If human behavior couldn’t be improved, perhaps the market could. His remedy was to make nations pay the true cost of carbon by levying a tax on emissions. By his calculation, the price came out to ten dollars a ton. A global carbon tax, however, required a global tax collector. And that would require an international treaty.
Which raised the question: Was a strong treaty possible, even under the most favorable of circumstances? Nordhaus didn’t think so. Nor did Michael Glantz, a political scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Writing in Nature in 1979 (“A Political View of CO2”), Glantz observed that politicians tended to take one of two approaches to major problems: “crisis management” or “muddling through.” Decisive action was only taken during a crisis, like the toxic smog that in the 1960s caused people to drop dead in the streets of major American cities and led to the passage of air pollution laws. Belated reforms were more expensive and far less effective than preventative action would have been, but that was how we addressed social problems: tardily, with half measures. Incremental dangers like air pollution were inevitably muddled through, since a society’s short-term needs (unfettered energy production) eclipsed long-term environmental consequences, no matter how cataclysmic. The only future worthy of consideration was the short term. The longest term of any elected office in America was six years.
Even if the world’s powers consented to negotiate a treaty, it was bound to be toothless, argued the German physicist-philosopher Klaus Meyer-Abich. Since every nation had its own set of interests, a global compromise would inevitably favor the minimal action. That was the lowest-common-denominator law of international diplomacy, and it was inflexible. But Meyer-Abich’s fatalism went deeper still. The oil crisis had already proved the dangers—environmental, geopolitical, and economic—of fossil fuel combustion. If that crisis, with its dramatic, sudden negative consequences, could not convince the world to transform its energy model, the more abstract and gradual threat of climate change had no chance. Some mitigation was possible, sure, at the margins, but only measures with other short-term economic benefits. By this logic, a binding treaty to reduce emissions seemed fantastical. Put another way, the only viable approach to the dawning existential crisis of climate change was to do nothing.
The Fatalists attended the major summits, like the World Climate Conference and a major carbon dioxide symposium held by the Energy Department in spring 1979. But when they spoke, no one seemed to listen. The physical scientists who dominated such meetings simply nodded along, waiting for the opportunity to resume debating the relative influences of radiative transfer and albedo. That was their field of expertise, after all—clouds, oceans, forests, the invisible world. And so it happened that the economists, philosophers, and political scientists came to feel that, no matter how forcefully they issued their warnings, they were becoming invisible themselves.
5.
A Very Aggressive Defensive Program
1979–1980
After the publication of the Charney report, Exxon decided to create its own carbon dioxide research program, with an annual budget of $600,000. But it wanted to ask a slightly different question than Jule Charney had. Exxon didn’t concern itself primarily with how much the world would warm. It wanted to know how much of the warming could be blamed on Exxon.
A manager in its research laboratory named Henry Shaw was convinced that the company needed a deeper understanding of the issue in order to influence future federal efforts to restrict emissions. “It behooves us to start a very aggressive defensive program,” Shaw wrote in a memo to a supervisor, laying out his case, “because there is a good probability that legislation affecting our business will be passed.”
Exxon had been tracking the carbon dioxide problem since before it was Exxon. In 1957, scientists from its predecessor, Humble Oil, published a study analyzing “the enormous quantity of carbon dioxide” contributed to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution “from the combustion of fossil fuels.” Even then, the notion that burning fossil fuels had increased the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere went unquestioned by Humble’s scientists. What was new, in the late fifties, was the effort to quantify what percentage of emissions had been contributed by the oil and gas industry. The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s largest trade association, had already begun similar studies—in 1955 it financed research by geochemists at the California Institute of Technology, who had found that fossil fuel combustion had increased the concentration of atmospheric carbon by about 5 percent.
The warnings continued. In December 1957, Edward Teller, who had led the development of the hydrogen bomb, told members of the American Chemical Society, which included engineers from oil and gas companies, that the exploitation of fossil fuels might bring about climate change; he repeated the message in 1959 at a centennial celebration of the American oil industry in New York City, organized by API and Columbia Business School. “When the temperature does rise by a few degrees over the whole globe,” he told the assembled dignitaries, “there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise.” In 1968, an API study conducted by the Stanford Research Institute concluded that the burning of fossil fuels would bring “significant temperature changes” by the year 2000. It was “ironic,” the study’s authors noted, that politicians, regulators, and environmentalists fixated on incidents of air pollution that were localized and immediately observable, while the climate crisis, which would cause damage of far more daunting severity and scale, went unheeded.
