Tomorrow's editorials: Climate change progress and city pensions

Here are previews of some editorials we're working on. Let us know what you think. The best comments will appear alongside them in the print edition.

--Efforts to pass climate change legislation through Congress in time for the international summit in Copenhagen received an unexpected boost from Republican sources this week. The first, and perhaps most important, was South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham's decision to join Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry in a bipartisan climate bill that includes — gasp! — the cap-and-trade provision so often derided by conservatives.

But for those frustrated by the pseudo-science and quackery of climate change opponents who continue to bury their heads in the warming sand, the second was just as satisfying: Turns out the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush was just as alarmed by climate change as the rest of the mainstream scientific community.

The infamous e-mail from the EPA that the White House refused to even open in 2007 was released this week under a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Greenwire, the environmental news service. As expected, the e-mail shows that the agency, under Republican leadership, expressed the same concerns about the impact of greenhouse gases that the EPA under President Obama does today.

The "U.S. and the rest of the world are experiencing the effects of climate change now," the Bush-era memo concludes. It also warns of rising sea levels, drought, violent weather, outbreaks of disease and greater numbers of heat-related deaths.

Any similarities between the language of that dire forecast and the one EPA provided earlier this year is strictly common-sensical. The agency's choice to move forward with an endangerment finding under the Clean Air Act that could soon lead to strict regulations imposed on major carbon producers was, if anything, overdue.

The Graham-Kerry bill won't please everyone in the green community. It would open up more off-shore sites to oil and natural gas exploration, for instance, and would promote nuclear and clean coal technologies that have significant environmental drawbacks.

But the fact that a Republican senator would endorse climate change legislation so early in the process (the Senate has yet to even conduct hearings on House-approved climate change bill) is quite a contrast to how a divided Congress has so far handled health care reform.

No doubt Mr. Graham is not the only GOP senator willing to take action on greenhouse gases despite the party's anti-tax mantra. Are you listening Sen. John McCain? Plenty of traditional Republican allies in the business community support legislation, too. Most recently, Nike and Apple resigned from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the organization's failure to face climate change realities.

The potential impact of climate change is simply too worrisome not to take action. Most Americans recognize that. So do many big corporations and major utilities. At the moment, the biggest obstacle to meeting the December Copenhagen deadline may be timid Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who doesn't want to deal with it until health care reform is passed.

That's too bad because, as the Bush EPA e-mail confirms, the science of climate change is clear. It's just the politics of it that need to be overcome.

--Baltimore's fire and police pension system is in need of major reform right now. The board that governs it passed along a bill for a nearly $165 million contribution to the fund next year, almost double what we're paying now. Part of the problem is an egregious benefit that gives retirees all the benefits of the stock market's upturns and none of the consequences of its downturns. (For more on that, click here.) But that's only the tip of the iceberg.