EDITORIAL: Turn up heat on carbon

At the end of the hottest decade on record, we seem to be willing to waste a precious chance to mitigate climate change by putting a price on carbon. Even if Congress enacts a small-bore energy bill this year - highly unlikely - it won't do much to slow greenhouse gas emissions or to speed investment in a safer, cleaner energy future.

The House passed a climate bill, but the Senate won't act on one sponsored by John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). Nor will it pass a better bill, requiring first sellers of fossil fuels to buy permits for the right to sell the fuels, and rebating 75 percent of the proceeds from the permit sales back to the public. Yet the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's new "State of the Climate" report, finding the first 10 years of the millennium to be the warmest decade, says, "Global warming is undeniable." And now an exclamation point: An iceberg four times as big as Manhattan has broken off a Greenland ice shelf.

Still, Republicans falsely label any climate bill a job-killing tax. Actually, the cost of inaction is higher, both in environmental degradation and in the attending economic erosion. Democrats, fearing an anti-incumbent tsunami, are too timid to act. And fossil fuel companies fight any price on carbon.

Without regulatory certainty, business won't invest in a clean-fuel economy, and we'll fall behind. If we don't act soon, we will be failing to lead in curbing climate change, though we have for so long led in contributing to it. hN