Losing Earth
Page 15
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Nearly every conversation that we have in 2019 about climate change was being held in 1979. That includes not only the predictions about degrees of warming, sea level rise, and geopolitical strife but also the speculations about geo-engineering technology, the appeals to help developing nations overcome starvation and disease without relying, as we did, on massive increases in coal consumption, and the cost-benefit analyses that always seem to favor inaction. Forty years ago, the political scientists, economists, social theorists, and philosophers who studied the slow-moving threat of climate change generally agreed that we could not be counted on to save ourselves. Their theories shared a common principle: that human beings, whether in international bodies, democracies, industries, political parties, or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations. If human beings really were able to take the long view—to consider seriously the course of human history decades or centuries after our deaths—we would be forced to grapple with the transience of all we know and love in the great sweep of time. So we have trained ourselves, whether culturally or evolutionarily, to obsess over the present, fret about the medium term, and cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison. Adaptation to climate change, the philosopher Klaus Meyer-Abich observed in 1980, “seems to be the most rational political option.” It is the option that we have pursued, consciously or not, ever since.
A major difference, four decades later, is that a solution is in hand; many solutions, in fact. They tend to involve some combination of carbon taxes, renewable energy investment, expansion of nuclear energy, reforestation, improved agricultural techniques, and, more speculatively, machines capable of sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. “From a technology and economics standpoint,” Jim Hansen told me, “it is still readily possible to stay under two degrees Celsius.” He has developed his own proposal, which runs a decade, arrests climate change, and saves trillions of dollars. William Nordhaus, upon winning the Nobel Prize in 2018, made the same point: “The problem is political, rather than one of economics or feasibility.” We can trust the technology and the economics. It’s harder to trust human behavior. “From the first time I got involved with the issue until now,” Al Gore told me, “the central problem has always been that the maximum considered politically feasible still falls short of the minimum required to be efficacious. Confronted with that gap, you have two options. One is to curl up into a fetal position and fall into despair. The other is to develop a strategy for expanding the limits of what is politically feasible.” The gap remains, but Gore thinks it is shrinking—he credits “dramatic changes in technological innovation and business philosophy”—and he believes, despite irreparable damage having already been done, that “we now really do have a chance to overtake the problem.” Nordhaus and Hansen are less optimistic. They doubt that we will keep warming below 2 degrees.
When Rafe Pomerance feels despondent, he wears a bracelet that his granddaughter made for him, to remind him why he continues to fight. He has devised his own practical solution to climate change—not a technological solution but a political one. He argues that the critical legislative body for curtailing global emissions is the U.S. Congress. If it insists on major climate policy, he believes, the rest of the world will follow. How, then, to motivate congressional action? It is the problem he has been working on, more or less, since he met Gordon MacDonald in 1979. Pomerance is now a consultant for ReThink Energy Florida, which hopes to alert the state to the threat of rising seas. Republican congressmen in Florida have a healthier fear of climate change than their colleagues—a reasonable position in the state that, by a wide margin, is most imperiled by sea level rise. Pomerance believes that if he can persuade Florida Republicans to demand policy action, they can help turn the rest of their party.
If the prospect of a wholesale political conversion seems delusional, consider that we have solved, or at least endeavored far more seriously to solve, major social crises before, some of them existential in nature. When popular movements have managed to transform public opinion in a brief amount of time, forcing the passage of major legislation, they have done so on the strength of a moral claim that persuades enough voters to see the issue in human, rather than political, terms. We do not hesitate to summon moral arguments in debates about racial injustice, nuclear proliferation, gun violence, immigration, same-sex marriage, or the accelerating rate of mechanization. Yet the public discussion of climate change rarely ventures beyond political, economic, and legal considerations. If we speak about climate as only a political issue, it will suffer the fate of all political issues. If we speak about climate as only an economic issue, it will suffer the fate of all moral crises subjected to cost-benefit analysis. The first requirement is to speak about the problem honestly: as a struggle for survival. This is the antithesis of the denialist approach. Once the stakes are precisely defined, the moral imperative is inescapable.
