The following editorial appeared Thursday in the Tri-City Herald.

It’s more a leveling than it is a breakthrough, but the Western Climate Initiative is good news just the same.

In it, eight Western states and Canadian provinces have agreed to a regional goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 15 percent by 2020.

That’s not exactly a new goal. According to the Associated Press, it is an aggregation of goals set individually by the states and provinces and does not change any existing targets.

But by combining forces and agreeing on some minimal regional standards, the initiative members serve as pathfinders for other regions and the Canadian and U.S. national governments.

Members of the initiative are Washington, Oregon, Arizona, California, Utah, New Mexico, British Columbia and Manitoba.

Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski says the group is “leading the way for North America in adopting real measures and programs to combat global warming and to secure economic and environmental opportunity.”

It’s easy to understand why the West is out front. Dam operators, water district managers, farmers, conservationists and scientists are predicting dire water shortages in the region if the effects of global warming aren’t curbed.

Already, snowfall is diminishing and spring runoff is coming earlier. In the mid-Columbia, where much of the agricultural industry depends on melting snow in the Cascades to irrigate summer crops, the potential damage would be devastating.

Among the revelations before a Senate committee: The spring snowpack already has declined at nearly 75 percent of all weather recording stations in Washington, Oregon and California.

If trends continue, tens of thousands of irrigated acres could fall out of production in the West as water supplies tighten, the senators were told this summer.

The regional initiative’s aims include mandating use of renewable energy resources, imposing stricter standards on new power plants and buying alternative-fuel vehicles where practical. These are hardly radical ideas, and their costs shouldn’t be prohibitive.

Also important is that the initiative should help reduce the ever-popular notion that if one state undertakes something, those who oppose it need do nothing more than cross state lines to get a bargain.

Not any more – not in these states.

And the planet may just benefit. That, in the end, is the whole idea.