You would not know that, though, from reading the newspapers in 2010. Climate skeptics, many funded by the fossil-fuel industries, seized on a few leaked e-mails among climate scientists working with Great Britain’s University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit to gin up a controversy about the conduct of some of its scientific investigators. Whatever one thinks of this specific case, it hardly invalidates the scientific consensus on global warming based on independent research conducted all over the world, nor do a few minor mistakes in the UN’s massive Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. But for a public too busy to take the time to study these issues, without the background to appreciate fully how little these errors touched on the larger scientific certainties and disinclined to ask why and how climate scientists all over the world could organize a vast conspiracy to get people to believe this problem was more serious than it is, these news stories created doubt and confusion about the issue and helped to stall any U.S. climate legislation.
The climate skeptics took a page right out of the tobacco industry’s book, said Joseph Romm, the physicist and popular Climateprogress.org blogger. “When the whole smoking-causes-cancer issue came up, the tobacco industry figured out that it did not have to win the debate, it just had to sow enough doubt to pollute what people thought. It was: ‘I don’t have to convince you that I am right. I just have to convince you that the other guy may be wrong.’ The tobacco people wrote a famous memo that said ‘Doubt is our product.’ It is a much easier threshold to meet.” The other thing the skeptics have on their side is that their goal is to persuade you that the way you are living your life is just fine. It is human nature to “remember and latch on to things that confirm your worldview and ignore and discount those things that don’t. It is called ‘confirmation bias,’” said Romm.
At the same time, scientists, who tend to focus on what they don’t know more than on what they do, also tend to be poor communicators and defenders of their positions. As Romm put it: “Scientists do live in ivory towers. They believe that facts win debates and speak for themselves and that you don’t need to market your ideas or repeat them over and over again. And they are even distrustful of people who repeat themselves or cultivate too high a public profile.”
Eventually, though, the irresponsible campaign against the science of climate change reached the point that it triggered an open letter signed by 255 members of America’s National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s top scientific society, which was published in Science magazine on May 7, 2010. Here is what the scientists said:
All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet.
Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basic laws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature and mathematical and computer modeling. Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them. This process is inherently adversarial—scientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation. That’s what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein did. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of “well-established theories” and are often spoken of as “facts.”
The letter went on to list the fundamental, well-established scientific conclusions about climate change:
(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact. (ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. (iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth’s climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes. (iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic. (v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.
Honk If You Think Like Dick Cheney
The conclusion that emerges from the summary is that while climate change does involve substantial uncertainties, they concern when and how, not whether, it will affect the planet. Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, concluded in its February 2007 report for the United Nations that the only sensible response now to the reality of global warming is a two-pronged action strategy to “avoid the unmanageable (mitigation) and manage the unavoidable (adaptation)”—because some significant climate change is coming, even if we don’t know when or how much damage it will do.
In other words, uncertainty is a reason to act and not a reason not to act. After all, people in Kansas buy insurance on their homes not because they are certain that a tornado will smash it one day but because they cannot be sure one will not. When faced with a credible threat with potentially catastrophic consequences, uncertainty is why you act—especially with this climate problem, because buying energy and climate insurance will not only pay for itself, it will eventually make a profit. For both these reasons, we favor the “Dick Cheney Strategy” when dealing with the climate issue.
Why do we call it that? In 2006, Ron Suskind published The One Percent Doctrine, a book about the U.S. war on terrorists after 9/11. The title came from an assessment by then vice president Dick Cheney, who, in the face of concerns that a Pakistani scientist was offering nuclear-weapons expertise to al-Qaeda, reportedly declared: “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.” Cheney contended that the United States had to confront a very new type of threat: a “low-probability, high-impact event.”
Soon after Suskind’s book was published, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, then at the University of Chicago, pointed out that Cheney seemed to be endorsing the same “precautionary principle” that animated environmentalists. Sunstein wrote in his blog: “According to the Precautionary Principle, it is appropriate to respond aggressively to low-probability, high-impact events—such as climate change. Indeed, another vice president—Al Gore—can be understood to be arguing for a precautionary principle for climate change (though he believes that the chance of disaster is well over 1 percent).”
