Losing Earth

by Nathaniel Rich

  Still Sununu seethed at any mention of the subject. He had taken it upon himself to make a formal study of the greenhouse effect; he would have a rudimentary, one-dimensional general circulation model installed on his personal desktop computer. He decided that Hansen’s models were horribly imprecise, “technical poppycock” that failed adequately to account for the ocean’s capacity to mitigate warming. He complained about them to Darman and D. Allan Bromley, a nuclear physicist from Yale whom, at Sununu’s recommendation, Bush had named science adviser. Hansen’s models, Sununu groused, didn’t begin to justify such wild-eyed pronouncements as “the greenhouse effect is here” or that the 1988 heat waves could be attributed to global warming. God forbid they be used as the basis for national economic policy. Darman and Bromley nodded along.

  When a junior staffer in the Energy Department, in a White House meeting with Sununu and Reilly, mentioned in passing an initiative to reduce fossil fuel use, Sununu interrupted her.

  “Why in the world would you need to reduce fossil fuel use?”

  “Because of climate change,” the young woman replied, uncertain.

  Sununu went incandescent. “I don’t want anyone in this administration without a scientific background using ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ ever again,” he said. “If you don’t have a technical basis for policy, don’t run around making decisions on the basis of newspaper headlines.”

  After the meeting, Reilly caught up to the staffer in the hallway. She was shaken.

  “Don’t take it personally,” Reilly told her. “Sununu might have been looking at you. But that was directed at me.”

  Relations between Sununu and Reilly became openly adversarial. Reilly had worked well with real estate developers and executives from the chemical and energy industries. But he had never encountered anyone like Sununu. Reilly’s conservative bona fides meant nothing to Sununu, who considered him a creature of the environmental lobby: a lawyer and an urban planner by training who was trying to impress his pals at the EPA without having a basic grasp of the science. Most unforgivable of all was Reilly’s propensity to gossip to the press any time internal decisions went badly for him. Whenever Reilly submitted to the White House candidates for openings at the EPA, Sununu vetoed them. He didn’t trust Reilly to negotiate on behalf of the administration, so when it came time for the major conference in the Netherlands, where it was expected that the world’s environmental ministers would endorse the IPCC process, Sununu decided to send Allan Bromley to accompany Reilly.

  Reilly, ever conciliatory, didn’t entirely blame Sununu for Bush’s indecision on a climate treaty. The president had never taken a particularly vigorous interest in global warming. He had not discussed the issue at depth with scientists. (When scientists offered to brief the White House, they reported to Sununu.) Bush had brought up global warming on the campaign trail only after hunting through a briefing booklet for a new issue that might get him some positive press. When Reilly tried in person to persuade him to take action, Bush deferred to Sununu and Baker. Why don’t the three of you work it out, the president said. Let me know when you decide.

  But by the time Reilly landed in the Netherlands, he suspected that it was already too late.

  21.

  Skunks at the Garden Party

  November 1989

  Rafe Pomerance awoke at sunlight and stole out of his hotel, making for the flagpoles. It was nearly freezing—November 6 on the coast of the North Sea in the Dutch resort town of Noordwijk—but the wind had yet to gust and the photographer was waiting. More than sixty flags lined the strand between the hotel and the beach, one for each nation in attendance at the first major diplomatic summit on global warming. The environmental ministers would review the progress made by the IPCC and decide whether to endorse a framework for a global treaty. There was a general sense among the delegates that they would agree to the target proposed by the host, the Dutch minister—freezing greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2000—which, after all, was more modest than the Toronto number. If the meeting was a success, it might encourage the IPCC to accelerate its negotiations and finalize a treaty more quickly. At the very least, the ministers planned to approve a binding target of emissions reductions. The energy in the seaside hotel was high, nearly giddy. After more than a decade of fruitless international meetings, they would finally sign an agreement that meant something.

  Pomerance had not been among the four hundred delegates invited to Noordwijk. But together with three young activists—Daniel Becker of the Sierra Club, Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Stewart Boyle from Friends of the Earth—he had formed his own impromptu delegation. Their constituency, they liked to say, was the climate itself. Their mission was to pressure the delegates to include in the final conference statement, which would be used as the basis for a global treaty, the target proposed in Toronto: a 20 percent reduction of greenhouse gas combustion by 2005. It was the only measure that mattered, the amount of emissions reductions, and the Toronto number was the strongest target yet to have been widely embraced. With the ministers’ endorsement, it would be a step closer to becoming global law.

