How the pope is saving Earth

But forest conservation needn't be an end. It should be a beginning. Again, we can look to the Vatican as a model. The pope didn't stop with his Hungarian forest. This year, he's planning to unveil an array of solar panels atop the huge Paul VI Audience Hall, which will provide enough electricity to light, heat and cool the building year-round. The pontiff is using forest conservation the right way: not as a method to avoid a clean-energy revolution but as a way to achieve immediate gains while other progress is underway, including the greening of Catholic Church operations around the world.

That should be the model for the United States (and other industrialized nations too). Although comprehensive climate change legislation is considered dead for this year, it's likely that Congress and President Bush could cobble together a consensus to authorize the $11 billion necessary to halt worldwide deforestation for 2009. That would keep 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere -- equivalent to the United States' entire annual emissions -- and save 30 million acres of forest from destruction for the foreseeable future. It would send a clear signal to American voters (and the world) that although the details still have to be figured out, the federal government can deliver real action on climate change.

This isn't as pie-in-the-sky as it might seem. Bush already has approved several significant tropical forest conservation projects in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama and elsewhere. With this deal, Bush could legitimately claim that he'd done far more, far sooner, for far less money to stop global warming than either the Kyoto Protocol or the failed congressional climate bill would have.

By following the pope's example, even Bush might qualify for a bit of eco-sainthood.