“I think what you’ll see is nearly every Mid-Atlantic and New England state agreeing to join in a regional [carbon dioxide] cap and trade regime,” Bradley Campbell, commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection, told Salon. Campbell said that Republican governors are expected to sign on to the plan despite backroom coercion by the White House. “Several of my counterparts in Republican-led states have reported active efforts by the Bush administration to pressure them to not participate in a regional program to implement greenhouse gas reductions,” he said.

While it’s not surprising that Northeast Democrats would defy Bush, it seems likely six Republican states will break ranks with the president’s refusal to address climate change, certainly including New York Gov. George Pataki, and possibly Vermont Gov. James Douglas, New Hampshire Gov. Craig Benson and Connecticut Gov. John Rowland. Only Maryland, said Campbell, is so far siding with the president. “Republican Gov. [Robert] Ehrlich has largely aligned himself with the pollution policies of the Bush administration which has been hostile to even acknowledging climate change as a problem,” Campbell noted. “I think the jury is also out on Pennsylvania because their economy is so coal dependent, and because [Democratic] Gov. [Edward] Rendell is new to these issues and newly elected.”

Campbell argued that the states have been forced to act due to the White House’s lack of leadership on climate change. National and regional climate change assessments generated by U.S. scientists during the Clinton administration — but disregarded by the Bush team as too extreme — forecast dire global warming consequences for the states, including financially disastrous tidal surges in coastal cities, significant stresses on forest, wetland and estuary ecosystems, and increased human diseases such as West Nile Virus.

The Bush administration’s response to these and other scientific warnings has been feeble at best, and sometimes counterproductive. The Bush-Cheney energy plan (a fossil fuel corporate-feeding frenzy) is dead on arrival in Congress, and Bush’s carbon dioxide reduction plan (corporate volunteerism at its most cynical) is stillborn. In fact, Bush’s entire environmental agenda is in disarray, with EPA chief Christie Todd Whitman resigning after her many battles with the White House, and with Bush’s “Clear Skies” air pollution initiative seen as so corporate-friendly that it is creating defectors even among stalwart Republicans like Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

Led by New York and New Jersey, the Northeast governors are looking to act on climate change by moving beyond coal and oil. And they are listening seriously to visionary alternative-energy gurus who see a booming wind-hydrogen economy not decades ahead, but just around the corner.

“If we can go from making cars to making tanks and bombers in a single year, like we did in World War II, then we can transition to a wind-hydrogen economy in just a few years,” Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, told Salon. “But we can only do it if we want to. That level of commitment exists elsewhere. Germany, for example, is planning to cut carbon emissions 40 percent by 2020. The difference isn’t that they have engineering know-how we don’t. It is that they have leadership.”

The regional carbon dioxide emission cap and trade program agreed to in principle by the Northeast states would put limits on the amount of CO2 produced by power plants. Each governor’s home state would be allowed to set its own caps, while allowing individual plant owners to trade emission credits with energy producers around the region. The program will likely be designed similarly to the nation’s successful cap and trade program to limit sulfur dioxide air pollution. For example, one plant might emit less C02 than allowed under the cap; it could sell its surplus to a plant that exceeds its cap. That not only limits emissions, but gives both plants a financial incentive to reduce greenhouse gases.

Pataki challenged the Northeastern states to join him in a CO2 cap and trade program in April, and asked for a response by his fellow governors by this week. While an announcement is expected shortly, most officials declined comment.

Campbell speculated that the regional cap and trade program might be so much like that achieved by the Kyoto Climate Change Treaty that it would allow U.S. power plants, and eventually other industries, to trade their greenhouse gas pollution credits internationally. “There is a long-term possibility that we may, as a region, or as states, be able to participate in Kyoto in spite of the Bush administration’s rejection of the treaty,” Campbell said.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol calls for a 5.2 percent cut in planet-wide greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels, achieved by 2012. The treaty, rejected by the U.S., has been ratified by 100 nations but has yet to be implemented. It still requires approval by countries representing 55 percent of 1990 carbon emissions. If Russia ratifies this year, the treaty will go into effect. America’s cuts in all greenhouse gases under Kyoto were to have been 7 percent, made no later than 2012.

Beyond the technical complexities of the plan, some U.S. governors are setting significant mandatory quotas for electricity generated by alternative power — wind, biomass, solar and hydrogen.

The most outspoken and daring participant among the states is Pataki. The New York governor has steadily distanced himself from Bush on the climate change issue. “It’s important to remember that Pataki led the way by inviting the Northeast governors to participate in the [cap and trade] initiative back in April, and that he has worked closely with the environmental community on global warming,” says Ashok Gupta, director of the air and energy program for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This allows environmentalists, almost three years into the Bush administration, to work in a state where we are still making progress, while others around the country and especially in Washington are fully on the defensive.”

Since taking the White House, the president abandoned the Kyoto Treaty, reversed a GOP campaign promise to regulate power plant CO2 emissions, ignored scientific reports on climate change, and opted for a toothless global warming program. In June, a long section of an EPA environmental report outlining risks from rising temperatures was censored, “whittled to a few noncommittal paragraphs” after White House arm twisting, according to the New York Times.

Bush does offer limited support to sustainable energy. The administration, for example, allocated $720 million in new funding over the next five years to develop the much-hyped “Freedom Car,” a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. By comparison, federal coal and oil subsidies now run to $5 billion annually, says Taxpayers for Common Sense. This doesn’t even take into account the $55 billion to $96 billion spent yearly by the Pentagon to guard fossil fuel corporate interests worldwide, as calculated by the International Center for Technology Assessment.

Pataki has gone his own way. In 2001, he launched a state greenhouse gas emissions reduction taskforce. It made tough recommendations, which the governor is striving to meet. In an interview, state Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner Erin Crotty said Pataki’s state energy plan sets a greenhouse gas emission reduction target of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2010, and 10 percent by 2020.

In this year’s state-of-the-state speech, the governor announced that within 10 years, New York will get at least 25 percent of its electric power from renewable resources such as wind and solar. This goal, while ambitious, is not as challenging as it looks, since the state already generates 17 percent of its electricity from renewable hydropower. The governor has yet to officially commit to a specific cap on CO2 emissions from power plants at 25 percent below 1990 levels (a cut the taskforce said can be made with no cost to consumers).

Further, Crotty said, Pataki plans to adopt the California Zero Emission Vehicle standard to cut carbon dioxide exhaust from cars — if the California standard holds up in court. Pataki’s backing of the so-called “California Car” is significant since the Bush administration has joined carmakers in suing California to block the initiative.

While New York’s actions might seem paltry compared with the scope of the global problem, they could have a real impact. New York state, if it were its own nation, would boast the world’s eighth largest economy, spending $38 billion on energy alone. New England, combined with New York and New Jersey, as a nation, would be the world’s eighth largest greenhouse gas emitter.

Pataki’s reasons for supporting global warming action diverge 180 degrees from Bush’s view: “The governor’s philosophy on the environment is that you can’t have a strong economy without a protected environment, and vice versa,” said Crotty. New York state’s economic health is “based on the health of our natural resources. In Long Island Sound alone we have a $5 billion dollar economy based on everything from tourism to commercial and recreational fisheries, not to mention the Adirondack and Catskill forest preserves, an area twice the size of Yosemite. For us, climate change poses a serious threat to both the environment and the economy.”

A 2000 federal report estimated that the state’s temperatures may rise an average 1.7 to 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2020s due to human-caused global warming, resulting in higher sea levels, coastal flooding and increased likelihood of severe weather events such as drought and hurricanes. “The Federal Emergency Management Agency modeled the number of Level 5 hurricanes hitting New York City at high tide and doing billions in damage,” said Jeff Jones, communications director for Environmental Advocates of New York. What’s disturbing, Jones said, is that “while FEMA used to model such an event as a hundred-year storm, they now model it as a 20-year storm.” With New York temperatures projected to rise 6 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2080, such events could become even more frequent.

Crotty notes another divergence from Bush’s position. While the president claims that adherence to Kyoto CO2 cuts and a switch to alternative energy will bankrupt the nation, Pataki sees a commitment to wind, solar, hydrogen and biomass as a boon. “We’ve proven that reducing greenhouse gases can be done without harming the economy,” she said. “In fact, we see an economic advantage to encouraging technological innovations here in New York.”

Pataki may have a pragmatic reason for his stance. Global warming is becoming a hot political issue in New York. For example, the governor’s surprise announcement of a greenhouse gas taskforce came at the height of the last governor’s race, at a black-tie dinner by the New York League of Conservation Voters. “The governor recognized that a League endorsement was important the previous time he ran and would be very important to his reelection,” said Jones.

Other governors around the nation are pursuing greenhouse gas emission cuts and making commitments to renewable energy. “Three to five years ago, almost no one was talking about greenhouse gases,” says Gupta. “To have state leaders taking action sends a message that regulation at the national level is inevitable. It is part of the overall pressure on Congress to act.”

In New Jersey, it was another Republican, then-Gov. Christie Whitman, who took an early stand against climate change. In 1998, she set a state goal of cutting greenhouse gases 3.5 percent below 1990 levels by 2005, and she added a small charge to consumer utility bills to raise $358 million for energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. Later, when she was Bush’s EPA director, it was Whitman’s tough stance on global warming that caused her first rift with the administration and helped pave the way for her departure this year.

