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A decade ago a small crowd of politicians and environmentalists gathered on a steamy summer day outside the alabaster dome of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., and peered into a hole in the ground. The earthen cavity was cool and soothing, but the people were hot and bothered. The sapling they were supposed to plunk into the hollow to commemorate a new clean-air law was stuck on a truck in traffic. Turning to a bystander, one sweaty lawmaker compared the delay to the trouble he was having convincing colleagues to take seriously another emerging environmental threat. "At the rate we're going," he quipped, "that little tree will be a redwood by the time we do anything about the greenhouse effect."
Little did that observer, the late Representative George Brown, a feisty California Democrat, know how right he might be. In 1988, just a few years before the tree planting, a prominent NASA climate scientist named James Hansen had appeared before Congress during a record heat wave and sparked a political firestorm by announcing that the science was conclusive: People were warming the earth by pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) from tailpipes and smokestacks into the atmosphere, where the gases trapped heat like the glass in a greenhouse. Television newscasts and newspapers led with the story, moving an issue that had drifted in political backwaters squarely into the mainstream.
Since then researchers have nailed down the link between rising CO2 concentrations and temperatures. Recent records show that the 1990s, for instance, was the warmest decade in more than a century, and that 1998 boasted the highest average global temperatures ever recorded. And forecasters predict that average global temperatures could rise up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit during the next century if CO2 concentrations continue to increase. Among the possible consequences: rising sea levels that cause coastal communities to sink beneath the waves like a modern Atlantis, crop failures of biblical proportions, and once-rare killer storms that start to appear with alarming regularity.
"Investors loathe uncertainty. Who is going to invest a billion dollars in a power plant without knowing if they are going to have to spend even more later to comply with carbon controls?"
Six years ago, in a bid to head off such trouble, the United States and 83 other nations negotiated the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to begin curbing carbon emissions. But U.S. efforts to combat global warming have been stuck in idle since President George W. Bush took office in 2001. He promptly dumped the Kyoto pact, arguing that even its modest requirement--reducing U.S. emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012--was too costly for an economic superpower that produces one-quarter of the world's CO2 emissions. In a time-honored Washington stalling tactic, the administration then called for an expanded research program and unveiled a largely voluntary initiative that, even if successful, would still allow U.S. emissions to grow by more than 10 percent during the next decade. In the meantime, White House officials continue to downplay what scientists know about climate change in favor of what they don't by watering down government reports, despite growing warnings that warming is already affecting everything from mountain glaciers to tropical ocean reefs (see True Nature, "Meltdown," and Global Warning/Coral Reefs, "Color Blindness").
"Most everybody in the world but the Bush administration thinks that global warming is potentially harmful," says Senator Jim Jeffords (I-VT), a senior member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Ironically, the White House's cold shoulder has only heated up the climate-policy debate. Despite predictions that the U.S. departure would doom the Kyoto pact, 119 countries have ratified the agreement anyway, and approval by Russia would push it into force.
At home, meanwhile, climate advocates have taken their case beyond the Beltway, to living rooms, boardrooms, courtrooms, and statehouses, with often surprising results. Public-opinion polls chart rising recognition of the warming threat, and a majority support government action. A growing number of states and localities are forging ahead with climate policies of their own. Some have even taken the Bush administration to court over its inaction.
Such developments haven't gone unnoticed in Congress. Earlier this year the growing pressure forced a reluctant Republican leadership to schedule the Senate's first-ever vote on legislation to limit CO2 emissions, sponsored by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Joseph Lieberman (D-CT).
The bipartisan duo's plan aims to cut CO2 emissions from all of the nation's major sources--power plants, vehicles, and industrial plants--to 1990 levels by 2016. To meet that timetable, they want to harness an emissions trading scheme that has already proven successful in reducing the sulfur dioxide emissions that
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