The press followed Bumpers’s advice. Hansen’s testimony led the national news; across the top of its front page, The New York Times’ headline read “Global Warming Has Begun.” The images of Hansen in the Dirksen hearing room were ubiquitous, in halftone and high gloss and pixel. The television broadcasts showed Hansen hunched over his testimony, the shoulders of his beige suit bunched up, reading in his deliberate monotone; print publications used a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington black-and-white portrait shot by a cameraman lying below the witness table, in which Hansen, jaw clenched, teeth gritted, tie tightly knotted, stares down some questioning senator, delivering his grim verdict. For the first time the crisis had a face and, with it, an emotion—a fever of pent-up frustration, outrage, and moral conviction.
But Hansen had no time to dwell on any of this. When he got home to New York, Anniek told him that she had breast cancer. She had found out two weeks earlier but hadn’t wanted to upset him before the hearing. In the following days, while the entire world tried to learn about James Hansen, he tried to learn about Anniek’s illness. He took her for a second opinion. After he absorbed the initial shock and made a truce with the fear—his grandmother had died from the disease, orphaning his mother at the age of twelve—he dedicated himself to Anniek’s treatment with all the rigor he brought to his research. He stayed home from the Goddard Institute, helping around the house and preparing their children for school. He studied mammograms and ultrasounds. As they weighed treatment options and analyzed medical data, Anniek noticed him begin to change. The frustration of the last year began to fall away. It yielded, in those doctors’ offices, to a steady coolness, an obsession for detail, a dogged optimism. He began to look like himself again.
16.
Woodstock for Climate Change
June 1988–April 1989
In the immediate flush of optimism after the Wirth hearing (henceforth known as the Hansen hearing), Rafe Pomerance called his allies on Capitol Hill—the young staffers who advised politicians, organized hearings, wrote legislation. We need a number, he told them, a specific target in order to move the issue, to turn all this publicity into policy. The Montreal Protocol had called for a 50 percent reduction by 1998 in CFC emissions. What was the right target for carbon emissions? It wasn’t enough to exhort the world’s nations to do better. That kind of lofty talk might sound noble, but it didn’t change investments or laws. They needed a hard goal—something ambitious but reasonable. And they needed it soon: just four days after Hansen’s star turn, politicians from forty-six nations and more than three hundred scientists would convene in Toronto at the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, an event The New York Times’ Philip Shabecoff called “Woodstock for climate change.”
Pomerance hastily arranged a meeting with David Harwood, the architect of Wirth’s climate legislation; Roger Dower in the Congressional Budget Office, who at Wirth’s request was calculating the plausibility of a national carbon tax; and Irving Mintzer, a colleague at the World Resources Institute who had a deep knowledge of energy economics. Wirth was scheduled to give the keynote address in Toronto—Harwood would write it—and the senator could propose a number then. But which number?
Pomerance had one in mind: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2000.
Ambitious, said Harwood. In all his work planning climate policy, he had seen no assurance that such a steep drop in emissions was possible. Then again, 2000 was more than a decade off, so it gave them some rope.
What really mattered wasn’t the number itself, said Dower, but that they picked one. He agreed that a hard target was the only way to push the issue forward. Though his job at the Congressional Budget Office required him to come up with precise estimates of speculative, complex policy, there wasn’t time for yet another academic study to arrive at the exact right number. Pomerance’s unscientific suggestion sounded fine to him.
Mintzer pointed out that it was consistent with the academic literature on energy efficiency: most energy systems could be improved by roughly 20 percent if you adopted best practices. Of course, with any emissions target, you had to take into account the fact that the developing world, with its booming population growth, would inevitably ingest much larger quantities of fossil fuels by 2000. But those gains could be offset by a wider propagation of the renewable technologies already at hand—solar, wind, geothermal. It was not a rigorous scientific analysis, Mintzer granted, but 20 percent sounded plausible. We wouldn’t need to solve cold fusion or ask Congress to repeal the law of gravity. We could manage it with the knowledge and technology we already had.