New Jersey, now in Democratic hands, is out front in curbing greenhouse gas pollution, putting stringent CO2 emission limits on the state’s biggest utility. In June, Gov. James McGreevey pledged that 20 percent of the state’s energy will come from clean power by 2020, a tall order in a state with little hydropower.

Maine, under Democratic Gov. John Baldacci, has just committed to reducing carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by 2010, to 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and by 75 to 80 percent over the long term, in line with a proposal by the New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers. “At a time when the federal government has deleted climate change information from EPA reports, Maine is not risking our future — we’re taking action,” said Sue Jones of the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

Vermont has committed to reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by more than 25 percent over the next decade. And Massachusetts was the first state to mandate CO2 cuts at power plants, targeting its six dirtiest fossil fuel plants.

Outside the Northeast, the Republican stronghold of Nevada plans to get 15 percent of its energy from renewables by 2013, with a report by the Energy Foundation estimating that alternative energy will increase the state gross product by $665 million and create up to 5,000 jobs.

According to WorldWatch Institute, California Gov. Gray Davis has pegged the net benefits of renewable energy over a five-year period at $11 billion in economic development benefits for his state due to new job creation and in-state investments.

Remarkably, while he was serving as the Texas governor, George W. Bush signed a bill mandating that 3 to 4 percent of the state’s electricity come from renewable resources, creating a boon for Texas wind power. By the end of 2002, 15 states had enacted legislation requiring utilities to increase their use of renewable energy, reports the Washington Post. Not unexpectedly, the greatest resistance to alternative energy is in Midwestern states with the most fossil fuel-burning power plants, and in the Southeast, where coal mining remains an economic force.

In Europe, successful renewable energy initiatives and greenhouse gas caps are causing Bush’s bogeyman of economic ruin to vanish in a puff of prosperous reality.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, seen by many in Britain as “Bush’s poodle,” has broken with America over global warming, comparing the climate change threat to that of terrorism. Just days before the Iraq war, Blair announced plans to cut U.K. greenhouse gas emissions 60 percent by 2050 — a rate that, if achieved planet-wide, could probably stabilize global warming, U.N. scientists say. “There will be no genuine security if the planet is ravaged by climate change,” Blair said. He hopes to get the entire European Union to back his plan. He has also committed to getting 20 percent of British energy from renewables by 2020, according to the U.K. Guardian.

While critics call Blair’s initiative under-funded, just last week the U.K. announced a program to build offshore wind turbines to generate 6,000 megawatts of power. Wind power is now growing in Europe by 40 percent per year, with a capacity of more than 20,000 megawatts installed — that’s three-quarters of the world’s total wind power output, enough to serve more than 10 million European homes.

In the U.S., wind energy is at about one-fifth of Europe’s capacity, according to the WorldWatch Institute. Germany currently generates 12,000 megawatts annually from wind, Spain has 4,800 megawatts, while the U.S. falls behind at just 4,700 megawatts. Even Denmark installed more wind turbines last year than the U.S.

Japan and Germany lead the world in solar power, producing 100 and 75 megawatts respectively, while the U.S. is a distant third at 32 megawatts. (India may soon catch us, since it already produces 18 megawatts). Japan leads the manufacture of solar cells, monopolizing 43 percent of the market, with Germany controlling 25 percent. Again America is behind, in third place at 24 percent.

Iceland has declared plans to be the first nation to convert fully to a hydrogen economy, is retrofitting Reykjavik’s bus fleet with fuel cell engines, and has opened hydrogen fueling stations in the capital.

Forward-looking political action abroad and by the U.S. governors, while not as far-reaching as environmentalists might like, is indicative of a fundamental change in the response to global warming. Leaders beyond the influence of the Bush administration are fast recognizing that inaction on global warming could be catastrophically costly in dollars and human suffering; that popular opinion is shifting in support of decisive action; and that the alternative energy technologies able to abate global warming’s worst impacts are ready today. Best of all, those who implement these sustainable technologies are likely to reap huge economic dividends — in innovative corporate startups, increased jobs and improvements in quality of life.

This bold vision for the future that is starting to capture the political and public imagination includes vast windfarms that generate boundless power, and hydrogen cars that hum along streets while causing no pollution. It includes landfills that are no longer a source of noxious smells but of biomass power. It promises millions of solar roofs, and energy self-sufficient homes that sell their power back to utility companies. It even promises transformed human landscapes where telecommuters no longer sit in traffic jams wasting gas and time; where urban sprawl is contained and cities are made livable and pedestrian-friendly.

A whole suite of technologies, all blossoming simultaneously, explain the boom in alternative energy abroad. “One of the most exciting things has been advances in wind turbine design to operate at much lower wind speed and convert much more wind into electricity,” said Lester Brown, the alternative energy expert who heads the Earth Policy Institute. The largest turbines now produce 250 times more electricity than the ones built 20 years ago, when California pioneered the industry. “We have enough harnessable wind energy in the U.S. to meet all our energy needs,” Brown said. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, three windy states alone — Texas, North Dakota and Kansas — can supply all of the nation’s electricity.

Brown paints a future where Western ranchers and farmers plant a new cash crop among their cows and corn: wind turbines that will turn their lands into energy providers as well as food providers. Wind is abundant, cheap, clean, inexhaustible, environmentally benign and, because it is decentralized, free from terrorist threat.

“Once we get cheap electricity from wind, then we have the option of electrolyzing water to produce hydrogen,” said Brown. “And hydrogen is the fuel of the future.”

That future may be closer than we think. “Everyone always talks about hydrogen in relation to fuel-cell cars, but the reality is that if we wanted to move rapidly away from oil, we don’t have to go that route. We could simply convert our internal combustion engines from gasoline to hydrogen, burning the hydrogen directly,” revealed Brown. “It’s fairly simple, requiring minor engine changes probably costing not more than about $200 per car. For that amount, a mechanic at a service station could convert an internal combustion engine to a gas engine that would run on natural gas or hydrogen. In fact, BMW now has a prototype model where, while driving down the road, you can switch from gasoline to hydrogen and back again. From an engineering point of view, it is entirely within range.” It hasn’t been attempted before because hydrogen hasn’t been cheap, but an abundance of wind power would change that.

Brown dismisses another often mentioned impediment to the wind-hydrogen transition: the lack of a distribution system. The infrastructure is already in place, he said. “I do all my cooking in a Washington, D.C., apartment with natural gas piped in from Texas. Hydrogen can be delivered the same way, using the same pipes.”

American entrepreneurs already know what Brown knows. “Ken Lay, when he was at Enron — his faults aside — was a visionary,” Brown said. “What Lay saw was that the natural gas fields in Texas would one day be depleted, gone. But the wind that Texas has in abundance would still be there.” Lay founded a profitable wind company at Enron with the idea that Texas wind farms would produce cheap electricity and electrolyze water to make cheap hydrogen. Using existing but modified natural gas pipelines, the hydrogen would flow to the nation’s buildings and cars. General Electric has since taken over Enron’s wind company.

Retrofitting natural gas pipelines probably won’t come cheap. Because hydrogen atoms are very small, thousands of miles of pipeline would have to be better sealed to prevent leakage. But that cost pales against the $1 trillion in climate change-related disasters over the past 15 years. In 1998 alone, the hottest year on record, a Southern U.S. drought did $6 billion in damage; a freakish New England ice storm did $2.5 billion; Hurricane Mitch, the deadliest Atlantic storm in 200 years, caused $5 billion in destruction; while a Yangtze River flood in China did $30 billion in harm. Unless action is taken, the cost of global warming-caused disasters is likely to double every decade, according to a U.N. Environment Program Finance Initiative report.

Brown leaps further ahead in time and in hope: “The development of hydrogen fuel cells is exciting as well because of their efficiency. What we will see in the cities of the future are automobiles that don’t make any noise or emit any pollutants. We can’t even imagine a city without noise and air pollution, because we’ve never known it!”

Amory Lovins, another alternative energy guru, in an interview reported that just such a vehicle has been designed by his Rocky Mountain Institute: “We’ve developed a 99-mile-per-gallon gas-electric hybrid Explorer-class SUV.” According to Lovins, just $200 million in investment capital could see the hypercar roll off assembly lines, saving three or four times America’s annual Persian Gulf imports. Hypercars could eventually be converted to hydrogen fuel cell engines as the technology arrived. Lovins has not patented his design, and Ford, GM, Daimler/Chrysler and other car companies are all racing to be the first to market such a car.

“If you look at the speed of production conversion at the start of World War II, it was just stunning. I think the same could be done now because a lot of the technologies are already well-developed,” said Lovins. “If you put together a New Manhattan Project to develop the wind-hydrogen economy, all bets are off. Under normal conditions hypercars could control half the market in 10 years. With a crash program to get things into production, you could probably cut that time in half. That is ambitious, but Americans are very good at doing ambitious things when their attention is concentrated.”

Unfortunately, Brown believes that we may need a climate change disaster, or a series of them, on the psychological scale of the Pearl Harbor attack to create the needed urgency for change. “We’re probably going to see trouble first in the food sector, the most vulnerable section of the global economy. The combination of falling water tables and rising temperatures may very soon bring the era of cheap food to an end,” he warned. China is no longer producing enough grain to feed itself. Once its stores are used up, Brown said, that nation of 1.3 billion people is likely to come to the world’s table demanding grain. But continued climate shocks — intensifying bouts of drought and deluge — may make help difficult. “We’re really a lot closer to that moment than most of us imagine,” said Brown. “That could be our wakeup call.”

