Global
warming
... and the politics of denial
by Camille Colatosti
"This
meeting will be remembered as the moment when governments abandoned the promise
of global cooperation to protect planet earth," read a press statement issued
by the international environmental organization Greenpeace at the close of the
Sixth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change, held at The Hague last November. The conference brought together
representatives of more than 160 nations to hammer out details of the Kyoto
Protocol.
Crafted in 1997, the protocol sets
modest goals to reduce carbon emissions, and thereby slow down the rate of global
warming. The agreement calls for the U.S. to cut its emissions by 7 percent
below 1990 levels by 2012; 40 other industrial nations would need to cut their
emissions by an average 5.5 percent below 1990 levels. Representing 5 percent
of the world's population, the U.S. bears responsibility for emitting 25-30
percent of the world's greenhouse gases.
Many shared Greenpeace's disappointment.
The Hague conference was a failure. No new agreement was reached. No enforcement
mechanisms were put in place.
Bill McKibben, a fellow at the Center
for the Study of Values in Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School, attended
The Hague conference, and sent daily reports of its unraveling to gristmagazine,
an online journal whose tagline reads "a beacon in the smog." As he explains,
an agreement to the Kyoto Protocol would indicate that the world was going to
take climate change "seriously enough that we will agree to surrender absolute
autonomy over our economy -- not to a client agency like the World Trade Organization
that simply offers an easy way to spread our power, but to a truly international
regime that sets specific limits on what we can and cannot do."
"The science," says Ross Gelbspan,
author of The Heat Is On: the Climate Crisis, the Cover-Up, the Prescription
(Perseus 1998), "is unambiguous: Stabilization of the earth's climate requires
emissions reductions of about 70 percent. With our oil and coal burning, and
the resulting carbon emissions into the atmosphere, we have heated the deep
oceans. We have altered the timing of the seasons. We have burdened our atmosphere
with carbon concentrations that have not been seen in the last 40,000 years
and loosed a wave of violent and chaotic weather."
A report issued by the U.N.-sponsored
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this past January predicts that global
temperatures are rising at a faster rate than before believed. Five years ago,
the panel's scientists (there are hundreds of them) predicted an increase of
1.8 to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the 20th century. The panel now
predicts that temperatures will increase anywhere from 2.7 to 10.8 degrees by
2100. As Gelbspan explains,"If the upper end of this prediction actually comes
to pass, our planet will be transformed into something nearly unrecognizable
-- it will be even warmer than when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth."
Humanity's
challenge
The U.N. Climate Change panel's
report stresses that global warming results from human behavior. The implicit
challenge is clear: Just as we have the ability to heat the planet, we also
have the ability to reform our production practices and to restore the globe.
For Gelbspan, "The opportunity embedded
in the climate crisis is unprecedented."
McKibben likewise acknowledges the
challenge ahead, but he questions humanity's willingness to meet it. In his
landmark book The End of Nature (Random House 1989), one of the first books
on global warming written for a general audience, McKibben lamented that "nature
as a system of biology independent of man's influence no longer exists. We have
irrationally intruded on the very system that sustains us without having known
how it works." And the failure of The Hague conference, says McKibben, represents
a "failure of all the not very ambitious attempts to do anything about this."
McKibben is also clear about who
is most at fault: The conference "foundered on American unwillingness to do
anything in a meaningful way," he says.
European countries came to the conference
prepared with real plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, many European
countries have committed to make huge cuts regardless of the fate of the Kyoto
Protocol. Holland, for instance, plans to cut emissions by 80 percent in the
next 40 years. Germany plans to reduce greenhouse gases by 50 percent and England
has committed to 60 percent reductions by 2050.
The U.S., on the other hand, has
made no commitment to reduce greenhouse gases at all.
According to McKibben, "The U.S.
spent the last 10 years looking for loopholes or major escape hatches and there
really aren't any." The latest example is a U.S. proposal at The Hague that
would allow it to count the country's vast woodlands against our Kyoto emissions-reduction
commitments. "For politicians," says McKibben, "nothing could be more wonderful
-- they could be seen to be doing something about the world's climate problem
without having to really do anything at all."
Mark Hertsgaard, author of Earth
Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future (Broadway Books
1998), agrees. "This was a loophole that you could drive Exxon Valdez through,"
he says. Not only is it difficult, if not impossible, to measure the amount
of carbon dioxide that a forest absorbs, it is also true, says Hertsgaard, that
if forests serve this function, "they are acting as carbon sinks already and
this is not getting us any closer to where we need to be. We've got to cut these
gases by 50-70 percent and the U.S. has refused to cut them by even the 5-7
percent that Kyoto requires. The U.S. isn't ready to admit that we've got to
reduce energy use."
Why
won't the U.S. face facts?
