Bold Inaction on Global Warming

North Carolina has decided to that the best way to take action on the problem of global warming is to kick the can down the road. The local paper applauds this move, calling it "visionary leadership."

While some ideologues on the right and the left are busy arguing whether global warming is really due to man-made greenhouse gases or we're simply enduring some kind of natural climatic change, some of the wiser heads in the N.C. General Assembly have quietly created a commission to see what's up — and what it may mean for North Carolina.

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The bill — approved Tuesday in the legislature's final week — creates a Legislative Commission on Global Climate Change and gives it a November 2006 deadline to report its findings. The 34-member commission will include legislators and representatives of the state's biggest power companies, chamber of commerce, other business organizations, universities and environmental groups.

I guess I can sympathize with Michael Shore of Environmental Defense, who thinks that doing something is better than doing nothing. But I think we all know what's going to happen here. The environmentalists and the polluters won't be able to come to any agreement, and the commission will issue a report saying that there is still uncertainty about the cause and significance of climate change. And papers like the Charlotte Observer will write more editorials about how this uncertainty means that we need to study the problem some more before taking any substantive action.

In a way, I think it's rather funny that the Observer thinks that stacking a new commission with representatives from a bunch of special interest groups is going to cut through the ideological chatter that it sees as the problem. But I think it's tragic that the Observer thinks that kind of chatter is the problem in the first place.

The scientific community has reached a consensus conclusion that clearly shows that human activities are causing global warming. The Observer is being intellectually dishonest when it implies that equal consideration should be given to the critics from outside of the scientific establishment that reject this consensus view out of ideological or economic self-interest. Simply put, the views of a PR hack from Duke Power should not be given the same weight as the findings of a peer-reviewed journal article. But this kind of trumping of scientific truth by politics is exactly what the Observer is defending when it praises the creation of this new commission. Shame on them.