The U.S. Senate is now the only hope for sanity

House narrowly passes major energy-climate bill

In a triumph for President Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled House narrowly passed sweeping legislation Friday that calls for the nation's first limits on pollution linked to global warming and aims to usher in a new era of cleaner, yet more costly energy. The vote was 219-212, capping months of negotiations and days of intense bargaining among Democrats. Republicans were overwhelmingly against the measure, arguing it would destroy jobs in the midst of a recession while burdening consumers with a new tax in the form of higher energy costs.

The House's action fulfilled Speaker Nancy Pelosi's vow to clear major energy legislation before July 4, and sent the measure to a highly uncertain fate in the Senate.

Obama lobbied recalcitrant Democrats by phone from the White House as the debate unfolded across several hours, and Al Gore posted a statement on his Web site saying the measure represents "an essential first step towards solving the climate crisis." The former vice president won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work drawing attention to the destructive potential of global warming.

On the House floor, Democrats hailed the legislation as historic, while Republicans said it would damage the economy without solving the nation's energy woes. It is "the most important energy and environmental legislation in the history of our country," said Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts. "It sets a new course for our country, one that steers us away from foreign oil and towards a path of clean American energy."

But Rep. John Boehner, the House Republican leader, used an extraordinary one-hour speech shortly before the final vote to warn of unintended consequences in what he said was a "defining bill." He called it a "bureaucratic nightmare" that would cost jobs, depress real estate prices and put the government into parts of the economy where it now has no role.

The legislation would require the U.S. to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and by about 80 percent by mid-century. That was slightly more aggressive than Obama originally wanted, 14 percent by 2020 and the same 80 percent by mid-century. U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are rising at about 1 percent a year and are predicted to continue increasing without mandatory limits.

Under the bill, the government would limit heat-trapping pollution from factories, refineries and power plants and issue allowances for polluters. Most of the allowances would be given away, but about 15 percent would be auctioned by bid and the proceeds used to defray higher energy costs for lower-income individuals and families. "Some would like to do more. Some would like to do less," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said in advance of the final vote. "But we have reached a compromise ... and it is a compromise that can pass this House, pass that Senate, be signed by the president and become law and make progress."

One of the biggest compromises involved the near total elimination of an administration plan to sell pollution permits and raise more than $600 billion over a decade — money to finance continuation of a middle class tax cut. About 85 percent of the permits are to be given away rather than sold in a concession to energy companies and their allies in the House — and even that is uncertain to survive in the Senate. The final bill also contained concessions to satisfy farm-state lawmakers, ethanol producers, hydroelectric advocates, the nuclear industry and others, some of them so late that they were not made public until 3 a.m. on Friday.

Supporters and opponents agreed the result would be higher energy costs but disagreed vigorously on the impact on consumers. Democrats pointed to two reports — one from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the other from the Environmental Protection Agency — that suggested average increases would be limited after tax credits and rebates were taken into account. The CBO estimated the bill would cost an average household $175 a year, the EPA $80 to $110 a year.

Republicans questioned the validity of the CBO study and noted that even that analysis showed actual energy production costs increasing $770 per household. Industry groups have cited other studies showing much higher costs to the economy and to individuals.

The White House and congressional Democrats argued the bill would create millions of "green jobs" as the nation shifts to greater reliance on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar and development of more fuel-efficient vehicles — and away from use of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal. It will "make our nation the world leader on clean energy jobs and technology," declared Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who negotiated deals with dozens of lawmakers in recent weeks to broaden the bill's support.

Pelosi, D-Calif., took an intense personal interest in the measure, sitting through hours of meetings with members of the rank and file and nurturing fragile compromises.

At its heart, the bill was a trade-off, less than the White House initially sought though it was more than Republicans said was acceptable. Some of the dealmaking had a distinct political feel. Rep. Alan Grayson, a first-term Democrat, won a pledge of support that $50 million from the proceeds of pollution permit sales in the bill would go to a proposed new hurricane research facility in his district in Orlando, Fla. "This is revolutionary. This is a moment in history," declared Markey, a co-sponsor of the bill.

Republicans saw it differently. This "amounts to the largest tax increase in American history under the guise of climate change," declared Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind.