When the moment comes, Brown hopes the technology and economics will fall into place so we can quickly move to stabilize climate. At that date, the pioneering work of the Northeast governors may be recognized for its innovation.

“Twenty years from now, I hope we’ll be looking at a very different mix of energy sources, with a great many more renewables on-line,” said Campbell, the New Jersey environmental commissioner. The state, he asserted, is re-envisioning its future from the ground up, supporting a vigorous green-building program, planting 100,000 trees in urban areas to reduce energy needs and absorb carbon, and working toward livable cities and containing sprawl so people drive less. Ultimately, he thinks, the nation can effectively curb carbon dioxide emissions.

“I don’t want to underestimate what a significant challenge this is,” he said. “We have to build the infrastructure to regulate a new pollutant. It is like the early moments when Congress passed the first environmental laws, setting very ambitious goals, but having little conception of the mechanics and technology of how to get there.”

Should we fail, the cost could be terrible. A new book, “When Life Nearly Died,” by professor Michael Benton of the U.K.’s Bristol University, shows that temperature increases over the next 97 years could roughly equal that at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago. Runaway global warming then triggered the worst mass extinction ever, the disappearance of 95 percent of species on the planet.

President Bush, when he acknowledges modern climate change at all, sees it as a distant threat and challenge. But the problem of global warming — endangering the world’s food supply and even life itself — is with us now. And so are the solutions.

“I have dealt with the military for years, and they constantly seek to get out from under environmental laws,” said Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), the ranking member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. “But using the threat of 9/11 and al-Qaida to get unprecedented environmental immunity is despicable.” The exemptions are unneeded, since environmental-protection regulations have never interfered with military training and readiness, Dingell told Salon. If there ever is a conflict between the two, he added, environmental laws already provide for case-by-case exemptions.

Even within the Bush administration, the exemptions proposed last Thursday have provoked disagreement and opposition. The exemptions are similar to those proposed by the Bush administration last year, which Congress defeated. That bill, prompted by 9/11, would have given blanket exemptions from eight key environmental laws to all military forces conducting exercises.

The new, rewritten bill claims that the military is unable to prepare for war so long as it is hamstrung by provisions of the Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (better known as the Superfund Law).

The administration claims that these laws hamper soldier training and military readiness. According to the environmental news service Greenwire, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified at a Feb. 5 congressional hearing that the new exemptions will “clarify environmental statutes which restrict access to, and sustainment of, training and test ranges essential for the readiness of our troops and the effectiveness of our weapons systems in the global war on terror.”

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, backed Rumsfeld’s claim, noting that environmental issues affecting military training exercises must be resolved quickly, especially since military training facilities are now operating at “absolute peak” in anticipation of war, reported the Environment and Energy Daily. “We’re not being fair to the military,” Warner said.

Environmentalists vehemently disagree. “This bill is an attempt to roll back the laws that keep our air clean, that protect us from cancer caused by toxic waste, and that conserve our most endangered species,” Michael Jasny, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an interview. “To gut environmental protections on 30 million acres across our country is bad for local communities and for the soldiers who serve on those military bases, all who will have to deal with the health and environmental consequences. To undermine our environmental laws and ram this bill through Congress at this time, and in this way, is cynical even by the standards of this administration.”

The U.S. military is already the worst polluter in the nation, with 28,000 current and formerly contaminated sites scattered across every state and extending to some far-flung territories.

The exemption bill would override laws for the disposal of hazardous waste by changing the definition of “solid waste” to exclude explosives, munitions, munitions fragments and other toxic material. It would allow spent, toxic munitions to be left lying exposed on target ranges where they can leach into lakes, rivers, marshes and groundwater. It would also weaken the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency and of state agencies to guard communities from Defense Department toxic waste, and would prevent the states from collecting damages against the Pentagon when its contaminants damaged sensitive natural resources, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In a recent New York Times report, environmentalists warned that the bill would also allow the Pentagon to pass the buck. Cleaning up the most contaminated hazardous-waste sites would be mostly paid for not by the military polluter but by state governments, which with their severely strained budgets can ill afford the expense.

“There are obvious environmental-justice implications to all of these hazardous-waste exemptions,” Jasny said. “People that live near military bases and soldiers who live on those bases — who are exposed to these environmental hazards — are in many instances disproportionately of minority backgrounds and among our poorest citizens. Those are the people who will suffer most should this bill pass.”

The Pentagon initiative would also lift the mandate for ensuring that military activities do not worsen air quality. Clean Air Act exemptions would broaden the definition of “training” to exclude even the control of emissions caused by nonmilitary activities, such as driving vehicles on military bases or even spraying pesticides on a right of way.

One need look no further than Fort Wainright, Alaska, to see the impact of giving the Pentagon a blanket air-quality exemption. The base’s antiquated coal-burning power plant has been ordered to pay $16 million in air-quality fines to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over a 10-year period. It was cited for 450 state environmental violations in a single month.

Changes in another law, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, seem intended to squelch litigious battles between environmentalists and the Navy over the implementation of a low-frequency active sonar system that may possibly lead to whale beachings and deaths. Last fall, a federal court stopped the Navy from deploying the system, pending a trial.

While the Navy says that the sonar system is vital for detecting enemy “stealth” submarines and that it will harm few whales, Marsh Green, the president of the Ocean Mammal Institute, disagrees. “There is a significant body of research showing that whales avoid underwater sounds starting at 110 to 120 decibels,” the animal behavior specialist told the Christian Science Monitor. But “the sonar sound field around the [Navy] transmitting ship will be 180 decibels up to one kilometer (0.6 miles) away and 150 to 160 decibels up to 160 kilometers (100 miles) away  This means that many marine animals will be exposed to sonar levels capable of causing stranding and, possibly, lung hemorrhaging over large areas of the ocean.” Dr. Kenneth Balcomb, executive director of the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, Wash., has likened the biological harm done by high-powered sonar to that caused by “fishing with dynamite.”

Other military exemptions to the Endangered Species Act would do significant harm to America’s natural heritage. “Although [Defense Department]-managed lands represent only about 3 percent of the total federal land inventory, there is strong evidence that they have disproportionate value in terms of biodiversity,” states a 1996 Defense Department report. The report, jointly written by the Pentagon and the Nature Conservancy, goes on to say that there are “more than 220 Federally listed species as confirmed residents on, or migrants through, military lands.” The new Endangered Species Act exemption would put all of those species at risk, while offering no significant benefit to national security.

“With regard to the Endangered Species Act, the military again seeks to have exemptions for which no other federal agencies are eligible,” said Dingell. The act “requires that land where threatened or endangered species live be designated critical habitat. The military does not want to comply with this law like every other federal agency and every other American citizen does. As the author of [the Endangered Species Act], I can assure you that exemptions are available for reasons of national security. In fact, Section 7 of [the act] allows agencies to get waivers from the Fish and Wildlife Service. Ironically, the Pentagon wants a blanket waiver even though they have never sought a Section 7 exemption.”

Critics of the Bush exemption plan have concluded that none of the blanket exemptions are necessary, noting that the Pentagon has failed to make a compelling case that existing environmental laws impede military readiness. Rep. Nick J. Rahall II of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the House Resources Committee, adds that existing exemptions “have worked quite well to ensure that our armed services remain combat-ready and that our homeland environment remains safe and healthy,” reported the Washington Post.

A 2002 General Accounting Office study of military training, the Post also noted, found that training readiness remained high for most units and that military readiness data does not support the Pentagon’s assertion of being hurt by environmental laws.

Also dissenting from the Pentagon view is Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman. “I don’t believe there is any training mission in the United States that is being held up because of environmental regulations,” she said last month in remarks reported by Environment and Energy Daily.

The National Park Service, too, has weighed in against the Pentagon exemption plan. Criticizing an early draft of the bill, the Park Service said its provisions “would cause substantial degradation of natural resources, including migratory birds, marine mammals  and water quality.”

While conservation groups expect a tough battle, they are unwilling to surrender any ground. Last year’s congressional approval of a single component of the Defense Department’s 2002 exemption package tells why. That measure led to a waiver freeing the Pentagon from adherence to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which protects 859 species of birds from harm.

“The provision, which was inserted at the Bush administration’s request, will effectively give the Defense Department license to bomb and destroy at will the natural habitats of migratory birds, endangering more than 1 million birds and curtailing the enjoyment of more than 50 million bird enthusiasts in this country,” said Dingell.

The first victim of last year’s congressional surrender to Rumsfeld’s Migratory Bird Treaty “clarification” may be the endangered Micronesian megapode, a pigeon-size gray-brown bird with a rough crest that uses solar energy to incubate its eggs. Fewer than 2,000 of the birds are known to exist on U.S.-controlled Pacific islands. Paradoxically, as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service seeks to conserve and nurture the bird on some islands, the Navy is reserving the right to bomb it into oblivion on others.

Last year, the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based environmental group, blocked Navy bombing exercises on the Pacific atoll of Farallon de Medinilla to protect the endangered bird. During the ensuing court case, the Bush administration’s disdain for nature became clear with a now famous remark: A government lawyer argued that killing birds should not be considered a bad thing, because “bird watchers get more enjoyment spotting a rare bird than they do spotting a common one.” The judge in the case ordered the Defense Department to stop bombing until it came into compliance with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

But congressional approval of the Bird Treaty exemption last autumn means that court judgment is now moot, and the Micronesian megapode may be headed toward extinction on Farallon de Medinilla. Large numbers of frigate birds and masked red-footed and brown boobies would also be targeted within the Navy’s bombing sights.

