Promised Land (9781524763183)

by Obama Barack

  “With your critical engagement, Mr. President,” he said, “I’m sure we can drive these negotiations to a successful agreement.”

  And so it went for months to come. No matter how many times I repeated my concerns about the course the U.N.-sponsored negotiations were taking, no matter how blunt I was about the U.S. position on a binding, Kyoto-style treaty, Ban would return to underscoring the need for my presence at Copenhagen in December. He brought it up at G20 meetings. He raised it at G8 meetings. Finally, at the U.N. General Assembly plenary in New York in September, I relented, promising the secretary-general I’d do my best to attend so long as the conference appeared likely to produce an agreement we could live with. Afterward, I turned to Susan Rice and said I felt like a high schooler who’d been pressured to go to the prom with the nerdy kid who’s too nice to reject.

  By the time the Copenhagen conference kicked off in December, it seemed that my worst fears were coming to pass. Domestically, we were still waiting for the Senate to schedule a vote on cap-and-trade legislation, and in Europe, the treaty dialogue had hit an early deadlock. We’d sent Hillary and Todd ahead of me to try to drum up support for our proposed interim agreement, and over the phone, they described a chaotic scene, with the Chinese and other BRICS leaders dug in on their position, the Europeans frustrated with both us and the Chinese, the poorer countries clamoring for more financial assistance, Danish and U.N. organizers feeling overwhelmed, and the environmental groups in attendance despairing over what increasingly looked like a dumpster fire. Given the strong odor of imminent failure, not to mention the fact that I was still busy trying to get other critical legislation through Congress before the Christmas recess, Rahm and Axe questioned whether I should even make the trip.

  Despite my misgivings, I decided that even a slight possibility of corralling other leaders into an international agreement overrode the fallout from a likely failure. To make the trip more palatable, Alyssa Mastromonaco came up with a skinnied-down schedule that had me flying to Copenhagen after a full day in the Oval and spending about ten hours on the ground—just enough time to deliver a speech and conduct a few bilateral meetings with heads of state—before turning around and heading home. Still, it’s fair to say that as I boarded Air Force One for the red-eye across the Atlantic, I was less than enthusiastic. Settling into one of the plane’s fat leather conference-room chairs, I ordered a tumbler of vodka in the hope that it would help me get a few hours’ sleep and watched Marvin fiddle with the controls of the big-screen TV in search of a basketball game.

  “Has anyone ever considered,” I said, “the amount of carbon dioxide I’m releasing into the atmosphere as a result of these trips to Europe? I’m pretty sure that between the planes, the helicopters, and the motorcades, I’ve got the biggest carbon footprint of any single person on the whole goddamn planet.”

  “Huh,” Marvin said. “That’s probably right.” He found the game we were looking for, turned up the sound, then added, “You might not want to mention that in your speech tomorrow.”

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS A GLOOMY, arctic morning when we arrived in Copenhagen, the roads into the city shrouded in mist. The conference site itself looked like a converted mall. We found ourselves wandering through a maze of elevators and corridors, one of them inexplicably lined with mannequins, before meeting up with Hillary and Todd to get the current state of play. As part of the proposed interim agreement, I’d authorized Hillary to commit the United States to making a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, as well as a $10 billion pledge toward the $100 billion international Green Climate Fund to help poor countries with climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. According to Hillary, delegates from a number of nations had expressed interest in our alternative—but so far the Europeans were holding out for a fully binding treaty, while China, India, and South Africa appeared content to let the conference crash and burn and blame it on the Americans.

  “If you can persuade the Europeans and the Chinese to support an interim agreement,” Hillary said, “then it’s possible, maybe even likely, that the rest of the world falls in line.”

  Clear on my assignment, we paid a courtesy visit to the Danish prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who was presiding over the final days of negotiating sessions. Like all the Nordic countries, Denmark outperformed in international affairs, and Rasmussen himself reflected many of the qualities that I’d come to associate with the Danes—he was thoughtful, well-informed, pragmatic, and humane. But the task he’d been given—trying to cobble together a global consensus on a complicated, contentious issue over which the world’s biggest powers were at odds—would have been tough for anyone. For the forty-five-year-old leader of a small country who’d been in office for only eight months, it had proven downright impossible. The press had had a field day with stories of how Rasmussen had lost control of the conference, with delegates repeatedly objecting to his proposals, questioning his rulings, and challenging his authority, like unruly teenagers with a substitute teacher. By the time we met, the poor man looked shell-shocked, his bright blue eyes strained with exhaustion, his blond hair matted against his head as if he’d just finished a wrestling match. He listened intently as I explained our strategy and asked a few technical questions about how an interim agreement might work. Mostly, though, he seemed relieved to watch me try my hand at salvaging a deal.

  From there, we moved to a large makeshift auditorium, where I described to the plenary the three components of our proposed interim agreement, as well as the alternative: inaction and acrimony while the planet slowly burned. The crowd was muted but respectful, and Ban was there to congratulate me offstage, grabbing my hand in both of his, behaving as if it was entirely normal for him to now expect me to try to salvage the stalled negotiations and ad-lib my way to a last-minute agreement with other world leaders.