  The activists booked their own travel and doubled up in rooms at a beat-up motel down the beach. They managed to secure all-access credentials from the Dutch environmental ministry’s press secretary. He was inclined to be sympathetic because it had been rumored that Allan Bromley, who was tagging along with William Reilly, might try to persuade the delegates from Japan and the Soviet Union to join him in resisting the idea of a binding agreement. There had been concern in recent weeks that something like this might happen; “Sununu is winning,” Senator Wirth had told The Washington Post. On October 18, John Chafee and four other Republican senators (Rudy Boschwitz of Minnesota, Slade Gorton of Washington, James Jeffords of Vermont, and Robert Packwood of Oregon) wrote a stern, at times patronizing letter to Bush about the Noordwijk meeting. They urged him to direct his negotiators to propose a “forceful and specific agenda” on global warming. “Unless you provide personal leadership on this issue,” they wrote, “the United States will continue to send mixed signals to the world community and will put forth proposals that will be subject to criticism at home and abroad.” A successful negotiation, they stipulated, had to include commitments to freeze U.S. carbon dioxide emissions at current levels, establish specific targets for reductions, and assist developing countries to use renewable sources of energy. If the government failed to enact “an aggressive domestic policy on carbon dioxide emissions,” it could not expect other nations to act accordingly. The Republican senators called their proposal “the Bush plan” and offered the president permission to claim it as his own. Forty Democratic senators sent their own letter the next week.

  Following these intercessions, Bush renewed his promise that the United States would “play a leadership role in global warming.” Even Sununu seemed to have softened. On October 30, the day before Reilly and Bromley were to leave for the Noordwijk meeting, they accompanied Sununu to the Mayflower Hotel, where he was to address international investors in the American Stock Exchange. He devoted most of the speech to explaining why there had to be a coordinated international response to the threat of climate change. When an investor asked who would pick up the cost, Sununu, with undisguised imperiousness, produced the complementary rejoinder: “Who picks up the cost if we don’t fulfill our responsibilities as stewards of the environment?” Yes, he acknowledged, climate policy would incur some expense in the short term, “but if it is done constructively, the long-term cost will be less by doing it right now than it will be by trying to retreat from a disaster fifty or a hundred years from now.”

  But upon arrival in Noordwijk, Bromley appeared to be shrugging all this off. The Dutch were especially concerned about this development, as even a minor rise in sea level would swamp much of their nation.

  Pomerance and his crew planned to stage a stunt each day to embarrass Bromley. The first took place at the flagpole
s. Performing for the photographer from Agence France-Presse, Boyle and Becker lowered the Japanese, Soviet, and American flags to half-staff. Becker gave a reporter an outraged statement, accusing the three nations of conspiring to block the one action necessary to save the planet. The article appeared on front pages across Europe.

  On the second day, Pomerance and Becker met an official from Kiribati, an island nation of thirty-three atolls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean about halfway between Hawaii and Australia. They asked if he was Kiribati’s environmental minister.

  “Kiribati is a very small place,” the man said. “I’m the environmental minister. I’m the science minister. I’m everything. If the sea rises, my entire nation will be underwater.”

  Pomerance and Becker exchanged a look. “If we set up a news conference,” asked Pomerance, “will you tell them what you just told us?”

  Within minutes they had rounded up a couple dozen journalists.

  “There is no place on Kiribati taller than my head,” began the minister, who was about five feet tall. “So when we talk about one-foot sea level rise, that means the water is up to my shin.”

  He pointed to his shin.

  “Two feet,” he said, “that’s my thigh.”

  He pointed to his thigh.

  “Three feet, that’s my waist.”

  He pointed to his waist.

  “Am I making myself clear?”

  Pomerance and Becker were ecstatic. The minister came over to them. “Is that what you had in mind?” he asked.

  It was a good start—and necessary too. Pomerance had the plunging sensation that the momentum of the previous year was under threat. The censorship of Hansen’s testimony and the inexplicably strident opposition from John Sununu were unsettling signs. So were the findings of a report Pomerance had recently commissioned at the World Resources Institute, tracking global greenhouse gas emissions. The United States was the largest contributor by far, producing nearly a quarter of the world’s carbon emissions, and its contribution was growing faster than that of every other country. Bush’s indecision, or inattention, had already managed to delay ratification of a treaty until 1990 at the soonest, perhaps even 1991. By then, Pomerance worried, it would be too late.

  The one meeting to which Pomerance’s atmospheric delegation could not gain admittance was the only one that mattered: the final negotiation. The scientists and IPCC staff members were asked to leave; only the environmental ministers—and Allan Bromley—remained. Pomerance and the other activists staked out the carpeted hallway outside the conference room, waiting and thinking. Incredible as it seemed to Pomerance, it had been a decade since he helped warn the White House of the dangers posed by fossil fuel combustion; nine years since his first desperate efforts, at a fairy-tale castle in the Gulf of Mexico, to write legislation, reshape American energy policy, and demand that the United States lead an international campaign to arrest climate change. It had been a year since he devised the first emissions target proposed at a major international conference. Now, at the dawning of the decade, senior diplomats from more than sixty nations were debating the merits of a binding global treaty. But Pomerance was powerless to participate. As he stared at the wall separating him from the ministers’ muffled debate, he could only hope that all his work had been enough.