The Bird Treaty waiver offers another example of Bush’s disregard for international law. The treaty has been in effect since 1918, and it never presented an issue of national security in World War II, the Korean or Vietnam wars, or during the first war with Iraq.

In response to the Defense Department’s chief claim that it is seeking a balance between military readiness and environmental protection, Jasny responds: “There is no balance in letting the military contaminate our drinking water, as they have done on Cape Cod; neglecting or abandoning deadly toxic waste sites, as they have done in minority communities like Anniston, Ala.; and causing whales to strand and die on our beaches.”

Even in this time of great national uncertainty and fear of terror, the Pentagon might take a cue from an observation made in the mid-1990s by then-Defense Secretary William J. Perry. “Protecting our national security in the post-Cold War era,” Perry said, “includes integrating the best environmental practices into all Department of Defense activities.”

Americans need to listen intently to those balmy Arctic winds, see the water rising, and then turn a cold, pragmatic eye toward our Washington leadership to decide just how much Republican environmental policies contradict clear messages relayed by the earth. It could be that our leaders are viewing the world through a distorted lens, and that their corporate worldview and sometimes their fundamentalist Christian faith are guiding them to an interpretation of reality based not on scientific fact, but on dogma.

We should take lessons from history, looking to the example of Stalinist Russia to see the human misery that comes from sacrificing scientific objectivity to political ideology. Or look to the Iraqi deserts, not in search of oil, but to observe ancient archeological evidence that proves the dire consequences that result when leaders ignore environmental indicators. Today those global indicators are screaming at us.

World population, topping 6 billion, has already left 1.1 billion people without safe drinking water, says the United Nations Environment Program. The earth is poisoned by 500 million tons of hazardous waste annually. Fisheries are collapsing, croplands eroding, and forests shrinking — from 5 billion to 2.9 billion hectares in the last century, says Worldwatch Institute. And 20 percent of all species could go extinct by 2030, cautions Pulitzer Prize-winning entomologist Edward O. Wilson.

Despite these apocalyptic warnings, the federal government — with Republicans in control of the White House, Congress and the judiciary — has launched the largest rollback of environmental law ever. The Bush administration seems determined to undo much of the good done since Earth Day 1970, when 20 million Americans defended the planet in the biggest mass demonstration in U.S. history.

Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma is poised to become Bush’s lieutenant in the assault. As the new chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, he unseats Jim Jeffords, I-Vt., an environmental champion who advanced legislation to curb global warming. Inhofe, by contrast, is a Big Oil backer who once characterized the Environmental Protection Agency as “the Gestapo bureaucracy” and has earned a zero rating from the League of Conservation Voters three years running.

Under Inhofe, hearings to oppose Bush’s anti-environmental agenda are improbable, as are subpoenas for administration documents divulging shoddy science or corporate complicity. “Teddy Roosevelt is rolling over in his grave,” Alys Campaigne, legislative director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in the Bureau of National Affairs Environmental Report.

Bush and Inhofe will likely move to modify or overturn the National Environmental Policy Act Amendments of 1975. This Magna Carta of environmental law requires study, disclosure and public comment on the environmental impacts of federal projects. Bush has already demanded that “excessive red tape” be hacked from the law, fast-tracking road and airport construction and cutting the public out of a once democratic process.

The president is attacking the Clean Air Act of 1970, another cornerstone of environmental law. Late last year, Bush proposed rules to weaken the act’s new source review, which requires the installation of state-of-the-art pollution-control equipment in modernizing factories. The new rules allow industrial air pollution to continue at levels that, according to the American Lung Association, now kill 10,000 Americans annually.

Bush’s proposed “Clear Skies” initiative also undermines air quality. Like developers who christen subdivisions with the prettified names of the nature they destroy, “Clear Skies” won’t enhance the air at all, but will further pollute it, says the NRDC.

Bush’s “Healthy Forests” initiative likewise suffers from Orwellian doublespeak, felling Western forests to save them. Disguised as a measure for curbing wildfires, the plan invites logging companies to cut healthy trees in national forests while reducing public oversight. Ironically, the probable cause of recent catastrophic fires is global warming, a problem that most Republicans deny.

California last year passed the nation’s first law to control greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles. But the Bush administration has virtually gone to war against the state’s environmental initiatives, seeking to extend oil-drilling rights off the California coast and to overturn regulations requiring automakers to sell a zero-emissions vehicle.

This Congress will likely discontinue the requirement that corporate polluters contribute to Superfund, leaving taxpayers to pay for toxic waste cleanup. Both presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. supported Superfund, with Bush Jr. the first Republican president not to back reauthorization.

Under the Republicans, bigger oil-company tax breaks are likely, heightening the nation’s vulnerability to terrorism through dependence on foreign energy, while paying lip service to wind and solar power. Republicans will almost surely launch another assault on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other public lands — reserves that are an insignificant drop in the barrel compared to total U.S. demand.

When the Pentagon used Sept. 11 and the war on terrorism in an effort to get its training exercises exempted from eight environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act, the GOP-dominated House gave full approval. The lame-duck Democratic Senate rejected all but an exemption to the Migratory Bird Treaty, a “compromise” that allows the military to blast rare migratory birds like the American eagle in the defense of freedom.

This case illustrates Republican arrogance. The Los Angeles Times reported that an administration lawyer, arguing for military readiness, contended that naturalists benefit when the military kills birds because “bird-watchers get more enjoyment spotting a rare bird than they do spotting a common one.”

Environmentalists are appealing the military exemption, but another political sea change diminishes their chances of getting a fair hearing. Congressional Republicans blocked many of President Clinton’s judicial appointments, leaving over 100 federal judgeships open. With the Senate Judiciary Committee now in GOP hands, the courts could take a hard swing to the right, putting the environment further at risk.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit holds almost exclusive jurisdiction over environmental law, hearing cases concerning federal authority, involving the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency, for example. Senate Republicans blocked two Clinton appointments to the court, setting the stage for a bench packed with Bush conservatives. It is they who will likely hear the Migratory Bird Treaty appeal. Conservative judges appointed now could shape environmental law for decades.

Certainly, the Republican environmental onslaught will face enormous opposition, with new initiatives likely to be tied up in court. For example, just hours after the administration published rules weakening the Clean Air Act’s new source review, nine Northeastern states filed a legal challenge to the levels of pollution allowed by Bush’s plan. But in the meantime, damage done could be huge. Children crippled by pollution-aggravated asthma are not easily cured; public lands, once drilled, cannot be restored to wilderness.

The obvious reasons behind Republican anti-environmentalism have been often stated but deserve review: George Bush and Dick Cheney come from old-line industry and possess an old-line industrial worldview. They are oilmen who believe in the efficiency of the marketplace, an efficiency that for them is synonymous with virtue. They are unreconstructed capitalists — that’s their operating system, as surely as Windows drives most personal computers.

Such marketplace-minded Republicans tend to label environmentalists as either frivolous tree-huggers or dangerous monkey-wrenching eco-terrorists. They dismiss good environmental science as the doomsaying of the loony left. Almost by definition, they lack an understanding of such concepts as sustainability, carrying capacity, biodiversity, or webs of interdependence, all crucial ideas for ecologists.

Even if Bush and his allies were to understand these principles, economic and political factors are a heavy counterweight. Republicans, for example, see lower oil prices as good for the economy, and a strong economy as improving chances for reelection. For that reason, low gas prices in the short term become a primary public-policy goal above long-term health and environmental considerations.

And of course, promoting any policies that go against immediate economic goals would pit the administration against strong corporate interests. The American auto industry, for example, remains a powerful economic engine in many states; if SUV sales are keeping domestic automakers afloat, the automakers will resist spending millions to impose tough new fuel-efficiency standards on SUVs.

Hence the power of corporate campaign contributions. Earthjustice, a nonprofit public-interest law group, reports that in the 2000 campaign, Bush-Cheney and the Republican National Committee received $44 million in contributions from the fossil-fuel, chemical, timber and mining industries — more than was offered by these interests to all federal Democratic candidates and party committees combined. “The Bush administration’s anti-environmental agenda doesn’t just appear to be made-to-order for polluting and extractive industry interests,” said Earthjustice. “It is.” In 2002, the bond between polluters, extractors and Republicans persisted: GOP candidates received $14.6 million from oil and gas companies, for example, while Democrats got just $3.7 million, says the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

However, beyond all these more obvious anti-environmental motivations lies a more deep-seated cause, one tougher for the secular mind to grasp — especially for those who trust in unbiased science as a guiding principle of environmental policy. Difficult as it may be to believe, many of the right-wing conservatives who have great influence in the Bush administration and now in Congress are governed by a higher power.

In his book “The Carbon Wars,” Greenpeace activist Jeremy Leggett tells how he stumbled upon this otherworldly agenda. During Kyoto Protocol climate change negotiations, Leggett candidly asks Ford Motor Co. executive John Schiller how opponents of the pact could believe there is no problem with “a world of a billion cars intent on burning all the oil and gas available on the planet.” The executive asserts first that scientists get it wrong when they say fossil fuels have been sequestered underground for eons. The earth, he says, is just 10,000 years old — not 4.5 billion years old, the age widely accepted by scientists.