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The hot one from the Democrats

By Wesley Pruden

You can't blame the Democrats for hurrying to enact their hot-air legislation. The public is finally paying attention, recognizing the global warming crisis for what it is, a giant scam that will cost every American plenty. The globe isn't warming - it's actually cooling, in fact - and there's no crisis.

The only "crisis" Thursday in Washington was what to do with Al Gore. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had invited the ex-veep to Washington to appear Friday with senior Democrats to make a last-minute appeal for votes for the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Note there's not a word about "global" or "warming" in the title of the legislation. Once you stink up perfectly good words, you have to find new ones. (That's why liberals now call themselves "progressives.")

Mrs. Pelosi canceled Al's invitation late Wednesday night because one of his signature rants - "the sky is falling, the earth is melting" - would likely harm, not help her cause. Mrs. Pelosi said she would prefer to have Al making harmless telephone calls from his palatial house in Tennessee, and an aide says she doesn't want him "in the air for five and half hours" when he could be sitting down outside Nashville dialing for votes. (She presumably sent him a prepaid calling card.) "It's a question of what was energy efficient for the vice president," she said. "We were narrowing the list of undecideds. We had a great narrowing of the undecideds."

Given the size of their margins in Congress, the effort to pass the global warming bill shouldn't even be close. But it is. President Obama, who imagined only yesterday that he could remain royally aloof atop Mount Olympus, parsing his favorite Urdu poetry for Islamic insights, had to step out into 91-degree heat Thursday to make still another pitch to the undecideds. "We've been talking about this issue for decades," he said. "Now is the time to act." Quickly, before the globe cools even more than it has over the past decade, he didn't dare to say.

Despite all the pressure the speaker and her flacks and minions can exert on reluctant Democrats, a considerable number of Democratic congressmen who know better and understand that their constituents are learning better every day, are reluctant to walk the plank. They don't look forward to explaining to the home folks later why their congressman voted to squeeze the life out of their communities with the largest tax increase in history.

Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, the partner in this crime with Rep. Henry Waxman of California, jokes that the global warming tax will cost every American family only $175 a year, "no more than a postage stamp a day." That's just for starters; the tax rises every year. But the tax won't rise dramatically until the year 2020, when Messrs Markey and Waxman and a lot of their colleagues are counting on being safely dead, beyond human punishment.

Like most good scams, cap and trade as outlined in the Markey-Waxman legislation is simple. The government sets a cap on how much pollution the nation's factories, cars (and flatulent cows) are allowed to expel into the atmosphere. Companies can buy, sell or trade their emissions, or lack thereof. (If the cows must be cited for violations, Al Gore, a onetime tobacco farmer, can measure the barnyard effluvium.)

But the most acute pain will be the rising costs of everything as companies pass the effects of the tax on to consumers. Nobody knows this better than Mrs. Pelosi and her merry band of robbers. When this far-reaching legislation was debated in the House Energy Committee, the Republicans offered amendments to suspend the legislation if the price of gasoline exceeds $5 a gallon, if the price of electricity rises more than 10 percent over 2009, and if the unemployment rate, now hovering close to 9 percent, exceeds 15 percent. The Democrats, who know very well the devastation this "biggest tax increase in history" is likely to wreak on American families, nevertheless defeated all three amendments.

Hypocrisy, as we know, is the tribute vice pays to virtue, and nobody is louder in tribute than certain Democrats. Just before the Gores moved into the vice presidential residence on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, they were invited by Marilyn and Dan Quayle to inspect the premises. Tipper Gore was disappointed to see that the fireplace in the master bedroom had been closed. "Well," Mrs. Quayle told her, "the fireplace is wasteful and contributes to pollution." "Oh, I know," Tipper replied. "But a fireplace in the bedroom is so cozy." When the Quayles moved out, the fireplace was reopened.

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COULD AUSTRALIA BLOW APART THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SCARE?

As in America, the Senate is the crucial battleground

As the US Congress considers the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, the Australian Senate is on the verge of rejecting its own version of cap-and-trade. The story of this legislation's collapse offers advance notice for what might happen to similar legislation in the US-and to the whole global warming hysteria.

Since the Australian government first introduced its Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) legislation-the Australian version of cap-and-trade energy rationing-there has been a sharp shift in public opinion and political momentum against the global warming crusade. This is a story that offers hope to defenders of industrial civilization - and a warning to American environmentalists that the climate change they should be afraid of just might be a shift in the intellectual climate.

