by Sonia Shah
There was “something primeval” about the oil business, he said. It was the “hunter’s thrill” of stalking oil, on foot and with tools and weapons, the deep penetration of the earth, the huge machines, and the “fascinating engines.” The oil industry “hunts, and kills, with sophisticated toys,” he said. “I was one happy camper,” he remembered.19
But by 1988, the evidence of climate change had “become impossible to ignore,” he says. “I felt my sense of mission, future and professional identity eroding with every new report I read.”
One day he decided he wanted out.
And there I stood, that day, giving my lecture on the giant offshore California oilfield, once again teaching the students new tricks in the search for oil, as though concerns about the global environment . . . were somehow just a sideshow. Until then, my entire professional life had been dedicated to training people like these to go forth and find fossil fuels, to add carbon as heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere. To quite literally fuel a threat to the future, and risk bequeathing their children an uninhabitable world. It had to stop.
In 1989, he left the Royal School of Mines and joined Greenpeace. 20
The following year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of hundreds of climate scientists from around the world convened by the United Nations General Assembly, met to hash out their first scientific assessment report. Greenpeace sent Leggett to observe the report’s final drafting. He wasn’t the only advocate in the audience. Whatever credo the panel laboriously hammered out would be one that shaped potentially economy-transforming policies in legislative chambers across the planet. The IPCC meetings were full of Leggett’s former colleagues, oil industry public relations staff and oil ministry officials from oil-producing countries.
The industry’s future dealings in carbon were in peril. “These companies, some of which have existed for a hundred years, are essentially about extracting petroleum,” commented one industry consultant. “And in a world where you don’t extract petroleum anymore, the first order of expectation is that you’re dead.”21 Whereas earlier environmental concerns had restricted the way the industry conducted its business, this growing concern about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere attacked the very notion of a petroleum industry, confronting, for the first time, the value of the product itself. Not only did the petroleum industry emit over 87 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere in the United States alone,22 it relied on billions of other people buying its products and emitting hundreds of millions of tons more.
If government leaders decided to clamp down on machines that exhaled carbon into the air, investors might properly decide to stop anteing up for oil companies. Consumers would shun the pump. Bright-eyed graduates would stop applying for jobs. The entire industry could collapse.
The oil industry pinpointed the high-level, international climate talks as its public enemy number one. Each report that the IPCC scientists wrote up had to be approved by government delegates. Leggett watched as oil industry consultants and the oil-producing countries “chipped away at the draft, watering down the sense of alarm in the wording, beefing up the aura of uncertainty,” Leggett says. The point was to “wear the scientists down with diplomatic gutter tactics, if possible to derail the meeting procedurally, but certainly to reduce the impact of the product.”
Despite the fossil fuel industry’s efforts, the IPCC’s conclusions in its 1990 scientific assessment report were critical, if not yet damning: they concluded firstly that global warming was indeed occurring and secondly, that human activities were causing it. But, the IPCC added, they would need more time to be truly certain.23
International negotiations kicked off to enact some kind of agreement based on the IPCC’s 1990 findings. Fossil-fuel lobbyists were dispatched to circulate the industry’s arguments: that “stabilizing carbon dioxide emissions would have little environmental benefit,” and “the benefits of increased carbon dioxide have been ignored and the warming exaggerated,” as Leggett described.
An OPEC official making the rounds at the climate talks openly admitted that OPEC wanted to scuttle the looming agreement. “My motives are selfish,” he told Leggett. “We don’t want this convention. There’s nothing in it for us.”24
By 1992, the much-harangued international talks rendered an international agreement, the UN Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC). As Leggett described it,
It was a masterpiece of circumlocution, mentioning the possibility of developed countries stabilizing emissions by the end of the decade, but at an unspecified level, and merely as an “aim,” not as a legally binding commitment. It allowed the Europeans and Japanese to claim that the “spirit” of the convention as negotiated meant committing—as they all had, unilaterally—to a freeze in carbon dioxide emissions by the year 2000. The Bush Administration meanwhile could claim to Congress that they had committed to nothing.25
Signatories did agree to continue meeting to negotiate something a bit more binding. By then, Democrats Bill Clinton and Al Gore had taken the White House. Environmentalists were hopeful that the United States might surprise the international community with a bold pledge to cut back or at least stabilize its emissions.
Meanwhile, the rising waters of the mighty Pacific threatened to swallow its islands whole.
More than thirty thousand islands peek out of the Pacific Ocean, but many are barely land, snatching the tops of volcanoes and the corals that formed around them for tiny patches of solid ground.26 In what historians call one of the most amazing feats of maritime navigation in human history, thousands of years ago seafarers had set off from the Chinese mainland into the vast, featureless, and uncharted Pacific, miraculously finding Polynesia’s specks of habitable ground.27
Tuvalu, for instance, is a series of coral atolls and islands comprising ten square miles of land stretching across 350 miles of ocean. Most jut just a few feet above sea level. On their white sands sprout willowy coconut trees. People survive on Tuvalu’s little bit of paradise fishing, raising pigs, and growing taro, bananas, cassava, and coconuts in the island’s sandy soils. They practically live in the lagoon and ocean that encircle them. A reporter from the Guardian described their ocean-drenched life:Men and women stand neck-deep in the sea, eating fish and bits of coconut, or periodically raising pans they are silently scrubbing beneath the surface of the water. At midday, a father and son heave four pigs into the lagoon for slicing up; the pigs’ slashed-open bellies turn the water red and their entrails drift off on the ocean. At dusk, islanders gather on motorbikes to watch the sunset from the low concrete jetties jutting out into the lagoon. Children slide down algae-covered boat ramps into the water and a man clutches a fish the size of a dog to his chest.
