EDITORIAL
U.S. climate policy needs refocusing

It's commendable that the United States has sent delegates to a United Nations summit on climate change this week in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The question is, will it make any difference to the Bush administration's shortsighted climate policy?

We hope so. But three years after Washington rejected the landmark Kyoto Protocol agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the administration is still favoring the development of cleaner energy technologies over making the necessary sacrifice of limiting carbon dioxide emissions.

While we wholeheartedly embrace cleaner technologies, such as hydrogen-powered vehicles, something also has to be done to immediately reduce carbon-dioxide emissions — particularly considering the mounting evidence that global warming is the likely cause of fast-melting glaciers, sea-level change, changing animal migratory patterns, more violent storms and the loss of coral reefs.

More than two-thirds of the world's coral reefs have either been destroyed or are in danger of being lost, with global warming posing the greatest threat, according to a study by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network.

We have to accept that global warming is a real and mostly man-made threat to the environment. The only real scientific disagreement is the extent of damage.

Let's not forget that the United States produces roughly one-quarter of the planet's total greenhouse gas emissions, the most prevalent of which is carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels in automobiles and other engines. It's then incumbent on us to set the right example, particularly for countries such as China, a developing industrial giant with a pitiful environmental record.

Restricting carbon dioxide emissions will never be a voluntary program. The Bush administration must look at limiting greenhouse gasses rather than relying only on technology to dig us out of this hot hole.