“Time here is indeed the enemy,” said Hal Harvey, the CEO of the ClimateWorks Foundation, which promotes the best practices for energy management and climate-change mitigation around the world. “Things that happen suddenly, like a pinprick or a tornado, capture our attention. But we don’t even notice things that unfold over years or decades.”
Another reason we keep putting off action on global warming is that the solution requires putting a price on carbon and setting stronger energy-efficiency standards. Since politicians don’t want to propose either of those, they prefer not to talk about the problem. This did not use to be us. Under the leadership of presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the United States reacted to the 1973–1974 Arab oil embargo by putting in place higher fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks. In 1975, Congress, with broad bipartisan support, passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which established corporate average fuel economy standards that required the gradual doubling of efficiency for new passenger vehicles—to 27.5 miles per gallon—within ten years. As a result of that, said Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, “we raised our oil productivity 5.2 percent a year for eight years from 1977 through 1985; oil imports fell 50 percent and oil imports from the Persian Gulf fell 87 percent. We broke OPEC’s pricing power for a decade by cutting their sales in half.” Oil tumbled in price to below $15 a barrel. “Just think,” added Lovins, “with today’s innovations, we could rerun that old play so much better, and imagine what the impact would be.”
It was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who signed into law the first pieces of major environmental legislation in the United States, which addressed our first generation of environmental problems—air pollution, water pollution, and toxic waste. In particular, Nixon pushed Congress to pass the landmark Clean Air Act of 1970, and to oversee environmental protection, he also created both the Department of Natural Resources and the Environmental Protection Agency.
It was Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, who oversaw the negotiation of the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer—a landmark international agreement designed to protect the stratospheric ozone layer that shields the planet from damaging UVB radiation. And it was President George H. W. Bush who introduced the idea of “cap and trade” to address an environmental problem. Yes, you read that correctly.
In an article entitled “The Political History of Cap and Trade,” published in Smithsonian magazine (August 2009), Richard Conniff details the story of how “an unlikely mix of environmentalists and free-market conservatives hammered out the strategy known as cap-and-trade.” As Conniff explained it,
The basic premise of cap-and-trade is that government doesn’t tell polluters how to clean up their act. Instead, it simply imposes a cap on emissions. Each company starts the year with a certain number of tons allowed—a so-called right to pollute. The company decides how to use its allowance; it might restrict output, or switch to a cleaner fuel, or buy a scrubber to cut emissions. If it doesn’t use up its allowance, it might then sell what it no longer needs. Then again, it might have to buy extra allowances on the open market. Each year, the cap ratchets down, and the shrinking pool of allowances gets costlier …
Getting all this to work in the real world required a leap of faith. The opportunity came with the 1988 election of George H. W. Bush. [Environmental Defense Fund president] Fred Krupp phoned Bush’s new White House counsel [C. Boyden Gray] and suggested that the best way for Bush to make good on his pledge to become the “environmental president” was to fix the acid rain problem, and the best way to do that was by using the new tool of emissions trading. Gray liked the marketplace approach, and even before the Reagan administration expired, he put EDF staffers to work drafting legislation to make it happen …
John Sununu, the White House chief of staff, was furious. He said the cap “was going to shut the economy down,” Boyden Gray recalls. But the in-house debate “went very, very fast. We didn’t have time to fool around with it.” President Bush not only accepted the cap, he overruled his advisers’ recommendation of an eight million-ton cut in annual acid rain emissions in favor of the ten million-ton cut advocated by environmentalists …
Almost 20 years since the signing of the Clean Air Act of 1990, the cap-and-trade system continues to let polluters figure out the least expensive way to reduce their acid rain emissions.
Alas, today’s Republican Party is different. An October 2010 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that a “53%-majority of Republicans say there is no solid evidence the earth is warming. Among Tea Party Republicans, fully 70% say there is no evidence. Disbelief in global warming in the GOP is a recent occurrence. Just a few years ago, in 2007, a 62%-majority of Republicans said there is solid evidence of global warming, while less than a third (31%) said there is no solid evidence.”
Not all Republicans are happy about this. As Sherwood Boehlert, a Republican who represented New York’s Twenty-fourth District in Congress from 1983 to 2007, put it in The Washington Post (November 19, 2010),
I call on my fellow Republicans to open their minds to rethinking what has largely become our party’s line: denying that climate change and global warming are occurring and that they are largely due to human activities. The National Journal reported last month that 19 of the 20 serious GOP Senate challengers declared that the science of climate change is either inconclusive or flat-out wrong. Many newly elected Republican House members take that position. It is a stance that defies the findings of our country’s National Academy of Sciences, national scientific academies from around the world and 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists … There is a natural aversion to more government regulation. But that should be included in the debate about how to respond to climate change, not as an excuse to deny the problem’s existence … My fellow Republicans should understand that wholesale, ideologically based or special-interest-driven rejection of science is bad policy. And that in the long run, it’s also bad politics. What is happening to the party of Ronald Reagan? He embraced scientific understanding of the environment and pollution and was proud of his role in helping to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. That was smart policy and smart politics.
