Losing Earth

by Nathaniel Rich

  The oilmen agreed. They set aside money for policy analysis—about $100,000, a fraction of the environmental division’s approximately $30 million budget. API, by comparison, spent millions of dollars a year to study the health effects of benzene. But even a few thousand dollars would help. It was enough to get a press campaign going. It was enough to show the world that the industry cared.

  At the end of 1988, API’s president began to audition its policy arguments in the trades. At a briefing in December, described as a year-end “pep talk” that reviewed the anticipated energy policies of the Bush administration, DiBona raised the specter of global warming legislation. “Many people are already using the ‘greenhouse’ fever to push agendas built around extreme environmental and conservation ideas,” he said. “Unless cooler, less biased heads prevail, the nation could scare itself into a costly, nearly impossible set of environmental goals, with tremendous burdens on U.S. industry and society.” DiBona acknowledged the scientific consensus that carbon dioxide was rising and would warm the planet. But scientists couldn’t say with certainty how quickly the warming would occur. It was important, he emphasized, that whatever happened next, the industry had to stand together. The industry journalists dutifully marked down his words.

  18.

  The Great Includer and the Old Engineer

  Spring 1989

  The IPCC’s Response Strategies Working Group convened at the State Department ten days after Bush’s inauguration to begin the process of negotiating a global treaty. James Baker III chose the occasion to make his first speech as secretary of state. He had received a memo from Frederick M. Bernthal, a former nuclear regulatory commissioner and chemistry professor who was an assistant secretary of state for international environmental affairs and had been named the chairman of the IPCC working group. In frank, brittle prose, Bernthal argued that it was prudent to begin a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions; the costs of inaction were simply too high. Baker adopted some of Bernthal’s language in his speech. “We can probably not afford to wait until all of the uncertainties about global climate change have been resolved before we act,” said Baker. “Time will not make the problem go away.”

  After the speech, Baker received a visit from John Sununu, Bush’s chief of staff.

  “Leave the science to the scientists,” Sununu told Baker. “Stay clear of this greenhouse effect nonsense. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Baker, who had served as Reagan’s chief of staff and Treasury secretary, didn’t speak about the subject again. He later told the White House that he had recused himself from consulting on energy policy, on account of his previous career as a Houston oil and gas lawyer.

  Bush had chosen Sununu for his political instincts—he was credited with delivering the New Hampshire primary after Bush had come in third in Iowa and securing Bush’s nomination. But despite his reputation as a political wolf, and his three terms as New Hampshire governor, Sununu still thought of himself as an “old engineer,” as he was fond of putting it, having earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MIT decades earlier. He took great pleasure in defying others’ lazy characterizations of himself; he was an enthusiastic contrarian and a charming bully. His father was a Lebanese exporter from Boston, his mother a Salvadoran of Greek ancestry, and he was born in Havana. In New Hampshire he had come, in the epithets of national political columnists, to embody Yankee conservatism: pragmatic, business-friendly, technocratic, “no-nonsense.” He had fought angrily against local environmentalists to open a nuclear power plant, but he had also signed the nation’s first acid-rain legislation and lobbied Reagan in person for a 50 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide pollution, the target sought by the Audubon Society. He increased spending on mental health care and public land preservation. Still he was considered more conservative than Reagan, a budget hawk who had turned a $44 million state deficit into a surplus without raising taxes. Sununu openly insulted Republican politicians and the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce when they drifted, however subtly, from his anti-tax doctrinairism. Once in the White House, however, he would help negotiate a tax increase and secure the Supreme Court nomination of David Souter.

