Since last October, when I joined with you and Senator Mack in introducing credit for early action legislation in the Senate for the first time, there has been active debate about the concept and policy choices involved Ems new idea. Early actions to address climate change enjoy the distinct environmental and economic advantages of achieving near-term greenhouse gas emissions reductions while extending the period of time in which our companies and communities can innovate to maximize efficiency and minimize costs of protecting the environment.
Time is a relevant factor in the debate about global warming.
Since greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere for generations, the longer we wait to reduce our emissions, the more drastic and difficult our future efforts will have to be to address the problem. Greenhouse gas pollution is a major and growing problem. Emissions of greenhouse gases, due in substantial part to the combustion of fossil fuels, are causing greenhouse concentrations in the atmosphere to rise faster and higher than they would naturally. More than 2,500 of the world's best scientific and technical experts have concluded that this trend is likely to increase the Earth's temperature by 2-6 degrees in the 21st Century with serious impacts on the global environment. While it is difficult to link specific weather events to global climate change, the extreme weather we have seen in the past year is consistent with what scientists predict under current models of global warming.