06/13/2002

As the Bush administration grapples with the consequences of abandoning the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, it's hard to know the most salient issue in global warming. Is America a profligate fossil-fuel user? Obviously, we are. Or is it that the science behind measuring and evaluating climate change remains uncertain? That's true, too, though recent advances in climate modeling are impressive.

Fossil-fuel use understandably looms large in public discourse. The public, especially the well-off, claim to be fervently environmentalist, and given to much discussion of the perils of global warming. The actual American consumer practice, however, is quite something else, as evidenced by the SUV craze.

Carbon collects in the atmosphere, trapping solar heat that would otherwise be reflected back into space. And science shows that atmospheric carbon levels are high compared with norms measured over the 10,000 years since the last Ice Age. Meanwhile, evidence that human activity is affecting the global climate continues to mount. The Antarctic summer ended with vast sections of a 600-foot-high ice shelf crumbling into the ocean, in what has been termed, based on data extending back several centuries for some locales, the warmest year on record.

The Bush administration has raised some valid questions about the extent of the warming we might experience, its effects on such critical factors as sea level and precipitation, and whether Kyoto's cuts in carbon emissions could actually reverse climate change. But those questions should not be used to block action to minimize the threat.

Certainly the political costs to the administration, widely seen as a creature of the oil and gas industries, of rejecting Kyoto are heavy, domestically and internationally. More to the point is that Kyoto, while imperfect, points in directions that America needs to go.

The administration has proposed a series of voluntary measures to reduce carbon emissions. It would include a reporting system to pressure companies not to show up as the biggest polluters in their fields. That's not enough to actually reduce, as opposed to slightly slow the rise in, greenhouse-gas emissions.

The administration needs to get more serious. U.S. government scientists themselves have produced a report conceding the human contribution to climate change and detailing possible damage to the United States as a result.

The first steps should include a carbon tax and/or mandatory targets for limiting carbon emissions, as well as a system of carbon trading.

America needs to start taking the issue of manmade climate change much more seriously. And that, inconveniently, must include a raft of mandatory actions.