  The meeting began in the morning and continued into the night, much longer than expected; most of the delegates had come to Noordwijk prepared to sign the Dutch proposal. To use the bathroom, the diplomats had to exit the conference room and negotiate the hallway, squeezing past the activists; each time the doors opened and a minister darted out, the activists leapt up, demanding an update. The ministers maintained a studied silence, but as the negotiations went past midnight, their aggravation was recorded in their stricken faces and opened collars. Some time later, the Swedish minister surfaced.

  “What’s happening?” shouted Becker, for the hundredth time.

  “Your government,” said the minister, “is fucking this thing up!”

  When, close to dawn, the beaten delegates finally emerged, Becker and Pomerance learned what had happened. Bromley, at the bidding of John Sununu and with the acquiescence of Britain, Japan, and the Soviet Union, had forced the conference to abandon the commitment to freeze emissions. The final statement noted only that “many” nations supported stabilizing emissions—but it did not indicate which nations, or at what level, or by what deadline. And with that, a decade of excruciating, painful, exhilarating progress turned to air.

  The environmentalists spent the morning giving interviews and writing press releases. “You must conclude the conference is a failure,” said Becker, calling the dissenting nations “the skunks at the garden party.” Greenpeace called it a “disaster.” In Washington, Al Gore mocked Bush on the floor of the Senate: for all the brave talk about “the White House effect,” the president was practicing the “whitewash effect.” The United States had proved itself “not a leader, but a delinquent partner,” said Timothy Wirth. “I am embarrassed.”

  Pomerance tried to be more diplomatic. “The president made a commitment to the American people to deal with global warming,” he told The Washington Post, “and he hasn’t followed it up.” He didn’t want to sound defeated. “There are some good building blocks here,” he said, and he meant it. The Montreal Protocol, the ozone agreement, wasn’t perfect at first either—it had huge loopholes and weak restrictions. Once in place, however, the restrictions could be tightened. Perhaps the same could happen with climate change. Perhaps. Pomerance was not one for pessimism. As William Reilly told reporters, dutifully defending the official position forced upon him, it was the first time that the United States had formally endorsed the concept of an emissions limit. Pomerance wanted to believe that this was progress. To do so, however, he’d have to forget everything he’d learned since opening the pages of the coal report. He had been brave enough to tell the truth about Earth’s future to Congress, to three presidents, to the world. But there was a limit to what he dared to tell himself.

  Before leaving the Netherlands, he joined the other activists for a final round of drinks and commiseration. He knew that he would have to return to Washington the following day and start all over again. The IPCC’s next policy-group meeting would take place in Edinburgh in two months, and there was already concern that the Noordwijk failure might lower the members’ expectations for a treaty. But Pomerance refused to be dejected—there was no point to it. The other activists were more visibly disappointed but they shared his resolve. Alden Meyer would testify a few days later alongside Allan Bromley at a Senate hearing called by John Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts, to investigate why the United States had failed to sign a strong statement at Noordwijk. “I think a simple slogan might describe the situation today,” Meyer would say. “While Bush fiddles, the earth warms.” Stewart Boyle would go back to London and finish editing a report, to be published in January, showing that major cuts in carbon emissions could be achieved cheaply—“a message,” he would say, “which strengthens the case for unilateral action rather than waiting for international agreements.” And Daniel Becker was going to resume a Sierra Club campaign to raise automobile fuel standards. But mainly he was anxious to rejoin his wife. They had just learned that she was pregnant with their first child.

  She had traveled with Becker to the Netherlands to visit friends ahead of the conference. Their hosts took them on a day trip to the southwestern province of Zeeland, where three rivers emptied into the sea. After a flood in 1953, when the sea swallowed much of the region, killing more than two thousand people, the defiant Dutch built the Delta Works, a vast fortress of movable barriers, dams, and sluice gates. It was astonishing to behold: a masterpiece of human ingenuity and imagination. All week in Noordwijk, Becker couldn’t stop talking about it. The whole Delta Works could be locked into place within ninety minutes, a concrete-and-steel force field defending the land against storm surge. It reduced the country’s exposure to the sea by 4
35 miles. The United States coastline was about 95,000 miles long. How long was the entire terrestrial coastline? Because the whole world, Becker said, was going to need this. He said that in Zeeland he had seen the future.

  Afterword: Glass-Bottomed Boats

  You say I’m lost,

  I disagree.

  The map has changed,

  And with it, me.

  Gliding through the seaweed,

  What strange things I see below.

  Cars are waiting,

  Windshields wiping,

  Nowhere left to go!

  The ice caps are melting,

  Oh ho, ho ho!

  All the world is drowning,

  Ho, ho ho, ho ho!

  The ice caps are melting,