  As an old engineer, Sununu lacked the reflexive deference that so many of his political generation reserved for the vaunted class of elite government scientists. Though he had served as an adviser at MIT’s graduate program in technology and public policy, he harbored skepticism toward scientists who mingled the two professionally. During his years in government he had nursed this skepticism into a full-fledged theory of twentieth-century geopolitics. Since World War II, he believed, conspiratorial forces had used the imprimatur of scientific knowledge to advance a socialistic, “anti-growth” doctrine. He reserved particular disdain for Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which prophesied that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death if the world failed to curb population growth; the Club of Rome, an organization of European scientists, heads of state, and economists, which warned that the world would run out of natural resources; and, as recently as the mid-seventies, the hypothesis advanced by some of the nation’s leading authorities on global climate—among them Carl Sagan, Stephen Schneider, and Ichtiaque Rasool—that a new ice age was dawning, thanks to the proliferation of synthetic aerosols. All were theories of questionable scientific merit, portending vast, authoritarian remedies to halt economic progress, and all had been debunked.

  Sununu had suspected that the greenhouse effect belonged to this nefarious cabal since 1975, when Margaret Mead spoke out on the subject. “Never before have the governing bodies of the world been faced with decisions so far-reaching,” she wrote. “It is inevitable that there will be a clash between those concerned with immediate problems and those who concern themselves with long-term consequences.” When Mead talked about “far-reaching” decisions and “long-term consequences,” Sununu heard the marching of jackboots.

  On April 14, 1989, a bipartisan group of twenty-four senators, headed by majority leader George Mitchell, requested that Bush cut carbon emissions in the United States even before the IPCC’s working group made its recommendation. “We cannot afford the long lead times associated with a comprehensive global agreement,” the senators wrote. Sununu learned from Richard Darman, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, a close ally, that Al Gore was going to call a hearing to shame Bush into taking immediate action. James Hansen would again serve as lead witness. Darman had the testimony on his desk and described it. Sununu was appalled: Hansen’s warnings seemed extreme to him, especially since they were based on scientific arguments that Sununu considered, as he put it, “technical garbage.”

  While Sununu and Darman reviewed Hansen’s statements, the recently sworn-in EPA administrator, William K. Reilly, brought a new proposal to the White House. Reilly—tall, patrician, direct and pragmatic of manner, crisply attired, bassoon-voiced, a former army captain and intelligence officer with degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Columbia—was a professional environmentalist, having served as a staffer on Nixon’s Council on Environmental Quality and later as president of the Conservation Foundation and the World Wildlife Federation. For his dogged pursuit of political consensus, he had been nicknamed “the Great Includer”; his nomination to the EPA was praised by the National Coal Association and the National Resources Defense Council, the Chemical Manufacturers Organization and the Sierra Club. At his swearing-in, Bush boasted that the selection of Reilly should make it “plain to everyone in this room and around the country that among my first items on my personal agenda is the protection of America’s environment.” One of the first items on Reilly’s own agenda was global warming. The next assembly of the IPCC’s working group was scheduled to take place in Geneva the following month, in May. It was the perfect occasion, Reilly argued in a meeting at the White House, to prove that the administration was serious about the greenhouse effect. Bush should demand a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions.

  Sununu disagr
eed. It would be foolish, he said, to let the nation stumble into a binding agreement on questionable scientific merits, especially one that would compel some unknown quantity of economic pain. They went back and forth. Reilly didn’t want to cede leadership on the issue to the European powers; just a few months later, after all, Reilly would travel to the Netherlands to attend the first high-level diplomatic meeting on climate change. Statements of caution would make the “environmental president” look like a hypocrite and undermine the United States’ leverage in a negotiation. But Sununu wouldn’t budge. He ordered the U.S. delegates not to make any commitment in Geneva. Soon after, someone leaked the exchange to the press.

  Their dispute was reported by The Washington Post and the AP ahead of the Geneva meeting, characterizing Sununu as single-handedly thwarting the will of various “top Bush administration officials,” led by a “frustrated” Reilly. Sununu, furious, was certain that Reilly was the source. Spilling to the press, especially about internal disputes, was intolerable. The articles made the administration look as if it didn’t know what it was doing. It drove Sununu crazy.

  Jim Baker’s deputy pulled Reilly aside. He said he had a message from Baker. “In the long run,” the deputy warned Reilly, “you never beat the White House.” Sununu, Baker predicted, wouldn’t forget this.

