President Bush's backtracking on reducing carbon dioxide emissions to slow global warming should come as no surprise, because the policy was set without a realistic plan for achieving the reduction. But natural gas is in extremely tight supply.
Fossil fuels are largely carbon, which burns to carbon dioxide.
That option is not practical at this time. Carbon dioxide is being called a pollutant, but it is not like trace pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, which are regulated by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Trace pollutants can be reduced by processing equipment designed for that purpose. Carbon dioxide emission cannot be cleaned up in that manner, and attempting to do so is extremely impractical. If and when carbon dioxide emissions are regulated, it will be done by a national energy policy, not by monitoring what comes out of a smoke stack or tail pipe.