Losing Earth

by Nathaniel Rich

  “It is so weak,” said Pomerance, the air seeping out of him, “as to not get us anywhere.” His reticence was gone, replaced by a ripening frustration that threatened the fragile professional decorum that had held to this point.

  Reading the anxiety in the room, Jorling reversed himself and wondered if it might be prudent to avoid proposing any specific policy. “Let’s not load ourselves down with that burden,” he said. “We’ll let others worry about that.”

  Pomerance begged Jorling to reconsider. The commission had asked for hard proposals. But why stop there? Why not propose a new national energy plan? “There is no single action that is going to solve the problem,” said Pomerance. “You can’t keep saying, ‘That isn’t going to do it,’ and ‘This isn’t going to do it,’ because then we end up doing nothing.”

  Scoville pointed out that the United States was responsible for the largest share of carbon emissions. But not for long. “If we’re going to exercise leadership,” he said, “the opportunity is now.” One way to lead, he proposed, would be to classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act and regulate it as such. This was received by the room like a belch. By Scoville’s logic, every sigh or peal of laughter was an act of pollution. Did the science really support such an extreme measure?

  Yes, said Pomerance—the Charney report did exactly that. He was beginning to lose his patience, his civility, his stamina. “Now, if everybody wants to sit around and wait until the world warms up more than it has warmed up since there have been humans around—fine. But I would like to have a shot at avoiding it.”

  Most everybody else seemed content to sit around. The meeting was turning into the same meeting he’d had so often on Capitol Hill. Political appointees confused uncertainty around the margins of the issue (whether warming would be 3 or 4 degrees Celsius in fifty or seventy-five years) for uncertainty about the severity of the problem. As Gordon MacDonald liked to say, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause temperatures to rise; the only question was when. The lag between the emission of a greenhouse gas and the warming it produced could last several decades. It was like adding an extra blanket on a mild night: it took a few minutes before you started to sweat.

  Yet Slade, the director of the Energy Department’s carbon dioxide program, considered the lag a saving grace. If changes did not occur for another decade or more, he said, those in the room couldn’t be blamed for failing to prevent them. So what was the problem?

  Pomerance could take it no longer.

  “You’re the problem,” he said. Because of the lag between cause and effect, humankind would not likely detect hard evidence of warming until it was too late. The lag would doom them. “The U.S. has to do something to gain some credibility.”

  “So it is a moral stand,” replied Slade, as if seizing an advantage.

  “Call it whatever.” Besides, Pomerance added, they didn’t have to ban coal tomorrow. A pair of modest steps could be taken immediately to show the world that the United States was serious: the implementation of a carbon tax and increased investment in renewable energy. Then the U.S. could organize an international summit on climate change. This was his closing plea to the group. The next day, they would have to draft policy proposals.

  But when the group reconvened after breakfast on Halloween morning, they immediately became stuck on a sentence in their prefatory paragraph declaring that climatic changes were “likely to occur.”

  “Will occur,” proposed Laurmann, the Stanford engineer.

  “What about the words highly likely to occur?” asked Scoville.

  “Almost sure,” said David Rose, the nuclear engineer from MIT.

  “Almost surely,” said Laurmann.

  “Perhaps you can use will occur,” said another, “and quantify the changes.”

  “When they start to quantify the changes,” said Laurmann, “I can’t make such a statement.”

  “Changes of an undetermined—”

  “Changes as yet of a little-understood nature?”

  “Highly or extremely likely to occur,” said Pomerance.

  “Almost surely to occur?”

  “No,” said Pomerance.

  “I would like to make one statement,” said Annemarie Crocetti, a public health scholar who sat on the National Commission on Air Quality. She had barely spoken all week. “I have noticed that very often when we as scientists are cautious in our statements, everybody else misses the point, because they don’t understand our qualifications.”

  “As a nonscientist,” said Tom McPherson, the Florida legislator, “I really concur.”

