Warming Up on Capitol Hill

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Al Gore held his first hearing on global warming about 25 years ago, when he was a member of the House of Representatives, and a quarter century later Congress seems to be listening to him. Apart from the usual dinosaurs — James Inhofe, who took great glee in pointing out that Mr. Gore had a big house that used lots of energy, and Trent Lott, who dismissed the former vice president’s ideas as “garbage” — Mr. Gore received a strong welcome from the two Congressional committees that will frame any legislation to deal with the warming threat.

Legislating, of course, will be the hard part. But Mr. Gore’s efforts to raise both public and Congressional awareness are likely to make that easier. As is his habit, Mr. Gore spoke in dramatic, almost apocalyptic terms, at one point demanding an “immediate freeze” in carbon dioxide emissions. This certainly overestimates America’s capacity for rapid social and technological change in much the same way that his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” seemed on occasion to overstate how quickly we will see the consequences of climate change.

As Mr. Gore concedes, he is more salesman than scientist. But most scientists acknowledge that he is absolutely right on the fundamentals: humans are artificially warming the world, the risks of inaction are great, the time frame for action is growing short and meaningful cuts in emissions will happen only if the United States takes the lead.


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Then there will be those who argue that it is pointless for America to go down this road if China and India will not come along. But that one is easy. The United States produces 25 percent of global emissions with only 5 percent of the population. If the world’s biggest per capita emitter of carbon dioxide doesn’t act, why should anyone else?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/opinion/25sun2.html