Losing Earth

by Nathaniel Rich

  The tide is rushing in,

  All the world is drowning,

  To wash away the sin.

  —TINY TIM, “THE OTHER SIDE,” 1967

  I asked William Reilly whether he believed that John Sununu was the only person standing in the way of a binding international agreement to prevent catastrophic global warming.

  “Yes,” he said. “And no.”

  Sununu’s obstruction was critical, Reilly granted, at a time when there was little concerted opposition from any quarter, public support for climate policy was at an all-time high, the IPCC process received vocal bipartisan support, and a binding treaty along the terms broadly agreed on at Noordwijk would have kept planetary warming to 1.5 degrees.

  But the negotiation of the first IPCC accord continued for another two and a half years before it was finalized at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the largest gathering of world leaders in history. (Reilly led the U.S. delegation; George H. W. Bush, after some equivocation, attended.) At any point Bush could have demanded a binding treaty, and likely compelled one: the United States, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, not only dominated the world order economically and militarily, but was responsible annually for more than one-third of humanity’s carbon emissions. Bush’s chief scientist, D. Allan Bromley, after his week with Reilly in Noordwijk, grew increasingly supportive of major climate policy, pushing Bush to reconsider carbon taxes and cap-and-trade plans; others in the administration joked that Reilly had brainwashed him. And in the final, critical six months of negotiation, John Sununu was powerless to protest: he resigned in December 1991, after an impressive run of effrontery that began when he was caught taking military aircraft to a dental appointment in New Hampshire.

  By then, however, Bush’s entire economic council had turned, having consolidated behind the position that the benefits of emissions cuts should be weighed against immediate economic costs. And those costs needed to be calculated—slowly and deliberately. At one meeting in the White House, a member of the economic council cautioned Bush against allowing environmentalists, who used a very different strain of cost-benefit analysis, to dictate the terms of a treaty. “Mr. President,” he warned, “this is a bet-your-economy decision.”

  Even if one grants that Sununu can be blamed entirely for Noordwijk and, by extension, the thwarting of a binding global treaty, the easy success of his obstruction poses a more unsettling question: Why was support for a climate remedy so shallow that all it took was a single naysayer within the Bush administration to unravel it?

  I asked Sununu the same question I asked Reilly. Had it not been for you, I asked, would we have had an effective global warming treaty? If you had argued with the same force in favor of a binding climate treaty, might we have one today?

  “It couldn’t have happened,” Sununu told me, “because the leaders in the world at that time were all looking to seem like they were supporting the policy without having to make hard commitments that would cost their nations serious resources. That was the dirty little secret at the time.” The IPCC process, he believes, was a face-saving act of meaningless symbolism that could lead to nothing but false promises. Even if the United States had signed a strict treaty, Sununu is convinced that it wouldn’t have had any bearing on emissions levels.

  Allan Bromley had evidence of this firsthand, or so he claimed in a memoir published shortly before his death in 2005. At Noordwijk, he found the lack of both economic and technical understanding “astonishing.” When he asked delegates from the major European nations how they intended to stabilize their greenhouse gas emissions, they could not answer. “Who knows?” one of them told him. “After all, it’s only a piece of paper and they don’t put you in jail if you don’t actually do it.”

  Thus the syllogism of binding global treaties: There is no global police force, and no appetite for economic sanctions or military action triggered by a failure to meet emissions targets, so we can only enforce ourselves. And if we are willing to enforce ourselves, what need for a binding treaty? John Sununu: “The other nations were saying we’ll ride the horse, and since we don’t have to make any commitments, we can look like we’re on board. And frankly, that’s about where we are today.”

  * * *

  Where we are today: More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since November 7, 1989, the final day of the Noordwijk conference, than in the entire history of civilization preceding it. Earth is now as warm as it was before the last ice age, 115,000 years ago, when the seas were more than twenty feet higher. In 1990, humankind emitted more than 20 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. In 2018, we were projected to have produced 37.1 billion metric tons—a record. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the world’s fastest-growing energy source has been coal. Despite every action taken since the Charney report—the treasure invested in research and renewable energy, the nonbinding treaties, commitments, and pledges—the only number that counts, the total quantity of emitted greenhouse gases, has continued its inexorable rise.