Then Schiller drops the bomb: “You know, the more I look, the more it is just as it says in the Bible.” The Book of Daniel, he tells Leggett, predicts that increased earthly devastation will mark the End Time and return of Christ. Paradoxically, Leggett notes, many fundamentalists see dying coral reefs, melting ice caps and other environmental destruction not as an urgent call to action but as God’s will. Within the religious right worldview, the wreck of the earth is Good News!

Some true believers, interpreting biblical prophecy, are sure they will be saved from the horrific destruction brought by ecosystem collapse. They’ll be raptured: rescued from earth by God, who will then rain down seven ghastly years of misery on unbelieving humanity. During this tribulation, a powerful ruler led by Satan and called the antichrist will rule the world. Then Jesus will come in glory to defeat Satan’s forces at the battle of Armageddon. His return marks the Millennium, when the Lord restores the earth to its green pristine condition, and the faithful enjoy a thousand years of peace and prosperity.

U.S. fundamentalists number in the tens of millions, but not all of them believe literally in this apocalyptic vision, warns Joan Bokaer, an expert on the religious right, formerly of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University. That would be an oversimplification, she says. Some, no doubt, don’t even dwell on environmental issues. But many do hold ideas antithetical to the environment.

One powerful fringe group, the Reconstructionists, don’t speak of the End Time at all, Bokaer notes. They put the onus for the Lord’s return not in the hands of biblical prophecy, but in their own political activism. Reconstructionists say Christ will only return when a righteous nation acts to purge unrepentant sinners and applies biblical law to its populace. They want to spread the Gospel in a political context, making the Bible the foundation of U.S. jurisprudence. That includes an end to environmental regulation.

Reconstructionists believe the Lord will provide, and their view is laid out in “America’s Providential History,” a religious-right high school history textbook: “The secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie … that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece,” write authors Mark Beliles and Stephen McDowell. “In contrast, the Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God’s Earth. The resources are waiting to be tapped.”

In another passage, the writers explain: “While many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people.” Fossil fuels and forests are like the loaves and fishes, Reconstructionists say, miraculously multiplying for true believers.

Such misinformed viewpoints would be of little import except that, in the 1980s, they began permeating the Republican Party. That’s when Republican strategists, eager to broaden the party’s narrow base of wealthy corporate supporters, partnered with religious right leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who agreed to politicize their followers and bring them into the GOP, according to Bokaer.

Working through fundamentalist, Pentecostal and charismatic churches, the Christian Coalition has promoted right-wing Republican candidates by mailing voter guides at election time — 30 million in 1994; another 45 million in 1996; and 70 million in 2000 to support candidate Bush, reported the watchdog group People for the American Way.

As it turns out, politicians who ally themselves with the religious right are also rabidly anti-environmental. Those who score high with the Christian Coalition almost invariably score low with the League of Conservation Voters.

According to the Washington-based People United for Separation of Church and State, 178 House members in the last Congress allied themselves with the religious right, earning barely a 15 percent average approval rating with the League of Conservation Voters. In the 108th Congress, Republican leadership hails almost exclusively from the religious right, scoring a perfect 100 percent with the Christian Coalition, but getting barely a 4 percent average approval rating from the conservation group.

Among them are Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. These leaders seem ready to aggressively move the religious right agenda forward: DeLay has bluntly said that the Almighty is using him to promote “a biblical worldview” in American politics, according to Paul Krugman in the New York Times.

Also among those holding an extreme fundamentalist perspective is Inhofe, reports Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “When we win this revolution in November, you’ll be doing the Lord’s work, and He will richly bless you for it!” Inhofe declared at the Christian Coalition’s Road to Victory Conference last October.

And George W. Bush? He and Attorney General John Ashcroft make no secret of being born again. According to the Nation, Bush’s “walk with Jesus” began in 1985 when Billy Graham visited him in Kennebunkport, Maine. While Graham doesn’t support the politicizing of Christianity, one has to wonder how Bush’s conversion (whether real or a ploy) has helped him justify anti-environmental positions to himself and others.

The Republican Party platform in Bush’s home state warns of what to expect from a federal government guided by religious-right radicalism. “The Republican Party of Texas reaffirms the United States of America as a Christian Nation,” the platform says, and seeks to nullify the separation between church and state. It would abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy and Department of Education. It dismisses global warming as “myth.” And it promotes public school education “based upon biblical principles,” not upon secular humanism, which teaches Darwinian evolution theory and a scientific worldview. If the Texas Republican Party platform became the law of the land, America would become a very different place.

Whether the Republican Party’s attack on nature is based on corporate piracy or fundamentalist ideology, the result is similar. With environmental laws removed as braking mechanisms, the role of the federal government as environmental guardian is repealed, and industry is given free rein to destroy.

In such a brave new world, office holders and bureaucrats, embracing the corporate or fundamentalist worldview, will be unable to see, or may even willfully engineer, what many ecologists recognize as the looming global environmental crisis.

In the early days of the current administration, the news was full of instances where Bush appointed foxes to guard the henhouse: Gale Norton, a mining industry lobbyist, became secretary of the interior. Steven Griles, a lobbyist for major coal interests, was appointed Norton’s second-in-command. The list goes on.

Now, the Washington Post reports a more disturbing trend. Bush “has begun a broad restructuring of the scientific advisory committees that guide federal policy,” says the Post. These largely anonymous committees of scientists, lawyers and academics make recommendations vital to determining health and environmental risk.

Replaced, for example, were 15 members of a 17-member Department of Health and Human Services committee that assesses the impacts on human health of low-level exposure to environmental chemicals. New Bush-imposed panel appointees include chemical-industry advocates and a California scientist who helped defend Pacific Gas and Electric Co. against the real-life Erin Brockovich.

More troubling is W. David Hager, one of Bush’s nominees to the influential Food and Drug Administration panel on women’s health policy. Hager, says Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, has a résumé “more impressive for theology than gynecology.” Hager emphasizes the restorative power of Jesus Christ in one’s life and recommends specific Scripture readings to treat headaches, eating disorders and premenstrual syndrome. One wonders how his radical fundamentalism may cloud his scientific objectivity.

The administration has repeatedly turned a blind eye to good science. When the National Academy of Sciences came to Bush in 2001 with a report saying that global warming was real, serious and human-caused, he ignored it. When the Environmental Protection Agency sent a 2002 report to the United Nations saying that global warming will result in “rising seas, melting ice caps and glaciers, ecological system disruption, floods, heat waves, and more dangerous storms,” Bush rejected it as a document “put out by the bureaucracy.”

Marty Jezer, writing for the Online Common Dreams News Center, notes, “One has to go back to the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union to find such a display of political arrogance and ignorance of science.”

At that time, Trofim Lysenko told Josef Stalin that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel’s theory of heredity were wrongheaded “bourgeois science,” not suited to a communist state. Lysenko’s ideologically based science professed that the environment can alter genes and cause evolutionary change within a single generation. Under the right conditions, he said, a wheat seed can produce rye. Or a tropical palm seed, soaked in cold water, can have its genetics retuned to thrive in a chilly climate.

With Stalin’s blessing, Lysenko purged Russia’s scientific leadership; researchers were silenced, sent to Siberia, killed. His principles were used to guide Soviet agriculture, with disastrous results. While the rest of the world explored genetic science, leading to the green revolution, Russia resisted, declaring evolution’s tenets “reactionary and decadent.”

Lysenko’s theories were practiced on collective farms on a massive scale, displacing traditional agricultural knowledge and killing millions in the Russian famine of 1931-33.

His beliefs were exported to China, says Joseph Becker, author of “Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine.” Farmers were told that seeds of the same species act like “comrades,” and wouldn’t compete with each other. Chinese farmers were ordered to plant up to 15 million seedlings per 2.5 acres, rather than the scientifically proven 1.5 million, helping bring on history’s worst famine. An estimated 30 million people starved to death between 1958 and 1961.

Lysenkoism, repudiated by the Soviets in the 1960s, stands as a warning to those now controlling the U.S. federal government. When truth in science is sacrificed to corporate ideology or religious-right theology, we ignore the true workings of the natural world at our peril. When the bottom line and/or religious fervor rather than sound science guide our decisions, we are traveling blind and at the mercy of unforeseen consequences.

But it seems that Bush has already taken a plank from the Texas Republican Party platform. In a move to blunt new U.S. global-warming research, he has launched a four-year study to ascertain “precisely how much climate change between 1950 and now was human-caused.” Prominent climate experts, like Princeton University’s Michael Oppenheimer, say the study may merely rehash issues most scientists consider settled. Critics see the new study as intended to delay federal action on the problem — years lost in Lysenko-like denial, as we edge toward an unseen precipice that is the threshold of runaway global warming. “The danger is that while they’re continuing to do the research, the window of opportunity to avoid dangerous global warming is closing,” said Oppenheimer.

Again, look to Texas to see what impact a worldview “based upon biblical principles” can have. Last fall, the Texas Board of Education rejected several environmental science textbooks, including one titled “Environmental Science: Creating a Sustainable Environment,” according to Audubon Magazine. Critics forced the book ban primarily on ideological grounds, calling the text “vitriol against Western civilization and its primary belief systems.” Another science book was approved only after the publisher agreed to remove entire sections on climate change, which were deemed offensive. The decision reaches far beyond the Lone Star State: Texas is America’s second-largest textbook buyer, so the expurgated texts will likely be sold in other states.

In 2000, the Kansas school board briefly removed Darwinian evolution from the state’s science standards and tests, while similar campaigns have been pushed in over 20 states, says People for the American Way. Last spring, two Republican congressmen from Ohio, John Boehner and Steve Chabot, pressured their state’s school board unsuccessfully to introduce creationism, disguised as “intelligent design,” into school curricula.