The reluctance of the U.S. to act,
especially when the predictions for the future are so grave, may seem puzzling.
Experts offer a range of explanations, from what McKibben terms "Americans'
addiction to cheap fossil fuel," to the steady and consistent efforts of the
fossil fuel lobby to minimize the dangers of global warming, to the lack of
a viable environmental or Green Party on the national scene.
McKibben argues that Americans think
of it as "a constitutional right to have $1-a-gallon gas and we're angry when
we don't. But keeping prices artificially low, at $1 a gallon, sends no signal
on how we should conserve and doesn't force the development of new technologies.
Europeans pay the real price of gas -- $4-$5 a gallon. Perhaps that's why they
are more willing to seek alternatives."
McKibben explains that, while it
is impossible to put a price on destabilizing the earth's climate system, it
is possible to calculate the costs of protecting lines to the Persian Gulf,
human healthcare, oil depletion allowance and subsidies. "At $4-$5 a gallon,"
he says, "people would not buy Ford Explorers.
"We've been lazy. Ten years ago,
the problem was brand new and we didn't know much about it. Now, there is no
scientific doubt about global warming. But in that same decade, the U.S. economy
boomed and Americans went on a binge, buying ever-larger cars and houses. The
idolatry of economic growth has made it impossible to deal with environmental
problems. In a rational world, the fact that scientists were talking about changes
that would transform the planet should focus everyone's attention on the issue
and it hasn't."
Acknowledging the huge amount of
money and influence that has been used to divert the U.S. public's attention
away from global warming, McKibben adds, "There are always powerful interests
who don't want progress -- who didn't want civil rights laws and women's equality.
None of that removes the onus from us."
But the misinformation campaign
has been strong and well-funded. Ross Gelbspan has examined in detail the role
of the fossil fuel, auto and heavy-industry lobby to minimize the problems that
we face. "The Global Climate Coalition -- a lobbying group that represents fossil
fuel, automotive and heavy industry interests -- has spent more than $63 million
to combat any progress toward addressing the climate crisis, including a $13
million ad campaign in 1997 to support a Senate resolution against ratification
of the Kyoto Protocol," Gelbspan says.
Another organization actively working
to influence public opinion in its favor is the Western Fuels Association, a
$400 million coal cooperative. As Gelbspan explains, "Western Fuels has been
quite candid about its attack on mainstream science. In one annual report, it
declared: '[T]here has been a close to universal impulse in the [fossil fuel]
trade association community in Washington to concede the scientific premise
of global warming ... while arguing over policy prescriptions that would be
the least disruptive to our economy. We have disagreed, and do disagree, with
this strategy. As a result, Western Fuels has waged an unceasing war against
mainstream science for the last eight years.'"
In addition, adds Gelbspan, "the
George C. Marshall Institute, an extreme, politically conservative institute,
maintains that the climate crisis is basically a liberal plot to subvert the
U.S. economy.
"By keeping the discussion focused
on whether or not there is a problem, the fossil fuel lobby has effectively
prevented discussion in the U.S. about what to do about it."
Importantly, too, while U.S. policymakers
feel the powerful economic and political pressure of the fossil fuel lobby not
to pass legislation limiting emission, they feel no corresponding pressure in
favor of such legislation, as they might if they lived in Europe.
In the January/February 2001 issue
of Dollars and Sense, David Levy, a Dollars and Sense associate who teaches
management at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, suggests that "the change
in Europe can be understood mostly as a response to political and social pressures."
In particular, the Green Party in
France and Germany helped pull those countries to the left, leading them to
reject U.S. efforts at The Hague conference to broker a deal. It is probably
not a coincidence that, in both France and Germany, the environmental minister
is a member of the Greens. In several other European nations, the Greens serve
in coalition governments, pushing those policymakers to give the environment
real consideration.
Paul Hawken, economist and co-author
of Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Little, Brown
and Company 1999), believes that the reason the Green Party in the U.S. did
as well as it did in the last presidential election is because "people are fed
up with both sides of the aisle. Gore and Clinton had a huge relationship with
corporations."
A new
industrial revolution?
Despite the failure of The Hague
conference, there are signs that some representatives of heavy industry are
at least moving away from efforts to deny the science of climate change.
In 1999 and 2000, British Petroleum,
Shell, Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, Texaco, The Southern Company and General Motors
all left the Global Climate Coalition, the main lobbying group opposed to action
on global warming.
Auto companies are also developing
alternative technologies. Toyota launched the Prius, a car with a hybrid electric-gas
engine, in Japan in 1998 and in the U.S. in 2000. Honda launched its own hybrid,
Insight, in December 1999.
Mazda, Ford and Daimler-Chrysler
are working jointly to produce fuel-cell-powered cars by 2003. British Petroleum's
new ads portray BP as standing for "Beyond Petroleum." As Gelbspan explains,
"BP now anticipates doing $1 billion a year in solar commerce within the decade,
and Shell is investing $500 million in renewable technologies."
