Forward-looking political action abroad and by the U.S. governors, while not as far-reaching as environmentalists might like, is indicative of a fundamental change in the response to global warming. Leaders beyond the influence of the Bush administration are fast recognizing that inaction on global warming could be catastrophically costly in dollars and human suffering; that popular opinion is shifting in support of decisive action; and that the alternative energy technologies able to abate global warming's worst impacts are ready today. Best of all, those who implement these sustainable technologies are likely to reap huge economic dividends -- in innovative corporate startups, increased jobs and improvements in quality of life.

This bold vision for the future that is starting to capture the political and public imagination includes vast windfarms that generate boundless power, and hydrogen cars that hum along streets while causing no pollution. It includes landfills that are no longer a source of noxious smells but of biomass power. It promises millions of solar roofs, and energy self-sufficient homes that sell their power back to utility companies. It even promises transformed human landscapes where telecommuters no longer sit in traffic jams wasting gas and time; where urban sprawl is contained and cities are made livable and pedestrian-friendly.

A whole suite of technologies, all blossoming simultaneously, explain the boom in alternative energy abroad. "One of the most exciting things has been advances in wind turbine design to operate at much lower wind speed and convert much more wind into electricity," said Lester Brown, the alternative energy expert who heads the Earth Policy Institute. The largest turbines now produce 250 times more electricity than the ones built 20 years ago, when California pioneered the industry. "We have enough harnessable wind energy in the U.S. to meet all our energy needs," Brown said. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, three windy states alone -- Texas, North Dakota and Kansas -- can supply all of the nation's electricity.

Brown paints a future where Western ranchers and farmers plant a new cash crop among their cows and corn: wind turbines that will turn their lands into energy providers as well as food providers. Wind is abundant, cheap, clean, inexhaustible, environmentally benign and, because it is decentralized, free from terrorist threat.

"Once we get cheap electricity from wind, then we have the option of electrolyzing water to produce hydrogen," said Brown. "And hydrogen is the fuel of the future."

That future may be closer than we think. "Everyone always talks about hydrogen in relation to fuel-cell cars, but the reality is that if we wanted to move rapidly away from oil, we don't have to go that route. We could simply convert our internal combustion engines from gasoline to hydrogen, burning the hydrogen directly," revealed Brown. "It's fairly simple, requiring minor engine changes probably costing not more than about $200 per car. For that amount, a mechanic at a service station could convert an internal combustion engine to a gas engine that would run on natural gas or hydrogen. In fact, BMW now has a prototype model where, while driving down the road, you can switch from gasoline to hydrogen and back again. From an engineering point of view, it is entirely within range." It hasn't been attempted before because hydrogen hasn't been cheap, but an abundance of wind power would change that.

Brown dismisses another often mentioned impediment to the wind-hydrogen transition: the lack of a distribution system. The infrastructure is already in place, he said. "I do all my cooking in a Washington, D.C., apartment with natural gas piped in from Texas. Hydrogen can be delivered the same way, using the same pipes."

American entrepreneurs already know what Brown knows. "Ken Lay, when he was at Enron -- his faults aside -- was a visionary," Brown said. "What Lay saw was that the natural gas fields in Texas would one day be depleted, gone. But the wind that Texas has in abundance would still be there." Lay founded a profitable wind company at Enron with the idea that Texas wind farms would produce cheap electricity and electrolyze water to make cheap hydrogen. Using existing but modified natural gas pipelines, the hydrogen would flow to the nation's buildings and cars. General Electric has since taken over Enron's wind company.

Retrofitting natural gas pipelines probably won't come cheap. Because hydrogen atoms are very small, thousands of miles of pipeline would have to be better sealed to prevent leakage. But that cost pales against the $1 trillion in climate change-related disasters over the past 15 years. In 1998 alone, the hottest year on record, a Southern U.S. drought did $6 billion in damage; a freakish New England ice storm did $2.5 billion; Hurricane Mitch, the deadliest Atlantic storm in 200 years, caused $5 billion in destruction; while a Yangtze River flood in China did $30 billion in harm. Unless action is taken, the cost of global warming-caused disasters is likely to double every decade, according to a U.N. Environment Program Finance Initiative report.

Brown leaps further ahead in time and in hope: "The development of hydrogen fuel cells is exciting as well because of their efficiency. What we will see in the cities of the future are automobiles that don't make any noise or emit any pollutants. We can't even imagine a city without noise and air pollution, because we've never known it!"

Amory Lovins, another alternative energy guru, in an interview reported that just such a vehicle has been designed by his Rocky Mountain Institute: "We've developed a 99-mile-per-gallon gas-electric hybrid Explorer-class SUV." According to Lovins, just $200 million in investment capital could see the hypercar roll off assembly lines, saving three or four times America's annual Persian Gulf imports. Hypercars could eventually be converted to hydrogen fuel cell engines as the technology arrived. Lovins has not patented his design, and Ford, GM, Daimler/Chrysler and other car companies are all racing to be the first to market such a car.

"If you look at the speed of production conversion at the start of World War II, it was just stunning. I think the same could be done now because a lot of the technologies are already well-developed," said Lovins. "If you put together a New Manhattan Project to develop the wind-hydrogen economy, all bets are off. Under normal conditions hypercars could control half the market in 10 years. With a crash program to get things into production, you could probably cut that time in half. That is ambitious, but Americans are very good at doing ambitious things when their attention is concentrated."

Unfortunately, Brown believes that we may need a climate change disaster, or a series of them, on the psychological scale of the Pearl Harbor attack to create the needed urgency for change. "We're probably going to see trouble first in the food sector, the most vulnerable section of the global economy. The combination of falling water tables and rising temperatures may very soon bring the era of cheap food to an end," he warned. China is no longer producing enough grain to feed itself. Once its stores are used up, Brown said, that nation of 1.3 billion people is likely to come to the world's table demanding grain. But continued climate shocks -- intensifying bouts of drought and deluge -- may make help difficult. "We're really a lot closer to that moment than most of us imagine," said Brown. "That could be our wakeup call."

When the moment comes, Brown hopes the technology and economics will fall into place so we can quickly move to stabilize climate. At that date, the pioneering work of the Northeast governors may be recognized for its innovation.

"Twenty years from now, I hope we'll be looking at a very different mix of energy sources, with a great many more renewables on-line," said Campbell, the New Jersey environmental commissioner. The state, he asserted, is re-envisioning its future from the ground up, supporting a vigorous green-building program, planting 100,000 trees in urban areas to reduce energy needs and absorb carbon, and working toward livable cities and containing sprawl so people drive less. Ultimately, he thinks, the nation can effectively curb carbon dioxide emissions.

"I don't want to underestimate what a significant challenge this is," he said. "We have to build the infrastructure to regulate a new pollutant. It is like the early moments when Congress passed the first environmental laws, setting very ambitious goals, but having little conception of the mechanics and technology of how to get there."

Should we fail, the cost could be terrible. A new book, "When Life Nearly Died," by professor Michael Benton of the U.K.'s Bristol University, shows that temperature increases over the next 97 years could roughly equal that at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago. Runaway global warming then triggered the worst mass extinction ever, the disappearance of 95 percent of species on the planet.

President Bush, when he acknowledges modern climate change at all, sees it as a distant threat and challenge. But the problem of global warming -- endangering the world's food supply and even life itself -- is with us now. And so are the solutions.

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