Free Republic

In a surprise move that caught Europe's smug moralists and the environmental movement's noisy extremists flatfooted, the United States announced in Vientiane, Laos, last week that it was joining five other nations - China, India, Japan, South Korea and Australia -- in a new pact that offers a refreshing and effective alternative route to tackling the problem of climate change. While given short shrift by the puzzled media, this is a big deal, in many ways. First, it breaks the climate-change deadlock. This is the agreement that responsible scientists and public officials have been seeking since the failure of the...

<p>The Senate rejected an attempt to limit greenhouse-gas emissions yesterday in the first vote Congress has ever taken on major climate-change legislation.</p> <p>The bill was sponsored by Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut Democrat, and proposed cutting U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions to 2000 levels by the end of this decade.</p>

Senators John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (D., Conn.) are deeply concerned about the issue of global climate change. So much so that they are cosponsoring the Climate Stewardship Act in the Senate this month, a Kyoto-like measure which would impose extra costs on greenhouse-gas-emitting industries such as energy and manufacturing, and will set up a whole new welfare agency to compensate those whose heating costs go up as a result. Climate change is, of course, a very complex area, so one would expect the good senators to have studied the science and economics of the subject in great...