  Our understanding of the problem hasn’t changed substantially during this time. Ken Caldeira, at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, has a habit of asking new graduate students to name the largest fundamental breakthrough in climate physics since 1979. It’s a trick question. There has been no breakthrough. As with any mature scientific discipline, there is only refinement. The computer models grow more precise; the regional analyses sharpen; the estimates solidify into observational data. The inaccuracies have inclined toward understatement. Caldeira’s own research has shown that the world is warming more quickly than most climate models have predicted. He found that the toughest emissions reductions so far proposed will probably fail to achieve “any given global temperature stabilization target.”

  The political story hasn’t changed greatly either, except in its particulars. Sununu is correct that, to this day, even some of the nations that have advocated most aggressively for climate policy—among them the Netherlands, Canada, Denmark, and Australia—have failed to honor their own commitments. William Nordhaus has diagnosed the problem succinctly: “Countries have strong incentives to proclaim lofty and ambitious goals—and then to ignore these goals and go about business as usual.” Only seven countries are close to limiting emissions at the level necessary to keep warming to 2 degrees: India, the Philippines, Gambia, Morocco, Ethiopia, Costa Rica, and Bhutan. When it comes to the United States, which has not deigned to make any binding commitments whatsoever, the dominant narrative for the last quarter century has concerned the unrestrained efforts of the fossil fuel industry, compounded by the ingratiating abetment of the Republican Party, to suppress scientific fact, confuse the public, and bribe politicians.

  The mustache-twirling depravity of these campaigns has left the impression that the industry always operated thus. But while the Exxon scientists and American Petroleum Institute clerics of the seventies and eighties were hardly good Samaritans, they did not initiate multimillion-dollar disinformation campaigns, pay scientists to prevaricate, or try to brainwash elementary school children, as their successors would. The germ of this onslaught can be traced to Jim Hansen’s testimony before Congress on June 23, 1988. After Exxon’s Duane LeVine consulted on strategy with a public relations officer, he gave a presentation on the greenhouse effect to Exxon’s board of directors in February 1989, emphasizing “the uncertainty in scientific conclusions.” LeVine predicted that global warming policy would closely follow the trajectory of atmospheric ozone policy, speculating—correctly, it would turn out—that a global treaty would be finalized in 1992. Such a treaty, he maintained, should avoid adopting “Draconian” policies that might lead to “premature limitations on fossil fuels,” since the projections concerning the magnitude and timing of global warming could not be trusted. He did endorse, however, pursuing measures that reduced carbon emissions while offering other economic and environmental benefits—energy conservation, reforestation, and the development of renewable forms of energy—much a
s Irving Mintzer had proposed at the American Petroleum Institute the previous year, and Rafe Pomerance had proposed at the Pink Palace in 1980.

  Terry Yosie drafted API’s own initial “Position on Global Climate Change” in July 1989. It echoed LeVine’s arguments almost exactly—warning against “premature” and potentially “counterproductive” policies “based on today’s limited understanding of the issue,” while advocating for “measures that will reduce the threat of climate change, yet also make sense in their own right.”

  In February 1990, two months after Noordwijk, these twin statements became the default position of the global petroleum industry. Exxon’s LeVine, it so happened, served as chairman of the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association’s working group on climate change, the industry’s liaison to the IPCC. Yosie was another member of the group; they were joined by Exxon’s climate expert, Brian Flannery, and men from Shell, Texaco, BP, and Saudi Aramco. The Exxon and API position papers were included in the briefing booklet the group prepared for members of the IPCC. The industry’s stance at the time was, as Yosie put it to me, echoing Henry Shaw, “defensive”; the idea was to match skepticism with accommodation, in the hope of moderating policy changes that seemed inevitable.

