Recently, reports have appeared that more and more companies and EVEN GWB
have accepted "the truth" of global warming. An opinion piece in today's WSJ
explains the phenomenon:

How It Became Safe to Embrace Global Warming
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
July 6, 2005; Page A15

(Subscribers can read the full piece at
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112060655997977924,00.html?mod=opinion%5F
main%5Ffeatured%5Fstories%5Fhs or
http://tinyurl.com/8we8e)

Some excerpts:
Mr. Bush is finally getting the message about being more agreeable if he's
going to be a member of the club. At this week's G-8 summit at the
Gleneagles golf resort in Scotland, he's expected to accede gracefully to
the need to worry about carbon dioxide in the name of "climate change."
...
Mr. Bush stands himself in excellent company here with some of the most
respected names in business: GE's Jeff Immelt, Duke Energy's Paul Anderson,
Ford's Bill Ford Jr. They, in turn, have benefited from the pioneering PR
efforts of BP's John Browne, whose conversion to climate change was based
firmly on science -- sociology not climatology. He assayed the public mood
and started referring to his company as "Beyond Petroleum" even as he went
about turning BP, once a smallish, regional producer of smelly petroleum,
into a much bigger, global producer of smelly petroleum.

But listen between the lines: With the oddball exception of Lord Oxburgh,
the retiring chairman of Shell, who overlearned the lesson and has taken to
predicting planetary disaster, Mr. Browne and his copycats have largely
restricted themselves to acknowledging the inevitability of carbon
regulation, not the inevitability of carbon-driven global warming. Most of
all, they see a cornucopia of subsidies and tax breaks flowing from an
emerging Western consensus to treat carbon as a problem, and Mr. Bush, with
his talk of "technological" fixes, is clearly moving their way.
...
Once companies turned their attention to CO2, long ignored as a costless
waste product, they found the first whacks came easily -- indeed, they
discovered that CO2 reductions are a byproduct of routine cost-cutting. BP's
Lord Browne set the fashion in the mid-1990s by restyling his efficiency
gains as "emissions cuts" and trumpeting them in press releases.

Next came the dawning realization that, hey, a company might actually get
paid twice for these efficiency gains. BP has led the way here too. Last
month, its lobbyists were quietly working Capitol Hill to promote the Hagel
bill, which would grant tax breaks for companies that reduce CO2 emissions.

BP has been similarly active on the sidelines of this week's Gleneagles
summit. There, the company is promoting a nearby "green" power station: It
would be fueled with hydrogen stripped from natural gas, while BP would
inject the residual carbon dioxide into a fading North Sea oil well. Again,
the company's green eye is fixed on its own bottom line: Postponed would be
the mandatory environmental costs entailed in shutting down the tapped-out
offshore well. At the same time, BP also hopes to persuade European
regulators to grant valuable carbon credits for the project, even though it
creates a new CO2 source rather than reducing or eliminating an existing
source.
...
Indeed, opponents of mandatory carbon restraints, such as the Cato
Institute's Patrick Michaels, readily concede the claim that CO2 is raising
the earth's temperature -- because all the evidence points to the effect
being small and innocuous. In turn, advocates of dire climate scenarios have
been forced to shift their footing to new theories that posit large and
catastrophic effects from minor changes in average global temperatures. A
recent favorite is the suggestion that a small temperature increase might
stop the recirculation of cold Arctic waters, leading to global weather
havoc.

USA Today went so far as to pronounce the debate "over" in a recent
front-page editorial, and it's almost true. Global warming -- the belief
system, not the scientific puzzle -- has now been fully domesticated and
institutionalized. That's why Mr. Bush felt free to offer his quasi-embrace
this week. From a threat to the earth or threat to the economy (depending on
your point of view), climate change has become just another excuse for tax
breaks, corporate subsidies and soppy PR.
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And this message WAS brought to you by British Petroleum.

Mark W.

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