In The Air.(The Talk of the Town)(preventing global warming)(Essay)

The first celebration of Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, was a raucously exuberant affair. In New York, Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic. People picnicked on the sidewalk; dead fish were dragged through midtown; and Governor Nelson Rockefeller rode a bicycle across Prospect Park. Students in Richmond, Virginia, handed out bags of dirt (to represent the "good earth"); demonstrators in Washington poured oil onto the sidewalk in front of the Interior Department (to protest recent oil spills); and in Bloomington, Indiana, women dressed as witches threw birth-control pills into the crowd (no one was quite sure why). All told, some twenty million Americans took part--far more than the man who thought up the occasion, Senator Gaylord Nelson, Democrat of Wisconsin, had expected. "That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day," Nelson later said. "It organized itself."

Among those who seemed unmoved was President Richard Nixon. He avoided the festivities and made no public comment on them. (One of his aides, John Whitaker, later acknowledged that the Administration had been "totally unprepared" for the wave of environmental activism "that was about to engulf us.") Nevertheless, even Nixon seems to have got the message. Three months afterward, he created the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and five months after that he signed the Clean Air Act. The Clean Water Act, the Pesticide Control Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act all became law by the end of 1974.

Since the mid-nineteen-seventies, the nation's environmental agenda--to the extent that it has had one--has consisted mainly of trying to defend these early achievements. This is all the more notable because of what has happened in the intervening years. At the time of the first Earth Day, the term "global warming" was barely in circulation--the relatively small group of scientists concerned about the consequences of rising CO levels used the phrase "inadvertent climate modification"--and actual warming had yet to be clearly detected. Today, of course, there are thousands of scientists studying global warming, and new effects are constantly being observed. Just a few weeks ago, researchers reported that Antarctica's Wilkins Ice Shelf had "begun to collapse because of rapid climate change." The ice shelf was larger than the state of Connecticut; it now seems destined to disappear. "We've come to the Wilkins Ice Shelf to see its final death throes," a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey, who made a farewell trip there, told Reuters.

To do something meaningful about global warming will require legislation even more far-reaching than the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, and recently there have been encouraging signs that Congress and the White House understand this. Late last year, Henry Waxman, of California, an outspoken advocate of action on climate change, wrested control of the House's Energy and Commerce Committee from John Dingell, of Michigan, an outspoken advocate of delay. A few weeks ago, Waxman introduced a comprehensive energy bill, which, while flawed, at least represents a starting point. President Barack Obama, for his part, has been clear about the urgency of the problem; shortly after taking office, he observed that global warming, "if left unchecked," could result in "irreversible catastrophe." To guide ...