Gibbons’ stance puzzles global warming activists

Sunday, March 11, 2007 | 7:41 a.m.

WASHINGTON - Global warming activists were thrilled to hear Gov. Jim Gibbons was launching a climate change task force in Nevada - until they learned that the starting point for discussion would not assume that global warming exists.

With mounting scientific evidence that temperatures have been on the rise since the Industrial Revolution started spewing more carbon emissions into air, even the skeptical Bush administration and leading industrial giants have begun recognizing the problem.

The governor's office says the task force's major objective will be to study how global warming affects Nevada. But the neutral starting point worries those who fear time and money will be spent discussing science instead of solutions.

Several Western states that formed similar task forces over the years say they entered discussions with the belief that global warming was a given, and moved on from there.

On Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano's climate change advisory group "there was very little discussion" about whether global warming exists, said Lori Faeth, the governor's senior policy adviser for the environment. Rather, the group focused on what the state could do to curtail warming.

"That's not to say everyone in Arizona believes greenhouse gases is an issue," Faeth said. "But the science is sound."

A month after the Arizona group produced 49 recommendations last fall, including one to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2020, Napolitano signed an executive order to speed up the process. She moved the target date to 2012.

Five Western states, including Arizona, joined forces in February to announce plans for a new market-based system to limit carbon emissions. A month earlier 10 corporate giants asked Congress for a similar cap-and-trade system, and Northeastern states are doing the same. The Western states want Nevada and other neighbors to join.

Sarah Cottrell, energy and environmental policy adviser to New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, said that when the governor asked an advisory group of oil industry, farming and environmental representatives in 2005 to recommend ways to reduce even more his target for greenhouse gas emissions, they didn't debate the reality of global warming.

"I don't think that a body like that can really add much to the discussion on the science," Cottrell said.

Nationwide, more than one-fourth of the states have convened such task forces to address global warming. Nevada now joins the list and expects to produce recommendations within a year.

Gibbons' task force will consider global warming and greenhouse gas emissions and "how they are affecting Nevada," his energy and science adviser, Hatice Gecol, said last month.

Gecol, a UNR scientist on leave to the governor's office, was not available for further comment. But in announcing the task force last month, she said its job would be to consider "what is our contribution to global warming, what are the possibilities, the suggestions."

Yet when asked if the committee's starting point was the belief that global warming exists, she said the committee would be neutral. "I would like to encourage them to read the scientific publications in both senses," she said.

When pressed about that rationale, especially after this year's landmark United Nations report signed onto by 113 countries and more than 1,000 scientists essentially confirming global warming, Gecol said:

"They need to look at both possibilities . They need to evaluate all the scientific data."

She said, "It is the task force's duty to rule out or rule in. They need to gather and they need to decide about it."

Judi Greenwald, a policy analyst at the Pew Center for Global Climate Change, sees value in launching the debate from a neutral point.

"I'm OK with that," she said. "We're convinced that the science is serious. But we also believe people need to be educated. If it's used to get everyone on the same page, and then move on to solutions, then that's fine."

But Greenwald added: "I think it's getting harder though, day by day, unless you're living in a hole, not starting from, 'This is a problem, let's move on, how do we solve it?' "

States say they are increasingly interested in global warming because of the economic effects, such as ski resorts suffering from light snowfall or water supplies drying up.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels founded the U.S. Mayor's Climate Change Agreement to reduce global warming pollution. It has been signed by more than 400 cities, including Las Vegas, Henderson, Reno and Sparks. Nickels said he knew it was time to act when he couldn't see snowfall on the mountains.

"It was something of an epiphany for him," said John Healy, spokesman for the city's sustainability office. "We are a city that depends on snowpack to generate hydroelectric energy and drinking water."

Healy said debating whether global warming is real is a "little like spending a lot of time arguing if the Earth is flat."

Still, he welcomed Nevada's task force as a "positive development."

"I would hope they would move quickly to the solutions, and not spend too much time belaboring science that has effectively ended the debate."