After years of difficult and intense negotiations, the Kyoto Global Climate Treaty took effect February 16 with the world’s biggest polluter, the United States, conspicuously absent from the 150 participating countries.

    The solid scientific consensus that global warming caused by human excesses is already catastrophically altering our weather is confirmed beyond doubt by over 2,000 top climate experts from over 100 countries in the largest, most rigorous peer reviewed collaborative research project ever.  But you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.  The evidence of climate chaos is all around us.

    History’s ten hottest years have occurred since 1990. The Arctic Ice Cap has lost 40% of its volume in 20 years and will be gone within our generation. Forests are dying, permafrost and glaciers are melting worldwide.  Within decades, there will be no glaciers in Glacier National Park, no snows on Kilimanjaro.  Sea levels are rapidly rising, coral reefs disappearing, weather patterns are becoming increasingly chaotic, animals and plants are changing their behavior.  Russian bears, suffering through that nation’s warmest winter ever, are so confused that they have awoken a month early, throwing off their entire life cycle. A quarter of the earth’s species will be extinct in 50 years, according to a new collaborative study by top biologists from eight nations published in Nature in January 2004. The frequency of catastrophic weather is increasing exponentially. Deadly storms made 2004 the most costly year ever for the insurance industry.  England received a month’s worth of rain in a single night.  Two years ago a lethal European heat wave killed more than 15,000 people. U.N. Weapons Inspector Hans Blix warns that global warming is a greater threat to global security than war or terror, a conclusion shared by Great Britain’s top scientist Sir David King, and by a recent Pentagon study.

    Responsible foreign oil companies like B.P. (which has changed its name to Beyond Petroleum) acknowledge the crisis and are aggressively investing in clean, efficient technologies and renewable energies that will help reduce carbon dioxide emissions globally by 70%. Similar investments by our nation would be a boon to America’s air, our economy and our national security. After all, the steps we must take to comply with Kyoto are steps we should be taking to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, our vulnerability to price shocks on the international oil market and our balance of payment deficits. 

    Conservation and efficiency will make American industry more competitive and cleaner. Fuel efficiency will make every American richer; less money spent on gasoline means more money in our pockets. Efficient technology, like refrigerators, automobiles and air conditioners, will be key export items over the coming decades as third world nations strive to reduce their greenhouse gases. (China has already implemented one of the world’s most aggressive programs for curbing dangerous emissions, including banning gas-guzzling automobiles.) The patents on and profits from these technologies will go to the nation with the toughest laws at home.

    But rather than investing in a sustainable future, irresponsible American companies like Chevron, Exxon/Mobil, and Peabody Coal have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a campaign intended to deny the science and delay reform. 

    Remember the successful anti-regulatory tactics of the tobacco industry which employed diabolical public relations geniuses, corrupt scientists, powerful lobbyists and rivers of money to derail, for sixty years, regulation of a product that was killing one in five of its consumers?  With far greater profits at stake in poisoning the public than did Big Tobacco, King Coal and Big Oil, are now employing the same tactics on a grander scale. They’ve put hundreds of millions of dollars into an aggressive campaign to distort science and deceive the public, the press and policy makers about the climate crisis. They’ve funded phony Washington think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Competitive Enterprise Institute from which industry-paid scientists known as "biostitutes" grind out pronouncements that global warming is environmental henny pennyism. Exxon persuaded the White House to muzzle and fire America’s top global warming scientist Dr. Robert Watson—former chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—who had long been a thorn in the industry’s side. At industry behest, the administration has suppressed or fraudulently altered a dozen major studies on climate change, including studies by EPA, NASA, NOAA and a 10-year study, commissioned by this president’s father, in his own efforts to delay action on the issue. American energy industry thugs harass and intimidate Britain’s top scientist Sir David King at public appearances and disrupt international climatological meetings. And now we can add pop-culture author Michael Crichton to the propaganda machine; his bestselling novel, State of Fear, takes the asinine position that environmentalists have made the whole thing up. 

    Seventy Eight million dollars spent on checkbook diplomacy between Detroit and Washington since 1990 has dimmed political enthusiasm for meaningful fuel efficiency standards and won automakers an astounding $100,000 write-off for Hummers and the sixteen largest gas-guzzlers. Hundreds of millions more contributed by big oil and coal to indentured servants on Capitol Hill have brought industry the most compliant Congress and President in history.  Corporate toadies in the White House invited the fossil fuel barons to secretly write the President’s national energy policy, a collection of massive subsidies and tax breaks, which instead of reducing fossil fuel dependence, increases our wasteful addiction. Even the Wall Street Journal condemned the obscene plan as a "$145 billion boondoggle."

    All that money has bought the industry public officials willing to ignore the science.  President Bush, who has received $100 million in energy industry largesse, says "the jury’s still out" on global warming.  Powerful senate Environment and Public Works Committee chair James Inhoffe (who has received over $1 million in energy industry cash in 10 years) calls global warming a "farce" and the senate Commerce Science and Transport chairman Senator Ted Stevens who has received $560,000 from the energy and transportation industries, recently said that "global warming is the biggest hoax perpetuated on the American people." Meanwhile, Stevens’ home state Alaska is currently heating up ten times faster than anywhere else, with frightening results already obvious to anyone with open eyes; warming weather is destroying villages, threatening polar bears, walruses and seals with extinction and even impeding the North Slope oil industry as permafrost melting erodes vital roads. Stevens must be keeping his thick head very deep in the rapidly melting snow!  The extent to which this White House is willing to alter scientific "fact" to please the energy industry is documented in a February 2005 report by EPA’s Inspector General describing how EPA scientists were ordered to invent a fraudulent scientific rationale for reducing controls of mercury emissions at industry’s behest.

    The Machiavellian manipulation of public opinion by Exxon/Mobil, Peabody Coal and their cronies helps erode our democracy and is certain to result, over time, in trillions of dollars in property damage, the loss of millions of human lives, the profound diminishment of our planet’s natural wealth and ultimately of our dignity and humanity. Will someone explain to me why the energy barons who are guilty of this public deception and injury should be considered higher on the moral scale than the universally-condemned suicide terror bombers, for whom murder and mayhem, at least arguably, involve some self-sacrifice? 

    Now, don’t start howling in indignation! I am not insensitive to the misery caused by terrorists. My father was murdered by an Arab terrorist, and I lost close friends (and my office) in the World Trade Center attack.  But, the tragedy of our losses should not blind us to the larger threats to our democracy, our nation and our values. For over two years the American press and many political leaders have focused on the terrorist threat to the exclusion of almost all other important stories—missing altogether the war that this administration has declared on our environmental laws.

    Not a single question was asked by a reporter about the environment or global warming during the presidential debates and many key newspapers and networks have lost, terminated or transferred key environmental reporters to other beats—including, most recently, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and CNN.

    It’s time to change the paradigm. As Hans Blix and Sir David King, and the Pentagon have recognized, global warming poses a far graver threat to America than terrorism. As we consider the relative culpability of corporate criminals who are putting the planet at risk and engineering a massive deception to defraud the public and our lawmakers, it’s worth remembering Teddy Roosevelt’s oft-repeated statement that our nation would never be destroyed by a foreign enemy and his warning that our democratic institution would be subverted by "malfactors of great wealth" who would erode them from within.