There is another new factor blocking legislative action against climate change: the shift in Senate rules whereby it now requires sixty votes to shut off a filibuster and thereby pass any significant legislation such as an overhaul of our energy system. A significant majority of Democratic senators were ready to pass such legislation, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, in President Obama’s first two years, but even though the Democrats had a sixty-vote majority, they could only muster from fifty to fifty-two votes, because oil-state and coal-state Democrats could not be brought on board. Surely, however, they could have found ten Republicans who would support such legislation or offer their own simpler alternative to cap and trade, such as a carbon tax, could they not?
After all, as Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told Tom in an interview in February 2007, when this legislation was being debated, it was vital for the country and his party to help produce some clean-energy legislation. “I have been to enough college campuses to know if you are thirty or younger this climate issue is not a debate,” said Graham. “It’s a value. These young people grew up with recycling and a sensitivity to the environment—and the world will be better off for it. They are not brainwashed … From a Republican point of view, we should buy into it and embrace it and not belittle them. You can have a genuine debate about the science of climate change, but when you say that those who believe it are buying a hoax and are wacky people, you are putting at risk your party’s future with younger people.”
Graham’s approach to bringing around the conservative state he represents was to avoid talking about “climate change.” Instead, he framed America’s energy challenge as a need to “clean up carbon pollution,” to “become energy independent,” and to “create more good jobs and new indust
ries for South Carolinians.” He proposed “putting a price on carbon,” starting with a focused carbon tax rather than an economywide cap-and-trade system, so as to spur both consumers and industries to invest in and buy new clean-energy products. He included nuclear energy, and insisted on permitting more offshore drilling for oil and gas to provide more domestic sources as we make the long transition to a new clean-energy economy.
“You will never have energy independence without pricing carbon,” Graham argued. “The technology doesn’t make sense until you price carbon. Nuclear power is a bet on cleaner air. Wind and solar is a bet on cleaner air. You make those bets assuming that cleaning the air will become more profitable than leaving the air dirty, and the only way it will be so is if the government puts some sticks on the table, not just carrots. The future economy of America and the jobs of the future are going to be tied to cleaning up the air, and in the process of cleaning up the air this country becomes energy independent and our national security is greatly enhanced.” Remember, he added, “we are more dependent on foreign oil today than after 9/11. That is political malpractice, and every member of Congress is responsible.”
We have no problem with this more conservative approach. Unfortunately, Graham could not get a single Republican senator to join him when he worked out a draft bill—with senators Joseph Lieberman and John Kerry—that included a complex mechanism for pricing carbon, which was never called a tax but was tantamount to it. As The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza noted in a reconstruction of the failure by the Senate to produce an energy bill (October 11, 2010), Republican senators looking to follow Graham’s lead were bombarded with allegations that they were raising taxes and killing jobs. As a result, each and every one of them backed off, including Graham. A lot of this had to do with intra-Republican politics. Lizza reported, “Graham warned Lieberman and Kerry that they needed to get as far as they could in negotiating the bill ‘before Fox News got wind of the fact that this was a serious process,’ one of the people involved in the negotiations said. ‘He would say: The second [the Fox newscasters] focus on us, it’s gonna be all cap-and-tax all the time, and it’s gonna become just a disaster for me on the airwaves. We have to move this along as quickly as possible.’” Unfortunately, they couldn’t. Fox found out, Graham backed off, and the bill died.
In addition, the vested interests in the oil, coal, and gas industries, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, spread their political donations around to make sure that nothing happened. As Lizza noted, “Newt Gingrich’s group, American Solutions, whose largest donors include coal and electric-utility interests, began targeting Graham with a flurry of online articles about the ‘Kerry-Graham-Lieberman gas tax bill.’”
In the middle of all this, President Obama decided that he would not spend any significant political capital to press for the clean-energy legislation, to set a price on carbon, or to refute aggressively the climate-change deniers. His political advisers told him it would not be good politics heading into the 2012 election. Rather than change the polls, the president chose to read the polls.
So 2010 turned out to be a microcosm of all the forces undermining our ability to get something big, or even something small, done to deal with our energy and climate challenges. The Democrats were cowardly, and the Republicans were crazy. The Democrats understood the world they were living in but did not want to pay the political price—alone—for adapting to it. The Republicans simply denied the reality of this world. Democrats didn’t have the courage of their convictions. Republicans had the wrong convictions. In the end, both parties acted as if a serious energy and climate policy is a luxury that can be put off indefinitely or achieved simply with investments and incentives but without a price signal.