  But a more combative approach was simultaneously being piloted, without oversight or even much forethought. Of the approximately $100,000 API budgeted to carbon dioxide policy after the Hansen hearing, a small fraction went toward establishing a lobbying organization called, in an admirable flourish of newspeak, the Global Climate Coalition. Initially run out of the offices of the National Association of Manufacturers, it was joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and thirteen other trade associations, including those representing the coal, electric-grid, and automobile industries—though membership soon increased several-fold. The GCC was conceived as a reactive body, to share news of any proposed regulations, but on a whim it added a press campaign, to be coordinated by API’s own communications shop, led by Charles Sandler, a veteran lobbyist, and Arthur Wiese, formerly the Houston Post Washington bureau chief and president of the National Press Club. They gave a few briefings to pal politicians and contacted scientists who had professed doubts about global warming. The latter included Fred Singer and Patrick Michaels from UVA, leading skeptics during the ozone-depletion debate; and an MIT meteorologist, Richard Lindzen, the son of refugees from Nazi Germany, who shared John Sununu’s anxieties about the exploitation of science by authoritarian ideologies. For an original op-ed, API offered $2,000.

  In October 1989, comments from GCC scientists began to surface in national publications. They gave an issue that lacked controversy a convenient fulcrum. “You know very well we can’t predict the weather with any certainty,” Lindzen said “with a chuckle,” in a major AP report claiming that “many respected scientists say the available evidence doesn’t warrant the doomsday warnings.” It was a useful refrain: the skeptics’ scientific arguments were tidily debunked, but their broad characterization of the views of “the scientific community” went unquestioned. The Times published a letter from Singer claiming that there was “considerable doubt in the scientific community about the greenhouse climate warming.” Forbes devoted its cover to “The Global Warming Panic,” and even Newsweek, which had published frequent reports on the subject for two years, was prompted to ask, “Is It All Just Hot Air?” The journalistic fetish for balanced coverage was easily exploited. Despite the sudden preponderance of articles about the “doubt in the scientific community,” Science in 1991 placed the total number of “outspoken greenhouse dissidents” in the United States at “a half-dozen or so.”

  Cheap and effective, GCC-like front groups began to proliferate, their cynicism laid bare by their parodic names: Citizens for the Environment, the Information Council on the Environment (ICE), the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, the Cooler Heads Coalition, the Global Climate Information Project, and the George C. Marshall Institute, named after the great architect of American-led multilateralism. The last, founded in 1984 to support Reagan’s hawkish nuclear policy, was directed for a period by Robert Jastrow, Jim Hansen’s first boss at NASA, and counted William Nierenberg, chairman of the Changing Climate report, among its leading members. (Nierenberg told an interviewer in 1996 that he believed serious consequences of climate change would not be felt for 150 years and expected that technological innovation would solve the problem before that, most likely through the substitution of nuclear energy for fossil fuels.) The corporations that funded these groups together represented the lion’s share of the gross domestic product.

  Investments in persuasion peddling rose to the level of a line item during the run-up to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, where Bush refused for the final time to commit to specific emissions reductions. The following year, after President Bill Clinton proposed an energy tax in the hope of meeting the goals of the Rio treaty, API’s number two, William O’Keefe, assumed control of the GCC and directed a $1.8 million API investment in a GCC disinformation campaign. Senate Democrats from oil and coal states joined Republicans to defeat Clinton’s tax proposal, which was widely blamed for the Democrats’ rout in the midterm congressional elections in 1994—the first time the Republicans had won control of both houses in forty years. Through the rest of the decade, the GCC spent at least $1 million a year to crush public support for climate policy.

