Brown Chides Bush Over Flimsy Environment Proposal

Monday, May 14, 2007
Contact: (916) 210-6000, agpressoffice@doj.ca.gov

Note to Editors: Here is the reaction of California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. to President Bush’s speech today in the Rose Garden:

While Mr. Bush was in the Rose Garden today stating his desire to “cut America’s gasoline usage by 20 percent,” his own lawyers were in a San Francisco federal court defending his administration’s scandalously inadequate fuel efficiency standard for SUVs, pickups and minivans.

Brown applauded the president’s favorable comments on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and cutting back on gas-guzzling, but urged the President to take two immediate steps: 1) tell the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to grant California and 12 other states permission to reduce vehicle greenhouse gas emissions and 2) junk last year’s token 1-mile-per gallon increase in fuel efficiency standards and “propose something real.”

“The president doesn’t offer a single concrete proposal on how to combat global warming and instead directs his bureaucracy 'to work together’ to come up with a plan,” Brown said. “California already has a plan that can be adopted immediately.”

# # #