The Age of Global Warming: A History

by Rupert Darwall

  Maurice Strong, recently appointed secretary-general of the Rio Earth Summit, described the evidence of global warming as ‘compelling, if not yet definitive’. It posed ‘the greatest threat ever to global security’. Action had to be taken before the scientific evidence was definitive, Strong told delegates. ‘It is not feasible to wait for the post mortem on planet earth to confirm our diagnosis. If there is ever an instance in which we must act in accordance with the precautionary principle, this surely is it.’[38]

  Michel Rocard, the French prime minister, declared that the time for words was over. ‘What we need now is action,’ Rocard told the conference. ‘The race against time is on. The very survival of our planet is at stake.’[39] Despite the appeal for action made at The Hague and the summits at Noordwijk and Bergen, ‘nothing decisive has yet been accomplished’. Beyond the problem of global warming, the world community faced a fundamental question on the enforcement of international environmental law. ‘What point is there in holding meetings and conducting research if there is no certainty that the standards we adopt and the commitments we enter into will actually be respected?’ Rocard asked.[40]

  Acknowledging the need for more research, Mrs Thatcher argued it should not be used as an excuse to delay ‘much needed’ action. ‘There is already a clear case for precautionary action at an international level,’ she said. ‘We must not waste time and energy disputing the IPCC’s report.’[41]

  Her argument did not impress The Times science correspondent Nigel Hawkes. ‘Computer models predicting temperature rises very much smaller than their proven margins of error are being used by a prime minister who claims to be a scientist as grounds for imposing economic sacrifices on the entire world,’ Hawkes wrote. ‘A couple of cold winters will take the froth off the debate, and allow us the time we need to discover whether or not the earth is really warming up.’[42]

  By this stage of her premiership, it says much for Thatcher’s commitment to global warming that she was dedicating so much time to it. The week before, Sir Geoffrey Howe, her nominal deputy, had resigned. Before the month was out, she was no longer prime minister. In retirement, her views on global warming appear to have evolved. Her last book Statecraft, published in 2002, speaks of her concern about anti-capitalist arguments deployed by campaigners against global warming and the lack of scientific advice available to leaders from experts who were doubtful of the global warming thesis.[43]

  These were not the sentiments of her Geneva speech, her last pronouncement on the subject as prime minister. Instead she used language straight out of the green lexicon, talking of the growing imbalance between ‘our species and other species, between population and resources, between humankind and the natural order.’[44] She called for as many countries as possible to negotiate a framework convention on climate change for agreement in 1992 with binding emissions cuts, following the lead taken by European governments. In this endeavour,

  the International [sic] Panel’s work should be taken as our sign post: and the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organisation as the principal vehicles for reaching our destination.[45]

  The IPCC did play the role Thatcher envisaged, but the WMO and UNEP – neither of which can be remotely described as purveyors of doubt about global warming that Thatcher said in her 2002 book was needed – were sidelined as negotiating vehicles. The G77 group of developing countries have more leverage within UN fora than inter-governmental arrangements, in which it is easier for OECD countries to hold sway.*

  The previous year, Brazil and Mexico had led an initiative to get increased representation with the formation of a special committee on the participation of developing countries. Both countries had objected to Bolin’s draft of the synthesis report. Frankly admitting that IPCC was a political bargaining process, the report was changed: ‘Recognising the poverty that prevails among the populations of developing countries, it is natural that they give priority to achieving economic growth,’ it now reads. ‘These sentences are of course politically inspired, but they are basically factual,’ Bolin explained.[46] Bolin was right. Since the 1972 Stockholm conference, this has been the consistent position of the G77 on environmental issues, right the way through the negotiations to hammer out UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 to the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009.

  In December 1990, UN General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change (INC). Four intensive rounds of negotiations in the course of 1991 were marked by procedural wrangles and failure to produce a draft negotiating text. A fifth round in February 1991 was marked by deadlock. According to Daniel Bodansky’s account of the INC negotiations, ‘States still seemed engaged in a battle of nerves, hoping that, with the Rio Summit fast approaching, the other side would blink first.’[47]

  In April – less than two months to go before the summit – INC chairman Jean Ripert held extended meetings with key participants in Paris. No one blinked.

  ‘Don’t go wobbly on me, George,’ Thatcher is reported to have told President Bush on facing down Saddam Hussein in 1990. On climate change, the Europeans wanted Bush to wobble. The prospect of the Rio Earth Summit without a convention on climate change was being taken right down to the wire.

  * With coal, the ratio of hydrogen to carbon is 0.5 to one; with natural gas, it is four to one, i.e., the proportion of carbon in natural gas is one-eighth that of coal.

