Word: congress
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...just about the weather outside but also about what it might portend. While a single heat wave doesn't make a worldwide meltdown (see following story), a great many scientists believe that by continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, humans are forcing drastic climate changes. Yet Congress seems determinedly indifferent. As the lawmakers prepare for their summer adjournment, legislative efforts to slow that warming by reducing greenhouse emissions have all but ground to a halt. Withering too, like so many cornstalks, are other major pro-environmental bills: increased funding for research on energy sources other than fossil fuels...
...case of dysfunction that has drawn scant public attention. Instead of putting together a large single proposal, Congress has been nibbling at the global-warming issue piecemeal, with opponents throwing up obstacles at almost every turn in the form of directives and riders tacked on to major spending bills so they slip through the legislative process virtually unnoticed. This tactic has environmentalists, no slouches at publicity themselves, crying foul. "A lot of these [proposals] could never be moved in the light of day," says Greg Wetstone, a congressional watchdog for the Natural Resources Defense Council...
...While Congress remains bitterly divided along party lines on other issues, opposition to climate-change initiatives has surprisingly broad support on both sides of the aisle. Some lawmakers dismiss worries about global warming as little more than "liberal claptrap," as California Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher puts it. Others interpret the climate moves as a sly attempt by the Administration to enact by bits and pieces what the Senate declared it would not do when it voted 95-0 to oppose the Kyoto treaty, an international pact to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions that is strongly supported by Vice President Al Gore...
...there is pressure on Congress to confront the issue, and it is coming from an unexpected quarter: the business community. While commercial interests joined forces to block the Kyoto treaty in the Senate two years ago, the opposition has since splintered. Even such big oil companies as BP Amoco concede that global warming demands a serious response. Just two weeks ago, a subgroup of FORTUNE 500 companies known as the Business Roundtable called on government to encourage the development of advanced technologies to "address concerns about climate change." And when he visited Washington recently, Ford Motor chairman Bill Ford said...
...last avenue of relief--personal bankruptcy--is about to get tougher too. Congress is close to passing a controversial bill that would make it harder for average Americans to write off bad credit-card debt, though Visa and others insist only well-off deadbeats would be affected...