WASHINGTON-A proposed tax intended to fight climate change is facing some heat on Capitol Hill. The cap-and-trade system, which President Obama has proposed as one way to fund his budget for next year, would require businesses who exceed certain carbon emissions limits to pay for offsets. And now that the proposal is being aired, debate is rising before an energy bill takes shape in committees over the next few weeks.

Rainforests are worth protecting. The dense jungles of vegetation cover only about 7 percent of the world's land surface but house, according to some estimates, about half of all plant and animal species.

So it was that a New York Times story last month questioning the importance of old-growth preservation set off a firestorm in the environmentalist community. A buzz of emails and breathless phone calls swirled between biologists from the Amazon to Southeast Asia.

Lawmakers in the United Kingdom have begun circulating a memo aimed at undercutting a proposal to institute tough new emissions caps on power plants. Many in Parliament fear that the anti-pollution directive would halt construction of the country's first new coal plant in three decades, threatening the security of national electricity supplies and spiking prices by 20 percent.

The election of Barack Obama as the United States' 44th president was supposed to usher in a new era of international climate talks. For years, environmentalists, journalists, and European heads of state have cast President George W. Bush among the primary obstacles to worldwide agreement on greenhouse gas reduction targets. The debate on global warming is over, so the story goes; Bush simply hasn't gotten the memo.

Think a Barack Obama presidency would significantly change the country's course on climate policy? Not so says a growing cadre of economists, political analysts, and environmental experts-including some supporters of the Illinois senator.

Are evangelicals buying into global warming alarmism? Since February 2006, media reports throughout the country have claimed as much, often citing the Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI), a document calling for federal caps on greenhouse-gas emissions and boasting the support of such influential Christian leaders as Rick Warren and Bill Hybels.

Climate-change alarmism has its Al Gore and Hollywood activists, characters whose appeal and personas transcend the issue to popularize green behavior. But where are the personalities of global warming skepticism? Outside the voices of conservative talk radio, whose scope of influence rarely extends beyond a static niche, the call for cool-headed environmental policy lacks star power.