GETTING WARMER.(The Talk of the Town)(efforts to pass Climate Stewardship Act, which would have protected the environment)

During the debate last month on the Climate Stewardship Act, Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, held up a map of the Arctic ice cap. The map, based on a series of nasa satellite photographs, showed the extent of year-round sea ice over the Arctic twenty-four years ago and the extent of that sea ice today. In 1979, the ice began halfway down the east coast of Greenland, extended over the North Pole, and stretched, uninterrupted, to Siberia. Now it begins above Greenland, and an expanse of open water extends north from Siberia for hundreds of miles. Altogether, the ice cap has shrunk by two hundred and fifty million acres, an area the size of California and Texas combined. According to nasa's latest calculations, it is continuing to retreat at a rate of nine per cent per decade and could well disappear by the end of this century.

As McCain pointed out, the Climate Stewardship Act, which he co-sponsored with Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat, is, on the scale of global catastrophe, "a very minimal proposal." The bill would cap emissions of six greenhouse gases--most significantly, carbon dioxide--at 2000 levels and establish a trading system under which corporations that came in under their caps would receive credits, which they could sell to others. A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that the bill would cost the average household less than twenty dollars a year. (A similar cap-and-trade system, put in place in 1995 to combat acid rain, has helped to reduce sulfur-dioxide emissions in the United States by more than thirty per cent.) Minimal though it was, the McCain-Lieberman bill was nonetheless rejected in the Senate by a vote of fifty-five to forty-three, with ten Democrats crossing party lines to oppose it. It is a measure of how demoralized environmentalists are these days that many of them treated this solid defeat as a victory.

The Climate Stewardship Act was the first bill of its kind to reach the Senate floor since 1997, when the body effectively sank the Kyoto protocol by a vote of ninety-five to zero. In the intervening years, the evidence that human activity is changing the planet's climate has continued to mount, as has evidence of the consequences. Roads in Alaska are buckling because of liquefying permafrost, islands are disappearing as a result of higher sea levels, and the glaciers of Glacier National Park are retreating so quickly that some have suggested, only half in jest, that the park will soon have to be renamed. Among the many unfortunate aspects of this vast melt-off is that, because bare ground and seawater absorb sunlight more efficiently than ice does, the warming process tends to be self-reinforcing. As nasa dryly put it in the press release accompanying its latest study of the shrinking ice cap, "The rate of decline is expected to accelerate due to positive feedback systems between the ice, oceans, and atmosphere." In another nasa report, released last month, researchers found that between 1995 and 2000 ...