Here, the parallels with Lysenko become uncomfortably close. Should efforts to de-emphasize the teaching of evolutionary theory actually succeed, one wonders how we could hope to confront tough environmental problems — training scientists, for example, to fight the virulent new strains of bacteria that have evolved resistance to potent antibiotics. Or, for another example: In his book “The Beak of the Finch,” environmental journalist Jonathan Weiner tells how the U.S. cotton industry is threatened with collapse because of Heliothis virescens, a moth that has evolved total resistance to all pesticides. Frustrated entomologist Martin Taylor notes the irony of the equivalence between the Cotton Belt and Bible Belt. “It’s amazing,” Taylor notes, “that cotton growers are having to deal with these pests in the very states whose legislatures are so hostile to the theory of evolution. Because it is evolution itself they are struggling against in their fields every season. These people are trying to ban the teaching of evolution while their own cotton crops are failing because of evolution. How can you be a creationist farmer anymore?”

For those who think the teaching of environmental science is safe in our schools, or that evolution vs. creationism is a dead issue, listen to this comment from Tom DeLay, one of the most powerful men in Congress. He has suggested that the Columbine, Colo., school shootings occurred “because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial mud.” With such leaders at the helm, it becomes necessary to ask where precisely we are being led.

Six thousand years ago, the arid Iraqi wastes over which U.S. tanks may soon roll flourished with amber waves of grain. Today, our government stands ready to launch an attack by the most advanced technological civilization ever against the ancient source of our species’ first great historical trauma: humankind’s original eviction from Eden.

The modern nation of Iraq is built upon the ruins of Sumer, the world’s earliest civilization. Resourceful Mesopotamian city-states like Ur on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers invented writing, the wheel, sailboats, animal-drawn plows, metalwork, the potter’s wheel, and mapmaking. They originated large professional armies, imperialism and bureaucracy. They were also the first to develop an urban lifestyle, inhabiting great cities like Ur, and temporarily insulating themselves from nature’s harsh realities.

They made the desert bloom with “grainfields, date plantations, fishponds, and gardens of lettuce, onions, lentils, garlic and cress,” says “Ecology of Eden” author and historian Evan Eisenberg. They created a human-made paradise on earth, a realm echoed in their mythology where we find the precursors of Eden: a paradise called Dilman, a holy land of palm trees and sweet waters blessed by the gods.

Also in Sumer, we find the first nation to track its economic progress through hard-nosed business records. It is partly through those ledgers that scientists learned why Sumer collapsed.

The Sumerians built impressive irrigation systems that produced a bountiful surplus, feeding a booming population and supporting an administrative, military and religious elite. While leaders sought greater riches through warfare, and priests guided those wars through astrological forecasts, environmental mismanagement caused Sumer’s power to erode.

The grand irrigation system that made Sumer possible also destroyed it. The arid soil became waterlogged. Evaporating water left salt deposits behind. Records show that in southern Mesopotamia at about 3500 B.C., equal amounts of wheat and barley grew. Then salt-intolerant wheat began to be replaced by more salt-tolerant barley, until by 1700 B.C., wheat was abandoned entirely. As salinity worsened, crops failed. Fields turned to desert and the Sumerians abandoned their cities, writes Clive Ponting in “A Green History of the World.”

In 1936, archeologist Leonard Woolley was stunned at the contrast between southern Iraq’s past and present. He wrote that it was impossible to imagine that “the blank waste ever blossomed, [and] bore fruit for the sustenance of a busy world.”

The Sumerians, distracted by human matters, had destroyed the natural basis of their wealth. They ignored the implications of failing harvests, though meticulously tracking the decline much as CNN follows the falling NASDAQ. Walled up in urban centers, busied with commerce and war, they never took action to sustain themselves.

As America girds for international conflict, our government, dominated by corporate interests and the religious right, seems about to make the same mistake. While able to wield the greatest war machine in history, we seem unable to squarely face the threat of climate change, to clean up deadly coal-burning power plants or nuclear waste that could contaminate the planet for millennia. We, like Sumer, seem ready to march off to war and ask for answers from the stars, while ignoring the sinking fortunes of our own fields and forests.

Sumerian leaders and the priests of Ur had little idea of the scientific mechanisms at work out at the edge of town, where the human-dominated realm ended and that of nature began. We are in similar peril, but can’t plead ignorance as an excuse.

As we neared the winter solstice it stayed sunny and 70. Asters bloomed inappropriately outside my door. Our mountain lake, usually frozen by then, was ice-free. We were also eight inches short of rain.

By New Year’s 2002, streams from North Carolina to New York were at their lowest ebb on record. Reservoirs resembled stony deserts. Wells ran dry. Still the drought hadn’t moved to Page 1 — Osama and Enron saw to that.

In February, the heat wave and drought finally got noticed. The New York Times reported that the winter of 2001-2002 was the warmest on U.S. record. By March, the drought extended from Maine to Georgia, with much of the New York metropolitan area a foot below normal rainfall levels — a winter drought not seen since the 1890s. One meteorologist mused that without exceptional rains soon “we would be in a world of hurt.”

Of course, his was a provincial pessimism. The Northeast and Appalachian Mountains are a tiny part of the world and have seen dry times before, seen empty reservoirs and a seared, tinder-dry landscape.

What is more troublesome is that our exceptional drought fits into a broader pattern. Around the globe, climate trends have been freakish for a decade — enough so to make a thinking weatherman’s grin twist into a worried frown.

The 1990s were the warmest decade on record in the hottest century for 1,000 years. The decade saw record destructive windstorms and floods in Europe, record droughts that scorched Africa, and record droughts and hurricanes that did multibillion-dollar damage in the Americas. The hottest year on record, 1998, was also the costliest ever for weather-related disasters. A one-year price tag on economic losses hit $92.9 billion, compared to the $78.4 billion total for all such losses over the entire decade of the 1980s.

“Hundred year” storms and droughts now come with increasing regularity — in some places every 50 years, in others, even more often. In 1998, a freakish ice storm that hit the northeastern U.S. and Canada was the worst in recorded history; in Europe, a 1997 flood on the Oder River was caused by a 1,000-year storm. In 1999, record downpours in Venezuela killed 30,000 people.

Scientists point to global warming as the likely culprit. With both the atmosphere and the oceans heating up, adding energy to climate systems, altering wind currents and precipitation patterns, extreme weather will become more and more common.

But like TV’s AccuWeather guy, the United States is ignoring the deepening storm that is global warming. Although it has just 4 percent of the planet’s population, the U.S. is responsible for 23 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions — a fact that makes it both practically and morally incumbent on the the U.S. to address the problem. But at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, backstage arm-twisting by the Bush administration kept the world’s greatest looming environmental disaster off the agenda, while the president himself pointedly declined to attend.

America’s refusal to address global warming may be good news for industries that dread possibly expensive reforms and consumers who imagine their lifestyles will be affected. But avoidance will only make the problem worse. And as global climate change makes life harsher for millions worldwide, the fallout for the U.S. in particular could be unforeseen and devastating, in ways that go far beyond water rationing or the loss of beachfront property.

A three-year drought, the worst on earth, now besieges central and south Asia, threatening 60 million people. In Iran last fall, Lake Hamoun, the country’s biggest body of water and one of the largest lakes in the world, turned to desert.

In this poor, strife-ridden region, a deepening drought could be dangerously destabilizing. Imagine this scenario: A disenfranchised group, made desperate by terrible poverty and relentless drought, wields the destructive power of smallpox or nuclear weapons, seeking vengeance on the nation that consumes the most natural resources.

This may sound like fear mongering, but maybe not in light of what the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says. The panel’s more than 2,000 scientists tell us that our recent wildly erratic weather may be the mere prelude to extreme weather borne out of severe global warming in the 21st century. Near future climate change could be greater than anything civilization has ever experienced.

A 2001 National Research Council report says that as humankind pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we may be doing more than making a lot of hot air. We may be “forcing the climate,” putting tension on an exquisitely balanced hair-trigger mechanism that once released, could send us careening into a radically new climate paradigm with new extremes of temperature and precipitation for which governments are unprepared and that would cause the world’s poorest billions to suffer most.

Average global temperatures are up by 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century, almost certainly as a result of fossil-fuel burning. The result: Drought and deluge are unprecedented; glaciers are melting, seas rising, coral reefs dying and heat-sensitive animals migrating. In Antarctica, icebergs the size of Rhode Island fall into the sea.

What is apparent to those watching the skies or the Weather Channel (and possessing immunity from the deep denial that accompanies U.S. fossil-fuel addiction), is that things are changing far too rapidly. Transformations that are supposed to happen in geological time are taking place in human time, and the consequences can only be guessed at.

Weather has played a huge role in the course of human events, usually unacknowledged. It was weather — a chilly April in 1912 — that allowed icebergs to drift exceptionally far south in the Atlantic, where one sank the Titanic. The briefest respite between gales allowed D-Day to take the Nazis by surprise. And it was the Russian winter that helped topple Napoleon and Hitler.

Weather, or rather its long-term average called climate, has shaped history with broader strokes, birthing and killing cultures. In America, pre-Inca empires rose and fell in sync with wet and dry periods. Vibrant urban societies like the Moche and Tiwanaku civilizations were wrecked by killer droughts that kicked out their agricultural underpinnings. Drought may have also destroyed Mexico’s Maya. A two century-long drought, one theory says, escalated city state strife to horrific levels. Another theory claims the Maya’s godlike leaders, unable to bring rain, were toppled by a disillusioned people.

