by Obama Barack
Still, I had to believe that having a successful precedent gave us a real shot at getting a deal done. Carol, Phil, and the rest of the White House legislative staff spent much of spring 2009 shuttling back and forth between chambers, prodding the action along, smoothing over problems, and providing the main players and their staffs with whatever technical support or policy guidance they needed. All this was happening while we were still trying to mend the economy, pull the healthcare bill into shape, put an immigration package together, get judicial nominees confirmed, and move a dozen other smaller initiatives through Congress—a testament to how hard the team drove itself. It also lent Rahm’s office—sparsely decorated, the big conference table at its center usually littered with coffee cups, cans of Diet Coke, and the occasional half-eaten snack—the overcaffeinated atmosphere of an air traffic control center.
Then, on a muggy day in late June, our labors started to pay off. The White House Social Office had arranged for a staff picnic on the South Lawn, and I had just begun circulating through the crowd, holding babies and posing for pictures with the proud parents of staff members, when Rahm came bounding across the grass, a sheet of paper rolled up in his hand.
“The House just passed a climate bill, Mr. President,” he said.
“That’s great!” I said, giving him a high five. “How close was the vote?”
Rahm showed me his tally: 219–212. “We actually got eight moderate Republicans. We lost a couple of Dems we were counting on, but I’ll deal with them. In the meantime, you should call Nancy, Waxman, and Markey to thank them. They had to work the members pretty hard.”
Rahm lived for days like this, when we scored a clear win. But as we walked back to the Oval, stopping to greet others along the way, I noticed that my usually irrepressible chief of staff seemed a little subdued. Rahm went on to explain what was nagging at him: So far, the Senate had failed to even release its version of a climate bill, much less start moving it through the relevant committees. McConnell, meanwhile, was displaying a singular talent for grinding Senate votes to a halt. Given the already slow process, the window for us getting a climate bill done before Congress adjourned in December was rapidly closing. And after that, we’d likely have even more trouble making it to the finish line, since Democrats in both the House and the Senate would be reluctant to vote on yet another big, controversial bill just as they started campaigning for the midterms.
“Gotta have faith, brother,” I said, clapping him on the back.
Rahm nodded, but his eyes, even darker than usual, betrayed doubt.
“I just don’t know if we’ve got enough runway to land all these planes,” he said.
The implication being that one or more might crash.
* * *
—
THE SKITTISH MOOD in Congress was not the only reason I hoped to have cap-and-trade legislation in hand by December: There was a U.N. global summit on climate change due to happen in Copenhagen that same month. After eight years of the United States absenting itself from international climate negotiations under George W. Bush, expectations abroad were soaring. And I could hardly urge other governments to act aggressively on climate change if the United States didn’t lead by example. I knew that having a domestic bill would improve our bargaining position with other nations and help spur the kind of collective action needed to protect the planet. Greenhouse gases, after all, don’t respect borders. A law reducing emissions in one country might make its citizens feel morally superior, but if other nations didn’t follow suit, temperatures would just keep rising. So as Rahm and my legislative team were busy in the halls of Congress, my foreign policy team and I looked for a way to restore America’s stature as a leader in international climate efforts.
Our leadership on this front had once been all but presumed. In 1992, when the world convened in Rio de Janeiro for what became known as the “Earth Summit,” President George H. W. Bush joined representatives from 153 other nations in signing the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change—the first global agreement to try to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations before they reached catastrophic levels. The Clinton administration soon took up the baton, working with other nations to translate the broad goals announced at Rio into a binding treaty. The final result, called the Kyoto Protocol, laid out detailed plans for coordinated international action, including specific greenhouse gas reduction targets, a global carbon-trading system similar to cap-and-trade, and financing mechanisms to help poor countries adopt clean energy and preserve carbon-neutralizing forests like the Amazon.
Environmentalists hailed Kyoto as a turning point in the fight against global warming. Around the world, participating countries got their governments to ratify the treaty. But in the United States, where treaty ratification requires an affirmative vote from two-thirds of the Senate, Kyoto hit a brick wall. It was 1997, Republicans controlled the Senate, and few considered climate change to be a real problem. Indeed, the then chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, archconservative Jesse Helms, proudly despised environmentalists, the U.N., and multilateral treaties in equal measure. Powerful Democrats like West Virginia senator Robert Byrd were also quick to oppose any measures that might hurt fossil fuel industries vital to their state.
Seeing the writing on the wall, President Clinton decided not to send Kyoto to the Senate for a vote, preferring delay to defeat. Though Clinton’s political fortunes would recover after he’d survived impeachment, Kyoto remained mothballed for the remainder of his presidency. Any glimmer of hope for the treaty’s eventual ratification was snuffed out entirely once George W. Bush beat Al Gore in the 2000 election. Which is how it came to pass that in 2009, a year after the Kyoto Protocol finally went into full effect, the United States was one of only five nations not party to the agreement. The other four, in no particular order: Andorra and Vatican City (both of which were so tiny, with a combined population of about eighty thousand, that they were granted “observer” status rather than asked to join); Taiwan (which would have been happy to participate but couldn’t because its status as an independent nation was still contested by the Chinese); and Afghanistan (which had the reasonable excuse of having been shattered by thirty years of occupation and a bloody civil war).