Cheney’s instinct on nuclear weapons in the hands of rogue states is the right framework for thinking about the climate issue. It’s all a game of odds. We’ve never been here before, but we do know two things. First, the CO2 we put into the atmosphere stays there for several thousand years, so it is “irreversible” in real time (barring some not-yet-invented technique of geo-engineering to extract greenhouses gases from the atmosphere). And second, the CO2 buildup, if it reaches a certain point, has the potential to unleash “catastrophic” global warming—warming at a level that no humans have ever experienced. We do not know for sure (and cannot know until it is too late) that this will happen, but we do know that it could happen. Since the buildup of greenhouse gases is irreversible and the impact of that buildup could be “catastrophic”—that is, it could create such severe and irreparable damage to the Earth’s ecosystem that it would overturn the normal patterns of human life on the planet—the sensible, prudent, conservative thing to do is to buy insurance.
This is especially advisable when there is every chance our response will
eventually turn a profit and serve as an antidote to almost every energy/climate problem set in motion in 1979. If we prepare for climate change by gradually building an economy based on clean-power systems but climate change turns out not to be as damaging as we expect, what would be the result? During a transition period, we would have higher energy prices, while new technologies providing both clean power and greater efficiency achieved scale from mass production. Very quickly, though, we would have higher energy prices but lower energy bills, as well as lower greenhouse gas emissions, as the new technologies dramatically improved efficiency to give us more power from less energy for less money. In its 2009 report Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy, the McKinsey consultancy found that if serious but affordable energy-efficiency measures were implemented throughout the U.S. economy through 2020, this would yield gross energy savings worth more than $1.2 trillion—more than twice the $520 billion investment in such measures needed in that time frame. Energy efficiency, that is, would save more than twice as much as it would cost.
At the same time, as a result of buying insurance by starting the transition to clean energy, we would become competitive in what is sure to become the next great global industry. Even if global warming did not exist at all, the fact that the planet is on track to move from 6.8 billion people today to 9.2 billion by 2050, and more and more of these people will indeed live in American-size homes, drive American-size cars, and eat American-size Big Macs, means that global energy demand for oil, coal, and gas will surge. Fossil fuels will therefore become more expensive, and the pollution they cause will increase. This will raise the demand for clean, renewable energy, and rising demand will stimulate an increasing supply. There is every reason to believe, in other words, that clean energy will become the successor to information technology as the next major cutting-edge industry on which the economic fortunes of the richest countries in the world will depend. That is the bet that China has made in its twelfth five-year plan, authorized in March 2011, which stresses that development of renewable energy will be the key to China’s energy security for the next decade. That plan places special emphasis on developing solar and nuclear energy.
Moreover, renewable energy depends on new technology, which the United States has historically led the world in developing. China is now seeking to seize that position. “Chinese solar panel manufacturers accounted for slightly over half the world’s production last year,” Keith Bradsher, the New York Times Hong Kong business reporter, wrote (January 14, 2011). “Their share of the American market has grown nearly sixfold in the last two years, to 23 percent in 2010, and is still rising fast … In addition to solar energy, China just passed the United States as the world’s largest builder and installer of wind turbines.” Bradsher also noted that since 2007, China has become the world’s leading builder of more efficient, less polluting coal power plants, mastering the technology and driving down the cost. “While the United States is still debating whether to build a more efficient kind of coal-fired power plant that uses extremely hot steam, China has begun building such plants at a rate of one a month,” Bradsher wrote (May 10, 2009). China is also building far more nuclear power plants than the rest of the world combined.
America does not have in place the rules, standards, regulations, and price signals—the market ecosystem—to stimulate thousands of green innovators in thousands of green garages to devise the breakthrough technologies that will give us multiple sources of abundant, cheap, reliable, carbon-free energy. Solar “is an industry we pioneered and invented,” explained Phyllis Cuttino, the director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Clean Energy Program. “We used to be the leading manufacturer of solar in the world, and now the largest manufacturers of solar and wind are China and Germany. In 2008, we led the world in private investment and financing of clean energy. In 2009 China took the lead at $54 billion, Germany is attracting $41 billion, and we are at $34 billion.”
A key reason for the rise of Germany and China in clean power, Cuttino noted, is that they both used “domestic policy tools to create huge internal demand.” If we set high energy-efficiency standards for our own buildings, trucks, cars, and power plants, we would trigger innovation by American companies, which would then be better positioned to compete globally. If, on the other hand, we lower those standards, we invite competition from low-cost, low-standards competitors.