  “In 1807,” said John Perry, “they didn’t have a winter in Switzerland.”

  Some members of the group exchanged looks.

  “There were flowers all winter,” said Perry. “I was just reading a book on it. So it is very difficult to make these unequivocal statements that give the world the impression that a group of scientists has sat down and said, you know, we are all going to fry. I, for one, find myself very uncomfortable with some of the language.”

  “The point,” said Scoville, “is that there should be a real push to get them to start making decisions and to really move.”

  Yet these two dozen experts, who shared the same scientific understanding and had made a commitment to Congress, could not draft a single paragraph. Hours passed in a hell of fruitless negotiation, self-defeating proposals, and impulsive speechifying. Pomerance and Scoville pushed to include a statement calling for the United States to “sharply accelerate international dialogue,” but even that was sunk by objections and caveats.

  “It is very emotional,” said Crocetti, succumbing to her frustration. “What we have asked is to get people from different disciplines to come together and tell us what you agree on and what your problems are. And you have only made vague statements—”

  She was interrupted by Waltz, the economist, who wanted simply to note that climate change would have profound effects. “Now, I don’t want to go on and elaborate on what I mean by that,” he said. “But it is profound.”

  Crocetti waited until he exhausted himself before resuming in a calm voice. “All I am asking you to say is: ‘We got ourselves a bunch of experts and, by God, they all endorse this point of view and think it is very important. They have disagreements about the details of this and that, but they feel that it behooves us to intervene at this point and try to prevent it.’”

  They never got to policy proposals. They never got to the second paragraph. The final statement was signed by only the moderator, who phrased it more weakly than the declaration calling for the workshop in the first place. “The guide I would suggest,” wrote Jorling, “is whether we know enough not to recommend changes in existing policy.”

  But by that time Rafe Pomerance had already left for Washington. He had seen enough. A consensus-based strategy would not work—could not work—without American leadership. And the United States wouldn’t act unless a strong leader persuaded it to do so, someone who could speak with authority about the science, demand action from those in power, and hazard everything in pursuit of justice. Pomerance knew he wasn’t that person; he was an organizer, a strategist, a fixer—which was to say that he was an optimist, a romantic even. His job was to build a movement. And every movement, even one backed by widespread consensus, needed a hero. He just had to find one.

  7.

  A Deluge Most Unnatural

  November 1980–September 1981

  The meeting ended Friday morning. On Tuesday, four days later, Ronald Reagan was elected president. And Rafe Pomerance found himself wondering whether what had seemed to be a beginning had actually been the end.

  In the following months, Reagan floated plans to close the Energy Department, increase coal production on federal land, and deregulate surface coal mining. He appointed James Watt, the president of a legal firm that fought to open public lands to mining and drilling, to run the Interior Department. The president of the National Coal Association
pronounced himself “deliriously happy.” After some debate about whether to terminate the EPA, Reagan relented and did the next best thing, appointing as administrator Anne Gorsuch, an anti-regulation zealot who proceeded to cut the agency’s staff and budget by a quarter. In the midst of this carnage, the Council on Environmental Quality submitted a report to the president warning that fossil fuels could “permanently and disastrously” alter Earth’s atmosphere, leading to “a warming of the Earth, possibly with very serious effects.” It urged the government to give high priority to the greenhouse effect in national energy policy and to establish a maximum level of carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere. Reagan declined to act on his council’s advice. Instead he considered eliminating the council.

