Nicole Gelinas on Carbon Trading

In a short time, global warming has graduated from niche cause to accepted fact. Though skeptics may still grumble (or shout) that the science isn’t settled, they’ve lost the battle when President Bush agrees to “seriously consider” an international climate-change treaty; when media mogul Rupert Murdoch writes that “climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats”; when conservative standard-bearer National Review runs a cover article saying that “it’s no longer possible, scientifically or politically, to deny that human activities have very likely increased global temperatures”; when Ford CEO Alan Mulally tells the Detroit News that “temperature has increased . . . mainly because of the greenhouse gases keeping the heat in”; and when New York Times everyman columnist Tom Friedman exhorts us to “go green.” Al Gore—who, less than a decade ago, dropped his nearly career-spanning obsession with climate change, recognizing that no serious politician could make it the cornerstone of a presidential campaign—now has an Oscar for the global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Some 84 percent of Americans think that human beings are contributing to global warming, with 78 percent (and 60 percent of Republicans) saying that we should do something about it “right away,” according to an April New York Times article.