The ritual repeated itself every few years. Industry scientists, at the behest of their corporate bosses, reviewed the problem, finding good reasons for alarm and better excuses to do nothing. Why should they, when almost nobody within the United States government—nor, for that matter, within the environmental movement—seemed worried? As the National Petroleum Council put it in a 1972 report prepared for the Department of the Interior, climate changes would probably not be apparent “until at least the turn of the century.” The industry had enough emergencies already: antitrust legislation introduced by Senator Ted Kennedy; concerns about the health risks of gasoline; battles over the Clean Air Act; and the financial shock of benzene regulation, which increased the cost of every gallon of gas sold in America. Why take on an intractable problem that would not be detected until the current generation of employees was safely retired? Besides, the remedies seemed more punitive than the problem itself. Energy use, historically, had correlated to economic growth—the more fossil fuels we burned, the better our lives became. Why mess with that?
But the Charney report had changed the industry’s cost-benefit calculus. A formal consensus about the nature of the crisis had cohered. As Henry Shaw emphasized in his conversations with Exxon’s executives, the cost of inattention would rise in step with the Keeling curve.
To begin his very aggressive, defensive carbon dioxide program, Shaw turned to Wallace Broecker, a Columbia University oceanographer who was the second author of Roger Revelle’s 1965 carbon dioxide report for Lyndon Johnson. In 1977, in a presentation at the American Geophysical Union, Broecker predicted that fossil fuels would have to be restricted, either by taxation or by fiat. More recently, he had testified before Congress that carbon dioxide was “the No. 1 long-term environmental problem.” If presidents and senators trusted Broecker to tell them the bad news, Shaw figured that he would do for Exxon.
Broecker did not think much of Shaw’s first proposal for Exxon’s new program: testing the carbon levels in vintage bottles of French wine to chart the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide over time. Broecker did agree to collaborate with a colleague, Taro Takahashi, on a more ambitious experiment conducted on board one of Exxon’s largest supertankers, the Esso Atlantic, to determine how much carbon the oceans could absorb before coughing it back into the atmosphere. But the data came back a mess and the project was abandoned.
Shaw was running out of time. In 1978, an Exxon colleague
circulated an internal memo warning that humanity had only five to ten years before “hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” But Congress, as Shaw had anticipated, seemed ready to act a lot sooner than that. On April 3, 1980, Senator Paul Tsongas, a Massachusetts Democrat, held the first congressional hearing on carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere. Gordon MacDonald testified that the United States should “take the initiative” and develop, through the United Nations, a way to coordinate every nation’s energy policies to address the problem. That June, President Carter signed the Energy Security Act of 1980, which directed the National Academy of Sciences to start a multiyear, comprehensive study, to be detailed in a report called Changing Climate, that would analyze the social and economic consequences of climate change. Most urgently, the National Commission on Air Quality, at the request of Congress, invited two dozen experts, including Henry Shaw himself, to a meeting in Florida to develop climate legislation.
It appeared that some federal decree to restrict carbon emissions was inevitable. The Charney report had confirmed the diagnosis of the problem—a problem that Exxon helped create. Now Exxon would help shape the solution. Henry Shaw flew to Florida.
6.
Tiger on the Road
October 1980
Two days before Halloween, Rafe Pomerance traveled to a cotton candy castle in the Gulf of Mexico on a narrow spit of porous limestone that rose no higher than five feet above the sea. The Pink Palace, as locals called the Hotel Don CeSar, was a child’s daydream of birthday cake dimensions, its cantilevered planes of bubble gum stucco mounted by turrets with white cupolas like melting scoops of vanilla. It stood three miles off the Suncoast amid blooms of poisonwood and gumbo limbo, and at high tide the waves came within two hundred feet of the Buena Vista Bar, where the bartender served Pink Ladies. In its carnival of historical amnesia and childlike faith in the power of fantasy, the Pink Palace was a fine setting for the first rehearsal of a conversation that would be earnestly restaged, with little variation and increasing desperation, for the next four decades.
In the year and a half since he had read the coal report, Pomerance had attended countless conferences and briefings about the science of global warming. But nobody until now had shown much interest in the only subject that he cared about, the only subject that mattered: how to prevent warming. In one sense he had himself to thank. During the expansion of the Clean Air Act, he had pushed for the creation of the National Commission on Air Quality, charged with ensuring that the goals of the act were met. One such goal was a stable global climate. The Charney report made clear that goal was not being met and now the commission wanted to hear proposals for legislation. It was a profound responsibility and the two dozen experts at the Pink Palace—policy gurus, deep thinkers, an industry scientist, and an environmental activist—had only three days to achieve it, but the utopian setting made everything seem possible. The conference room, with its tall windows framing postcard views of the beach, looked better suited to hosting a debutante ball than a political roundtable. The sands were a confectionary shade of white, the surf was idle, the air unseasonably hot, and the dress code relaxed: sunglasses and guayaberas, jackets frowned upon.
“I have a very vested interest in this,” said State Representative Tom McPherson, a Florida Democrat, introducing himself to the delegation, “because I own substantial holdings fifteen miles inland of the coast, and any beachfront property appreciates in value.”
There was no formal agenda, just a young moderator from the EPA named Thomas Jorling and a few handouts on each seat, among them the Charney report. Jorling acknowledged the vagueness of their mission.