  At the Pink Palace, Anthony Scoville had said that the problem was not atmospheric but political. That was only half right, Pomerance thought. For behind every political problem, there lay a publicity problem. And the climate crisis had a publicity nightmare. The Florida meeting had failed to articulate a coherent statement, let alone legislation, and now everything was going backward. Even Pomerance himself couldn’t devote much time to climate change; Friends of the Earth was busier than ever. The campaigns to defeat the nominations of James Watt and Anne Gorsuch were just the beginning; they were joined by desperate efforts to block mining in wilderness areas, uphold the Clean Air Act’s standards for air pollutants, and preserve funding for renewable energy (Reagan “has declared open war on solar energy,” said the director of the nation’s lead solar-energy research agency, after he was asked to resign). After undoing the environmental achievements of Jimmy Carter, Reagan seemed determined to undo those of Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and, if he could get away with it, Theodore Roosevelt.

  The violence of Reagan’s attack alarmed even some members of his own party. Senator Robert Stafford, a Vermont Republican and chairman of the committee that held confirmation hearings on Gorsuch, took the unusual step of lecturing her from the dais about her moral obligation to protect the nation’s air and water. Watt’s plan to open the waters off California for oil drilling was denounced by the state’s Republican senator, and Reagan’s proposal to eliminate the position of science adviser was roundly derided by the committee of scientists and engineers who advised him during his presidential campaign. When Reagan threatened to terminate his Council on Environmental Quality, its acting chairman, Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, wrote to the vice president and the White House chief of staff, begging them to ask the president to reconsider; in a major speech the same week, “A Conservative’s Program for the Environment,” Baldwin argued that it was “time for today’s conservatives explicitly to embrace environmentalism.” It was not only good sense. It was good business. What could be more conservative than an efficient use of resources that allowed for a reduction of federal subsidies?

  The Charney report meanwhile continued to vibrate at the periphery of public consciousness. Its conclusions were confirmed by major studies from the Aspen Institute, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Every month or so there appeared national headlines summoning apocalypse: “Another Warning on ‘Greenhouse Effect,’” “Global Warming Trend ‘Beyond Human Experience,’” “Warming Trend Could ‘Pit Nation Against Nation.’” People magazine published a profile of Gordon MacDonald, in which he was photographed standing on the steps of the Capitol, pointing above his head to the level the water would reach when the polar ice caps melted. “If Gordon MacDonald is wrong, they’ll laugh,” the article read. “Otherwise, they’ll gurgle.”

  But Pomerance knew that to sustain major coverage, you needed major events. Studies were fine; speeches were good; news conferences were better. Congressional hearings, however, were best. The ritual’s theatrical trappings—the legislators holding forth on the dais, their aides decorously passing notes, the witnesses sipping nervously from their water glasses, the audience transfixed in the gallery—offered antagonists, dramatic tension, narrative. You couldn’t hold a congressional hearing without a scandal, however, or at least a scientific breakthrough. And two years after the Charney group met at Woods Hole, it seemed there was no more science to break through.

  It was with a shiver of optimism, then, that Pomerance read on the front page of The New York Times on August 22, 1981, about a forthcoming paper in Science by a team of seven NASA scientists. They had found that, in the past century, the world had already begun to warm. Temperatures hadn’t yet increased beyond the range of historical averages, but the authors predicted that the warming signal would emerge from the noise of routine weather fluctuations much sooner than previously estimated. Most unusual of all, the paper ended with a policy recommendation: in the coming decades, the authors wrote, human civilization should develop alternative sources of energy; fossil fuels should be used only “as necessary.” The lead author was listed as Dr. James Hansen.

  Pomerance called Hansen to ask for a meeting. He explained that he wanted to make sure he understood the paper’s conclusions. More than that, though, he wanted to understand James Hansen.

  At the Goddard Institute, Pomerance entered Hansen’s office, maneuvering through some thirty piles of documents arrayed across the floor like the skyscrapers of a model city. On top of each stack, some as high as his waist, lay a scrap of cardboard on which had been scrawled words like Trace Gases, Ocean, Jupiter, Venus. Behind a desk supporting another paper metropolis, Pomerance found a quiet, composed man with a heavy brow and implacable green eyes. Hansen’s speech was soft, equable, deliberate to the point of halting. He would have no trouble passing for a small-town accountant, an insurance-claims manager, or an actuary. And he did hold all those jobs, only his client was the global atmosphere. Pomerance’s political sensitivities sparked. He liked what he saw.

