Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (17 page)

From another perspective, however, the logic of Byrd-Hagel is deeply, even obscenely, self-serving. Suppose for a moment that the total anthropogenic CO
₂
that can be emitted into the atmosphere were a big ice-cream cake. If the aim is to keep global concentrations below five hundred parts per million, then roughly half that cake has already been consumed, and, of that half, the lion’s share has been polished off by the industrialized world. To insist now that all countries cut their emissions simultaneously amounts to advocating that industrialized nations be allocated most of the remaining slices, on the ground that they’ve already gobbled up so much. In a year, the average American produces the same greenhouse-gas emissions as four and a half Mexicans, or eighteen Indians, or ninety-nine Bangladeshis. If both the United States and India were to reduce their emissions proportionately, then the average Bostonian could continue indefinitely producing eighteen times as much greenhouse gases as the average Bangalorean. But why should anyone have the right to emit more than anyone else? At a climate meeting in New Delhi a few years ago, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then the Indian prime minister, told world leaders, “Our per capita greenhouse gas emissions are only a fraction of the world average and an order of magnitude below that of many developed countries. We do not believe that the ethos of democracy can support any norm other than equal per capita rights to global environmental resources.”

Outside the United States, the decision to exempt developing nations from Kyoto’s mandates was generally regarded as an adequate—if imperfect—solution to an otherwise intractable problem. The arrangement was basic to the Framework Convention, and it mimicked a structure that had already been employed—successfully—to deal with another potential global crisis: the depletion of atmospheric ozone. The Montreal Protocol, adopted in 1987, called for a phase-out of ozone-depleting chemicals, but gave developing nations what amounted to a ten-year grace period. Pieter van Geel, the Dutch environment secretary, described the European outlook to me as follows: “We cannot say, ‘Well, we have our wealth, based on the use of fossil fuels for the last three hundred years, and, now that your countries are growing, you may not grow at this rate, because we have a climate-change problem.’ We should show moral leadership by giving the example. That’s the only way we can ask something of these other countries.”

For its part, the Clinton administration supported the Kyoto Protocol in theory, but not really in practice. In November 1998, the United States’s ambassador to the U.N. signed the treaty on behalf of the administration. But the president never submitted it to the Senate, where clearly it wouldn’t have won the two-thirds vote needed for ratification. On Earth Day 2000, Clinton delivered more or less the same speech he had given seven years earlier: “The greatest environmental challenge of the new century is global warming. The scientists tell us the 1990s were the hottest decade of the entire millennium. If we fail to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, deadly heat waves and droughts will become more frequent, coastal areas will flood, and economies will be disrupted. That is going to happen, unless we act.” By the time he left office, CO
₂
emissions from the United States were 15 percent higher than they had been in 1990.

No politician in America—perhaps no major politician in the world—is more closely associated with the subject of global warming than Al Gore. In 1992, while still in the Senate, Gore published
Earth in the Balance
, in which he argued that protecting the global environment should be the “central organizing principle” of society; five years later, as vice president, he flew to Japan to salvage Kyoto when negotiations seemed on the verge of breaking down. Nonetheless, global warming never really became a factor in the 2000 election. During the campaign, George W. Bush repeatedly asserted that he, too, was deeply concerned about climate change, calling it “an issue that we need to take very seriously.” He promised that, if elected, he would impose federal regulations limiting CO
₂
emissions.

Soon after his inauguration, Bush sent the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christine Todd Whitman, to a meeting of environmental ministers from the world’s leading industrialized nations, where she elaborated on what she apparently believed to be his position. Whitman assured her colleagues that the president considered global warming to be “one of the greatest environmental challenges that we face” and that he wanted to “take steps to move forward.” Ten days after her presentation, Bush announced that not only was he withdrawing the United States from the ongoing negotiations over Kyoto—the protocol had left several complex issues of implementation to be resolved later—but also he had changed his mind about federal curbs on carbon dioxide. Explaining this reversal, Bush asserted that he no longer thought CO
₂
limits were justified, owing to the “state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change,” which he labeled “incomplete.” (Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who backed the president’s original position, has speculated publicly that the reversal was engineered by Vice President Dick Cheney.)

For nearly a year, the Bush administration operated essentially without any position on climate change. Then, the president announced that the United States would be pursuing a whole new approach. Instead of focusing on greenhouse gas emissions, the country would focus on something called “greenhouse gas intensity.” Bush declared this new approach preferable because it recognized “that a nation that grows its economy is a nation that can afford investments and new technology.”

Greenhouse gas intensity is not a quantity that can be measured directly. Rather, it is a ratio that relates emissions to economic output. Say, for example, that one year a business produces a hundred pounds of carbon and a hundred dollars’worth of goods. Its greenhouse gas intensity in that case would be one pound per dollar. If the next year that company produces the same amount of carbon but an extra dollar’s worth of goods, its intensity will have fallen by one percent. Even if it doubles its total emissions of carbon, a company—or a country—can still claim a reduced intensity provided that it more than doubles its output of goods. (Typically, a country’s greenhouse gas intensity is measured in terms of tons of carbon per million dollars’ worth of gross domestic product.)

To focus on greenhouse gas intensity is to give a peculiarly sunny account of the U.S. situation. Between 1990 and 2000, U.S. greenhouse gas intensity fell by some 17 percent, owing to several factors, including the shift toward a more service-based economy. Meanwhile, total emissions rose by some 12 percent. (In terms of greenhouse gas intensity, the United States actually performs better than many third world nations, because even though we consume a lot more energy, we also have a much larger GDP.) In February 2002, President Bush set the goal of reducing the country’s greenhouse gas intensity by 18 percent over the following ten years. During that same decade, his administration expects the American economy to grow by 3 percent annually. If both expectations are met, overall emissions of greenhouse gases will rise by about 12 percent.

