No, the fight against global warming has not been abandoned. President Bush's disinterest in the danger that carbon dioxide emissions pose to the atmosphere doesn't mean defeat so much as a shift in venue and a change in tactics.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has gone to court, along with his counterparts in seven other states and with New York City, to make the unprecedented legal argument that global warming poses a public nuisance that violates common law. Their lawsuit seeks no damages, though. Victory for the public would come in the form of reduced carbon dioxide emissions -- invaluable, really -- rather than one of those multimillion dollar judgments that are the subject of endless legal appeals and negotiations.

Still, the big power producers, off the hook for a financial settlement, are resisting. It's the position of the five companies that emit about 650 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, about 25 percent of the greenhouse gases produced by power plants, that even a slight reduction is too impractical to pursue.

The Southern Co. of Atlanta, which operates power plants in Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Mississippi, goes so far as to claim that the technology for even a 3 percent reduction in emissions doesn't exist -- at least not without a huge increase in utility rates.

Mr. Spitzer counters that pollution controls, cleaner fuels, renewable energies and energy conservation might well do the trick without much of an impact on household utility bills. A 3 percent reduction is next to nothing, in fact, considering that from 1990 to 2001, carbon dioxide emissions from power plants soared from 1.8 billion tons in 1990 to 2.24 billion tons in 2001.

Ordinarily, the matter would end right there. The Southern Co. and the four other power producers named in the lawsuit wouldn't have any real reason to listen to a group of attorneys general tell them how to do business.

Only now, a federal judge might order them to do just that. Mr. Spitzer and the rest are breaking new legal ground as they try to reduce global warming through the enforcement of what's known as nuisance law. They'll have to prove first that power companies harm communities with that level of emissions, and then that there are reasonable ways to decrease emissions.

That shouldn't be so hard. Science is on the side of the innovative litigators in state capitals from Albany to Sacramento. Here's hoping they prevail.