On their own, these efforts may
not be enough. But they may indicate the beginnings of a shift in worldview,
one in which labor is no longer seen as the limiting factor in production. As
economist Hawken explains in Natural Capitalism, in today's world natural resources
and the ecological systems they sustain are what is in short supply. Coming
to terms with this fact, he believes, can lead to a new industrial revolution
in which an emphasis on sustainability can lead the business community to "do
well by doing good."
Currently, explains Hawken, "natural
resources -- including air, sea and fish -- are treated as free and without
value unless they are drilled, mined, exploited." This view, he believes, will
inevitably change. "We're living in a time when natural capital is falling rapidly
and it is now emerging as a limiting factor to prosperity. The next industrial
revolution is about how we make human beings better off than they are now --
80 percent of the world needs to be better off while preserving nature."
For Hawken, living systems need
to take center stage. He urges industrial processes that make natural resources
more productive. "If you make something more productive," he explains, "you
need less of it." l
Camille Colatosti is The Witness'
staff writer.
For more information:
Climate
change
A review of the basics
by Murray Carpenter
To understand climate change, it's
helpful to consider the earth at a distance. There's the globe spinning through
the ether, a sphere mostly covered with water, several solid land masses here
and there, and all of it wrapped with a thick gaseous cushion.
For now, let's focus on the gases
in the atmosphere, which are all that buffers the earth from the inhospitable
habitat in outer space. The gases act like the glass in a greenhouse, allowing
solar radiation through and trapping some of the heat. These so-called "greenhouse
gases" include ozone, methane, water vapor and carbon dioxide. Naturally evolved
over eons, the greenhouse gases allowed the global temperature to climb to a
comfortable 60 degree Fahrenheit average, permitting life as we know it to evolve
and flourish.
Two greenhouse gases, water vapor
and carbon dioxide, deserve special attention. Carbon is an essential element
that, in combination with water and favorable climatic conditions, is the basis
of all life. Without carbon and water our forebears would never have crawled
from the primordial ooze, life as we know it would never have evolved, algae
to alligator, ape to us.
It's this very life that is problematic,
from a climate change perspective. The organic matter the earth brims with is,
by definition, carbon-based. The remnants of giant ferns, flying dinosaurs and
other such prehistoric flora and fauna now form the great underground stores
of carbon known as fossil fuels: oil, coal and natural gas. Huge quantities
of carbon are on the earth's surface in the soil, and in the trees, leaves and
leaf litter of our vast forests.
Releasing
carbon at an unprecedented rate
We are now burning this carbon at
an unprecedented rate. The carbon releases are pretty basic, according to Jonathan
Foley, Director of the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment
at the University of Wisconsin. "We're just digging up a lot of really ancient
carbon in the earth and burning it."
In burning the carbon, we release
carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And that additional carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere is the biggest contributor to this human-caused climate change that
we are beginning to learn more about. Absent other variables, the more greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere, the warmer the earth will become.
Since the advent of the industrial
revolution, when we really got serious about clearing forested land and burning
fossil fuels, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have increased over
30 percent to 370 parts per million. Continued emissions at current levels could
lead to a level of 500 parts per million by the end of this century, nearly
double the pre-industrial concentration of 280 ppm. Too, methane concentrations
have nearly doubled, and nitrous oxide concentrations have increased by about
15 percent. All greenhouse gases are not equal: Methane traps over 21 times
more heat than carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide absorbs 270 times more heat
than carbon dioxide, but by sheer volume carbon dioxide gets blamed for most
of the warming.
What this means for the global climate
is hotly debated. But few argue this: All else being equal, adding carbon to
the atmosphere will warm things up here. Conservative estimates by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change suggest we'll see warming of about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit
over the next century, and a one-and-one-half foot rise in sea level (due to
melting ice and water expanding as it warms).
Rising
temperatures, rising seas
Global temperatures have risen about
1 degree Fahrenheit over the last century, and recent data appears to reaffirm
scientists' projections about the current and projected warming: 14,000 square
miles of sea ice are melting annually in the Arctic; two cubic miles of ice
were lost annually from Greenland ice sheets from 1993-1998; researchers estimate
the glaciers in Montana's Glacier National Park will melt within the next 50
years; and butterflies are migrating farther north and birds are nesting earlier.
Continued warming is expected to stress species at the southern ends of their
ranges, such as brook trout in the Southern Appalachians, and Atlantic salmon
in Maine. This is just a short sampling of a long list of global scenarios that
even cautious scientists admit appear to be related to human-caused climate
change.
