The Next Climate Change Battleground

t’s easy, from my yuppified Brooklyn perch among the Times-reading tattooed gentry, to see the climate change policy debate as over:
across the land, states are passing greenhouse gas laws, energy companies are calling for climate change legislation, the color of the moment is decidedly green. America, it seems, is finally catching up to the rest of the civilized world.

But warning signs are out there. A recent Newsweek poll found that more than half of Americans don’t think the greenhouse effect is felt today.
Some two-fifths still believe there is "’a lot of disagreement among climate scientists" on the basic question of whether the planet is warming.’" Even Democrats have been too wimpy to merely hold a vote on whether carmakers ought to improve gas mileage.

The Newsweek poll came as part of their soup-to-nuts investigation into industry-funded global warming denialism. They spend the first five-sixths of the article rehashing old, well-known history — at least, it ought to be well-known history; maybe I shouldn’t be such a snob, given the poll results — before getting to the new stuff. The picture’s not pretty.

The response to the international climate panel’s latest report, in
February, showed that greenhouse doubters have a lot of fight left in them. In addition to offering $10,000 to scientists willing to attack the report, which so angered Boxer, they are emphasizing a new theme.
Even if the world is warming now, and even if that warming is due in part to the greenhouse gases emitted by burning fossil fuels, there’s nothing to worry about. As Lindzen wrote in a guest editorial in
NEWSWEEK International in April, "There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we’ve seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe."

This is important because it will influence the next stage of the debate. With John McCain, who has all the political capital of a John
Birch Society newsletter distributor, the last prominent GOP holdout against California-style federal emissions cuts, climate change legislation is coming. The battle will be over

what Americans are willing to pay and do to stave off the worst of global warming. So far the answer seems to be, not much. The NEWSWEEK
Poll finds less than half in favor of requiring high-mileage cars or energy-efficient appliances and buildings. No amount of white papers, reports and studies is likely to change that. If anything can, it will be the climate itself. This summer, Texas was hit by exactly the kind of downpours and flooding expected in a greenhouse world, and Las Vegas and other cities broiled in record triple-digit temperatures. Just last week the most accurate study to date concluded that the length of heat waves in Europe has doubled, and their frequency nearly tripled, in the past century. The frequency of Atlantic hurricanes has already doubled in the last century. Snowpack whose water is crucial to both cities and farms is diminishing. It’s enough to make you wish that climate change were a hoax, rather than the reality it is.

So the responsibility of climate change fighters is obvious: make clear to the denialists that climate change is a dangerous, uncomfortable, destablizing, economically disastrous phenomenon. And as Amory Lovins — described by Wired in this article on his supercar — has shown, cleaning up our act can be a money-making business proposition.