11/25/2006

Other View

U.S. must join fight against global warming

But change — not just heat — is in the air. California has set its own limits, and other states are poised to follow suit. The incoming chair of the U.S. Senate's committee on the environment is vowing to act.

Rather than fight them, the Bush administration would be smart to join them. Together, they could come up with the most economically practical ways to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

While some skeptics still dispute global warming, most scientists believe a build-up in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases from human activity is raising temperatures. Last year, national science academies from the United States and 10 other nations issued a statement declaring "the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action.”

Five years ago, President George W. Bush ruled out signing the Kyoto Protocol, the first international agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Bush complained that the treaty did not commit developing nations such as China to any reductions, and he argued that its limits would hurt the U.S. economy. Now, as the world considers a successor to Kyoto, the administration's position is essentially unchanged.

It's true that China is rapidly industrializing and is expected to surpass the United States as the world's biggest greenhouse-gas emitter by 2009. But the U.S. refusal to commit to any emissions reductions gives the administration no authority or credibility to demand cutbacks from other nations.

As for economic damage, a recent British government report concluded that the cost of doing nothing about global warming would dwarf the cost of curtailing it. The report predicted that without action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the world eventually will suffer coastal flooding, lower crop yields, drinking-water shortages, disease outbreaks and other disastrous consequences.

The Bush administration maintains that new, cleaner energy technologies and voluntary initiatives are sufficient to deal with global warming.

Yet under that approach, U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by 2012 are expected to have jumped 14 percent from a decade earlier, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Congress doesn't need to start from scratch on a more effective policy. There have been good bipartisan proposals in recent years that would combine caps on carbon-dioxide emissions with incentives to meet them.

It's past time for the White House to join the battle.

— The Orlando Sentinel