Editorial: Protecting the climate of discovery

Friday, Jan. 20, 2006 | 7:56 a.m.

In the deep, dark recesses of caves beneath the Sierra Nevada, biologists have uncovered 27 species of spiders, centipedes and other creatures that previously were unknown.

They include a flourescent orange spider and a bug with an outer shell so translucent that its internal organs are visible. Some species have adapted to living conditions in a single cave among the 238 known caverns beneath California's Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks.

As we send a rocket on a nine-year journey to Pluto, it is remarkable to learn that we still have forms of life to uncover right here on Earth. Such discoveries should be considered as our government makes decisions that have global effects on our environment.

Earlier this week six former heads of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency agreed that the Bush administration needs to be more aggressive in limiting the emission of greenhouse gases -- such as carbon dioxide -- that have been linked to global climate change.

According to The New York Times, the group of former EPA chiefs that convened in Washington on Wednesday to commemorate the agency's 35th anniversary also included current EPA Chief Stephen Johnson. In defending the Bush administration's policies, Johnson said the government has spent $20 billion since 2001 exploring technologies to cut carbon emissions.

But the Annual Energy Outlook for 2006, which the EPA released in December, predicts that America's carbon emissions will increase 37 percent over the next 25 years.

The United States is the world's leader in greenhouse gas emissions, yet it has refused to sign a global treaty designed to cap them. The Bush administration's chief negotiator for the issue walked out of the United Nations' global warming treaty talks last month. And in Washington members of Congress are haggling over whether carbon emissions should be addressed in new air quality legislation.

According to the Times, Russell Train, EPA chief under President Gerald Ford, said that to "deal with (global warming) sometime down the road is dishonest and self-destructive."

It also is incredibly selfish and short-sighted. Too many officials still refuse to recognize the urgency with which we must act. Global warming not only threatens the world as we know it, but it also could obliterate the parts we haven't yet discovered.