  19.

  Natural Processes

  May 1989

  In the first week of May, when Hansen received his proposed congressional testimony back from the White House, it was disfigured by deletions and, more incredible, substantial additions. Gore had called the hearing to increase pressure on Bush, but Hansen had agreed to testify for a different reason: he worried that one of the major points he had tried to make at the 1988 hearing had been misunderstood. His research had found that global warming would not only cause more heat waves and droughts like those of the previous summer; it would also lead to more extreme rain events. This was a crucial disclaimer—he didn’t want the public to assume, the next time there was a mild summer, that global warming wasn’t real.

  But the revised text was a mess. For a couple of days, Hansen played along, accepting the more innocuous edits, though he refused to accept some of the howlers proposed by the Office of Management and Budget. With the hearing only two days away, he gave up. He told NASA’s congressional liaison to stop fighting. This time, he wouldn’t go through the charade of testifying as “Atmospheric Scientist, New York, N.Y.” He told the liaison to let the White House have its way.

  But Hansen would have his way too. As soon as he hung up, he drafted a letter to Gore. He explained that OMB wanted him to demote his own scientific findings to “estimates” from models that were unreliable and “evolving.” His anonymous censor wanted him to say that the causes of global warming were “scientifically unknown” and might be attributable to “natural processes,” caveats that would not only render his testimony meaningless but make him sound like a moron. The most bizarre addition, however, was a statement of a different kind. He was asked to demand that Congress consider only climate legislation that would immediately benefit the economy, “independent of concerns about an increasing greenhouse effect”—a sentence no scientist would ever utter, unless perhaps he was employed by the American Petroleum Institute. Hansen faxed his letter to Gore and left the office.

  Upon arriving home, he learned from Anniek that Gore had called. When Hansen called back, Gore told him that he planned to tell a couple of reporters what had happened. Hansen said that was fine with him.

  Philip Shabecoff of The New York Times called the next morning. “I should be allowed to say what is my scientific position,” Hansen told him. “I can understand changing policy, but not science.”

  On Monday, May 8, the morning of the hearing, Hansen left early for his flight to Washington and did not see the newspaper until he arrived at Dirksen. Gore showed it to him. The front-page headline read, “Scientist Says Budget Office Altered His Testimony.” Gore prepared him to brace for another public bonfire. They agreed that Hansen would give his testimony as planned, after which Gore would ask about the rewritten passages.

  Gore stopped at the door. “We better go separately,” he said. “Otherwise they’ll be able to get both of us with one hand grenade.”

  The official title of the hearing was “Climate Surprises,” but the only surprise the press cared about was the White House’s interference with Hansen’s testimony. In the overstuffed hearing room, the cameras fixed on the reluctant celebrity scientist. Hansen held his statement in one hand and a single Christmas-tree bulb in the other—a prop to help explain, however shakily, that the warming already created by fossil fuel combustion was equivalent to placing a Christmas light over every square meter of Earth’s surface. After he read his sanitized testimony, Gore pounced. He was puzzled by inconsistencies in Hansen’s presentation, he said, in a tone thick with mock confusion. “Why do you directly contradict yourself?”

  Hansen explained that he had not written those contradictory statements. He explained that he certainly did not agree, for instance, with the claim that his scientific findings were not reliable. He did not quarrel with the White House’s practice of reviewing policy statements by government employees. But, he added, in the same flat tone he used to explain the phenomenon of La Niña, “my only objection is being forced to alter the science.”

  Gore was beside himself. “The Bush administration is acting as if it is scared of the truth,” he said. “If they forced you to change a scientific conclusion, it is a form of science fraud.” He worked himself into a righteous fervor. “You know, in the Soviet Union they used to have a tradition of ordering scientists to change their studies to conform with the ideology then acceptable to the state. And scientists in the rest of the world found that laughable as well as tragic.”

