Global Warming Bill May Wait for 2008 ... or Even 2010

With the House and Senate still wrangling over their various version of energy legislation, the prospects of a crafting second bill to deal with the greenhouse gases fueling global warming is increasingly unlikely, several lobbyists who support such a bill told the San Francisco Chronicle. Former Clinton and Bush Administration officials who are working with Congress in support of carbon-capping legislation say the best chance will come after the 2008 presidential election, or even later.

Major environmental initiatives have, in the past, taken many years to negotiate, and this is the mother of all environmental laws, for the mother of all environmental problems. Political Reality, meet Reality. James Hansen, a NASA scientist and unofficial leader of the climate research club, has been saying for several years that the world has 10 years -- at most -- to take substantive action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, or else the worst consequences of global warming will be inevitable. Already, the United Nations has warned that there is enough excess carbon in the atmosphere to make many potentially catastrophic scenarios unavoidable. This year, we've seen the Arctic ice reach historic lows -- and far ahead of U.N. projections.

That's as clear a signal as we're likely to get that global warming is a real, clear and present danger. But the United States has only recently begun talking seriously about climate change. For that, we can thank a concerted and underhanded effort by ExxonMobil and a select few others, who financed a handful of climate skeptics who were given unearned weight in media reports about global warming. For years, this obfuscation kept the growing scientific consensus about climate change murky, and so today we see the political will to act still in its infancy.

Fortunately, Congress is poised to take a few tentative, but worthwhile, steps: Improving fuel economy, increasing the use of alternative renewable energy technology and requiring the sale of more efficient appliances and light bulbs. Those measures fall short of the wholesale changes in the economy that are needed to confront the climate challenge. But wholesale changes take huge political will, and the normal growth of that will has been stunted.

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