  The IPCC process continued, however, ahead of a 1997 summit in Kyoto. Timothy Wirth, who retired from the Senate after serving one term, led the American delegation as undersecretary of state for global affairs; he was joined by Rafe Pomerance, who had been named deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs. Every effort by Wirth’s delegation to win support for emissions reductions and carbon trading brought poisonous attacks from industry and the Republican Party, coordinated by the GCC. Clinton and Gore, though supportive of Wirth’s efforts, failed to win over the opposition even within their own administration, particularly among their economic advisers. Though the U.S. delegation endorsed the Kyoto Protocol—committing its parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in about two decades by an average of 5 percent—it was never submitted to Congress for ratification. After the GCC spent $13 million on a single ad campaign, the Senate voted on a preemptive resolution declaring its opposition to a treaty. It passed 95–0. There has not been another serious effort to negotiate a binding global climate agreement since. The closer we have come to taking action, the sharper the backlash, the more abased the retreat.

  The GCC disbanded in 2002 after the defection of several major members who had grown embarrassed by its tactics; one senior Shell employee said, “We didn’t want to fall into the same trap as the tobacco companies who have become trapped in all their lies.” Besides, those lies weren’t required anymore. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who for the previous five years had been CEO of the oil-services behemoth Halliburton, had beaten Gore and won the White House. By that point, emboldened by their undefeated record against climate policy over the previous decade, the GCC and its sister groups had made a subtle, if audacious, correction to their public relations strategy. No longer did they emphasize uncertainty in the “magnitude and timing” of climate change, while ceding the potential for worst-case scenarios. Now they pushed a wilder claim: that the fundamental science of climate change, established by Tyndall and Arrhenius in the nineteenth century, ratified by Jule Charney’s group in 1979, and confirmed by every major study since, was itself uncertain—a rhetorical feint akin to a historian who turns from arguing that slavery was not the primary cause of the Civil War to arguing that slavery did not exist. Though George W. Bush himself acknowledged that climate change was real and vowed (however disingenuously) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and during the 2008 presidential campaign the Republican nominee John McCain called for a mandatory limit on U.S. emissions, the cult of denialism overtook much of the Republican Party after Barack
Obama’s inauguration. The Senate, with a fifty-nine-seat Democratic majority, declined to take up comprehensive climate legislation in 2009, despite passage in the House. In that year alone, the oil and gas industry spent about half a billion dollars on lobbying efforts to weaken energy legislation.

  The largest donor to that lobbying campaign was ExxonMobil, which in 2008, under pressure from shareholders—including members of the Rockefeller family, who later brought a lawsuit—had announced that it would no longer fund “public policy research groups” that advanced climate skepticism. But ExxonMobil has continued to do so to this day, even as it places national television advertisements featuring attractive young scientists experimenting with green algae. This has made the company an especially vulnerable target for the wave of compensatory litigation that began in earnest in 2015 and may last a generation. In recent years, tort lawsuits have become a possible remedy, as the science of attributing regional effects to global emissions has grown more precise; other cases have made use of the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Fifth and Ninth Amendments, the Take Care Clause, the Separations of Power Doctrine, and the Public Trust Doctrine. This is one subfield of climate science that has advanced significantly since 1979—the assignment of blame.

  The rallying cry of this multipronged legal effort is “Exxon knew.” It is incontrovertibly true that senior employees at Exxon, and its predecessor, Humble Oil, like those at many other major oil and gas corporations, knew about the dangers of climate change at least as early as the 1950s and did nothing to reduce emissions. But it is also true that the automobile industry, responsible for nearly one-fifth of U.S. carbon emissions, knew. That industry has studied the issue since the 1970s; GM, to take one example, hosted a scientific workshop on the greenhouse effect in 1981, sent a vice president to attend the Changing Climate gala, and employed for most of the decade a respected atmospheric scientist, Ruth Reck, to oversee its climate change research. The electric utilities, responsible for 29 percent of national emissions, have also known since the 1970s, when their trade research association, the Electric Power Research Institute, began conducting studies on the subject. They all own responsibility for our current paralysis and have made it much more painful than necessary. But they haven’t done it alone.