Besides, said Pomerance, 20 by 2000 sounds good.
In Toronto a few days later, Pomerance talked up his idea with everyone he met—environmental ministers, scientists, journalists. Nobody thought it sounded crazy. He took that as an encouraging sign. Other delegates soon proposed the number to him independently, as if they had come up with it themselves. That was an even better sign.
Wirth, in his keynote on June 27, called for the world to reduce emissions by 20 percent by 2000, with an eventual reduction by 50 percent. It was the first specific benchmark to be proposed at a major international meeting. Other speakers likened the ramifications of climate change to a global nuclear war, but it was the emissions target that sold in Washington, London, Berlin, and Moscow. The conference’s final statement, signed by all four hundred scientists and politicians in attendance, repeated the demand with a slight variation: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2005. Just like that, Pomerance’s hunch became global diplomatic policy.
Hansen, emerging from Anniek’s successful cancer surgery, took it upon himself to start a one-man global warming public information campaign. He gave news conferences and was quoted in seemingly every article about the issue; he even appeared on television with homemade props. Like an entrant in an elementary school science fair, he made “loaded dice” out of sections of cardboard, Scotch tape, and colored paper to illustrate the increased likelihood of hotter weather in a warmer climate. Public awareness of the greenhouse effect reached an all-time high of 68 percent. Global warming caused approximately one-third of Americans to worry “a great deal.”
At the end of the sulfurous summer, several months after Gore suspended his candidacy, the climate crisis at last became a major issue in the presidential campaign. When Michael Dukakis proposed tax incentives to encourage domestic oil production and boasted that coal could satisfy the nation’s energy needs for the next three centuries, George H. W. Bush took advantage. “I am an environmentalist,” he declaimed on the shore of Lake Erie, the first stop on a five-state environmental tour that would take him to Boston Harbor, Dukakis’s home turf. “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect,” he said, “are forgetting about the White House effect.” His running mate emphasized the ticket’s commitment to solving global warming at the vice presidential debate. “The greenhouse effect is an important environmental issue,” said Dan Quayle. “We need to get on with it. And in a George Bush administration, you can bet that we will.” A week before the election, barnstorming in Alabama, Bush interrupted a speech on space exploration with a mournful reflection on global warming and the fate of Earth, summoning his inner Aldo Leopold: “I recall the old fisherman’s prayer: ‘The sea is so large, Lord, and my boat is so small…’ We face the prospect of being trapped on a boat we have irreparably damaged, not by the cataclysm of war but by the slow neglect of a vessel we believed to be impervious to our abuse.”
Two weeks after the election, Bush was visited in the White House by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. They presented him with American Agenda, a yearlong, bipartisan report on the challenges facing the country. It recommended making climate change a major national priority and doubling the EPA’s research budget. Americans, the former presidents said, “should no longer see environmental issues simply as a luxury.”
A lawyer for the Senate energy committee told an industry
journal that lawmakers were “frightened” by Bush’s commitment to the issue and predicted that Congress would pass significant legislation once he took office. “A lot of people on the Hill see the greenhouse effect as the issue of the 1990s,” a gas lobbyist told Oil & Gas Journal. The coal industry, which had the most to lose from restrictions on carbon emissions, had already moved beyond denial to acceptance. The National Coal Association acknowledged that the greenhouse effect was no longer “an emerging issue. It is here already, and we’ll be hearing more and more about it.”
By the end of the year, thirty-two climate bills had been introduced in Congress, led by two gigantic omnibuses: the Global Warming Prevention Act, proposed in the House by Claudine Schneider, a Republican from Rhode Island; and Wirth’s National Energy Policy Act of 1988, cosponsored by thirteen Democrats and five Republicans. Both called for the establishment of an “International Global Agreement on the Atmosphere” by 1992; Wirth’s called for a 20 percent reduction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 2005, a reduction of national energy use by at least 2 percent every year until then, and $1.5 billion in funding for worldwide birth control. At a meeting of oil executives shortly after the election, Representative Dick Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming, warned that a gasoline tax would “be very difficult to fend off” after Bush took office.
