Editor's Note: The century after tomorrow

It's difficult for people to wrap their heads around global warming. Even if you understand that it's happening and it's not good, you know you aren't likely to see any tangible effects during your lifetime. As entertaining as Hollywood's The Day After Tomorrow is, we're pretty sure it presents a remote scenario. (The good news is if the world is suddenly hit with a giant storm that triggers a new ice age, Las Vegas apparently won't be covered with a thick sheet of the stuff. The satellite maps I saw in the movie suggest we might get some snow flurries and have to wear coats, but otherwise we'll be all right. If you think Las Vegas traffic congestion is bad now, wait till ice covers most of the Northern Hemisphere.)

Anyway, a concerted effort to personally combat global warming is a lot to expect of folks who have enough problems without altering their lives to maybe help prevent something from happening 1,000 years from now. It's not like a whole lot of people are trading in their Hummers and Suburbans in favor of electric cars and bus passes.

But fortunately for the global warming cause, other factors are at work these days to raise awareness and perhaps turn greater numbers toward conservation and alternative energies. The main factor is cost. Gasoline used to be ridiculously cheap, but now it's not, and all signs indicate it will continue to go up. As a result, all those gas hogs people bought over the past decade or so are starting to pinch the pocketbook.

Still, people are stubborn. I've talked in recent weeks with half a dozen people who own big trucks and SUVs and they aren't ready to let them go. Drive into any shopping center parking lot in the city and you'll find scores of soccer moms and NASCAR dads struggling to park huge vehicles in spaces made for Hondas and Subarus.

Nonetheless, energy awareness seems to be rising, and it takes time for these developments to result in individual lifestyle changes. In Las Vegas, electricity, natural gas and water--not to mention housing and insurance--have become significantly more expensive in recent years, yet the city is still generally regarded as a more affordable place to live than most metropolitan areas. It will take time for the true cost of living in Las Vegas to sink in across the continent.

The key impetus for widespread energy conservation and transition to alternative energies would be the federal government making a commitment to promoting and financing these programs. This is not happening under President Bush. Remember when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created a furor by describing France and Germany as "old Europe"? Well, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney personify "old energy." Oil is in their blood, it seems, and they will do everything in their power to ensure huge profits for the oil companies. What's more, "alternative energy," to Bush and Cheney, means nuclear power, not solar, wind or geothermal.

To be fair, no president has yet gotten real serious about renewable resources. As Bill McKibben notes in the latest New York Review of Books, "Bush has evaded energy and climate issues, but Bill Clinton and Al Gore weren't conspicuously better." The reason is much the same as the one that fails to entice individuals to act against global warming. McKibben writes: "Dealing with global warming is not a matter of simply paying a relatively small price to clean the air or water. It will demand nothing less than the overhaul of the entire global economy, which is currently based on the very fossil fuels whose combustion we can no longer afford, but whose replacement remains technologically, economically and politically more challenging than perhaps any transition in modern human history."

Converting entirely to alternative energies may not occur for 50 years or more--and not until we see additional technology breakthroughs--but clearly it's time to get started. Western Resource Advocates, a Colorado-based environmental group, published a study last week showing that Nevada and six other Western states could save $2 billion a year and have cleaner air if they made a greater commitment to conservation and green power sources. The plan would be for the seven states to get 20 percent of their power from fossil fuel alternatives by 2020.

Nevada actually has an aggressive statute requiring increased use of renewable energy. The state's power companies are required to get 15 percent of their power from green sources by 2013. But--surprise--the private sector has been slow to get with the program. Nevada Power Co. has already found itself in violation of this law. Financing for projects has been difficult to obtain, apparently, and many proposals have failed to materialize. The Air Force didn't help when it suddenly, late in the game, decided to nix a wind farm at the Nevada Test Site because it would interfere with radar. The Reno News & Review reports that of seven planned renewable energy projects listed on the state's Office of Energy website, only one--a geothermal facility near Fallon--is expected to be developed on time.

And so it goes in the alternative energy game. Without a commitment from the top--from the Oval Office--the transition to renewables will be slow and bumpy. It absolutely has to happen eventually, most scientists agree. But getting people--from political leaders to regular joes--to act globally and long term is a tough task in our immediate-gratification culture.

--GEOFF SCHUMACHER