Oscar in the desert While decreeing Oscar of good documentary with exposed of Al Gore on global warming and its impact on planet (“An Inconvenient Truth”), Hollywood proclaimed extremely what president George Bush had evoked of the end of the lips in his speech on the state of the Union: the global warming is an established fact, the human responsibility also, and the time of an immediate action came.

If the American cities and States did not await the sanction of Hollywood to multiply the initiatives of reduction of the toxic emissions and conservation of energy, Washington knows finally a quivering of activity. Behind the closed doors of the chancelleries, conversations and handshakes multiplied these last months under the persistent attacks of increasingly influential groups resulting from the mediums of businesses. Environmental Contractors (E2), the group created in California by the founder of Sybase, regularly sends its delegations on the other coast and is declared encouraged by the increasing quality of the listening which is reserved to him. Safe (Securing America Energy' S Future), a founded organization bipartisane in Washington “to reduce the oil dependence of the United States”, has even its entries in the White House. Its council with energy safety counts eight Generals and admirals with the retirement and eight leaders of large companies like UPS, Fedex and Goldman Sachs. It is in particular under its influence that George Bush pronounced for the first time in public the words “change of the climate” last January.

The militants of a legislation on the limitation of the carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) stress the need for an approach bipartisane. On the whole, the initiatives of the cities and States gave them reason. But Washington is another animal. The body of the republican elected officials followed until now the line dictated by the president and his backers, among which the large pollutants of the country and their suppliers in energy dominate.

Also, the election of a democratic majority to the Congress and the Senate last November unquestionably made climb few degrees the optimism of the partisans of a federal legislation. The principal hope being that the debate on the validity of the problem of the warming leaves room to a constructive dialogue on the means of damming up the phenomenon.

The senatorial commission with the Environment and Public works, which has jurisdiction on the aforementioned dialogue, is chaired since the beginning of January by Barbara Boxer, senator democratic of California. Near allied to the powerful group environmentalist Sierra Club, it declared that the legislation on the global warming was the priority of its mandate. By contrast, its predecessor, James Inhofe, who always sits at the commission, asserted himself like a burning lawyer of the scientific doubt on the impact of the human activity on the climate, in accordance with the position of the White House, and quotes readily Claude Allègre.

On her side, the president of the Room, Nancy Pelosi, representing democratic of San Francisco, created a Committee of enquiry on energy independence and the global warming, and invited the Room to pass a law from here to the summer.

The democratic majority is too narrow so that the republicans do not exploit a decisive part a possible vote. However not only the speech on the state of the Union suggests that the president is opened with the debate, but the chairman of the oil giant ExxonMobil had held last December of the careful but unexpected remarks on the need for attacking the gas emissions for purpose of greenhouse.

In parallel, between the increasing concern of the opinion on the energy dependence of the United States per hour when a conflict with Iran is profiled, and the emergence of an ecological conscience in the electorate supplied with the media, the republicans also start to include/understand the interest to support the diary of the global warming.

The convergence of the factors for the explosion of what the Americans call a “perfect storm” was completed in January with the creation of US Climate Action Partnership. In a detailed report/ratio of ten pages, its ten founder members, among whom General Electric, Dupont and Alcoa, require a federal law on the levelling off of the gas emissions for purpose of greenhouse together with a system of exchange of appropriations CO2 on the European model. They support that a legal field nationally unified is more desirable for the companies than the patchwork of the legislations of State. They consequently provided occasion to Capitol Hill, always inclined to support the interests of the private sector, a perfect alibi to plunge in the debate with objective of result.

The possibility of a vote this year is already evoked. Three bills were already filed in and at least four others are in preparation. But the results are very dubious. Many estimates that the Congress will never be confined that of a limited and late action, political compromise obliges. In front of the urgency and the hugeness of the means to implement, one intends to plead the need for a presidential project of the scale of the Apollo program of John F. Kennedy. It is in particular the position of the governor of New Mexico, democratic candidate to the presidential elections, and of the governor of Pennsylvania, which must announce at the beginning of May a legislative project anti-warming for its State. However even if, with less than two years of the end of its mandate, George Bush has in heart to perhaps bequeath better to the history than the stagnation of the conflict in Iraq, nobody currently awaits oval Office the ambitious program that the situation requires. Do not remain any more with the Americans but to choose itself, the next year, a leader able to present and support the vision until part of the country waits.