The other great powers refused to wait that long. The German parliament created a special commission on climate change, which called the Toronto goal inadequate and concluded that action had to be taken immediately, “irrespective of any need for further research”; it recommended a 30 percent reduction of carbon emissions. Sweden’s Parliament announced a national strategy to stabilize emissions at the 1988 level and later imposed a carbon tax. Margaret Thatcher, who had studied chemistry at Oxford, warned in a speech to the Royal Society that global warming could “greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope” and that “the health of the economy and the health of our environment are totally dependent upon each other.”
It was at this moment—when the environmental movement was, in the words of one energy lobbyist, “on a tear”—that the United Nations unanimously endorsed the establishment, by UNEP and the WMO, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to be composed of scientists and policymakers who would conduct scientific assessments and develop a global climate policy.
During the transition period, Bush’s administration invited the IPCC’s Response Strategies Working Group, the body responsible for planning a climate treaty, to hold one of its first sessions at the U.S. State Department. Bush had promised to combat the greenhouse effect with the White House effect. The self-proclaimed environmentalist would soon be seated in the Oval Office. It was time.
17.
Fragmented World
Fall 1988
The oilmen started calling Terry Yosie.
“What is this global warming business all about, Terry?”
“What’s the story with this guy Hansen, Terry?”
“What are we doing about this, Terry?”
Yosie was ready for them. Though he had only recently been hired by the American Petroleum Institute to run its health and environment division, he was on easy terms with the CEOs of most major oil and gas companies, having worked at the EPA for the past seven years. Ozone was his expertise, though he had helped negotiate the joint statement on global warming signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in Moscow. After the Hansen hearing, it had become clear to Yosie that nobody at API knew much about the subject. His boss, executive vice president William O’Keefe, who had worked there since 1979 and had run the health and environment division for the previous five years, had never even heard of it. At least not until James Hansen came along.
In all the wildness and havoc that followed the hearing, API, unprepared to provide comment, had offered the same boilerplate it used for any new environmental concern, whether benzene or ozone or smog: it cited a “divergence of expert opinion” and warned that “premature actions taken to address this issue could be disruptive and a potential waste of society’s resources.” More research was needed. That was Yosie’s assignment—to do the research.
Some of API’s members, he came to learn, had begun, however tentatively, to do their own research. British Petroleum, which had spent $11 billion on rigs, roads, and pipelines that rested on Alaskan permafrost, wanted to figure out what would happen if the frost wasn’t perma: What if icebergs calved and gave oil tankers the Titanic treatment? Mobil, too, had advanced beyond a posture of skepticism. In November 1988, its president, Richard Tucker, speaking at a national conference for the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, warned that action to address the greenhouse effect might require “a dramatic reduction in our dependence on fossil fuels.” And in spring 1988, Royal Dutch Shell had released a rigorous internal briefing report on the greenhouse effect, initiated more than two years earlier, laying out the science, the social and economic effects, and the challenges of achieving an effective solution. The authors concluded that “the energy industry needs to consider how to play its part,” but argued that the main burden would have to be assumed by governments, as “the only effective way to tackle the problem is through international cooperation.”
Shell had questioned the prospects of international cooperation since at least 1982, however, when it hired the futurist Peter Schwartz to run its long-term strategy division. Schwartz had previously worked at the Stanford Research Institute, where, in 1977, he oversaw the grim sixty-page report, commissioned by the Energy Research and Development Administration, on the sociopolitical impacts of global warming. At Shell, Schwartz had developed two divergent models of the future. In “The Next Wave,” climate change prompted deep investments in renewable energy; in “Fragmented World,” the major nations developed differing responses to climate change, leading to geopolitical turmoil and, in aggregate, an increasing reliance on fossil fuels.
