This administration's response to the gravity of Earth's rapidly changing climate has been unerringly duplicitous, malevolently anti-science and morally bankrupt. Consider the events of the past week.

At the conclusion of the Group of Eight summit, Bush said with a straight face that "significant progress" had been made by leaders of the wealthiest nations on a strategy to combat global warming. That brought a blunt response from the United Nations' top climate negotiator, Yvo de Boer: "I don't find the outcome very significant," which in diplomatspeak meant that Bush's assessment was a crock.

The leaders agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2050, but the pledge was not legally binding and affixed no interim timetable for meeting the target. Moreover, the five developing nations that make up 42 percent of the global population - India, China, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico - refused to go along. They pointed out that since the 16 developed countries emit 80 percent of the world's air pollution, they should not expect emerging nations to meet the same goal. Rather, the industrialized countries should "take the lead in achieving ambitious and absolute greenhouse gas emissions reductions."

Which is something the Bush administration has not only refused to do, but has dismissed or suppressed research by government scientists that confirms global warming and its potential consequences. Last week, a former Environmental Protection Agency official accused Cheney's office of having tried to alter sworn congressional testimony by EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson in January in order to minimize the threat posed by a warming Earth, thus to sidetrack regulations to reduce greenhouse gases.

And on Friday, Bush flatly rejected regulation of greenhouse gases as a pollutant because it would harm the economy and reduce jobs. The EPA said nothing about the threat of climate change to human health, just three weeks after concluding that it could use the the Clean Air Act as an effective tool to fight global warming.

So, a new president and Congress will have to start at square one in January with the pro-fossil fuels policies of Bush-Cheney intact, policies that may prove the most damaging of all the blows they have dealt to the future of America and the world.