  The rest of the day was unlike any other summit I attended as president. Apart from the pandemonium of the plenary session, we had a series of sideline meetings, moving from one to the next through corridors stuffed with people who craned their necks and took photos. Other than me, the most important player in attendance that day was the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. He’d brought a giant delegation with him, and the group of them had thus far been inflexible and imperious in meetings, refusing to agree that China should submit to any form of international review of their emissions, confident in the knowledge that through their alliance with Brazil, India, and South Africa, they had enough votes to kill any deal. Meeting one-on-one with Wen for a bilat, I pushed back, warning that even if China saw avoiding any obligation toward transparency as a short-term win, it would prove to be a long-term disaster for the planet. We agreed to keep talking through the day.

  It was progress, but just barely. The afternoon evaporated as negotiating sessions continued. We managed to extract a draft agreement endorsed by E.U. members and a number of other delegates, but we got nowhere in follow-up sessions with the Chinese, as Wen declined to attend and instead dispatched junior members of his delegation who were predictably inflexible. Late in the day, I was led to yet another room, this one crowded with unhappy Europeans.

  Most of the key leaders were there, including Merkel, Sarkozy, and Gordon Brown, all wearing the same bleary-eyed look of frustration. Now that Bush was gone and Democrats were in charge, they wanted to know, why couldn’t the United States ratify a Kyoto-style treaty? In Europe, they said, even the far-right parties accept the reality of climate change—what is wrong with Americans? We know the Chinese are a problem, but why not wait until a future agreement to force their hand?

  For what felt like an hour, I let them vent, answering questions, sympathizing with their concerns. Eventually the reality of the situation settled over the room, and it was left to Merkel to say it out loud.

  “I think what Barack describes is not the option we had hoped for,” she said calmly, “bu
t it may be our only option today. So…we wait to see what the Chinese and the others say, and then we decide.” She turned to me. “You’ll go meet them now?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good luck, then,” Merkel said. She shrugged with a tilt of the head, a downward pull of the mouth, a slight raising of the eyebrows—the gesture of someone experienced with getting on with unpleasant necessities.

  Whatever momentum we felt coming out of the meeting with the Europeans quickly dissipated once Hillary and I got back to our holding room. Marvin reported that a ferocious snowstorm was rolling through the East Coast, so to get us back to D.C. safely, Air Force One needed to be wheels-up in two and a half hours.

  I looked at my watch. “What time’s my follow-up meeting with Wen?”

  “Well, boss, that’s the other problem,” Marvin said. “We can’t find him.” He explained that when staffers had reached out to their Chinese counterparts, they’d been told that Wen was already on his way to the airport. There were rumors that he was actually still in the building, in a meeting with the other leaders who’d been pushing back against having their emissions monitored, but we weren’t able to confirm it.

  “So you’re saying he’s ducking me.”

  “We got folks out looking.”

  A few minutes later, Marvin came back in to tell us that Wen and the leaders of Brazil, India, and South Africa had been spotted in a conference room a few levels up.

  “All right, then,” I said. I turned to Hillary. “When’s the last time you crashed a party?”

  She laughed. “It’s been a while,” she said, looking like the straitlaced kid who’s decided to throw caution to the wind.

  With a gaggle of staffers and Secret Service agents hustling behind us, we made our way upstairs. At the end of a long corridor, we found what we were looking for: a room with glass walls, just large enough to hold a conference table, around which sat Premier Wen, Prime Minister Singh, and Presidents Lula and Zuma, along with a few of their ministers. The Chinese security team began moving forward to intercept us, hands held up as if ordering us to stop, but realizing who we were, they hesitated. With a smile and a nod, Hillary and I strolled past and entered the room, leaving a fairly noisy tussle between security details and the staffers in our wake.

  “You ready for me, Wen?” I called out, watching the Chinese leader’s face drop in surprise. I then walked around the table to shake each of their hands. “Gentlemen! I’ve been looking everywhere for you. How about we see if we can do a deal?”

  Before anybody could object, I grabbed an empty chair and sat down. Across the table, Wen and Singh remained impassive, while Lula and Zuma looked sheepishly down at the papers in front of them. I explained that I had just met with the Europeans and that they were prepared to accept our proposed interim agreement if the group present would support language ensuring a credible mechanism to independently verify that countries were meeting their greenhouse gas reduction commitments. One by one, the other leaders explained why our proposal was unacceptable: Kyoto was working just fine; the West was responsible for global warming and now expected poorer countries to impede their development to solve the problem; our plan would violate the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities”; the verification mechanism we were suggesting would violate their national sovereignty. After about a half hour of this, I leaned back in my chair and looked directly at Premier Wen.