Beyond the potential for spawning new industries, taking climate change and our oil addiction seriously would surely bring strategic advantages. Led by Ray Mabus, President Obama’s secretary of the navy and the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, the navy and marines are not waiting. Using their own resources, they have been building a strategy for “out-greening” al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the world’s petro-dictators. Their efforts derive from a Pentagon study from 2007 data that found that the U.S. military suffers one person killed or wounded for every twenty-four fuel and water convoys it runs in Afghanistan. Today, many hundreds of these convoys are needed each month to transport the fuel to run air conditioners and to power diesel generators—to remote bases all over Afghanistan.
On April 22, 2010, Earth Day, the navy flew an F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet powered by a fifty-fifty blend of conventional jet fuel and camelina aviation biofuel made from pressed mustard seeds. That fighter jet flew at Mach 1.2 (850 miles per hour) and has since been tested on biofuels at Mach 1.7 (nearly 1,300 miles per hour)—without a hiccup. As Scott Johnson, general manager of Sustainable Oils, which produced the camelina, put it in Biofuels Digest: “It was awesome to watch camelina biofuel break the sound barrier.”
Mabus believes that if the navy and marines could deploy generators in Iraq and Afghanistan with renewable power, as well as more energy-efficient tents; could run more ships on nuclear energy, biofuels, and hybrid engines; and could fly some of its jets with biofuels, it would gain a major advantage over the Taliban and America’s other adversaries. This is still a long, long way off, but it is heartening to see the Pentagon taking some leadership on this issue—which is no surprise, since for the marines it is a life-and-death issue. The best way to avoid a roadside bomb is not to have vehicles on the roads trucking fuel in the first place. Similarly, the best way not to have to kowtow to petro-dictators is to take away, or reduce the value of, the only source of income they have. And the best way to make it possible for the United States to cut its military budget without harming the nation’s security is to reduce our and the world’s addiction to oil. Making oil less important would reduce the military forces we have to keep on station to protect its flow from the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world. And, of course, importing less oil would strengthen the dollar. Americans currently send more than $1 billion a day abroad to purchase both crude oil and refined petroleum products from around the world. Bring that number down with energy efficiency and clean power, and America’s trade deficit would improve. As a bonus, the air we breathe would be cleaner, so our health-care bills would be lower.
Any of these points individually would argue for adopting a different policy on energy and climate. All of them together add up to a case that is overwhelming. No single measure would do more to make America stronger, wealthier, more innovative, more secure, and more respected than implementing a sound energy strategy—putting a price on carbon, or increasing the gasoline tax, or establishing national energy-efficiency standards for every building and home. To dismiss global warming as a hoax and refuse to take any of these steps to reduce our addiction to oil, therefore, is to wage war not just against physics but against the American national interest and against elementary prudence.
China has a different approach. “There is really no debate about climate change in China,” said Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, a nonprofit group working to accelerate the greening of China. “China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time questioning scientific data.” Air pollution is much worse in China than in the United St
ates because the country burns huge quantities of cheap coal. That creates serious health problems of a kind that, fortunately, we in the United States do not face. For this reason, Liu added, the push to be green in China “is a practical discussion on health and wealth. There is no need to emphasize future consequences when people already see, eat, and breathe pollution every day.” And because runaway pollution in China means wasted lives, air, water, ecosystems, and money—and wasted money means fewer jobs and more political instability—the regime takes it seriously. Energy efficiency achieves three goals at once for China. The country saves money, takes the lead in the next great global industry, and earns some credit with the world for mitigating climate change.
Why is that attitude so hard for America to duplicate? Why has the United States failed so abjectly to meet the related challenges of climate change and energy?
Of Science and Political Science
For starters, climate change occurs gradually and may not produce an equivalent of Pearl Harbor—until it is too late. That is, it’s another one of those slowly unfolding problems—like the deficit—in which there is a fundamental mismatch between the cause and the people who cause it, on the one hand, and the effect and the people who will be most affected, on the other. The effects lag far behind the causes.
So, for example, whatever global warming effects we’re experiencing today, which are relatively mild, are the product of CO2 emissions from decades ago, before China and India and Brazil became economic powerhouses. And the emissions that we are pouring into the atmosphere today will be felt by our grandchildren in 2050. When people cannot see any immediate effect of what scientists tell them is harmful behavior, generating collective action to stop that behavior is extremely difficult. But this also means that if and when the environmental equivalent of Pearl Harbor does come, the response will have to be sweeping and disruptive.
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Page 24