Climate models suggest warming will
do more than add a few degrees to today's average temperatures. Some places
will be warmer, some cooler, some drier, others wetter. Heat waves and droughts
will be more common, and precipitation could come in more intense bursts, leading
to more flooding.
While the science is far from perfect,
and another decade of research would still not lead to absolute certainty about
the changing climate, Foley says recent weather seems to re-affirm what scientists
have predicted. He noted that July of 1999 was the warmest month ever recorded
in the instrumental record, and the warming has been accompanied by continued
unusual episodes of weather.
Seasonal,
annual and 'serious' variabilities
Making the whole thing harder to
understand, confounding scientists and lay people alike, is the natural climatic
variability underlying the human-caused warming. There is seasonal variability
and annual variability -- one winter may be cold, the next mild. Then there
are the longer periods of cool weather, like the so-called Little Ice Age a
century ago. And then there is serious variability, like the ice ages.
All of civilization as we know it
has evolved in this relatively short time since the last ice age, 10,000 years
ago. In that period there were roughly 5,000 years of gradual warming, then
an equal amount of gradual cooling, and now we have this uptick, this warming.
While many scientists agree that we will have another ice age starting within
the next few thousand years, what happens between now and then is up for grabs.
We could see gradual warming, abrupt warming, or even catastrophic cooling.
The last theory, yet another example of the many ways climate change is dependent
on a mind-boggling array of interconnected systems, was developed by a scientist
who believes a circular ocean current that brings the Gulf Stream north, warming
Europe in the process, could shut down suddenly due to decreased water density
brought on by melting ice caps.
If that's not uncertainty enough,
there are more localized effects of human-caused climate change. University
of Georgia researchers found that the expansive, well-paved Atlanta metropolitan
area is often 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the surrounding areas,
an "urban heat island effect." The researchers found that the area is losing
56 acres of trees every day to development, and that the heat is contributing
to an already bad air pollution problem (ground level ozone, a key component
of smog, forms in the presence of sun and heat).
Some urban areas are becoming cloudier
due to the cloud-seeding effect of air pollution, and staying warmer at night
due to the increased cloud cover. The bottom line is that we can and are changing
the weather, and any large, global-scale climate change will have to be considered
against the background noise of this smaller-scale, human-caused climate change.
Pluses
and catastrophic minuses
Global warming may not be universally
bad. Some northern areas could become more moderate and enjoy longer growing
seasons, somewhat offsetting lost agricultural productivity in the south. And
many plants grow more vigorously with elevated carbon dioxide levels.
But a few degrees of warming would
be catastrophic for the billions living in the tropical and subtropical regions
of the globe. These areas will likely lose agricultural productivity due to
heat and aridity. The changing climate will likely increase the range and incidence
of diseases such as cholera, malaria, dengue fever, West Nile Virus, and encephalitis.
The diseases would not only spread through the warming, but also through heavy
rains (many associated with the El Niño/La Niña phenomenon, which
is projected to remain more frequent than it was in cooler years).
Other disastrous events could be
in store for the billions of people living in floodplains and coastal zones.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that a 3.5 degree Fahrenheit
warming would increase the number of people vulnerable to storm surges from
46 million to 92 million. Low-lying countries will be particularly hard hit:
Bangladesh could lose 17.5 percent of its land mass.
While global warming has become
a common topic, we continue to burn more and more fossil fuels. According to
the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. citizens generate approximately 6.6
tons of greenhouse gases per person annually, more than any other country in
the world. And emissions per person increased over 3 percent between 1990 and
1997. The simple act of driving is a big contributor. The Rocky Mountain Institute
(RMI) estimates that Americans drive over 2 trillion miles annually, consuming
115 billion gallons of fuel. The average American's personal vehicle uses 570
gallons of gasoline annually, according to RMI, and emits 11,400 pounds of carbon
dioxide. l
Murray Carpenter is a freelance
writer living in Belfast, Me.
True
for California, true for the world
The lack of environmental and economic
vision is apparent in policymakers' reaction to the recent energy shortage in
California. Michael Walsh of the Chicago Climate Exchange, an institution working
to build a market-based approach to solving climate change, expresses an idea
shared by all the experts. "Don't blame environmental regulations for this.
Environmental regulations are not a factor here."
Here's the problem, says Bill McKibben,
author of The End of Nature (Random House 1989). "There is a shortage. People
are using more electrons than there are in the system. The solution isn't to
put more electrons in the system. The solution is to conserve."
Paul Hawken, co-author of Natural
Capitalism (Little, Brown and Company 1999), agrees. "The only way out of the
California energy mess is in our book. We need conservation, and not conservation
like, 'Turn off the heater.' We need heaters that use less energy. We need to
change our appliances, our heating systems, so that we use dramatically less
energy, less money and so that there is a return on our investment.
"This is the only way out," Hawken
says again. "This is not just true for California, but true for the whole world."