By the end of 2010, the energy debate shifted to the prospect of abundant domestic natural gas, which emits only half as much carbon dioxide as coal. Recently, new exploration and drilling technologies have made vast new gas reserves economically attractive. Because of this, America’s recoverable gas reserves have grown ten- to twentyfold in just the last few years. This sounds great—and it might be—but it could equally portend real trouble if not put in the proper context. If we just opt for one more fix of cheap hydrocarbons, consuming it as fast as we can, this bonanza will simply extend our energy and climate denial, make things far worse, and miss the next great global industry. If we choose to use gas as an intelligent bridge to a clean-energy future, it can make the transition easier. Where possible, we should use gas to shut down our oldest, dirtiest coal power plants as rapidly as we can. But to exploit these new reserves of natural gas, which are embedded in deep formations, special drilling techniques known as “fracking” are required, and these can be environmentally destructive. The natural gas industry and the environmental community need to work together to develop guidelines that determine where drilling for natural gas can safely take place and how to avoid contaminating aquifers.
Hot, Flat, and Crowded; Hungry, Thirsty, and Unstable
We began this chapter by recounting the events of 1979 that fed off one another to create a giant feedback loop that has fueled the energy and climate challenge faced by America and the world ever since. A similarly toxic feedback loop, or vicious cycle, appeared in 2010. Unless we create a virtuous cycle to counter it, it will wreak even greater havoc.
Here is what we mean: The UN Food and Agriculture Organization tracks the global prices of fifty-five food commodities. In December 2010, the FAO Food Price Index hit its highest level since records began being kept in 1990, climbing above the peak reached during the 2008 food crisis. Those rising food prices were one factor, perhaps the last straw, that sparked the political uprising in Tunisia, which quickly spread to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and across the Arab world. Those uprisings then triggered disruptions in oil production and speculations in oil futures, sending global oil prices soaring toward their historic peaks. Higher oil prices, in turn, raised food costs, because of oil’s prominence in fertilizers, food production, and transportation. So the prices for rice, corn, potatoes, and other staples that sustain the world’s poor all spiked. Rice alone is a basic food for three billion of the world’s people. The continually rising food prices heightened discontent in the Arab world (and elsewhere), which kept pressure on oil prices, which kept pressure on food prices, and so on …
This inner loop is being reinforced by another loop of steadily rising world population, plus steadily rising standards of living, plus steadily rising climate change. Egypt alone has grown from twenty-two million people in 1950 to eighty-two million today. That is one reason that FAO experts estimate that global food production will have to increase by some 70 percent by 2050 to keep up with the world’s population growth from 6.8 billion to 9.2 billion. Meanwhile, thanks to the hyper-connecting of the world, more and more people will be living, driving, and eating like Americans, increasing the demand for fossil fuels, which will put even more stress on global natural resources and oil prices. China faces major water shortages already, with industrial demand for water roughly doubling every seven to eight years. Yemen may be the first country in the world actually to run out of water.
Some of the world’s leading investors believe this is the start of a major global shift in resource supply and demand. “Accelerated demand from developing countries, especially China, has caused an unprecedented shift in the price structure of resources: after 100 years or more of price declines, they are now rising, and in the last 8 years have undone, remarkably, the effects of the last 100-year decline,” the noted money manager Jeremy Grantham wrote in his April 2011 report to investors. “Statistically, also, the level of price rises makes it extremely unlikely that the old trend is still in place … From now on, price pressure and shortages of resources will be a permanent feature of our lives. This will increasingly slow down the growth rate of the developed and developing world and put a severe burden on poor countries. We all need to develop serious resource plans, particularly energy policies. There is l
ittle time to waste.”
All these trends are being exacerbated by the fact that the more people there are on the planet, the more urbanized the world becomes. Urbanization increases global warming, which, as we have noted, many scientists predict will set off even more severe storms, droughts, deforestation, and floods of the kind that ruined harvests all over the world in 2010. The more that harvests are disrupted, the higher food prices will rise. The higher food prices rise, the more political uprisings there will be. The more uprisings, the higher fuel prices will rise. Welcome to our own 1979-like feedback loop in 2011. The only way to stop it is for America, and other big industrialized countries, to launch a virtuous cycle to counter this emerging vicious one.
“We need to bring our own cause-and-effect logic” to this dangerous feedback loop gathering momentum today, argues Hal Harvey, the ClimateWorks CEO. He proposes an approach with three parts: performance standards, a price on carbon, and research and innovation. Melded together, they can create a powerful virtuous cycle.
Twenty years’ experience in California demonstrates the gains in efficiency and innovation that can come from steadily rising performance standards. California’s strategy reduced electricity consumption in refrigerators by a full 80 percent. New houses, built with ever higher performance standards, known as building codes, have cut energy use in new homes there by 75 percent compared to precode versions. Together, these policies now save the average California family some $1,000 per year. The state is going further: It has led the nation in raising mileage standards for cars and trucks, and in raising requirements for utilities to provide energy produced from solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear sources. These performance standards are transforming the California energy economy.
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Page 25