“You know things have hit a low point when our closest allies think we’re worse on an issue than North Korea,” Ben said, shaking his head.
Reviewing this history, I sometimes imagined a parallel universe in which the United States, without rival immediately following the end of the Cold War, had put its immense power and authority behind the climate change fight. I imagined the transformation of the world’s energy grid and the reduction in greenhouse gases that might have been achieved; the geopolitical benefits that would have flowed from weakening the grip of petrodollars and the autocracies supported by those dollars; the culture of sustainability that could have taken root in developed and developing countries alike. But as I huddled with my team to chart a strategy for this universe, I had to acknowledge a glaring truth: Even with the Democrats now in charge of the Senate, there was still no way for me to secure sixty-seven votes to ratify the existing Kyoto framework.
We were having enough trouble getting the Senate to come up with a workable domestic climate bill. Barbara Boxer and Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry had spent months drafting potential legislation, but they’d been unable to find a Republican colleague willing to cosponsor it, signaling that the bill was unlikely to pass and that a new, more centrist approach might be in order.
Having lost John McCain as a Republican ally, our hopes shifted to one of his closest friends in the Senate, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Short in stature, with a puggish face and a gentle southern drawl that in an instant could flip from warm to menacing, Graham was known primarily as an ardent national security hawk—a member, along with McCain and Lieberman, of the so-called Three Amigos, who’d served as the biggest boosters of the Iraq War
. Graham was also smart, charming, sarcastic, unscrupulous, media savvy, and—thanks partly to his genuine adoration of McCain—occasionally willing to stray from conservative orthodoxy, most notably in his support for immigration reform. Having been reelected to another six-year term, Graham was in a position to take some risks, and although he’d never shown much interest in climate change in the past, he seemed intrigued by the possibility of filling McCain’s shoes and brokering a meaningful bipartisan deal. Early in October, he offered to help deliver the handful of Republicans needed to get climate legislation through the Senate—but only if Lieberman helped steer the process and Kerry could convince environmentalists to offer up concessions on subsidies for the nuclear power industry and the opening up of additional U.S. coastlines to offshore oil drilling.
I wasn’t wild about having to depend on Graham. I knew him from my time in the Senate as someone who liked to play the role of the sophisticated, self-aware conservative, disarming Democrats and reporters with blunt assessments of his party’s blind spots, extolling the need for politicians to break out of their ideological straitjackets. More often than not, though, when it came time to actually cast a vote or take a position that might cost him politically, Graham seemed to find a reason to wriggle out of it. (“You know how in the spy thriller or the heist movie, you’re introduced to the crew at the beginning?” I told Rahm. “Lindsey’s the guy who double-crosses everyone to save his own skin.”) Realistically, though, our options were limited (“Unless Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt are walking through that door, buddy,” Rahm replied, “he’s all we got”); and mindful that any close association with the White House might spook him, we decided to give Graham and his fellow cosponsors a wide berth as they crafted their version of the bill, figuring we could fix any troublesome provisions later in the process.
Meanwhile, we prepared for what lay ahead in Copenhagen. With the Kyoto Protocol set to expire in 2012, U.N.-sponsored negotiations for a follow-up treaty had been under way for over a year already, with the goal of finalizing an agreement in time for the December summit. We weren’t, however, inclined to sign a new treaty modeled too closely on the original. My advisors and I had concerns about Kyoto’s policy design—in particular, its use of a concept called “common but differentiated responsibilities,” which placed the burden of cutting greenhouse gas emissions almost exclusively on advanced, energy-intensive economies like those of the United States, the European Union, and Japan. As a matter of fairness, asking rich countries to do more about climate change than poor countries made complete sense: Not only was the existing buildup of greenhouse gases largely the result of a hundred years of Western industrialization, but rich countries also had a much higher per capita carbon footprint than other places. And there were limits to how much you could expect poor countries like Mali, Haiti, or Cambodia—places where lots of people still lacked even basic electricity—to cut their already negligible emissions (and possibly slow their short-term growth). After all, Americans or Europeans could achieve far greater effects simply by adjusting their thermostats up or down a few degrees.
The trouble was, the Kyoto Protocol had interpreted “differentiated responsibilities” to mean that emerging powers like China, India, and Brazil had no binding obligations to curb their emissions. This might have made sense when the protocol was drawn up, twelve years earlier, before globalization had fully transformed the world economy. But in the middle of a brutal recession, with Americans already seething over the steady outsourcing of U.S. jobs, a treaty that placed environmental constraints on domestic factories without asking for parallel action from those operating in Shanghai or Bangalore just wasn’t going to fly. As it was, China had surpassed the United States in annual carbon dioxide emissions in 2005, with India’s numbers also on the rise. And while it remained true that the average Chinese or Indian citizen consumed a fraction of the energy used by the average American, experts projected a doubling of those countries’ carbon footprints in the coming decades, as more and more of their two billion–plus people aspired to the same modern conveniences that folks in rich countries enjoyed. If that happened, then the planet was going to be underwater regardless of what anybody else did—an argument that Republicans (at least those who didn’t deny climate change altogether) liked to use as an excuse for having the United States do nothing at all.