An April 29 article in The Australian described the general trend-and its leading cause.

There is rising recognition that introduction of a carbon tax under the guise of "cap and trade" will be personally costly, economically disruptive to society and tend to shift classes of jobs offshore. Moreover, despite rising carbon dioxide concentrations, global warming seems to have taken a holiday....

With public perceptions changing so dramatically and quickly it is little wonder Ian Plimer's latest book, Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science, has been received with such enthusiasm and is into its third print run in as many weeks. [It's now up to the fifth printing.]

The public is receptive to an exposé of the many mythologies and false claims associated with anthropogenic global warming and are welcoming an authoritative description of planet Earth and its ever-changing climate in readable language.

One of the most remarkable changes occurred on April 13, when leading global warming hysteric Paul Sheehan - who writes for the main Sydney newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, which has done as much to hype the threat of global warming as any Australian newspaper - reviewed Plimer's book and admitted he was taken aback. He describes Plimer, correctly, as "one of Australia's foremost Earth scientists," and praised the book as "brilliantly argued" and "the product of 40 years' research and breadth of scholarship."

What does Plimer's book say? Here is Sheehan's summary:

Much of what we have read about climate change, [Plimer] argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modeling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as "primitive."...

The Earth's climate is driven by the receipt and redistribution of solar energy. Despite this crucial relationship, the sun tends to be brushed aside as the most important driver of climate. Calculations on supercomputers are primitive compared with the complex dynamism of the Earth's climate and ignore the crucial relationship between climate and solar energy.

To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable-human-induced CO2-is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly.

In response, this is Sheehan's conclusion: "Heaven and Earth is an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence." This cannot be interpreted as anything but a capitulation. It cedes to the global warming rejectionists the high ground of being "evidence-based," and it accepts the characterization of the global warming promoters as dogmatic conformists.

The political impact has been manifested in a series of climb-downs as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's government has been forced to delay its plans for cap-and-trade controls. On May 4, the government announced it would postpone the onset of the scheme until mid-2011, a year later than originally planned.

On June 4, this delayed emission trading scheme passed the House of Representatives despite a vote against it by the opposition. But it now faces almost certain defeat in the Australian Senate. Whereas the Labor government controls 32 votes in the Senate, the opposition Liberal-National coalition controls 37 and is committed to vote against it if the Rudd government will not grant more time to consider the outcome of the Copenhagen climate conference in December and US Senate deliberations. This itself is a compromise position, because many of the coalition parliamentarians now want to vote unconditionally against an ETS in any form.

There are 7 other votes in the Senate: five Greens who say the scheme doesn't go far enough but who could be induced to go along; one independent, Nick Xenophon, who has pledged to vote against the bill unless the government waits till after Copenhagen; and one other, Senator Steve Fielding of the Family First Party, who has decided to investigate the whole thing first hand. Fielding could turn out to be the single deciding vote.

His story is particularly interesting. Andrew Bolt, who has been leading the charge against the global warming hysteria for years, notes that Fielding's investigation "could blow apart the great global warming scare."

Fielding went to the US to assess the American evidence for global warming at close quarters. As Melbourne's Age reported on June 4:

Senator Fielding said he was impressed by some of the data presented at the [US Heartland Institute's] climate change skeptics' conference: namely that, although carbon emissions had increased in the last 10 years, global temperature had not.

He said scientists at the conference had advanced other explanations, such as the relationship between solar activity and solar energy hitting the Earth to explain climate change.

Fielding has issued a challenge to the Obama White House to rebut the data. It will be a novel experience for them, as Fielding is an engineer and has an Australian's disregard for self-important government officials. Here is how The Age described his challenge:

Senator Fielding emailed graphs that claim the globe had not warmed for a decade to Joseph Aldy, US President Barack Obama's special assistant on energy and the environment, after a meeting on Thursday…. Senator Fielding said he found that Dr. Aldy and other Obama administration officials were not interested in discussing the legitimacy of climate science.

Telling an Australian you're not interested in the legitimacy of your position is a red rag to a bull. So here is what Fielding concluded:

Until recently I, like most Australians, simply accepted without question the notion that global warming was a result of increased carbon emissions. However, after speaking to a cross-section of noted scientists, including Ian Plimer, a professor at the University of Adelaide and author of Heaven and Earth, I quickly began to understand that the science on this issue was by no means conclusive….