  Hansen had no political sensitivities—that was clear. But he did have political problems. In the final days of the Carter administration, NASA’s budget was cut and Hansen was informed that the funding for his climate research, about $500,000 a year, would in the future need to come from the Energy Department. The director of its carbon dioxide program, David Slade, assured Hansen in writing that he would be good for it. But now Slade was gone. Reagan had replaced him with Fred Koomanoff, a Bronx native with the brusque manner of a sergeant major and an unconstrained zeal for budget cutting. Koomanoff had already summoned Hansen to Washington to justify his research. Hansen did not feel optimistic.

  As Hansen spoke, Pomerance listened and watched. He understood Hansen’s basic findings well enough: Earth had been warming since 1880, and the warming would reach an “almost unprecedented magnitude” in the next century, leading to the familiar suite of terrors, like the flooding of a tenth of New Jersey and a quarter of Louisiana and Florida. But what excited Pomerance was Hansen’s blunt way of making the complex contingencies of atmospheric science sound simple, even intuitive. Though Hansen was something of a wunderkind—at forty, he was about to be named director of the Goddard Institute—he spoke with the blunt midwestern sincerity that played on Capitol Hill. He presented like a heartland voter, the kind of man interviewed on the evening news about the state of the American dream or photographed in the dying sun against a blurry pastoral landscape in a presidential campaign ad. And unlike most scientists in the field, he was not afraid to follow his research to its policy implications. He was perfect.

  “What you have to say needs to be heard,” said Pomerance. “Are you willing to be a witness?”

  8.

  Heroes and Villains

  March 1982

  Though few people other than Rafe Pomerance seemed to have noticed amid Reagan’s environmental blitzkrieg, another hearing on the greenhouse effect had been held several weeks earlier, on July 31, 1981, by an obscure House subcommittee. It was led by Representative James Scheuer, a New York Democrat who lived at sea level on the Rockaway Peninsula, in a neighborhood no more than four blocks wide
, sandwiched between two beaches, and a canny thirty-three-year-old Democrat from Tennessee named Albert Gore, Jr.

  Gore’s climate awakening had come a dozen years earlier as an undergraduate at Harvard, when he took a class taught by Roger Revelle. Chalking Keeling’s rising zigzag on the blackboard, Revelle explained that humankind was on the brink of radically transforming the global atmosphere and risked bringing about the collapse of civilization. Gore was stunned: If this was true, why wasn’t anyone talking about it? He had no memory of hearing about the issue from his father, a three-term senator from Tennessee who later served as chairman of an Ohio coal company. Once in office, Gore figured that if Revelle gave the same lecture before Congress, his colleagues would be moved to act. Or at least that the hearing would get picked up by one of the three major national news broadcasts.

  Gore’s hearing was part of a larger campaign he had designed with his staff director, Tom Grumbly. After winning his third term in 1980, Gore was granted his first leadership position, albeit a modest one: chairman of an oversight subcommittee within the Committee on Science and Technology—a subcommittee that he had lobbied to create. Most members of Congress considered the science committee a legislative backwater, if they considered it at all; this made Gore’s subcommittee, which had no legislative authority, an afterthought to an afterthought. That, Gore vowed, would change. Environmental and health stories had all the elements of narrative drama: villains, victims, and heroes. In a hearing, you could summon all three, with the chairman serving as narrator, chorus, and moral authority. Gore told Grumbly that he wanted to hold a hearing every week.

  It was like storyboarding episodes of a procedural drama. Grumbly gamely assembled a list of subjects that possessed the necessary dramatic elements: a Massachusetts cancer researcher who faked his results, the dangers of excessive salt in the American diet, the disappearance of an airplane on Long Island. All fit Gore’s template; all had sizzle.