Fire up Congress

The potential effects of climate change were vividly displayed last week when scientists showed Greenland’s ice sheet melting more rapidly than previously thought.

In Congress, however, the pace remains glacial. Even as data accumulate showing that humans are contributing to a rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide and nitrogen, that affect the planet in severe and destabilizing ways, Congress avoids doing anything that looks like action.

True, the Senate’s resolution last summer endorsing mandatory reductions of those gases was one of the few strong signs that Washington has acknowledged the extent of the problem. But if all it can do is muster a resolution, that body remains more an impediment to progress than a leader of it.

This situation isn’t necessary. There are enough senators, Republican and Democrat, who have grasped the extent of the problem and have the ability to lead the rest on improving the federal government’s response.

To make progress, Congress should want to know why, in the face of the evidence, government will spend any amount studying the problem of climate change but is unwilling to formulate policy that would, over the long term, increase this nation’s security against natural – or unnatural – disasters. And it should know how government might reform itself to act more forcefully to reduce the production of greenhouse gases.

This is properly the role of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, whose chairman and ranking members, Sens. Susan Collins and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., respectively, have on other occasions worked on climate-change issues. Recently, for instance, they asked NASA for an explanation about the reports that the agency had been keeping some of its scientists from expressing their opinions about climate change. Last summer, they asked the Government Accountability Office to examine the costs of weather-related property losses and how they might relate to climate change.

That request turned out to be too complicated to answer, though the notices from the re-insurance industry about the cost of changing weather patterns certainly gave everyone some sense of the cost of what will grow worse. The GAO says it will continue looking at ways to gauge this rising cost.

Meanwhile, a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases, by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lieberman, could return this year, as could a plan by Sens. Domenici, R-N.M., and Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M. In a white paper released earlier this month, they outlined a plan for a market-based greenhouse gas regulatory system focused on the energy and automotive industries, instead of regulating actual emitters of greenhouse gases. Interesting ideas and it is welcome to see the problem being taken seriously, but to advance any of this agenda will require a straightforward rallying point.

That could be a reform of the level the 9/11 Commission recommended for intelligence gathering or it could be the high-profile creation of a climate change czar to serve as a leader at home and a negotiator internationally. But judging by the lack of results and the administration’s continued hostility to acting strongly on climate change, it could not be the status quo.

Any solution to the production of greenhouse gases will take decades and should be done gradually both to prevent shocks to the economy and to adjust programs as new information about climate change arises.

That demands the federal government begin acting soon and that requires Congress to figure out how to best make that happen.