As a federal senator, I would be derelict in my duty to the Australian people if I did not even consider whether or not the scientific assumptions underpinning this debate were in fact correct.

What Fielding's questioning represents is just the tip of the kangaroo's tail. He speaks for a growing number of Australians who will no longer take green propaganda on trust.

And that's what makes Plimer so influential—not just his credibility as a scientist, but the righteous certainty with which he dismisses man-made global warming as an unscientific dogma. He writes: "The Emissions Trading Scheme legislation poises Australia to make the biggest economic decision in its history"—Australia generates 80% of its electricity from coal, which would essentially be outlawed—"yet there has been no scientific due diligence. There has never been a climate change debate in Australia. Only dogma."

Plimer is not a "skeptic," a term which would imply that he merely has a few doubts about the global warming claims. Instead, he rejects the whole myth outright, and this seems to have emboldened and liberated a great many Australians who were already chafing under global warming conformity. As Plimer puts it:

[T]here are a large number of punters [Australian for "customers" or "gamblers"—in this case, skeptical customers who may or may not buy what the government's selling] who object to being treated dismissively as stupid, who do not like being told what to think, who value independence, who resile from personal attacks and have life experiences very different from the urban environmental atheists attempting to impose a new fundamentalist religion. Green politics have taken the place of failed socialism and Western Christianity and impose fear, guilt, penance, and indulgences onto a society with little scientific literacy.

Australia is not that different from America. If a shift in public opinion against the global warming dogma can happen on one side of the earth, it can happen on the other—especially when the US edition of Plimer's book, scheduled for July 1, hits the stands.

His role, Plimer says, is to show "that the emperor has no clothes." After three decades of relentless global warming propaganda, it's about time.

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Lights out

Already President Obama and the Democratic Congress have raised taxes on smokers, boosting the cigarette tax. But a tax increase that affects just a fifth of the electorate is unlikely to lead to a second Boston Tea Party. The Obama budget blueprint anticipates a return to Clinton-era marginal tax rates on upper-income earners, but that can easily be justified as a tax hike borne by the wealthy who failed to pay their "fair share" while the Republicans were in office.

Cap and trade will hit the wallets of many Americans who are firmly middle-class and fancy themselves admirers of Hope and Change. That's why Republicans, even after unveiling their own energy alternative this month, have kept up the rhetorical assault against the Democrats' "national energy tax."

In every conference call and press conference on energy policy since the start of the year, House Republicans have pilloried "cap and tax." The National Republican Congressional Committee sent out a fundraising letter on Tuesday containing the following broadside: "Cap-and-trade is nothing more than a tax which starts accruing the moment you flip on your light switch. This 'light switch tax' will raise energy costs by hundreds of dollars for the average family and between 1.8 and 7 million American jobs could be lost."

Bill Clinton's honeymoon came to a close when he shelved his middle-class tax cut and proposes tax increases that didn't just fall on the top 1.5 percent. Southern and industrial state Democrats stripped his budget of the most egregious tax increases -- such as the BTU-based energy tax -- but the damage was done. Democrats in marginal districts didn't want to vote with Clinton to raise their constituents' taxes. Those who did often went down to defeat in 1994. Thus did a Congress with Democratic majorities almost as large as those President Obama enjoys today come within one vote in each house of defeating the Clinton tax increase. Were it not for the votes of Al Gore in the Senate and Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky in the House, Clinton's 1993 tax-and-budget bill would have been defeated despite tiny Republican minorities.

Ask yourself where Al Gore and Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky are now.

Democrats have tried to save Obama and Pelosi from the cruel fate of Waxman-Markey. Congressman Colin Petersen (D-MN) stalled the bill in the Agriculture Committee. Factions ranging from the Blue Dogs on the right to the Congressional Black Caucus on the left expressed their concerns about the bill's price tag. Petersen relented after Pelosi cut a deal. And the Blue Dogs once again seem to content to roll over and have their tummies scratched by the leadership...

According to a least one poll (pdf), cap and trade is deeply unpopular among the most Democratic voting bloc in the country: African Americans. That survey was commissioned by a group of black conservatives, but the reluctance of some in the liberal Congressional Black Caucus to support Waxman-Markey suggests that the concerns within this community are real.

Just a few more votes like this and it could be lights out for some red-state Democrats.