  * Mostafa Tolba, UNEP executive director at the time, complained that governments took the preparation of the framework convention away from UNEP. ‘It has been speculated that the developed countries were not yet ready for the positive action and concrete action advocated by the UNEP executive director.’ Other than his testimony, there is little evidence to support this view. Mostafa K Tolba with Iwona Rummel-Bulska, Global Environmental Diplomacy: Negotiating Environmental Agreements for the World, 1973–1992 (1998), p. 95.

  [1] Bert Bolin, A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), p. 64.

  [2] ibid., p. 61.

  [3] ibid., pp. 61–2.

  [4] J.T. Houghton, G.J. Jenkins, J.J. Ephraums, Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment (1990), p. xii.

  [5] ibid., p. 199.

  [6] ibid., p. 233.

  [7] ibid., p. 243.

  [8] ibid.

  [9] ibid., p. 254.

  [10] ibid., p. xxiii.

  [11] ibid., p. xxv.

  [12] ibid., p. xi.

  [13] ibid., p. xxxix.

  [14] John Houghton, ‘World climate needs concerted action’ in the Financial Times, 10th November 2010.

  [15] Houghton, Jenkins, Ephraums, Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment (1990), p. xvii.

  [16] ibid., p. 202.

  [17] ibid., p. 48.

  [18] ibid., p. 78.

  [19] ibid., p. 79.

  [20] ibid., p. xxv.

  [21] ibid., p. 80.

  [22] ibid.

  [23] ibid., p. 80.

  [24] ibid., p. 73.

  [25] J.T. Houghton, Global Warming: The Complete Briefing (1994), p. 68.

  [26] ibid., p. 69.

  [27] Houghton, Jenkins, Ephraums, Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment (1990), p. 73.

  [28] ibid., p. 17.

  [29] ibid., p. xi.

  [30] P.D. Jones, D.E. Parker, T.J. Osborn, and K.R. Briffa (2010), ‘Global and hemispheric temperature anomalies – land and marine instrumental records’ in Trends: A Compendium of Data on Gl
obal Change, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tenn., U.S.A. doi: 10.3334/CDIAC/cli.002 http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/trends/temp/jonescru/global.txt

  [31] Sir John Houghton, interview with author, 10th May 2010.

  [32] Margaret Thatcher, Speech opening Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, 25th May 1990 http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108102

  [33] Marlise Simons, ‘Scientists urging gas emissions cuts’ in the New York Times, 5th November 1990.

  [34] Reuters News Service, ‘Expert says warming could spur starvation’ 25th October 1990.

  [35] Margaret Thatcher, Speech at Second World Climate Conference, 6th November 1990 http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108237

  [36] John Hunt, ‘World climate conference: Thatcher urges swift action on global warming’ in the Financial Times, 7th November 1990.

  [37] Marlise Simons, ‘US view prevails at climate parley’ in the New York Times, 8th November 1990.

  [38] Maurice Strong address to the Second World Climate Conference, November 1990, in J. Jäger and H.L. Ferguson (ed.), Climate Change: Science, Impacts and Policy: Proceedings of the Second World Climate Conference (1991), p. 434.

  [39] ibid., p. 519.

  [40] ibid., p. 522.

  [41] Thatcher’s speech at Second World Climate Conference, 6th November 1990 http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108237

  [42] Nigel Hawkes, ‘Is this really a scientist speaking?’ in The Times, 8th November 1990.

  [43] Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft, London (2002), pp. 451–2.

  [44] Thatcher’s speech at Second World Climate Conference, 6th November 1990 http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108237

  [45] ibid.

  [46] Bolin, A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), p. 68.

  [47] Daniel Bodansky, ‘Prologue to the Climate Change Convention’ in Irving M. Mintzer & J. Amber Leonard (ed.), Negotiating Climate Change: The Inside Story of the Rio Convention (1994), p. 67.

  15

  A House Divided

  I say this on climate change: we’re not going to enter into commitments we don’t keep.

  President Bush, 7th June 1992[1]

  Negotiations on the climate change framework convention were marked by what the head of India’s delegation described as a ‘fundamental and irresolvable difference’ between the US and European Community.[2] Apart from the INC’s first session, US negotiators maintained the line that they would not accept any text which bound them to timetables and targets for carbon dioxide emissions. Diluted formulations calling for countries to commit to measures ‘aimed at’ stabilising emissions were rejected.

  The negotiations stalled.

  Less than two months before the summit, British and American negotiators hammered out a compromise. Britain’s environment secretary, Michael Howard, was sent to Washington to persuade key members of the administration that the President could sign the convention.