  Another government scientist testifying at the hearing, Jerry Mahlman from NOAA, acknowledged that the White House had tried to change his conclusions too. Mahlman had managed to deflect the worst of it, however—“objectionable and also unscientific” recommendations, he said, that would have been “severely embarrassing to me in the face of my scientific colleagues.”

  “The time has come,” said Senator Timothy Wirth, for “greater confrontation” with the White House, “to push them and maybe embarrass them into action if, in fact, they cannot be led to action by a more reasonable approach.”

  Gore called it “an outrage of the first order of magnitude.” The 1988 hearing had created a hero out of Jim Hansen. Now Gore had a real villain, one far more treacherous than Fred Koomanoff—a nameless censor in the White House, hiding behind OMB letterhead.

  After recess, the stroboscopic lights followed Hansen and Gore into the marbled hallway. Hansen insisted that he wanted to focus on the science. Gore was happy to focus on the politics. “I think they’re scared of the truth,” he said. “They’re scared that Hansen and the other scientists are right and that some dramatic policy changes are going to be needed, and they don’t want to face up to it.”

  At the White House press briefing later that morning, Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater conceded that Hansen’s statement had been altered. He blamed an official “five levels down from the top” and promised that there would be no retaliation against Hansen, who, he added, was “an outstanding and distinguished scientist” and was “doing a great job.”

  The episode did more to publicize the need for climate policy than any testimony Hansen could have delivered. It was “an outrageous assault” (Los Angeles Times) that marked the beginning of “a cold war on global warming” (Chicago Tribune), sending “the signal that Washington wants to go slow on addressing the greenhouse problem” (The New York Times). An administration that valued political posture above political policy was caught, once again, in a defensive crouch.

  The day after the hearing, Gore received an unannounced visit from Richard Darman. He came alone, without aides. He said he wanted to apologize to Gore in person. He was sorry and he wanted Gor
e to know it; OMB would not try to censor anyone again. Gore, stunned, thanked Darman. It was wildly out of character: Dick Darman was notoriously conniving, arrogant; even fellow Republicans complained to reporters that he was “abrasive.” He graduated Harvard a year before Gore entered, served as James Baker’s deputy at the Treasury Department, and had been one of Reagan’s master strategists. He was an insider’s insider, a professional cynic, a hardened member of Capitol Hill’s managerial elite. Yet Gore suspected his apology was sincere. The effusiveness, the mortified tone, and the fact that he had come unaccompanied, as if in secret, left Gore with the impression that the idea to censor Hansen didn’t come from someone five levels down from the top, or even from Darman. It had come from someone above Darman.

  20.

  The White House Effect

  Spring–Fall 1989

  Dick Darman went to see Sununu. He didn’t like being accused of censoring scientists. They needed to issue some kind of response. Sununu called Reilly to ask if he had any ideas. We could begin, said Reilly, by recommitting to a global climate treaty, as he had first suggested. The United States was the only Western nation on record as opposing negotiations.

  On the evening of Thursday, May 11, three days after the disastrous hearing, and two days after it was reported that Margaret Thatcher’s government had called on world leaders to organize a global warming convention as soon as possible, Sununu sent a telegram to U.S. negotiators in Geneva, where the IPCC meeting was already under way. The telegram reversed his previous directive to avoid making any commitments. Instead, he said, the Americans should work “to develop full international consensus on necessary steps to prepare for a formal treaty-negotiating process. The scope and importance of this issue are so great that it is essential for the U.S. to exercise leadership.” He further proposed an international workshop on global warming, to be hosted by the White House, that would aim to improve the accuracy of the science and calculate the economic costs of emissions reductions. Sununu signed the telegram himself. It wasn’t enough for Al Gore: “Once again, the president has been dragged slowly and reluctantly toward the correct position. Although this is progress, it is still not nearly good enough.” Nor did it satisfy Rafe Pomerance, who told reporters that the belated effort to save face was a “waffle” that fell short of real action. But the general public response was one of praise, and relief.