Cap-and-trade bill won't dislodge the sky

One of the favorite tactics of global warming skeptics is to claim that scientists who cite data to support their concerns are Chicken Littles seeking enrichment by repeating overcooked alarms about the end of the world.

Now, as important climate change legislation heads for a vote in Congress, those same skeptics have become Chicken Littles seeking enrichment by repeating overcooked alarms about the end of the world.

The U.S. House of Representatives this week will vote on a bill that would - among other things - leverage market forces against industrial carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. So-called "cap and trade" would make power companies and industrial energy users either cap their greenhouse gas emissions or trade for the right to pollute. Market forces would become a means of environmental stewardship.

A piece of legislation with a similar mechanism was sponsored a few years ago by then-U.S. Sen. John Warner, a Republican, who considered it a critical part of his legacy. But opponents of the current bill now make dark references to an all-powerful cabal of newly imperial Democrats.

Radio, TV and newspaper ads by the bill's opponents - mostly oil and gas lobbies, industrial groups and conservative organizations - have been ratcheting up the rhetoric as the vote nears, claiming that cap and trade will cost Virginians thousands of dollars each, throw countless people out of work and force us to live in the dark.

It's all nonsense, of course. But so are the promises that the bill represents a solution without cost. What the bill will almost certainly do is raise energy prices - albeit not by thousands, and not for years. But it will also provide an impetus to shift jobs from polluting industries to cleaner ones, especially green energy.

How many jobs would be shifted, and when, nobody can possibly know. About the only thing anyone does know is that it would reduce carbon emissions in one country - ours.

The United States has made significant progress in cleaning up its worst abuses of the environment - mostly the chemicals that industry used to routinely dump into the air and water. But, like most nations, the U.S. hasn't made much progress in limiting the emission of gases that trap heat in the world's atmosphere.

Scientists have concluded that the resulting greenhouse effect has already warmed the Earth and its oceans, has incrementally raised sea levels and will cause even greater disruptions to come. The only solution is to begin now, and seriously, to limit the emission of greenhouse gases.

The world will have to do that, of course, not just America. Europe has made considerable progress - far more than we have - but India and China remain laggards.

As important as it is for America to do its part to reduce carbon emissions, in part because our industrial vigor through the decades means we were a primary source of them, this nation also has an obligation to lead the rest of the world into an economy less dependent on burning fossil fuels.

The first step is leading by example, by capping our own carbon emissions and by passing the House energy bill this week.