Face up to global warming

July 18, 2008, The Post and Courier, Charleston SC
Editorial

A strong consensus has developed, in and out of the scientific realm, that the planet is in an extended and potentially dangerous warming trend. Another strong consensus has developed that human activity significantly contributes to that pattern. Unfortunately, the task of developing a consensus on what humans can or should do about that — if anything — is fraught with political and economic peril. But that doesn't mean the United States shouldn't move forward on reasonable measures to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, which experts cite as a trigger for climate change.

While understandable, the persisting focus on President Bush's handling of this topic is misplaced considering the circumstances of his limited time left in the White House. He continues to be alternately praised for acknowledging climate change as a problem that must be addressed and condemned for failing to provide the leadership needed to initiate effective action to slow it.

Last week at the G-8 summit in Toyako, Japan, Mr. Bush again emphasized the need to craft international accords that would reduce CO2 emissions. Phillip E. Clapp of the Pew Environmental Group was impressed enough to tell The New York Times: "This is an enormous movement for a man who questioned the science on global warming, who was opposed to international treaties and who was opposed to international targets."

By week's end, though, environmentalists were assailing the Bush administration anew over its refusal to act on the findings of Environmental Protection Agency scientists who concluded that climate change presents "grave risks" to human health due to its impact on supplies of food, water and energy. That EPA analysis was conducted in response to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling requiring it to regulate greenhouse gases unless it could provide a "scientific" basis for not doing so.

Yet EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson rejected his own agency's report, instead declaring a four-month "public comment" period before deciding the next step. By the time that delay ends, a new president-elect will have been chosen.

The Bush administration's apparent intention to play out the clock on climate change is hardly surprising. In a related recent development, a former senior EPA official charged that Vice President Dick Cheney's office altered testimony from the Centers for Disease Control early this year to downplay climate change's ill effects on public health.

President Bush did make a familiar — and fair — point last week in stressing that China and India, with their rapidly developing economies, must be part of any international agreement to lower CO2 emissions if it is to produce significant results. And convoluted "cap-and-trade" formulas favored by some climate-change hawks have serious flaws.

The choices on this issue won't be easy for the next U.S. president. But at least Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama both say climate change would be a high priority for them if they win in November. And Sen. McCain isn't the only prominent Republican who takes climate change seriously. South Carolina's Gov. Mark Sanford and Sen. Lindsey Graham do, too.

Another conservative who's sounding the alarm on climate change is Michael Gerson, former chief speechwriter for President Bush. On today's Commentary page, he reports on what he learned on a recent trip to the Arctic Circle, and correctly points out: "The one factor dramatically different from the past is the human production of greenhouse gases."

How to counter the exponential growth of that human production?

Sen. Graham convincingly accentuated the positive Wednesday, telling us that rising gas prices and rising awareness of climate change are creating "a magic merging" of previously disparate interests, including "the national security constituency, the innovation constituency and the environmental constituency." He said that "creating alternatives to fossil fuels is the new economy."

Thus, the path to reduced CO2 emissions, if plotted properly, could also be a path to prosperity. Clearly, we have more than one good reason to reduce our use of fossil fuels.