“We are flying blind, with little or no idea where the mountains are,” he said. But the stakes couldn’t be higher: a failure to recommend policy would be the same as endorsing the present policy—which was no policy. “Would anyone like to break the ice?” he asked, failing to grasp the pun.
“We might start out with an emotional question,” proposed Thomas Waltz, an economist at the National Climate Program. “The question is fundamental to being a human being: Do we care?”
This provoked huffy consternation.
“In caring or not caring,” said John Laurmann, a Stanford engineer who had briefed Henry Shaw and other oil and gas industry scientists on the climate problem, “I would think the main thing is the timing.” It was not an emotional question, in other words, but an economic one: How much did we value the future?
We have less time than we realize, said an MIT nuclear engineer named David Rose, who studied how civilizations responded to large technological crises. “People leave their problems until the eleventh hour, the fifty-ninth minute,” he said. “And then: ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’”
It was a promising beginning, Pomerance thought. Urgent, detailed, clear-eyed. Why had it taken so long to put a group like this together?
John Perry, a meteorologist who had worked as a staffer on the Charney report, proposed an old schoolboy trick: they should solve the problem backward. “Suppose by some mechanism the world has managed to control the growth in atmospheric CO2 levels by sometime in the first part of the next century,” he said. “Then ask: How could that have come about?”
There was general agreement that some kind of international treaty would be needed to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide at a safe level. But nobody could agree on what that level was. And any policy that restricted the use of energy would cause trouble.
“Changes in how we are able to burn things, how we get our fuel,” agreed the EPA’s John Hoffman, “have tremendous destabilizing effects on society.”
And if the United States did act, what good would it do? William Elliott, a NOAA scientist, introduced some hard facts: If the whole country stopped burning carbon that year, it would delay the arrival of the doubling threshold by only five years. If the entire Western world somehow managed to stabilize emissions, it would forestall the inevitable by eight years. The only way to avoid the worst was to stop burning coal. Yet China, the Soviet Union, and the United States, by far the world’s three largest coal producers, were frantically accelerating extraction.
“Do we have a problem?” asked Anthony Scoville, a Republican appointee on the House science committee. “We do, but it is not the atmospheric problem. It is the political problem of the inertia of the economic and political system and the time it takes to get decisions put into effect.” He doubted that it was possible for a scientist to produce a study that would convince politicians to act. The whole model was screwy. When had science alone ever forced the passage of a bill?
Pomerance found himself staring out at the beach, where the occasional tourist dawdled in the surf. Outside of the lurid pink hotel, few Americans realized that the planet would soon cease to resemble itself.
What if the problem, continued Scoville, was that they were thinking of it as a problem? Might it not be better to think about it as a solution—to economic stagnation, the traumas of Saudi oil, and air and water pollution? Even if the coal and oil industries collapsed, new energy technologies, like solar, would thrive, and the broader economy would be healthier for it. Now Carter was planning to invest $80 billion in synthetic-fuel development. “My God,” said Scoville, “with $80 billion, you could have a photovoltaics industry going that would obviate the need for synfuels forever!”
The talk of ending oil production stirred for the first time the gentleman from Exxon. “I think there is a transition period,” said Henry Shaw. “We are not going to stop burning fossil fuels and start looking toward solar or nuclear fusion and so on. We are going to have a very orderly transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.”
“We are talking about some major fights in this country,” said Waltz, the economist. “We had better be thinking this thing through.”
But first—lunch. It was a bright day, in the low 80s, and the group voted to break for more than three hours to take advantage of the high Florida s
un. Pomerance couldn’t—he was restless. He had refrained from speaking, happy to let others lead the discussion, provided it moved in the right direction. But the high-minded talk had stalled into fecklessness and pusillanimity. He reflected that, as with most meetings on the subject, he was just about the only participant without an advanced degree. But few of these policy geniuses seemed to have much sense. They understood what was at stake, but they hadn’t taken it to heart. They remained cool, detached—pragmatists overmatched by a problem that had no pragmatic resolution. “Prudence,” Jorling had said, “is essential.” But prudence was suicidal.
After lunch, Jorling tried to focus the conversation. What did they need to know in order to act?
David Slade, who as the director of the Energy Department’s $200 million Office of Carbon Dioxide Effects had probably considered the question as deeply as anyone in the room, said he figured that at some point, probably within their lifetimes, they would see the warming themselves.
“And at that time,” bellowed Pomerance, “it will be too late to do anything about it.”
Yet nobody could agree what to do now. There was talk of disincentives to fossil fuel combustion and incentives to develop renewable energy. Anthony Scoville worried about the politicization of the issue once legislation or treaties were proposed. John Perry suggested they might request that American energy policy “take into account” the risks of global warming, though he acknowledged that a nonbinding measure might seem “intolerably stodgy.”
Losing Earth Page 4