Exxon used different terminology, but by the summer of 1988 it had begun to formulate its own strategy of bringing about a fragmented world. After Hansen’s hearing, Duane LeVine, Exxon’s manager of science and strategy development, requested a new corporate position on global warming—not from his scientists, but from a strategist, Joseph Carlson, a public relations officer. LeVine wanted Carlson to answer one question in particular: “What do you think is the direct impact on Exxon’s business?” Carlson’s first draft, written in August without consulting his corporate superiors, accepted the consensus view of the science. But he proposed that Exxon should resist any efforts at “overstatement and sensationalization,” which “could lead to noneconomic development of nonfossil fuel resources.” It would be useful, he argued, to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions regarding the potential enhanced Greenhouse effect.”
Yet Terry Yosie found that most of the industry, particularly the nonscientists, were altogether ignorant of the issue and its potential economic significance. With the encouragement of API’s president, Charles DiBona, Yosie organized a workshop to be hosted in a lecture hall within the institution’s L Street headquarters. Nearly a hundred people attended—men in chalked haberdashery paid to scan the horizon for opportunity and risk; senior lobbyists and lawyers from Shell, Arco, Chevron, and Mobil; and a retinue of senior API executives. Yosie invited guest speakers who he thought could speak credibly about the science and policy ramifications: Brian Flannery, Exxon’s in-house authority on climate modeling, who explained that climate change was real and that fossil fuel combustion was the cause; a political scientist, Aaron Wildavsky, who warned that regulations on energy production could hurt profits; Richard Morgenstern, the director of the EPA’s Office of Policy Analysis, who emphasized that the costs of controlling climate change were still fairly modest and worth pursuing; and Irving Mintzer of the World Resources Institute.
Before the meeting, Mintzer consulted with his colleague Rafe Pomerance to sharpen his argument. Mintzer, like Morgenstern, told the audience at API that immediate,
prudent actions—like investing in efficiency and renewable energy—would be economically beneficial. The economic risks of inaction, on the other hand, were extreme: a 2-degree warming could stagger the global economy in ways not yet imagined. The longer the industry waited to act, the worse it would go for them. The audience took this in stride.
After the presentation DiBona asked Yosie to give a briefing to API’s executive committee, composed of about fifteen CEOs of the world’s largest oil and gas companies. Yosie prepared a speech and a slideshow. There was no doubt that oil and gas combustion was making the world hotter, he explained. Yes, he granted, uncertainties remained, such as the timing of the changes. But the trend, as Exxon’s Flannery had explained, was not in doubt. He showed the world’s great oil barons the Keeling curve; the data quantifying the contribution of fossil fuels to global warming; and a chart of worldwide emissions, separated out by region. He also included a statistic rarely mentioned in accounts of the science. A warming world, he explained, would stimulate greater energy use, mainly due to higher demand for air-conditioning and refrigeration. By 2055, he told the executives, climate change would increase national energy consumption by 4 to 6 percent.
What should be done? What was the direct impact on business? As Yosie saw it, three strategic options lay available to them. The first was a binding global treaty, requiring strong intervention from governments. The second amounted to a shrug: Yosie quoted John Maynard Keynes’s observation that “in the long run we’ll all be dead,” so why worry? The final position, which Yosie endorsed, echoed William Nierenberg’s message five years earlier, after the publication of Changing Climate: proceed with caution, not panic, making sure that regulatory policy was applied gradually, in order to avoid any economic shocks. The best way to do this, argued Yosie, was to make the industry “an active participant in the scientific and policy debate.” It should highlight uncertainties in the science, question the effectiveness of any new regulations, urge international cooperation, and accept only those measures “consistent with broader economic goals,” which is to say, actions that didn’t hurt profits.
Losing Earth Page 10