  “Mr. Premier, we’re running out of time,” I said, “so let me cut to the chase. Before I walked into this room, I assume, the plan was for all of you to leave here and announce that the U.S. was responsible for the failure to arrive at a new agreement. You think that if you hold out long enough, the Europeans will get desperate and sign another Kyoto-style treaty. The thing is, I’ve been very clear to them that I can’t get our Congress to ratify the treaty you want. And there is no guarantee Europe’s voters, or Canada’s voters, or Japan’s voters, are going to be willing to keep putting their industries at a competitive disadvantage and paying money to help poor countries deal with climate change when the world’s biggest emitters are sitting on the sidelines.

  “Of course, I may be wrong,” I said. “Maybe you can convince everyone that we’re to blame. But that won’t stop the planet from getting warmer. And remember, I’ve got my own megaphone, and it’s pretty big. If I leave this room without an agreement, then my first stop is the hall downstairs where all the international press is waiting for news. And I’m going to tell them that I was prepared to commit to a big reduction in our greenhouse gases, and billions of dollars in new assistance, and that each of you decided it was better to do nothing. I’m going to say the same thing to all the poor countries that stood to benefit from that new money. And to all the people in your own countries that stand to suffer the most from climate change. And we’ll see who they believe.”

  Once the translators in the room caught up to me, the Chinese environmental minister, a burly, round-faced man in glasses, suddenly stood up and started speaking in Mandarin, his voice rising, his hands waving in my direction, his face reddening in agitation. He went on like this for a minute or two, the entire room not quite sure what was happening. Eventually, Premier Wen lifted a slender, vein-lined hand and the minister abruptly sat back down. I suppressed the urge to laugh and turned to the young Chinese woman who was translating for Wen.

  “What did my friend there just say?” I asked. Before she could answer, Wen shook his head and whispered something. The translator nodded and turned back to me.

  “Premier Wen says that what the environmental minister said is not important,” she explained. “Premier Wen asks if you have the agreement you’re proposing with you, so that everyone can look at the specific language again.”

  * * *

  —

  IT TOOK ANOTHER half hour of haggling, with the other leaders and their ministers hovering over me and Hillary as I used a ballpoint pen to mark up some of the language in the creased document I’d been carrying in my pocket, but by the time I left the room, the group had agreed to our proposal. Rushing back downstairs, I spent another thirty minutes getting the Europeans to sign off on the modest changes the developing-country leaders had requested. The language was quickly printed out and circulated. Hillary and Todd worked the delegates from other key countries to help broaden the consensus. I made a brief statement to the press announcing the interim agreement, after which we loaded up our motorcade and raced to the airport.

  We made our window for takeoff with ten minutes to spare.

  There was a cheerful buzz on the flight back as staffers recounted the day’s adventures for the benefit of those who hadn’t been present. Reggie, who’d been with me long enough not to be impressed by much of anything anymore, flashed a wide grin as he poked his head into my quarters, where I was reading through a stack of briefing memos.

  “I gotta say, boss,” he told me, “that was some real gangster shit back there.”

  I did feel pretty good. On the biggest of stages, on an issue that mattered and with the clock ticking, I’d pulled a rabbit out of a hat. Granted, the press gave the interim agreement mixed reviews, but given the chaos of the conference and the obstinacy of the Chinese, I still saw it as a win—a stepping-stone that could help us get our climate change bill through the Senate. Most important, we’d succeeded in getting China and India to accept—no matter how grudgingly or tentatively—the notion that every country, and not just those in the West, had a responsibility to do its part to slow climate change. Seven years later, that basic principle would prove essential to achieving the breakthrough Paris Agreement.

  Still, as I sat at my desk and looked out the window, the darkness interrupted every few seconds by a flashing light at the tip of the plane’s right wing, I was overtaken by more sobering thoughts. I thought about how much work we’d had to put in to land the deal—the countless hours of labor by a gifted an
d dedicated staff; the behind-the-scenes negotiations and calling in of chits; the promises of aid; and finally an eleventh-hour intervention that had relied as much on my seat-of-the-pants bluster as on any set of rational arguments. All that for an interim agreement that—even if it worked entirely as planned—would be at best a preliminary, halting step toward solving a possible planetary tragedy, a pail of water thrown on a raging fire. I realized that for all the power inherent in the seat I now occupied, there would always be a chasm between what I knew should be done to achieve a better world and what in a day, week, or year I found myself actually able to accomplish.

  The forecasted storm had hit Washington by the time we landed, the low clouds sending down a steady mix of snow and freezing rain. In northern cities like Chicago, the trucks would already be out, plowing the streets and scattering salt, but even a hint of snow tended to paralyze the notoriously ill-equipped D.C. area, closing schools and snarling traffic. With Marine One unable to transport us because of the weather, the drive back to the White House took extra time as our motorcade navigated the icy roads.

  It was late when I walked into the residence. Michelle was in bed, reading. I told her about my trip and asked how the girls were doing.

  “They’re very excited about the snow,” she said, “even if I’m not.” She looked at me with a sympathetic grin. “Malia’s probably going to ask you at breakfast whether you saved the tigers.”

  I nodded, pulling off my tie.

  “I’m working on it,” I said.

  PART SIX

  IN THE BARREL

  CHAPTER 22