Q Dana, looking ahead to the G8, a couple of global warming experts who are usually quite critical of the administration are now actually saying, wait a minute, there's a glimmer of hope on possible emission targets; that there's this thought that perhaps there's a exchange for the midterm, and you'll get a deal on the sort of 2050 limits.

Can you tell me how optimistic you are about a potential deal? And these guys were saying -- they were characterizing the G8 as a "lame duck summit," in terms of global warming issues, and now they're actually saying, wait a minute, there may be something here.

MS. PERINO: Well, I think -- when I read those quotes this morning, you could have knocked me over with a feather, too, because the President gets absolutely no credit for all that he has done here in our own country, because we have actually been able to reduce actual emissions from our country, even though our economy has grown over the past several years.

But to the G8, let me just take you back one step. So, in May of 2007, President Bush announces a new way forward on climate change, because for the past several years, ever since the Kyoto Protocol, we have been stuck in this situation where only 30 percent of the countries that emit were required to be a part of Kyoto.

President Bush realized that, one, it would not solve the problem that we're trying to solve, which was to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, but instead it would hurt our economy while emissions continued to go up overseas -- just unworkable, from his point of view. What he thinks is going to work is a real push on technologies for research and development, but also having everybody committed, especially the emerging economies such as India and China.

So last May before the G8, the President suggested a way that we could all work together to get the major economies of the world all at the same table and working towards the same goal. And that has held over the past year. The emerging economies are still at the table. We're talking now in terms of "our" challenge and how "we" are going to solve this. And the President laid out a way to try to work on both midterm and then a longer-term goal. We're optimistic that we can get there, but there's a lot of issues that have to go -- have to be ferreted out.

And one of them -- if you just look at what happened, I think it was three weeks ago, when Senator Boxer's bill was brought up for a debate on the Senate floor. There was considerable debate on the Senate floor, and you also saw a lot of people finally coming forward and saying, we've got some real problems with how this might actually work in the practical sense.

So that's not only happening in our capital, it's happening in all the other capitals as well. So while I say we're optimistic that we can maybe get something, I want to make sure it's very clear that these are difficult issues and we have made progress -- I am not saying that we're going to be able to come out of there with a signed deal, out of the G8 -- that was never the purpose of this point of the process anyway. We hope to get something done by the end of this year so that the major economies could feed into the U.N. process, which is going to take place next year.

seen at 09:00, 3 July in Whitehouse Press Briefings. Email this to a friend.
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