Forty-five years ago this week, Congress enacted the first Clean Air Act, and after eight long years, we will soon have a President who takes the environment seriously.

Climate change is an international problem that will require an international effort to reverse decades of damage.

That is the lesson of the Clean Air Act, first enacted 45 years ago and updated several times since.

The original clean-air efforts were modest, directing states to develop clean-air criteria and offering grants to state governments to create air-pollution controls. The efforts, however, allowed for the creation of 50 different standards.

A 1967 law, the Air Quality Act, created a set of national criteria but not a broad national standard. Instead, a patchwork of regional regulations was put in place – an approach that former U.S. Rep. Paul G. Rogers (D-Fla.) said “was a notable failure.”

Pollution doesn’t stop at state borders or national borders.

That’s why we have to work with other nations on the issue and create international targets that all nations will have to meet and standards that all nations will have to abide by.

The 1997 Kyoto treaty, imperfect as it was, offered that. Ratified by more than 140 nations but not the United States, it required reducing emissions to pre-1990 levels by controlling emissions at the source and developing renewable energy sources.

The Bush administration, in refusing to sign the Kyoto treaty nearly four years ago, said it would have hurt American economic competitiveness, offering a rationale for doing nothing that the business community has have offered each time new environmental rules have been placed on the table.

Since then, numerous studies have shown that the threat of climate change is accelerating.

Fortunately, President-elect Barack Obama has made clear his commitment to address climate change.

His reported choice for Energy Secretary, Nobel Prize-winner Steven Chu, has devoted his career to alternative energies.

His reported choice to head the EPA, Lisa Jackson, aggressively took on polluters as head of the New Jersey environmental agency.

And by tapping Carol Browner, who headed the EPA for Bill Clinton, as head of U.S. climate change policy, Obama left no doubt that the United States is about to join the world community in taking on this global challenge.

It’s about time.

Hank Kalet is online editor for the Princeton Packet newspaper group. He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.