During the Second World War, American troops arrived to build a landing strip on one of Tuvalu’s islands. The soldiers scratched into the thin soils, leaving behind pits (some as big as 300 feet by 50 feet, and 10 feet deep) that destroyed about one-third of the island’s arable land. After the war, the islanders took to using the pits as garbage bins.
The sea provided food and livelihoods, but money came from elsewhere. In the early days of the Internet, Tuvalu had acquired the Internet domain extension “.tv.” Leasing the rights to the domain netted tiny Tuvalu a $50 million deal with the American company dotTV—not bad for a country with an annual GNP, before the dotTV deal, of $8 million a year. They even sold postage stamps showing a smiling Tuvaluan woman with flowers in her hair, gazing up at the South Pacific sky, and the giant “.tv” emblazoned across it.
All might have seemed sun-soaked and placid yet there was something more than clever Internet domain names floating in the South Pacific sky.
Tuvaluans were used to weathering one or two serious cyclones every decade. Over the 1990s, the islanders confronted no fewer than seven major cyclones. Each storm took another bite of Tuvalu’s hard-won ground, each high tide digesting another slice, rendering the land thinner, saltier, and less nurturin
g. In 1992, as the UNFCC made its lackluster debut, Tuvalu’s prime minister announced that the island nation was the “world’s first victim of climate change” and started forming a plan to evacuate.28
He left his watery island for Washington, DC, where with Jeremy Leggett’s help, he tried to bring the plight of his drowning island to the attention of the people whose fuming machines, he was convinced, had caused the problem.29
The Clinton White House rebuffed Tuvalu’s prime minister but in April 1993, President Clinton announced that the United States would stabilize its greenhouse-gas emissions at 1990 levels within seven years. He didn’t say how the country would do it, nor did he explain what the United States planned to do after the year 2000. Still, it was progress.30
The oil industry stepped up its attack on the IPCC science that underlay Clinton’s alarming move, exploiting and extending its influence in academia. Like any good defendant on trial, the oil industry trained and showcased its own roster of expert witnesses, renegade scientists willing to counter the consensus-driven, peer-reviewed science of the IPCC.
Because oil companies had already infiltrated the ivory tower, shaping the priorities and directions of fields ranging from geology to engineering and astrophysics, this tactic was both highly effective and easily achieved.
In 1993, Sallie Baliunas, a Harvard astrophysicist who studied how changes in the sun’s magnetic cycle correlated with changes in the star’s brightness, published a paper stating that the sun had grown between 0.1 and 0.7 percent brighter since 1700—sufficient extra brightness at the medium- to high-end of the estimate to account for all of the observed global warming of the last century.31 It was just a correlation, Baliunas admitted, but the natural variation had to be taken into account when dusting for the human fingerprint on climate change.
The implications of Baliunas’ research fell on receptive ears in the oil industry. In 1994, Exxon and other corporations whisked Baliunas on a media tour.32 To her Harvard audiences, Baliunas was coy: “I am addressing scientific issues. Economic, political, and environmental considerations are quite another story,” she said.33 Yet, a couple of years after her Exxon tour, as federal funding for research in astronomy dried up, Baliunas publicly called for the government to encourage greater corporate underwriting of scientific research.34 Baliunas would go on to join a parade of scientists, who under fossil-fuel industry largesse, would bring the uncertainties, contradictions, and unknowns about climate change to the broader public.
The temperature was rising, and fossil fuel combustion added to the heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: these were observable facts that couldn’t be seriously disputed. Yet climatologists had found the connection between the two—that burning oil changed the climate—notoriously difficult to prove. Industry-funded scientists took pains to expose this soft underbelly of climate science.