Drought and deluge have triggered crop failures, starvation, revolts and the downfall of cultures in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Africa, China and the U.S. Southwest. Dry times in particular, the historical record shows, make people thirsty and hungry, turning them eventually desperate and violent.

Despite humanity’s often hostile relationship with weather, we’ve been the big winners in the single largest climate change of recent millennia. The end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago afforded our species the ideal conditions to civilize and enter our halcyon days, maybe better called our Holocene days.

The Holocene, as our current geological period is called by scientists, began when the world warmed drastically, melting away glaciers that covered America as far south as Manhattan. The Holocene has endured minor climatic shocks but it has stayed remarkably stable, allowing us to thrive, invent agriculture and swell our numbers to 6 billion — until now.

If today’s Earth suddenly experienced some of the radical climate changes that wrenched the world in previous ages (global average temperature fluctuations of 10 degrees Fahrenheit in a single decade, for example), it seems unlikely that civilization could prosper.

But as William Stevens notes in his book “The Change in the Weather,” a colossal climate shift isn’t needed to make us miserable. The Little Ice Age, which occurred in Europe after 1300, brought crop failures, starvation and civil strife, all triggered by an average temperature drop of just 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. We can expect a human-caused shift larger than that in the next 20 to 30 years.

Two reports from Europe in April 2002 show that temperatures are rising fast. Great Britain’s Hadley Center for Climate Prediction put average global temperatures in the decade between 2020 and 2030 at 0.5 to 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than between 1990 and 2000. Switzerland’s University of Bern projects an increase of 0.9 to 1.9 degrees — that’s almost a doubling or tripling of the warming we’ve seen in the past hundred years, occurring in only 30.

By 2100, the United Nation’s IPCC says, average global temperatures could increase up to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The gravity of this worst-case forecast becomes clear when it is compared with the global rise of just 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit that ended the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago, making all the difference between the Big Apple of today and a Manhattan buried under a half mile-thick mountain of ice.

Unfortunately, worsening scientific projections have made barely a dent on the policies of our current president or the lifestyle of the U.S. populace. And while new, gloomier climate change predictions seem to be issued almost monthly, what remains unknown is how global warming will impact humanity: our food and water supply, our societies and political stability; could it catalyze revolution, civil war, world war, or global terrorism?

Few have heard of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, but its people may be the first known casualties of our smokestack- and tailpipe-induced heat wave. The country’s 11,000 inhabitants could be the first of thousands, then millions, of climate-change refugees.

Here’s why Tuvalu is probably doomed: A century of fossil fuel burning by industrialized nations has dramatically increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, causing additional heat from the sun to be trapped, just like inside a hothouse. This heightened greenhouse effect melted glacial ice and also thermally expanded ocean waters (H20 takes up more space when warm), pushing sea levels higher on Tuvalu by about a foot.

Rising tides caused salt intrusion, poisoning the country’s water and crops. Storm surges are making the island nation unlivable (though over-development and overpopulation added to the problem).

But Tuvalu’s plight was ignored. In 1993, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore refused to meet with Tuvalu Prime Minister Bikenibeu Paeniu and hear his plea for U.S. support of the Kyoto Protocol, the U.N. treaty to slow global warming. Since then, the United States hasn’t budged on its refusal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, George W. Bush’s plan for voluntary corporate fossil fuel cutbacks plays a numbers game worthy of Enron or WorldCom, and actually allows increased emissions.

Granted, the U.S isn’t the only contributor to Tuvalu’s demise. Other industrial nations are responsible for 22 percent of all carbon emissions, while all developing countries contribute 41 percent. Still, it seems reasonable for the U.S., as the world’s only superpower and the worst carbon polluter at 23 percent, to lead the race to cut fossil fuel use and promote sustainable energy resources like wind and solar power.

Instead, at the Sustainability Summit the U.S. firmly opposed proposals by the European Union to achieve a 15 percent level of renewable energy use by 2010, as well as Brazil’s plan for a 10 percent renewable energy target of 2012. The summit’s final agreement pleased the U.S., but lacks teeth. It drops Europe’s insistence on firm targets, percentages and dates for the use of renewable energy.

For Tuvalu, all these proposals are too little too late. In summer 2001, the 11,000 islanders surrendered themselves to a gradual full evacuation of their country. Within 50 to 100 years, Tuvalu’s nine Pacific atolls will likely be engulfed by the sea, the first nation to die of global warming.

As Tuvalu acknowledged its fate last summer, government official Paani Laupepa bitterly criticized the United States. “By refusing to ratify the [Kyoto] Protocol, the U.S. has effectively denied future generations of Tuvaluans their fundamental freedom to live where our ancestors have lived for thousands of years.” Gone will be homes, schools, burial grounds and churches. All that will remain is a memory of a lost homeland and of an America that refused to help.

Before long, others may decry the U.S. and its steadfast support of the fossil fuel economy. Already, the Maldives Islands, another Pacific nation and a largely Islamic one, has appealed to the U.N. We are an “endangered nation,” declared Maldives President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. In this century, if IPCC predictions of a one-meter ocean rise are accurate, the Maldives will drown and its 311,000 people will become eco-refugees.

Half the rice land in Bangladesh could also be submerged, compelling mass migrations. In a nation of 134 million, one wonders where the millions of refugees who live in the endangered coastal wetlands will flee to, and what they’ll eat when they get there.

As oceans rise along China’s coasts, up to 70 million people could be vulnerable to a 100-year-storm surge, according to the Earth Policy Institute. Who will offer new homelands to those made homeless by climate change?

As the flood of eco-refugees rises, so could political tension. Developed nations may face demands for reparations or forgiveness of debts from those nations damaged or destroyed by global warming.

We need only look at the plight of the Palestinians to see the violence bred of a people wrenched from hearth and home. A question Americans should be asking now is: What country will bear the brunt of rage expressed by peoples disenfranchised by climate change?

The answer may lie in a statement written just before 9/11, and signed by more than 100 Nobel Prize winners including Mikhail Gorbachev, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and Dr. Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the DNA double helix). Here is what they said:

“The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world’s dispossessed. Of these poor and disenfranchised, the majority live a marginal existence in equatorial climates. Global warming, not of their making but originating with the wealthy few, will affect their fragile ecologies most. Their situation will be desperate and manifestly unjust. It cannot be expected, therefore, that in all cases they will be content to await the beneficence of the rich. If, then, we permit the devastating power of modern weaponry to spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor.”

These words barely made a blip in the U.S. media. But they could point to a coming global apocalypse.

Right now, the worst climatic crisis is taking place in the arid swath of South and Central Asia stretching from Iran to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. This area, a volatile soup of despotism, militarism, booming population, poverty, racial and religious rivalries, fragile economies and ecologies, seems about to be fired by the match of global warming.

The International Research Institute for Climate Prediction at Columbia University (IRI) reports that Central and Southwest Asia over the past three years represents the largest region of persistent drought on earth. A three-year drought — the worst in 50 to 100 years — now besieges Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, threatening 60 million people.

In Afghanistan, 12 million are impacted, parched by thirst and starved by crop failures. By autumn 2001, civil unrest and drought caused a million internally displaced persons, plus several million more refugees to leave the country entirely. But those fleeing found little relief in Iran or Pakistan — there’s as little water there as back home.

In Iran, the drought has affected over half the population. In some northwest provinces, there has been no measurable rainfall in 30 months. Orchards yielding almonds, apricots and mangoes have withered. Two hundred thousand nomadic herders have lost their flocks. Nationwide, 800,000 livestock died in 2000 because of the drought. By 2001, some 80 percent of all farm animals had been sold rather than face slow death. The U.N. estimates damages at $2.5 billion last year.

In Pakistan, where the urban population is exploding, outstripping the country’s ability to feed it, the drought has caused soil and seeds to blow away, vegetation to burn brown, and parched livestock to be slaughtered. 349,000 Pakistanis are impacted so far, not counting the influx of thirsty Afghans. At one refugee camp inside Pakistan wells had to be drilled a mile deep to find water. All of this in a volatile nation whose dictatorial Islamist-dominated regime supported the Taliban and possesses nuclear weapons.

Is global warming responsible for the central Asian drought? It is impossible to say for sure, but there is reason to suspect it is. IRI notes that global temperatures rose steadily over the past four years (1999 was the hottest year on record, with 2001 taking second place, and 2002 poised to steal the record). And all this warming may have contributed to the Central Asian drought.

The immediate cause of drought guessed at by IRI is a prolonged “La Niña” effect: unusually warm waters in the western Pacific Ocean colliding with cooler waters in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. La Niña is cousin to El Niño (a warming of central and eastern Pacific waters). El Niño is expected to become stronger under climate change, but the global warming impacts on La Niña are less known.

IRI scientists also note that hotter temperatures make any drought more severe: Hotter air causes greater evaporation rates, drying soils and reducing stream flows. That’s why a summer drought is worse than a winter drought.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that decade-long climate trends from 1990 to 2000 point to a world in which global warming is at work, causing extreme weather events, intensifying droughts and storms. Insurance loss data concurs. In the 1980s, insurers worldwide paid out just $2 billion each year for weather-related disasters. In the ’90s (the hottest decade on record), figures jumped to about $12 billion annually.

