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.
An increasing number of business leaders and politicians outside Washington are moving his way. These include Republican governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, major investment companies like Goldman Sachs, venture capitalists hoping to profit from cleaner technologies and even a few big power companies preparing for the day when they will have no choice but to reduce their emissions.
Congress is paying attention to this shift. Representative Henry Waxman of California has signed up 127 co-sponsors for a very tough bill he proposed last week that seeks to reduce United States greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by midcentury, which is close to what Mr. Gore wants. When you consider that Mr. Gore and President Bill Clinton could not find five senators willing to ratify the far more modest 1997 Kyoto treaty — which called for a mere 7 percent reduction below 1990 levels, with no further reductions scheduled after 2012 — you get some idea of how far the debate has come.
The next task will be to translate this new awareness into legislation capable not only of surviving the House but also of mustering a veto-proof 60 votes in the Senate. All of the bills — there are now five — start with the premise that forcing polluters to, in effect, pay a fee for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit will create powerful incentives for developing and deploying cleaner technologies.
Setting up a system that fairly distributes the cost of reducing emissions across a giant economy — without creating a bureaucratic nightmare — will require great skill. And nobody, including repeat viewers of “An Inconvenient Truth,” has a real grip on what it will cost. Given the consequences of doing nothing, it’s surely worth it, but Congress will have to be upfront about the numbers.
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?