The cost-benefit analysis is rapidly shifting; the distant perils of climate change are no longer very distant. Many now occur regularly, flagrantly. Each superstorm and superfire is a premonition of more terrifying convulsions to come. But disasters alone will not revolutionize public opinion in the remaining time allotted to us. It is not enough to appeal to narrow self-interest; narrow self-interest, after all, is how we got here. Tens of millions of Americans who have no reason to believe that flames will lick at their patio doors or that floodwaters will surge up their driveways must still be moved to demand a full transformation of our energy system, our economy, ourselves.
The alternative is to wait for the suffering to become unbearable. Should we pursue the status quo for the next dozen years—the amount of time that the IPCC gives us to limit warming to 1.5 degrees—the fears of young people will continue to grow, in pace with the multiplying tragedies of a warming world. At some point, perhaps not very long from now, the fears of the young will overwhelm the fears of the old. Sometime later, the young will amass enough power to act. If we wait that long, there may be time yet to avoid the most apocalyptic scenarios, but little else.
Everything is changing about the natural world and everything must change about the way we conduct our lives. It is easy to complain that the problem is too vast, and each of us is too small. But there is one thing that each of us can do ourselves, in our own homes, at our own pace—something easier than taking out the recycling or turning down the thermostat, and something more valuable. We can call the threats to our future what they are. We can call the villains villains, the heroes heroes, the victims victims, and ourselves complicit. We can realize that all this talk about the fate of Earth has nothing to do with the planet’s tolerance for higher temperatures and everything to do with our species’ tolerance for self-delusion. And we can understand that when we speak about things like fuel-efficiency standards or gasoline taxes or methane flaring, we are speaking about nothing less than all we love and all we are.
A Note on the Sources
This history relied on the generosity of the following people, some of whom sat for more than a dozen hours of interviews, as well as additional phone calls and correspondence that lasted more than two years: Rafe and Lenore Pomerance, James and Anniek Hansen, Jesse Ausubel, William Reilly, John Sununu, Terry Yosie, Gus Speth, Al Gore, Timothy Wirth, David Durenberger, Wallace Broecker, David Harwood, George Woodwell, William Clark, Wendy Torrance, James Bruce, Daniel Becker, Irving Mintzer, D. James Baker, Akio Arakawa, Tom Grumbly, Robert Chen, Taro Takahashi, Thomas Jorling, John Topping, Curtis Moore, Michael Boskin, Edward Strohbehn, Jr., David Hawkins, Ken Caldeira, Michael MacCracken, Jimmie Powell, Betsy Agle, John Perry, Ronald Rudolph, Anthony and Helen Scoville, Peter Schwartz, William O’Keefe, E. Bruce Harrison, John Williams, James Baker III, Andy Lacis, Philip Shabecoff, Michael Glantz, Eugene Bierly, Carl Wunsch, Elbert Friday, Nick Conger, Stacie Paxton Cobos, Jonathan Jarvis, Dan Klotz, Jimmie J. Nelson, Roger Dower, Nicky Sundt, Karl Braithwaite, Da
vid Rind, Richard Morgenstern, Anthony Del Genio, Lonnie Thompson, Allan Ashworth, Keith Mountain, Jon Riedel, Henry Brecher, David Elliott, Lisa East, Martin Hoerling, Robert Krimmel, Michael McPhaden, Tad Pfeffer, Daniel Fagre, Shad O’Neel, Richard Meserve, Eugene Skolnikoff, Lawrence Linden, Alan Miller, Benjamin Cooley, William Sprigg, Sylvia Laurmann, and Kathy Schwendenman; Ann Finkbeiner, author of The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite; James Rodger Fleming, author of Historical Perspectives on Climate Change; Janice Goldblum at the National Academy of Sciences; Justin Mankin, professor of geography at Dartmouth College; Julia Olson of Our Children’s Trust; Laura Kissel at Ohio State’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center; Kevin Krajick at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; and Amanda Kistler at the Center for International Environmental Law. Additional support was provided by the staffs of the National Archives and Records Administration, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, the Geisel Library Special Collections at UC San Diego, UCLA Library Special Collections, the W. R. Poage Legislative Library at Baylor University, and the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Media Communication Division.