The American Petroleum Institute, a trade organization representing the American oil and gas industry, launched a campaign in which “victory will be achieved when average citizens understand . . . uncertainties in climate science.” The institute proclaimed that those promoting cuts in greenhouse gas emissions “on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality.”35
The industry-friendly academics offered a range of arguments to counter the IPCC’s doomsday scenarios. Perhaps ancient astronomical processes altered the climate in ways that had little to do with human activities on the planet’s surface. The sun dimmed and brightened over time, as NASA’s satellites confirmed in the 1980s, possibly because the earth itself wobbles on its long orbit around the star. These tiny wobbles could alter the amount of sunlight coming to earth enough to trigger and melt ice ages. (In fact, the IPCC did take the influence of solar variation into account in their reports and still concluded that burning fossil fuels had changed the climate.36 Baliunas herself admitted, “It may be that it’s a coincidence that these two things have changed together.”37)
What would happen after the planet started to stew was even more difficult to predict. Who was to say that the new warm weather wouldn’t be a good thing? Indeed, over a century ago when scientists had first detected carbon dioxide’s role in warming the globe, they rejoiced. Fewer people would freeze to death. It would be easier to grow crops. “Global change is inevitable,” allowed Thomas Gale Moore of the conservative Hoover Institute, but “warmer is better.”38 “Warming is definitely better than cooling. It is certainly better for agriculture and therefore for basic human existence,” added industry darling S. Fred Singer, a professor emeritus of environmental science from the University of Virginia, who traveled the world promoting his anti-IPCC opinions on the coal industry’s tab.39
Then again, perhaps the planet wouldn’t warm, the trend in the air offset by any number of other unpredictable changes. The whispery thin ozone layer hovering high above the planet had been punctured and the hole could cool the planet. Forests could temporarily store carbon dioxide, keeping it out of the atmosphere and so help mitigate the warming effects of heightened levels of carbon dioxide. When they were gone, the denuded plains, blanketed with winter’s white snow, would reflect rather than absorb radiated heat and so would cool things down.40 Nobody could accurately predict the behavior of the fly-by-night clouds: the wispy ones could trap the earth’s reradiated heat, contributing to global warming, but the dark ones could block incoming sunlight and effect a cooling.
Although their arguments, promulgated in scientific papers, opeds, and magazine features, were sometimes arcane, industry-allied scientists contradicting IPCC science served a vital purpose, creating in the public mind the appearance of an actual scientific controversy. The news media helped, by pitting this small minority of contrarian scientists against the much larger majority who stood by the IPCC consensus, as if both sides were equal. If the scientists themselves couldn’t agree on whether the climate was changing or what it meant, why should citizens commit themselves to doing anything about it?
Many in the oil industry truly believed that climate change was an “overhyped nonproblem,” as Leggett described it. Exxon’s top scientific advisor felt certain that “most of the recoverable oil and gas would be burnt, and that it would have no noticeable effect on the climate,” Leggett says. A Texaco spokesperson pinned his hopes on future technology: centuries would pass before researchers settled the science, and by then, the problem might be moot: “someone discovers the gene that eats the carbon dioxide or something.” Others confessed that the planet probably was warming, but felt it wouldn’t be a major disruption. A prominent coal industry spokesperson wondered, “What’s wrong with a bit of sea-level rise? It is merely changing land use—where there were cows there will be fish.” A contrarian spirit, he asked the Washington Post: “How many people were following Moses when he started? And there was only one guy saying the earth was round in the beginning. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
One day, a Ford representative revealed how he understood his role in warming the planet. “You know, the more I look, the more it is just as it says in the Bible,” he said.41 Ford Motor Company’s John Schiller believed that the earth is not 6 billion years old but only 10,000 years old.
According to Schiller, climate change is part of the planetary devastation foretold in the Book of Daniel, according to which a one-world government, led by an Antichrist, would eventually take over. It isn’t worth worrying about because it has all been prophesied, and according to the prophecies, the Antichrist won’t rule for long. In this particular worldview, environmentalists agitating for controls on greenhouse gas emissions collaborated, whether knowingly or not, with the Antichrist himself, as Leggett later noted in his book, The Carbon War.42
Although certainly an outlandish belief, if the last century of scientific evidence is to be believed, it is by no means an unusual one. Polls suggest that nearly one-half of all Americans believe that both humans and the planet sprang into being around ten thousand years ago.43 Critics debate whether these are g
enuine beliefs or evidence of poor science education, but either way, the widespread incomprehension of the planet’s geological history doesn’t bode well for public understanding of the science behind climate change.
Even unsentimental industry scientists hewed to the doubts expressed by their colleagues, although for different reasons. Most of the scientific expertise in the oil industry tends towards the geological disciplines. For geologists, a million years is nothing; the events they study occurred on scales of hundreds of millions and billions of years. In geological time, the climate has changed many times before. For some industry geologists, nongeologist humans are simply myopic, absurdly viewing the changing climate in terms of their own miniscule human time-scales.
“I myself am not particularly convinced by this climate story,” petroleum geologist Colin Campbell said.
I think the science is extraordinarily weak. I know in a geological sense there’s been huge epochs of global warming in the past, and the degree to which this one is due to Man’s activities—it almost certainly is to some degree, but. . . [w]e live in Europe in a very vulnerable place because the Gulf Stream comes rushing across the Atlantic. There’s a current down the Davis Strait, west of Greenland, and in times of warming the meltwaters deflect the Gulf Stream. It’s like blowing at the base of a flame, a relatively small lateral push on this current shifts this Gulf Stream a few degrees, and this has an astronomical effect on the climate of Europe. So if we observe great climate fluctuations in Europe it’s not to say they’re all man-made. It’s a vulnerable climatic condition because we’re so dependent on the Gulf Stream. And I mean after all, Aleric the Goth managed to sack Rome because the Rhine froze in 406, and I wouldn’t imagine this fellow was wanting to move south for any particular reason except that it got kind of tough at home, you know.44