Like the balmy temperatures of early January, President George W. Bush’s first mention of climate change in his annual State of the Union speech was a signal that global warming has arrived in Washington DC. And just as quickly as the weather turned wintry again, climate change has gone from a hoax to a serious issue on Capitol Hill, second only to Iraq in the number of hearings that have been held by the new Congress.

This historic change is led by history-making Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve in that position, and as third in line for the presidency, the most powerful female politician in US history. Speaker Pelosi has made clear her intention to pursue the issue aggressively by creating a special committee to examine global warming and demanding that initial climate legislation be drafted by this summer. She even took the rare step for a Speaker of testifying before the House science committee as part of a hearing on the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Confronted with a rejuvenated Democratic Congress and reaffirmation of the science by the IPCC, the president’s closest environmental and science advisors released an open letter defending the Bush administration’s record on climate change. The president and his administration do have a long record on climate change, but it is not as uniformly positive as his advisors purport.

In March 2001, less than two months into his first term, President Bush reversed his campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide and his less-often-reported support for mandatory regulation over voluntary measures. Two weeks later, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency announced the Bush administration’s rejection of the Kyoto Protocol. Almost a year later, Bush finally proposed his own voluntary plan to reduce greenhouse gas intensity – emissions per dollar of GDP – by 18 per cent over ten years. Critics quickly pointed out that business-as-usual efficiency gains in the US economy would easily meet the goal, and that total emissions would continue to rise even as intensity fell. When asked about adopting mandatory emission caps, administration officials claim they are premature until the president’s plan has an opportunity to run its course, and have recently reaffirmed their rejection of mandatory caps on emissions to Congress.

The Bush administration has also tried to deflect calls for mandatory emission caps by pointing to their climate research agenda. In the same year his administration rejected the Kyoto Protocol, Bush asked the National Academy of Science to review key questions of climate-change science. Their report reinforced the findings of the IPCC’s 2001 assessment, but the administration seized on uncertainties in the science to focus its climate-change efforts on developing new research agendas.

At the same administration officials were using their commitment to climate-change science as a defence against critics, government scientists (most notably James Hansen at NASA) were reporting interference in communicating their scientific results to the public, and political appointees were editing government scientific documents, consistently weakening language on the impact of human activities on the climate system. The Bush administration also likes to tout the money it is spending on climate-change science and technology programs.

Based on their bookkeeping, climate funding is ticking upwards. But when the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s non-partisan audit arm, took a look at their books in 2005, they could not always follow the money and found some interesting things counted in the climate ledger, like coca eradication in Peru. Furthermore, a study released in January by the National Academy of Sciences found that NASA’s earth science budget has been cut 30 percent since 2000, and that the nation’s capability to analyse severe storms and detect changes in the Earth’s climate could be compromised in the future without increased funding.

With Russia’s announcement of their ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in late 2004, a recently re-elected George Bush faced renewed pressure at home and abroad to re-engage in international climate-change negotiations in 2005. Instead of taking the opportunity to find innovative ways forward on the climate issue presented by Tony Blair’s emphasis of global warming at the G8 in Gleneagles, leaked documents demonstrated that US negotiators had considerably watered down the original climate-change language. While the G8 leaders did sign a communiqué on climate change, it did not go much further than previous Bush administration positions.

Similarly, in December at the United Nation’s annual climate-change conference in Montreal, administration officials were more a hindrance than helpful, almost derailing efforts to move negotiations forward at one point. Ultimately many participants and observers hailed the outcome at Montreal as a success, since all countries, including the United States, agreed to a strengthened commitment to combat global warming under the UN framework agreement and reaffirmed the importance of tackling climate change through broad multilateral talks with mandatory commitments under the auspices of the UN.

In apparent response to renewed international pressure, the Bush administration spearheaded the formation of the Asia-Pacific Partnership with Australia, China, India, Japan and the Republic of Korea. Announced less than a month after Gleneagles wrapped up, the stated goal of the partnership is to accelerate the development and deployment of clean-energy technologies. Critics’ reactions ran the gambit from concern that it was a rival to the UN process to dismissal as little more than a PR stunt. So far the partnership has only developed action plans for public-private sector task forces in eight areas. Its accomplishments in 2007 will be important for evaluating the meaningfulness of the program, but the pace thus far does not match the urgency for low-carbon energy sources that our current understanding of climate-change science dictates.

Despite this period of inaction at the federal level in the United States, states and cities have developed their own policies and initiatives to help combat global warming. Twenty-three states now have renewable electricity production mandates, and almost as many have adopted greenhouse gas-reduction targets or are developing climate action plans. Eight north eastern states have banded together to limit carbon dioxide emissions from their power sector and to develop a market to trade carbon allowances. California has put the first mandatory economy-wide greenhouse gas emission cap legislation on the books. Almost 400 mayors representing 58 million Americans have committed their municipalities to meeting the emission-reduction targets suggested for the United States under the Kyoto Protocol.

Public attitudes towards global warming are also changing as strange weather buffets the nation, Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth fills movie theatre seats, businesses embrace sustainability, and more and more clergy are preaching creation care from their pulpits. Political observers watched Arnold Schwarzenegger rescue his re-election campaign for governor of California by embracing green issues, especially combating global warming. And the 2008 presidential campaign is likely to feature nominees from both parties who have embraced federal mandates for greenhouse gas emissions.

But before we even get to the 2008 election, the current Congress is poised to make progress on climate-change policy in the United States. The Democratic leadership has made clear it considers climate change a top priority. Although it is not clear what will emerge from Congress this session, they have already elevated the issue and are getting down to the difficult work of crafting policy, a dramatic change from the debate of the science that filled the halls of Congress not too long ago.

Just like the climate, the issue of global warming is heating up in Washington, DC. Let’s hope the response is quick enough and strong enough to make a difference.

Ana Unruh Cohen is director of environmental policy at the Centre for American Progress

www.americanprogress.org/