Does Civility Matter in the Blogosphere? Examining the

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Appendix 1. News story on global warming

HEADLINE: Lawmakers debate competing proposals on global warming

WASHINGTON - Congress turned the spotlight on global warming this week for the first time in six years, promising to pass legislation to address climate change by year's end.

Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate said there is growing agreement that Congress needs to address the problem of greenhouse gases causing global warming. There is less agreement, however, on how that should be done.

In a recent press conference, Rep. Mark Hunt, D-Colo., touted a plan that calls for mandatory caps on greenhouse emissions for power plants, industry and oil refineries. President Bush has opposed mandatory caps but has called for changes to federal fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles and a boost in ethanol production.

The Hunt plan, co-sponsored by Rep. Bill Reedy, D-Ky. would require releases of heat-trapping gases to return to 2004 levels by 2012 and to 1990 levels by 2020.

Carbon dioxide, produced from the burning of fossil fuels, is the primary greenhouse gas. United States emissions of this gas have increased an average of about 1 percent per year since 1990. "With each passing year, the consequences of federal inaction on reducing greenhouse gas emissions become more devastating for our children and grandchildren, and the range of solutions grows smaller," Hunt said Thursday.

Conservatives such as Rep. Mike Donald, R-Kan., oppose strict limits on emissions, arguing that they would raise energy costs for consumers and hurt economic growth. "Carbon caps will hit hardest on those with the least ability to pay. Do we really want that?" he said.

President Bush, while acknowledging concerns about global warming, maintains that industry can deal with the issue through the development of new technologies.

The president has submitted a plan to combine technological innovations and voluntary efforts by industry to reduce emissions through energy conservation and the use of renewable fuels. These measures, administration officials say, are already well on their way to slowing the growth of greenhouse gases.

The Bush plan falls short of the mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions envisioned by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which President Bush renounced in 2001. "We can get beyond. . .the pre-Kyoto era with a post-Kyoto strategy, the center of which is new technologies," he said on a visit Tuesday to a DuPont facility in Delaware.

Critics have questioned whether President Bush's proposals are the best way to address the problem of global warming.

"When you get to the bottom line, there are no hard caps, no enforcement mechanisms, and we aren't even going to start reversing the increase in carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector for 10 years," Hunt said.

The Bush administration believes that market forces will prove more efficient than government regulation. White House spokesman Tony Snow said, "Carrots work better than sticks."