We needed a fresh approach. With critical guidance from Hillary Clinton and the State Department’s special envoy for climate change, Todd Stern, my team came up with a proposal for a scaled-back interim agreement, anchored around three shared commitments. First, the agreement would require every nation—including emerging powers like China and India—to put forward a self-determined plan for greenhouse gas reduction. Each country’s plan would differ based on its wealth, energy profile, and stage of development and would be revised at regular intervals as that country’s economic and technological capacities increased. Second, while these national plans wouldn’t be enforceable under international law the way treaty obligations were, each country would agree to measures allowing the other parties to independently verify that it was following through on its pledged reductions. Third, wealthy countries would provide poor countries with billions of dollars in aid for climate mitigation and adaptation, so long as those poor countries met their (far more modest) commitments.
Designed right, this new approach would force China and other emerging powers to start putting skin in the game, while also retaining the Kyoto concept of “common but differentiated responsibilities.” By establishing a credible system to validate other countries’ efforts to reduce emissions, we’d also strengthen our case with Congress for the need to pass our own domestic climate change legislation—and, we hoped, lay the groundwork for a more robust treaty in the near future. But Todd, an intense, detail-oriented lawyer who’d served as the Clinton administration’s senior negotiator at Kyoto, warned that our proposal would be a tough sell internationally. The E.U. countries, all of which had ratified Kyoto and taken steps to reduce emissions, were anxious to come up with a pact that included legally binding reduction commitments from the United States and China. China, India, and South Africa, on the other hand, liked the status quo just fine and were fiercely resisting any changes to Kyoto. Activists and environmental groups from around the globe were scheduled to attend the summit. Many of them saw Copenhagen as a make-or-break moment and would consider anything short of a binding treaty with tough new limits as a failure.
More specifically, my failure.
“It’s not fair,” Carol said, “but they think that if you’re serious about climate change, you should be able to get Congress and other countries to do whatever’s necessary.”
I couldn’t blame environmentalists for setting a high bar. The science demanded it. But I also knew it was pointless to make promises I could not yet keep. I’d need more time and a better economy before I could persuade the American public to support an ambitious climate treaty. I was also going to need to convince China to work with us—and I was probably going to need a bigger majority in the Senate. If the world was expecting the United States to sign a binding treaty at Copenhagen, then I needed to lower expectations—starting with those of the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon.
Two years into his term as the world’s most prominent diplomat, Ban Ki-moon had yet to make much of an impression on the global stage. Some of this was just the nature of the job: Although the U.N. secretary-general presides over a budget of many billions of dollars, a sprawling bureaucracy, and a host of international agencies, his or her power is largely derivative, dependent on an ability to herd 193 countries toward something resembling a common direction. Ban’s relatively low profile was also the result of his understated, methodical style—a paint-by-numbers approach to diplomacy that had undoubtedly served him well during his thirty-seven-year career in his native South Korea’s foreign service and diplomatic corps but that stood in sharp contrast t
o the urbane charisma of his predecessor at the U.N., Kofi Annan. You didn’t go into a meeting with Ban expecting to hear captivating stories, witty asides, or dazzling insights. He didn’t ask how your family was doing or share details of his own life outside the job. Instead, after a vigorous handshake and repeated thank-yous for seeing him, Ban would dive headlong into a stream of talking points and factoids, delivered in fluent but heavily accented English and the earnest, formulaic jargon of a U.N. communiqué.
Despite his lack of pizzazz, I would come to like and respect Ban. He was honest, straightforward, and irrepressibly positive, someone who on several occasions stood up to pressure from member states in pursuit of much-needed U.N. reforms and who instinctively came down on the right side of issues even if he didn’t always have the capacity to move others to do the same. Ban was also persistent—especially on the topic of climate change, which he had designated as one of his top priorities. The first time we met in the Oval Office, less than two months after I’d taken office, he’d started pressing me for a commitment to attend the Copenhagen summit.
“Your presence, Mr. President,” Ban said, “will send a very powerful signal about the urgent need for international cooperation on climate change. Very powerful.”
I had explained all that we planned to do domestically to cut U.S. emissions, as well as the challenges of getting any Kyoto-style treaty through the Senate anytime soon. I described our idea of an interim agreement, and how we were forming a “major emitters group,” separate from U.N.-sponsored negotiations, to see if we could find common ground with China on the issue. As I spoke, Ban nodded politely, occasionally jotting down notes or adjusting his glasses. But nothing I said appeared to knock him off his principal mission.