I drew from the anthropologist Myanna Lahsen’s outstanding research on the history of climate denialism, as well as her use of the term Mirror Worlds to describe general circulation models (following Paul N. Edwards and, in a slightly different context, David Gelernter); the investigative and research work of Inside Climate News, the Los Angeles Times, Climate Files, the Center for International Environmental Law, and Benjamin Franta; and the impressive collection of oral history interviews conducted by the American Institute of Physics. The following books deeply informed my discussion of industry’s involvement in climate politics: Censoring Science by Mark Bowen; The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer R. Weart; Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway; The Heat Is On by Ross Gelbspan; Climate Cover-Up by James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore; and Stephen Schneider’s Science as a Contact Sport.
Acknowledgments
This work would not have been possible without the generous support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and its director, Jon Sawyer.
I am grateful for the guidance, wisdom, and unstinting encouragement of a quadrumvirate of brilliant editors: Sean McDonald at MCD, and, at The New York Times Magazine, which published an earlier version of this history, Claire Gutierrez, Bill Wasik, and Jake Silverstein.
Rigorous, patient fact-checking, copyediting, and proofreading was conducted by Nandi Rodrigo, Steven Stern, Lia Miller, Bill Vourvoulias, Riley Blanton, David Ferguson, Christian Smith, Susan Gonzalez, Stephanie Butzer, Maureen Klier, Rebecca Caine, Judy Kiviat, and Janet Renard. Any remaining errors are mine.
I owe a tremendous debt to the counsel and support of Elyse Cheney, Howie Sanders, Alex Jacobs, Brooke Ehrlich, Claire Gillespie, Tara Timinsky, Daniel Vazquez, and Isabel Mendia.
Everything else I owe to Meredith Angelson.
ALSO BY NATHANIEL RICH
Fiction
King Zeno
Odds Against Tomorrow
The Mayor’s Tongue
Nonfiction
San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nathaniel Rich is the author of the novels King Zeno, Odds Against Tomorrow, and The Mayor’s Tongue. He is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books. He lives in New Orleans. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: The Reckoning
PART I: SHOUTS IN THE STREET: 1979–1982
1. The Whole Banana: Spring 1979
2. Mirror Worlds: Spring 1979
3. Between Clambake and Chaos: July 1979
4. Enter Cassandra, Raving: 1979–1980
5. A Very Aggressive Defensive Program: 1979–1980
6. Tiger on the Road: October 1980
7. A Deluge Most Unnatural: November 1980–September 1981
8. Heroes and Villains: March 1982
9. The Direction of an Impending Catastrophe: 1982
PART II: BAD SCIENCE FICTION: 1983–1988
10. Caution Not Panic: 1983–1984
11. The World of Action: 1985
12. The Ozone in October: Fall 1985–Summer 1986
13. Atmospheric Scientist, New York, N.Y.: Fall 1987–Spring 1988
PART III: YOU WILL SEE THINGS THAT YOU SHALL BELIEVE: 1988–1989
14. Nothing but Bonfires: Summer 1988
15. Signal Weather: June 1988
16. Woodstock for Climate Change: June 1988–April 1989
17. Fragmented World: Fall 1988
18. The Great Includer and the Old Engineer: Spring 1989
19. Natural Processes: May 1989
20. The White House Effect: Spring–Fall 1989
21. Skunks at the Garden Party: November 1989
Afterword: Glass-Bottomed Boats
A Note on the Sources
Acknowledgments
Also by Nathaniel Rich
A Note About the Author
Copyright
MCD
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2019 by Nathaniel Rich
All rights reserved
First edition, 2019
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material: Lyrics from “The Other Side,” used by permission of the song’s composer, William Dorsey. “Cassandra,” copyright © 1925, 1929, and renewed 1953, 1957 by Robinson Jeffers; from The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers by Robinson Jeffers. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Frontispiece photograph of Gordon MacDonald from People magazine, October 8, 1979. Used under license. Robert Sherbow / Time Inc. / Getty Images. Photograph of Rafe Pomerance licensed from AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite. Photograph of James Hansen courtesy of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Photograph of Rafe Pomerance and Daniel Becker at Noordwijk in 1989 used by permission of Daniel Becker.
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