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Scientists and officials working with the U.S. Global Change Research Program released on June 16 the first climate-change assessment to be completed during Barack Obama's presidency. The assessment, which is required periodically by Congress, breaks down the predicted effects of global warming in the U.S. by region and sector; it contains no new research, but it paints a detailed and worrying picture of what a warmer America will be like 10, 50 and 100 years from today. "It is clear that climate change is happening now," says Jerry Melillo, a lead author of the report and an ecologist...
...timing of the new report is perfect. A bill to cap U.S. carbon emissions, sponsored by Democratic Representatives Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, is making its way through Congress and could be up for a vote in the House of Representatives as soon as next week. Although the bill has the support of the White House and has been watered down considerably to earn centrist and conservative votes, it will still struggle to become law. Opponents argue that cap and trade will ruin the U.S. economy by raising energy prices. But while there are arguments to be made against...
Negotiating a solution - among members of Congress and the nations of the world - won't be simple, but as the environmental author Bill McKibben wrote in a June 11 review in the New York Review of Books, that might be the easy part: "The real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don't bargain." Facts are facts...
...been a decade and a half since anyone in Congress has attempted to put together a major overhaul of the health-care system, and no one on Capitol Hill or in the White House these days is under any illusions that it will come easy. But as the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee on Wednesday becomes the first to begin the process of formally drafting a bill - one that members will call the Affordable Health Choices Act - it's already clear that the task will be that much tougher because of the absence of the committee...
...Congress, after all, has put more into the cause of health reform than committee chairman Ted Kennedy, who introduced his first national health-insurance bill all the way back in 1970. But Kennedy, who is struggling with brain cancer, has been away from Washington for most of this year - and it shows in the chaos that surrounds the panel as it begins to try to turn his long-held dream of universal health coverage into reality. "As we always say around here, if you want to get a bill through, give it to Kennedy," says Iowa Senator Tom Harkin...