Environment bill's odds looking good

WASHINGTON - The last time Congress enacted major environmental laws, acid rain was destroying lakes and forests, polluted rivers were on fire, and smog was choking people in some cities.

The fallout from global warming, while subtle now, could eventually be even more dire. That prospect has led to legislation backed by Democrats that rivals in scope the nation's landmark antipollution laws.

Lawmakers will hold hearings this week on an energy and global warming bill that could revolutionize how the country produces and uses energy. It also could reduce, for the first time, the pollution responsible for heating up the planet.

If Congress balks, the Obama administration has signaled a willingness to use decades-old clean-air laws to impose tough new regulations for motor vehicles and many industrial plants to limit their release of climate-changing pollution.

In a major reversal of the policies of former President George W. Bush, the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday said rising sea levels, increased flooding, and more intense heat waves and storms that come with climate change are a threat to public health and safety. The agency predicted that warming would worsen other pollution problems such as smog.

"The EPA concluded that our health and our planet are in danger. Now it is time for Congress to create a clean-energy cure," said Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), one of the sponsors of the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

If passed, it would be the first major environmental-protection law in almost two decades. Besides trying to solve a complex environmental problem associated with global warming, the bill also seeks to wean the nation off foreign oil and to create a new clean-energy economy.

"It's a big undertaking," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Waxman and Markey presented their 648-page bill last month.

From 1969 to 1980, Congress passed more than a dozen environmental bills tackling subjects such as air and water pollution, garbage, and protections for fisheries, marine mammals, and endangered species. In 1990, the Clean Air Act was overhauled to address the problem of acid rain created by the sulfur dioxide released from coal-burning power plants.

"We had two decades of extraordinary legislation and almost two decades of nothing," said Richard Lazarus, a Georgetown University law professor and author of The Making of Environmental Law. "If this one passes, it will certainly be an outburst."

There are many reasons Congress' chances to succeed in passing global warming legislation are improved this year, but by no means assured.

After the Bush administration did little about global warming over eight years, there is "a lot of pent-up demand" for action on climate, said William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the EPA.

The Democratic-controlled Congress and President Obama agree that legislation is needed to limit emissions of greenhouse gases and radically alter the nation's energy sources. They want to pass a bill by the end of the year.

"For the first time ever, we have got the political actors all aligned," Lazarus said. "That is not enough to get a law passed, but that is a huge start. We haven't been close to that before."

Unlike in the 1970s - when President Richard M. Nixon created the EPA and the first environmental laws passed nearly unanimously - Republicans are opposed. They question whether industry and taxpayers can afford to take on global warming during a recession.

Then there is the question of whether the public will have the appetite to accept higher energy prices for a benefit that will not be seen for many years. Climate change ranks low on many voters' priority lists.

Every year since 2001 has been among the 10 warmest years on record. Sea ice in the Arctic and glaciers worldwide are melting.

Yet the problems are not as striking as they were in the 1970s, or even the early 1990s, when Congress addressed acid rain and the depletion of the ozone layer.

"If carbon dioxide were brown, we wouldn't have the same problem," said Gus Speth, who organized the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1970. "The problems are chronic, not acute, and it is largely invisible to people unless they're reading the newspaper, or checking the glaciers, or going to the South Pole."

In 1969, oil and debris in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland burst into flames, an incident that led to the passage of the Clean Water Act. That same year, an offshore oil platform near Santa Barbara, Calif., spilled millions of gallons of oil that ended up on beaches. And long before that, a smog episode in Donora, Pa., in 1948 killed 20 people, sparking a crusade against air pollution.

"There was so much evidence - sort of smell, touch, and feel kind of evidence - that the environment was really in trouble," Ruckelshaus said. "There were rivers catching on fire and terrible smog events."

With climate, "you are asking people to worry about their grandchildren or their children," he said. "That is why it will be so tough to get something like this through."