Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (18 page)

On the day after the Kyoto Protocol took effect, the United Nations hosted a conference titled, appositely, “One Day After Kyoto.” The conference, whose subtitle was “Next Steps on Climate,” was held in a large room with banks of curved desks, each equipped with a little plastic earpiece. The speakers included scientists, insurance-industry executives, and diplomats from all over the world, among them the U.N. ambassador from the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, who described how his country was in danger of simply disappearing. Britain’s permanent representative to the U.N., Sir Emyr Jones Parry, began his remarks to the crowd of two hundred or so by stating, “We can’t go on as we are.”

When the United States withdrew from negotiations over Kyoto, in 2001, the entire effort nearly collapsed. All on its own, America accounts for 34 percent of Annex 1 emissions. According to Kyoto’s elaborate ratification mechanism, in order to take effect the protocol had to be approved by countries responsible for at least 55 percent of those emissions. European leaders spent more than three years working behind the scenes, trying to line up support from the remainder of the industrialized world. The crucial threshold was finally crossed in October 2004, when the Russian Duma voted in favor of ratification. The Duma’s vote was all but explicitly understood to be a condition of European backing for Russia’s bid to join the World Trade Organization. (RUSSIA FORCED TO RATIFY KYOTO PROTOCOL TO BECOME WTO MEMBER, read the headline in
Pravda
.)

As speaker after speaker at the U.N. conference noted, Kyoto is an important first step, but only a first step. The protocol expires in 2012 and the cuts it mandates don’t come close to stabilizing worldwide emissions. Even if every country—including the United States—were to fulfill its obligations under Kyoto, CO
₂
concentrations in the atmosphere would still be headed to five hundred parts per million, and beyond. Without substantive commitments from countries like China and India, there is no realistic way to avoid DAI. But why should China and India accept the costs of controlling emissions when America has refused to do so? In this way, the United States, having failed to defeat Kyoto, may be in the process of doing something even more damaging: ruining the chances of reaching a post-Kyoto agreement. “The blunt reality is that, unless America comes back into some form of international consensus, it is very hard to make progress” is how Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, recently put it.

Astonishingly, standing in the way of this progress seems to be Bush’s goal. Dobriansky explained the administration’s position to me as follows: While the rest of the industrialized world is pursuing one strategy (emissions limits), the United States is pursuing another (no emissions limits), and it is still too early to say which approach will work best. “It is essential to really implement these programs and approaches now and to take stock of their effectiveness,” she said, adding, “we think it is premature to talk about future arrangements.” At a round of international climate talks held in Buenos Aires in December 2004, many delegations were pressing for a preliminary round of meetings so that work could start on mapping out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The U.S. delegation opposed these efforts so adamantly that finally the Americans were asked to describe, in writing, what sort of meeting they would find acceptable. They issued half a page of conditions, one of which was that the session “shall be a one-time event held during a single day.” Another condition was, paradoxically, that, if they were going to discuss the future, the future would have to be barred from discussion; presentations, they wrote, should be limited to “an information exchange” on “existing national policies.” Annie Petsonk, a lawyer with the advocacy group Environmental Defense, who previously worked for the administration of George Bush Senior, attended the talks in Buenos Aires. She recalled the effect that the memo had on the members of the other delegations: “They were ashen.”

European leaders have made no secret of their dismay at the administration’s stance. “It’s absolutely obvious that global warming has started,” France’s president, Jacques Chirac, said after attending the 2004 summit of leaders of the world’s major industrial powers—the Group of 8. “And so we have to act responsibly, and, if we do nothing, we would bear a heavy responsibility. I had the chance to talk to the United States president about this. To tell you that I convinced him would be a total exaggeration, as you can imagine.” Tony Blair, who held the presidency of the G8 in 2005, spent the months leading up to that year’s summit trying to convince Bush that, in his words, “the time to act is now.” It’s plain, Blair said in an address devoted to climate change, that “the emission of greenhouse gases … is causing global warming at a rate that began as significant, has become alarming, and is simply unsustainable in the long-term. And by ‘long-term’I do not mean centuries ahead. I mean within the lifetime of my children certainly; and possibly within my own. And by ‘unsustainable,’ I do not mean a phenomenon causing problems of adjustment. I mean a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence.” Just a few weeks before the 2005 summit, which was held in Gleneagles, Scotland, the national science academies of all the G8 nations, including the United States, along with the science academies of China, India, and Brazil, issued a remarkable joint statement calling on world leaders to “acknowledge that the threat of climate change is clear and increasing.”

All of this, however, had no apparent impact on the president. In the lead-up to the summit, the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, James Connaughton, attended a meeting in London where he announced that he still wasn’t convinced that anthropogenic warming was a problem. “We are still working on the issue of causation, the extent to which humans area factor,” he said. According to the
Washington Post
, administration officials insisted on weakening a proposal for joint action prepared for the summit, demanding, for example, the deletion of a passage citing “increasingly compelling evidence of climate change, including rising ocean and atmospheric temperatures, retreating ice sheets and glaciers, rising sea levels, and changes to ecosystems.” The final communiqúe from the summit, which was overshadowed by the London subway bombings, largely reflected the administration’s position; it labeled global warming a “serious and long-term challenge” but also cited “uncertainties” in “our understanding of climate science” and called vaguely on G8 members to “promote innovation” and “accelerate deployment of cleaner technologies.”

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, is the primary sponsor of a bill that would, in effect, make good on George Bush’s unfulfilled 2000 campaign promise to regulate carbon emissions. The Climate Stewardship Act calls for a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States to 2000 levels by 2010, and to 1990 levels by 2016. McCain has managed to get the Climate Stewardship Act onto the Senate floor for a vote twice, both times over strong White House opposition. In October 2003, the measure was defeated by a vote of fifty-five to forty-three; in June 2005, it went down sixty to thirty-eight. When I asked McCain to characterize Bush’s position on global warming, he responded, “MIA.”