In 2001, the U.N.’s Environmental Programs Financial Services Initiative issued a study estimating that climate-change damage will top $304 billion annually by mid-century, potentially bankrupting some developing nations.

According to another U.N. study, crops worldwide will be negatively affected by climate change. It forecasts a 10- to 15-percent decline in grain yields in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia — poor regions with exploding populations that can ill afford the loss. One in eight people could face famine in just 50 years due to global warming.

Still, climatologists have no smoking gun. They’re unable to point to any single climatic occurrence, such as the Central Asian drought, and declare that it is due to climate change. That’s because climate is a weather average taken over many years; therefore, no single event can ever be called a trend. The Bush administration has used this argument to deny climate change and continue burning fossil fuels. But it is a high-stakes gamble. Add U.S. plans to develop new fossil fuel fields and refineries in the region, and the dangers mount still higher.

The Caspian Sea Basin has been called the “new oil El Dorado,” the most promising untapped oil field on earth. In 1997, the U.S. Department of State estimated the oil underground at 200 billion barrels — a third of Persian Gulf reserves. So it is no coincidence that at the height of the Afghan war, George W. Bush rushed to meet with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Since then, U.S.-Russian pipeline agreements have been forged to start tapping the Caspian.

Nor was it a coincidence that the U.S. sought permission to launch aircraft from Uzbekistan during its Taliban offensive. The stationing of planes in Central Asia escalates a U.S. military buildup begun in 1997, one that was all about oil long before it was ever about terror. Oil also explains why Afghanistan’s Taliban got $43 million in U.S. aid early in 2001. The gift was supposed to smooth the way for a pipeline stretching from the Caspian through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea — a pipeline the Taliban blocked but which the new U.S.-friendly Afghan government now welcomes.

But our energy strategy in Central Asia — whose architect was not the current Bush, but former President Jimmy Carter — may undermine homeland security, not protect it. As we exploit Central Asian oil, we may destabilize the region by backing dictators who repress their citizenry. In the long run, using Caspian oil to fuel our cars and culture may further destabilize the region by adding to global warming. Marginal climates like that of Central Asia are likely to be most affected by climate change.

Imagine the year 2010 and a super-powerful, climate-change-induced Central Asian drought, with crop failures leading to an uprising of the hungry and thirsty Arab populations of Islamabad, of Uzbek dissidents, of the Afghan and Iranian countryside. Such tumult could cut off Caspian oil. In a worst-case scenario, our fossil fuel-dependent nation might decide it had no alternative but to throw its military might into the fray, escalating resentment and violence.

Is there a better formula for fueling global terrorism? From those angry, hungry, thirsty, dispossessed masses, many of them sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, may come the terrorists of tomorrow, bent on revenge against energy-glutted America. And next time it could be accomplished with nuclear weapons seized from Pakistan’s ruling military dictatorship.

Journalist Ross Gelbspan calls the resulting political nightmare “the coming permanent state of emergency.” Gelbspan predicts that “a significant surge in terrorism is the likeliest result of the desperation that is overtaking many people in environmentally disrupted countries.” In his book about global warming, “The Heat Is On,” he offers the following warning from Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Henry Kendall:

“The world’s food supply must double within the next 30 years to feed the population, which will double within the next 60 years. Otherwise, before the middle of the next century [the 2000s] — as many countries in the developing world run out of enough water to irrigate their crops — population will outrun food supply, and you will see chaos. All we need is another hit from climate change — a series of droughts or crop-destroying-rains — and we’re looking down the mouth of a gun.”

The darkest, most frightening question concerns the future. There is a basic flaw in current global climate-change computer models: Every model assumes a linear progression of temperature and climate change. But evidence found in ancient ice cores gathered in Antarctica shows that climate rarely shifts in a straight line. Rather, like a car, change progresses linearly, gaining momentum, until at some unknown point, it hits a threshold and abruptly jerks up a gear. Then all bets are off and all hell breaks loose.

The rules that govern that new gear — the extremes of temperature of wind and storm beyond the threshold — are all different from the previous steady state. When will we reach such a threshold? That is anyone’s guess, and quite possibly beyond the limits of our current knowledge of climate science.

Oil-and-coal executives and Texas politicians, members of the so-called “Carbon Club” who are now running the United States, need to recognize the grim Catch-22 in which they’ve placed America and the world. While there is plenty of coal and oil in the ground, enough to power humanity for centuries, every gallon burned has the potential to disrupt global politics. Each car’s exhaust plume adds to the specter of hunger and thirst and terrorism likely to stalk our new century.

But there is a way out. We simply need to reduce our use of oil and coal.

Last autumn, while America focused on the World Trade Center attacks and on attacking Afghanistan, 160 nations met in Marrakesh, Morocco, and finalized mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gases 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. This is a first decisive, though baby, step toward cutting greenhouse emissions by the 50 to 70 percent the IPCC says is needed just to stabilize global warming at current levels. Accepting the treaty, those nations put themselves on a trajectory toward renewable energy — to tap the power of the sun and of hydrogen.

The U.S. was not among them. President Bush and ExxonMobil (a major player in scripting the fossil-fuel feeding frenzy known as the Cheney Energy Plan) made our country’s path clear.

Bush withdrew America from Kyoto against the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences, which warned that climate change is real and getting worse (a verdict seconded by Bush’s own Environmental Protection Agency, which he derisively referred to as “the bureaucracy”).

Meanwhile, America’s carbon dioxide emissions increased in 2001 by 3 percent, well higher than past average rises of 1.3 percent. To blame are Presidents Clinton and Bush (the elder and the younger), congressional Republicans and many Democrats, a coal-and-oil lobby that has used savvy marketing to deny the problem, and an oblivious citizenry that has made the gas-gulping SUV the source of 50 percent of new U.S. car sales and a symbol of American greed.

Much of the rest of the world recognizes climate change as a real danger. Even in the corporate world, BP and Shell have taken first steps to rethink themselves as energy companies, researching sustainable power.

There is no logical reason why ExxonMobil can’t do the same. It is one of the wealthiest corporations on earth, outspending most nation states. It would be a small matter to divert a few billion oil dollars to hydrogen fuel cells, solar, wind, or biofuel power.

They have not done this. Why not? Of course, there are financial reasons. But a deeper reason may be that oil exploration is ultimately about more than money: It is an addictive adventure in empire building. Jeremy Leggett in his book “The Climate War” recounts his oil-exploration exploits before becoming a Greenpeace activist:

“I had discovered a great romance. Looking back, I have a fancy now that it stemmed from something primeval. I remember the hunter’s thrill I felt in Baluchistan, watching smears of oil seeping from the ground … Then there were the hunter’s weapons … The drill rigs and down-hole instrument packages probing for the quarry … pipelines and supertankers carrying the object of the hunt to market … where finally, of course, the prize could be burned: in engines, all kinds of fascinating engines.”

This is the romantic bond that links Bush the Texas oilman with Saudi sheiks and Russia’s Putin. This is the game that holds them rapt in Central Asia. And this is the romance with power that hypnotizes American consumers as they mount their Excursions and Expeditions. It’s the same spirit that lured Marco Polo east and Cortez west. And it is the same industrial spirit that lured us to construct the greatest ocean liner ever, and to sail it too fast through a sea filled with icebergs.

No modern event better evokes the blind overconfidence of industrial society than the sinking of the Titanic. There may also be no better metaphor for America’s resolute denial of climate change.

We’re mesmerized by the Titanic story like children transfixed by fairy tales that end with little boys and girls devoured by wolves: The greatest ship ever built, conceived as unsinkable, opulent beyond imagining, sails with its millionaire and immigrant passengers. The reckless owners demand the captain load on the coal to reach New York in record time, despite repeated iceberg warnings.

The berg finally spotted, the big ship can’t react fast enough, can’t turn its Titanic mass on its too flimsy rudder. As the Titanic sinks, the wealthy still dance in the Grand Ballroom, not believing the news. Lack of preparedness dooms too many. Only half the lifeboats needed are aboard. About 1,500 passengers die. The survivors, rich and poor alike, are torn from comfort and carried in open boats upon a cruel sea. Nature humbles civilization’s rebellious and arrogant angels.

The metaphorical parallels with climate change are too obvious: Just like the Titanic skipper and the captains of industry, our government and corporations pour on the steam, ignoring dire warnings. And we the people are largely complicit.

The most powerful comparison may be the tragic inability of that magnificent ship to get out of its own way. Our fossil-fuel driven juggernaut seems similarly possessed of a weak rudder. Scientists caution that we must reduce fossil-fuel burning now, must curb the current warming trend now, or else our momentum could carry us beyond an unseen climate-change threshold — to a rendezvous with a sea of dark chaos we cannot yet clearly discern.

Back home in the Northeast, the dry spell drags on. A wet spring respite did little to end the long-term drought. Forecasts project below-normal rainfall into October. The West too is gripped by drought and its forests burn.

As I watch the blue sky, I worry my well may go dry. And I’m starting to feel a kinship with the Afghan farmer who looks into his arid heaven and slaughters a parched cow, or the Tuvalu islander who gauges a slowly rising sea.

While none of us can point to our situation and claim that the dark hand of climate change is responsible, in our hearts we may begin to guess that something has gone terribly wrong and that the time to act is now. While none of us has proof certain of the danger we are in, neither did Captain Smith who, holding a telegram in his hand telling him to slow down, sailed at full speed into an ocean full of ice.