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Trojan hearse

Indeed, the Waxman-Markey bill (as it’s commonly called, after its two chief sponsors) would be the largest tax increase in world history, as well as transfer vast wealth from consumers to big-business special interests.

And it would put Washington in charge of people’s lives in a way not seen since the Second World War—which was the last time Americans needed ration coupons to buy gasoline, food and other commodities.

The core of the complex 1,201-page bill is what’s called a “cap and trade” system. This would put a cap or limit on greenhouse-gas emissions—mainly on carbon dioxide produced by burning coal, oil and natural gas, three fuels that provide more than 80 percent of America’s energy. And the law lowers the cap every few years—ordering emissions to drop 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent below by 2050.

The “trade” part of the scheme would let companies buy and sell the government-issued ration coupons. Thus, a business closing down a factory and moving overseas could sell its no-longer-needed coupons to a firm that’s still trying to stay in business.

Cap-and-trade backers tell us that it’s a reasonable, effective way of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources and higher energy efficiency. But it’s proving anything but reasonable or effective in the European Union, which started a similar scheme several years ago. The prices of ration coupons have fluctuated wildly, electric rates have risen steeply and emissions haven’t gone down (at least not until businesses began curtailing production in this recession).

But even if it produced the promised results, cap-and-trade wouldn’t be worth it. For starters, the bill’s sneaky, indirect tax is still a tax—and a huge one. This would vastly increase fossil-fuel prices—which would make greens happy by making higher-priced alternatives such as wind power competitive, but would make Americans as a whole miserable, by forcing us to use less energy and pay much more for it.

Realize, too, that almost every recession of the last 60 years, including today’s mess, has followed a sharp rise in energy prices. Why would we want lawmakers to mandate a recession?

Understandably, Waxman-Markey’s supporters pretend the bill’s impact won’t be too severe. But independent economic studies have estimated the costs from $1,500 to more than $3,000 per year for the average family.

Then, this week, the Congressional Budget Office released an estimate of just $175 a year per family—then dropped it to $80. Green groups crowed—but no one really believes that number.

Certainly, the bill’s supporters in Congress don’t. If they did, these Democrats wouldn’t have voted down Republican amendments to the measure that would have suspended cap-and-trade if gasoline hit $5 a gallon, electricity prices doubled or unemployment topped 15 percent.

For that matter, similar government policies in Britain are already costing families $1,200 a year—and that’s in just the early stages.

During last year’s campaign, Sen. Barack Obama acknowledged: “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

And the Obama plan was less pernicious than Waxman-Markey. It would at least auction off the ration coupons, giving the federal government revenues that could fund programs or reduce the debt. Waxman-Markey gives away 85 percent of the ration coupons to big corporations. So while American consumers are stuck with ever rising energy prices, special interests will make enormous windfall profits.)

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The Climate Change Climate Change

The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere

By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation. If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

Credit for Australia's own era of renewed enlightenment goes to Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist. Earlier this year he published "Heaven and Earth," a damning critique of the "evidence" underpinning man-made global warming. The book is already in its fifth printing. So compelling is it that Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist -- and ardent global warming believer -- in April humbly pronounced it "an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence." Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public skepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.

The rise in skepticism also came as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, elected like Mr. Obama on promises to combat global warming, was attempting his own emissions-reduction scheme. His administration was forced to delay the implementation of the program until at least 2011, just to get the legislation through Australia's House. The Senate was not so easily swayed.

Mr. Fielding, a crucial vote on the bill, was so alarmed by the renewed science debate that he made a fact-finding trip to the U.S., attending the Heartland Institute's annual conference for climate skeptics. He also visited with Joseph Aldy, Mr. Obama's special assistant on energy and the environment, where he challenged the Obama team to address his doubts. They apparently didn't.

This week Mr. Fielding issued a statement: He would not be voting for the bill. He would not risk job losses on "unconvincing green science." The bill is set to founder as the Australian parliament breaks for the winter.

Republicans in the U.S. have, in recent years, turned ever more to the cost arguments against climate legislation. That's made sense in light of the economic crisis. If Speaker Nancy Pelosi fails to push through her bill, it will be because rural and Blue Dog Democrats fret about the economic ramifications. Yet if the rest of the world is any indication, now might be the time for U.S. politicians to re-engage on the science. One thing for sure: They won't be alone.

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