WITH GASOLINE costing $4 a gallon and even the Bush administration admitting that global warming is endangering polar bears, the time is right for Congress to enact reductions in the use of fossil fuels that are a principal cause of global warming. Today, the Senate will take up the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, which would slap a cap-and-trade system on utility and industrial emissions and invoke other measures to tackle 85 percent of greenhouse gas emission sources in the United States.
The bill is an updated version of one approved in December by the Environment and Public Works Committee, the first time a Senate committee had ever passed a comprehensive climate change bill. Due to mounting evidence of the threat posed by global warming to the planet and the damage that uncontrolled use of fossil fuels does to the economy, support has grown in the Senate for a bill with real teeth. But backers are unlikely to muster the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.
Last week, Representative Edward Markey, chairman of the House's select committee on climate change, unveiled a bill that goes beyond even the Senate measure in combating emissions, especially from coal-fired power plants.
The Senate bill has the support of 10 of New England's 12 senators. The two exceptions are New Hampshire's John Sununu and Judd Gregg. They should sign on, not least because funds from the auction of emission credits would subsidize green technology firms that are an important part of the region's economy.
Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia, former chairman of the Armed Services Committee, lent his name to the bill because he sees the threat to national security posed by the failure to address global warming. Others value the support the bill would provide to restore and protect natural resources threatened by climate change. That is the strength of this bill and Markey's - both take a broad-based approach to the challenge that climate change presents to this country and the world.
"If you don't take action on climate change," former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker has said, "you can be sure that our economies will go down the drain in the next 30 years." Three years ago, the Senate rejected a weaker global warming bill on the grounds, in part, that it might cause gasoline and utility prices to climb. Since then, the costs of both have skyrocketed, and the country is no closer to making a substantial shift away from fossil fuels. Passage of this bill with a filibuster-proof majority would start that historic change.