  If history judges George H.W. Bush’s supreme achievement to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion, then global warming could have been designed to wrong foot him. In the post-Cold War New World Order, America found itself isolated. Fundamentally an internationalist, it would have been hard for Bush to stay away from the most numerous gathering of world leaders ever assembled. But there was no upside for him in going to Rio. Election year made the politics harder still and Bush did not have the political skills to pull it around. Bush lacked Nixon’s cynicism in his handling of the Stockholm conference twenty years earlier or Bill Clinton’s deftness in negotiating the Kyoto Protocol but not putting it to a vote in the Senate.

  In the 1988 election, the Bush campaign had decided that the environment was critical to winning key battleground states. To win suburban voters in these states, the strategy was to go to the right on tax, defence and crime and to the centre on childcare and the environment. On election night, exit polls gave Bush and Dukakis a dead heat on the environment and Bush wound up winning New Jersey, Illinois and California, the last Republican candidate to do so.[3]

  This was more than ‘read my lips’ campaign rhetoric. William Reilly, president of the Conservation Foundation, provided briefings to both presidential campaigns. Mostly ignored by the Dukakis camp, they were devoured by the Republicans. Bush hosted a dinner with leading environmental campaigners, the candidate sitting between Russell Train, who led the US delegation at the Stockholm conference, and Reilly. After the election, William Ruckelshaus, the Environmental Protection Agency’s first administrator, suggested to Bush he appoint Reilly to lead the EPA.

  Reilly became the first environmentalist to head the EPA. He would not have many allies in the administration, except the most important one. On one occasion, budget director Richard Darman commented, ‘The problem is we have an environmentalist running the EPA and,’ pointing to the Oval Office, ‘the bigger problem is we’ve got an environmentalist sitting in there.’[4] According to Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater, Bush regarded people like Atwater as necessary tools, but had come into politics to work with people like Reilly.[5] Bush’s interest in environmental policy was genuine, a conservationist in the mould of Teddy Roosevelt averse to command-and-control solutions to environmental problems.[6]

  The priority of the senior White House staff was different: improving America’s economic performance. With Bush mostly focused on foreign policy, Reilly’s was an isolated voice. Nonetheless, the Bush administration notched up a number of achievements, notably the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, which pioneered the use of tradable emissions permits.

  The prospect of the administration’s differences being played out under the floodlights of the Rio Earth Summit meant that, one way or another, the divergence between the environment candidate and the priority accorded the economy needed to be resolved. That posed a particular challenge for an administration held together by loyalty to the president and, when John Sununu was chief of staff, the discipline he exerted, rather than a shared sense of mission. Reilly recalls remarking to Barbara Bush at a social event on how well everyone got on with each other. ‘They’re all old friends, except for you Bill,’ the First Lady replied. ‘You’re the only one we didn’t know.’[7] When loyalty gave way to other agendas, as happened during the Rio conference, the result was spectacularly damaging.

  This vulnerability was accentuated by another. As a communicator, Bush did not use speeches to build a case, but to convey sentiments (‘a kinder, gentler nation’, most famously) or state policy positions (‘the day of the open cheque book is over’, with respect to the Earth Summit).[8] This mattered when the global warming policy adopted by the Bush administration ran counter to where the rest of the world was heading. It needed advocacy, but the administration had no advocate.

  Technically, the Bush White House was unusually well equipped to appraise the science and economics of global warming. Sununu held a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MIT and had worked on thermal transfer problems. Darman held a Harvard Ph.D. Robert Watson, who later worked in the Clinton White House and succeeded Bolin as chairman of the IPCC, described Sununu and Darman as ‘incredibly bright’.[9] Michael Boskin, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, had devoted much of his career as a Stanford professor to studying the interface between technology and the economy. Allan Bromley, the White House science adviser, was a nuclear physicist. (During his confirmation hearings, Al Gore tried to convince Bromley that Bromley did not understand the greenhouse effect.)[10] Bromley wrote a memoir of his time in the White House. There was no question that Sununu and Darman considered many of the claims of environmental activists to be seriously overblo
wn, ‘but they were prepared to listen to any reasonable argument. What they refused utterly to do was to stipulate that we were already in a crisis, as many of the activists demanded as a basis for discussion’.[11]

  Of them, Darman was the most sceptical. He first brought Hansen’s claims to Sununu’s attention.[12] Darman’s approach to micro-economic policy was much more conservative than on fiscal and size of government issues. He deployed a cost-benefit approach that a particular environmental measure would cost X thousand dollars per fish saved, a mode of analysis he’d learnt from David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director.[13]