La Voz

It seems that everybody is talking about global warming nowadays. It has become the new hot-button topic in popular culture today, in part from its recent media exposure. Al Gore's global warming lecture, "An Inconvenient Truth," is the third highest-grossing documentary. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary, and deserves to win. The documentary played a key role in opening the global warming discussion to a more massive audience than ever before. It has taken the debate from fringe nut-jobs from both sides and put it front and center.

However, despite all the media attention, government has yet to take an active role in the issue. The right-wing ostrich ignores hard scientific facts, while the left-wing "Chicken Little" says the sky is falling. Here's a conservative scientific estimate: even if we stopped all extra (non-animal) carbon emissions right now, sea levels would still rise three feet over the next century. Battery Park in New York, much of the state of Florida, the Sacramento River delta, and many more areas would become significantly flooded. Of course, this would be a gradual change, so there would be time to adapt by moving people out of dangerously flooded areas and building levees and flood protection systems. But flood protection systems, as we saw during Hurricane Katrina, can often fail. Also, irrevocable damage could be done to ecosystems in affected areas.

These are facts, not opinions, but neither side has made things helpful for anyone who wants to make a reasonable decision. The fact is that global warming is happening because tons of carbon that normally stay deep in the earth are being dumped into the atmosphere. This carbon acts as an extra greenhouse gas and makes the planet warmer, melting ice in high-altitude and polar regions and raising sea levels.

The issue is whether we should do anything to stop global warming now. Many have tried to muddle the issue of whether the science is true, which is ridiculous. Rather, it seems clear that conservatives simply wish that it wasn't true so the issue of regulation wouldn't come up. On the other hand, Al Gore and many environmentalists have tried to turn the issue into a moral one when it should remain in the realm of public policy.

As a nation, we can either pay the minor price now to slow emissions, or pay the major price later to construct massive dams and levees to manage flooding in places like New York, Florida, and even as close to home as Sacramento. It won't happen overnight, as some alarmists might have you believe, but it will happen and it will cost this country and the world billions, if not trillions, of dollars.

When people can get past the intentional ignorance of one side, and the wanton alarmism of the other, they'll start to see the issue clearly. Such basic provisions as higher standards for automobile emissions, and encouragement of green energy, which benefit us in other ways by reducing our dependence on foreign oil, are the natural choice.

Pressuring legislators now to enact these reasonable provisions will make this country and the world an easier place to live for our own generation and the generations to come.

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