The administration’s plan, which relies almost entirely on voluntary measures, has been characterized by critics as nothing more than a subterfuge—“a total charade” is how Philip Clapp, president of the Washington-based National Environmental Trust, once put it. And certainly, if the goal is to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference,” then greenhouse gas intensity is the wrong measure to use. (Essentially, the president’s approach amounts to following the path of “business as usual.”) The administration’s response to such criticism has generally been to attack its premise. “Science tells us that we cannot say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of warming and therefore what level must be avoided,” Paula Dobriansky has stated. When I asked her how, in that case, the United States could support the aim of averting DAI, she answered by saying—twice—“We predicate our policies on sound science.”

Right around the time I went to visit Dobriansky, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, James Inhofe, gave a speech on the Senate floor, which he titled “An Update on the Science of Climate Change.” In the speech, Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, announced that “new evidence” had come to light that “makes a mockery” of the notion that human-induced warming is occurring. The senator, who has called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” went on to argue that this important new evidence was being suppressed by “alarmists” who view anthropogenic warming as “an article of religious faith.” One of the authorities that Inhofe repeatedly cited in support of his claims was the fiction writer Michael Crichton.

It was an American scientist—Charles David Keeling—who, in the 1950s, developed the technology to measure CO
₂
levels precisely, and it was American researchers who, working on Mauna Loa, first showed that these levels were steadily rising. In the half century since then, the United States has contributed more than any other nation to the advancement of climate science, both theoretically, through the work of climate modelers at places like GISS and NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and experimentally, through field studies conducted in the Arctic, the Antarctic, and every continent in between.

At the same time, the United States is also the world’s chief purveyor of the work of so-called global-warming skeptics. The ideas of these skeptics are published in books with titles like
The Satanic Gases
and
Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths
and then circulated on the Web by groups like Tech Central Station, which is sponsored by, among others, ExxonMobil and General Motors. While some skeptics’ organizations argue that global warming isn’t real, or at least hasn’t been proved—“Predicting
weather
conditions a day or two in advance is hard enough, so just imagine how hard it is to forecast what our
climate
will be,” Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, a lobbying organization funded by mining and power companies, declares on its Web site—others maintain that rising CO
₂
levels are actually cause for celebration.

“Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion are beneficial to life on earth,” the Greening Earth Society, an organization created by the Western Fuels Association, a utility group, states. Atmospheric levels of 750 parts per million—nearly triple preindustrial levels—are nothing to worry about, the society maintains, because plants like lots of CO
₂
, which they need for photosynthesis. (Research on this topic, the group’s Web site acknowledges, has been “frequently denigrated,” but “it’s exciting stuff” and provides an “antidote to gloom-and-doom about potential changes in earth’s climate.”)

In legitimate scientific circles, it is virtually impossible to find evidence of disagreement over the fundamentals of global warming. Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California at San Diego, recently tried to quantify the level of consensus. She conducted a study of more than nine hundred articles on climate change published in refereed journals between 1993 and 2003 and subsequently made available on a leading research database. Of these, she found that 75 percent endorsed the view that anthropogenic emissions were responsible for at least some of the observed warming of the past fifty years. The remaining 25 percent, which dealt with questions of methodology or climate history, took no position on current conditions. Not a single article disputed the premise that anthropogenic warming is under way.

Still, pronouncements by groups like the Greening Earth Society and politicians like Senator Inhofe shape the public discourse on climate change. And this clearly is their point. A few years ago, pollster Frank Luntz prepared a strategy memo for Republican members of Congress, coaching them on how to deal with a variety of environmental issues. (Luntz, who first made a name for himself by helping to craft Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” has been described as “a political consultant viewed by Republicans as King Arthur viewed Merlin.”) Under the heading “Winning the Global Warming Debate,” Luntz wrote, “The scientific debate is closing (against us) but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.” He warned, “Voters believe that there is
no consensus
about global warming in the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.” Luntz also advised, “The most important principle in any discussion of global warming is your commitment to sound science.”

It is in this context, and really only in this context, that the Bush administration’s claims about the science of global warming make any sense. Administration officials are quick to point to the scientific uncertainties that remain about global warming, of which there are many. But where there is broad agreement, they are reluctant to acknowledge it.

“When we make decisions, we want to make sure we do so on sound science,” the president said, announcing his new approach to global warming in February 2002. Just a few months later, the Environmental Protection Agency delivered a two hundred and sixty-three page report to the U.N. that stated, “Continuing growth in greenhouse gas emissions is likely to lead to annual average warming over the United States that could be as much as several degrees Celsius (roughly 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit) during the 21st century.” The president dismissed the report—the product of years of work by federal researchers—as something “put out by the bureaucracy.” The following spring, the EPA made another effort to give an objective summary of climate science, in a report on the state of the environment. The White House interfered so insistently in the writing of the global warming section—at one point, it tried to insert excerpts from a study partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute—that, in an internal memo, agency staff members complained that the section “no longer accurately represents scientific consensus.” (When the EPA finally published the report, the climate-science section was missing entirely.) In June 2005, the
New York Times
revealed that a White House official named Philip Cooney had repeatedly edited government reports on climate change in order to make their findings seem less alarming. In one instance, Cooney received a report stating: “Many scientific observations point to the conclusion that the Earth is undergoing a period of relatively rapid change.” He revised this statement to read: “Many scientific observations
indicate
that the Earth
may be
undergoing a period of relatively rapid change.” Shortly after his editing efforts were disclosed, Cooney resigned from his White House post and took a job with ExxonMobil.