“This is clearly an issue that we will win on over time because of the evidence,” he went on. “The overwhelming impacts of climate change are becoming more and more visible every day. The problem is: will it be too late? We are a country that emits nearly 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. How much damage will have been done before we act?”

As of this writing, U.S. emissions are nearly 20 percent higher than they were in 1990.

Chapter 9

Burlington, Vermont

Burlington, Vermont, on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, is by almost any measure a small city; still, it is the largest in Vermont. Several years ago, its voters decided that instead of authorizing the local utility company to buy more power, they would use less of it. Since then, the city has probably done as much as any municipality in the country to try to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. The Burlington Electric Department may be the only utility in the United States whose vehicle fleet includes mountain bikes.

Peter Clavelle has been Burlington’s mayor since 1989, with a two-year hiatus, which he likes to refer to as a “voter-inspired sabbatical.” He is short and bald, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and mournful blue eyes. During his “sabbatical,” Clavelle went to live with his family on the island of Grenada.

“Living on an island, you really get in touch with practices that are sustainable and practices that are unsustainable,” he told me. It was a sticky July day, and we were driving around town in Clavelle’s hybrid Honda Civic, looking at energy-saving projects. He paused to point out a city bus equipped with a bicycle rack on the front grille.

“The issues around climate protection are about sustainability,” he went on. “They’re about future generations. They’re also about this conviction that local action does make a difference. Many of us are very frustrated with the lack of vision and action by the federal government, but there’s a choice to be made. You either can bemoan federal policies or you can take control of your own destiny.”

Burlington’s energy-saving campaign, launched in 2002, is known as the “10 percent challenge.” (“Put the chill on global warming” is its slogan.) As the name of the campaign suggests, the city’s aim is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent, though from what baseline is somewhat vaguely defined. To further this goal, Burlington has tried just about everything, from providing free energy consultations to businesses to designing “energy efficiency calendars” for kids. Tray liners printed up for the local McDonald’s feature a well-meaning but creepy-looking dinosaur named Climo Dino. “While our climate was changed by a giant asteroid, you humans are changing your own climate by emitting six billion tons of CO
₂
into the atmosphere each year,” Climo Dino observes.

The first stop on Clavelle’s tour was an outpost of the county dump where, instead of collecting rubbish, the city sells it. Burlington encourages contractors to engage not in demolition but in “deconstruction,” a practice that saves energy both by reducing the city’s waste stream and cutting down on the need for new materials. Dozens of “deconstructed” sinks and doors and vanities were arrayed, showroom style, in what once had been a garage. A next-to-new staircase was leaning against the wall, waiting for a buyer needing steps of precisely the same dimensions. In the parking lot, some kids were building a garden shed out of old plywood. Clavelle told me that he had gotten the idea for ReCycle North from a similar program in Minneapolis. “It’s management by plagiarism,” he announced cheerfully.

Our next stop was the headquarters of the Burlington Electric Department, or BED for short. Behind the building, I could see a single wind turbine, which was turning briskly in the breeze. The turbine symbolizes the city’s effort, while at the same time generating enough power for thirty homes. All in all, Burlington Electric gets nearly half of its energy from renewable sources, including a fifty-megawatt power plant in town that runs off wood chips. As we headed inside the BED headquarters, we passed a display of compact fluorescent light bulbs, which the company leases to interested customers at a cost of twenty cents a month. An electric department official named Chris Burns came out to greet us. He explained that a family that was keeping a hundred-watt incandescent bulb burning out on the porch all night could cut its electricity bill by up to 10 percent by simply replacing that bulb with a compact fluorescent. He said that several businesses in Burlington had cut their energy usage by significantly more than that just by taking such basic steps as adjusting the thermostat. The Burlington Electric Department has estimated that the energy-saving projects that the city has undertaken will, over the course of their useful life, prevent the release of nearly 175,000 tons of carbon. “We consider every building a power plant,” Burns told me.

A little later in the day, Clavelle took me to visit the City Market, a grocery store built on municipal land that had previously been a hazardous waste site. The city supports the market so that Burlington residents won’t have to drive to the suburbs to go food shopping. The market, in turn, is heavily stocked with local produce. “We estimated that a typical tomato traveled twenty-five hundred miles to reach our kitchen table,” Clavelle said. “And we could produce that tomato right here.” Finally, we headed over to a section of town known as the Intervale. A flood plain along the Winooski River, the Intervale once was a farming district, then it was a wasteland, and now it is home to an assortment of community gardens and cooperatives with names like the Lucky Ladies Egg Farm and the Stray Cat Farm. By the time we arrived at the Intervale, the weather had changed for the worse. In the pouring rain, we stopped at an old brick farmhouse. Summer squash of various shapes and sizes were displayed out front. Next door was a composting facility that collects vegetable waste from local restaurants and turns it back into soil.

“It’s a closed loop,” Clavelle told me.

One consequence, presumably unintended, of America’s failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol has been the emergence of a not-quite-grassroots movement. In February 2005, Greg Nickels, the mayor of Seattle, began to circulate a set of principles that he called the “U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.” Within four months, more than a hundred and seventy mayors, representing some thirty-six million people, had signed on, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York; Mayor John Hickenlooper of Denver; and Mayor Manuel Diaz of Miami. Signatories agreed to “strive to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol targets in their own communities.” At around the same time, officials from New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine announced that they had reached a tentative agreement to freeze power plant emissions from their states at current levels and then begin to cut them. Even Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Hummer collector, joined in; an executive order he signed in June 2005 called on California to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2010 and to 1990 levels by 2020. “I say the debate is over,” Schwarzenegger declared right before signing the order.