Although it was under Whitman’s direction that the White House released its first report on climate change, she maintains that humans are not causing global warming but merely “exacerbating a natural trend.”

Question: What should be America’s response to climate change?

Christine Todd Whitman: The United States needs to be engaged in the issue of climate change. Humans aren’t causing it, but humans are so exacerbating a natural trend.

What’s happening is that the earth cannot respond to it in the way that it has. We are seeing species damaged. We are seeing all sorts of issues that come from it and we haven’t had the chance to adapt.

So, the idea of slowing it down is an important one. We’re not going to stop it. I don’t believe that that should be a goal. It’s not practicable and it’s not possible.

But we do need to start taking some action now so that we can mitigate the worst of that potential damage and be able to react to it and have in place other positions and other policies that allow us to continue to grow.

Recorded on: September 15, 2008