The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

by Daniel Yergin

  One of the recipients of the MacDonald-Pomerance briefings was Gus Speth, chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality. Speth asked for a report short enough for policymakers. The authors were those at the forefront of global-warming study—Charles Keeling, Roger Revelle, George Woodwell, and Gordon MacDonald. They warned of “significant warming of world climates over the next decades unless mitigating steps are taken immediately.” In contrast to Arrhenius and Callendar, who had seen virtue in a warm climate, they were emphatic: “There appear to be very few clear advantages for man in such short-term alterations in climate.” They offered a four-point program : acknowledgment of the problem, energy conservation, reforestation—and lower carbon fuels. That last meant using natural gas instead of coal.36

  Speth took the report to the White House and the Department of Energy. The reception was frosty. For at that moment the Carter administration—reeling from second oil shock, the Iranian Revolution, and natural gas shortages—was restricting natural gas use and promoting more coal.

  Speth did not give up. He made the issue central to the 1981 annual report from the Council on Environmental Quality. But that was the end of the road, at least for the time being. For Jimmy Carter had already been defeated by Ronald Reagan in November 1980.37 But some environmental groups were beginning to take up climate as a core issue.

  Under the Reagan administration, government money for climate research was reduced. No one knew this better than Charles Keeling. Though his funding was often precarious, the integrity of the carbon-monitoring project at Mauna Loa in Hawaii was preserved. Overall, though constrained, scientific research on climate did continue.

  A key breakthrough in the science of climate change occurred in the 1980s with the recovery of ice cores, extracted from deep under the earth’s surface both in Greenland and at Vostok, the Russian research station in Antarctica that was so remote it could be resupplied only once a year. These ice cores were truly time machines. They provided crucial evidence to the theory of climate change. For the tiny air bubbles trapped in these cores preserved the atmosphere as it had been thousands of years ago, and could be dated through radiocarbon analysis. Painstaking study seemed to make one thing very clear: that carbon concentrations had been lower in the preindustrial age—275 to 280 parts per million compared with 325 parts in 1970 and 354 parts in 1990.38

  REVELLE’S EXILE

  When the new campus of the University of California was established in San Diego, Roger Revelle, the head of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the mentor of Charles Keeling, seemed the inevitable choice to be its first chancellor. He had been the new campus’s leading champion, and his heart was set on the chancellorship. But Revelle had powerful enemies, one of whom, a powerful regent of the university, blocked his appointment. It was probably the biggest disappointment of Revelle’s professional career. He did not want to stay around and instead decided to go into what one of his friends called “exile.”

  This particular exile was hardly unpleasant, for he took up a professorship at Harvard, teaching a popular course—Natural Sciences 118: Human Populations and Natural Resources, otherwise known as Pops and Rocks .39

  “By bringing fossil fuels to the surface and burning them, human beings are simply returning the carbon and oxygen to their original state,” he told students in the autumn of 1968. “Within a few short generations we are consuming materials that were formed and concentrated over geologic eras. There was probably never more CO2 in the air at any time in the past billion years than today.” Burning of fossil over the next few generations, he said, would add vast amounts of additional CO2 to the atmosphere. The results would likely be increases in temperature and “significant effect on the earth’s climate.”

  Yet Revelle, thinking about the overall system, also spoke about he called the “complicating factors”—the possible offsets. Higher temperatures, for instance, would increase evaporation of water, and thus increase cloudiness “which in turn will reduce the amount of incoming solar energy, and tend to lower the temperature.”

  His conclusion was similar to that of his 1957 paper: “We can think of the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide as a gigantic, unintentional experiment being conducted by human beings all over the world, that may give us greater insight into the processes determining climate.”40

  Revelle was a compelling teacher who presented a distinctly global view of environmental issues. Among those in Pops and Rocks was a student named Albert Gore Jr., the son of Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee. If Revelle’s impact on Keeling and research into carbon concentrations was to have decisive impact on the science of climate, then his lectures to the class, which included Al Gore, would also have a profound impact on the politics of climate. “A great teacher of mine at Harvard, Dr. Roger Revelle, opened my eyes to the problem of global warming,” Gore wrote much later. “The implications of his words were startling . . . Like all great teachers, he influenced the rest of my life.”

  That was in the late 1960s. Two decades later, in the late 1980s, Gore and others in Congress were determined to make climate change into a political issue. As he and seven other senators put it in a letter in 1986, research on the impact of CO2 on climate change had left them “deeply disturbed.” They wanted not only more research. They wanted to see some true action.41

  23

  THE ROAD TO RIO

  That particular day—June 23, 1988—was very much a Washington summer day, for it was not only hot, very hot—with the temperature getting up over 100 degrees—but also muggy, almost unbearably so. Moreover, it followed months of high temperatures, and half the counties in the United States were officially suffering from drought. “For the Midwest,” it was reported, “drought has become a way of life.” All this meant that the media would be intensely interested in anything to do with weather. In short, June 23 was a perfect day for a Senate hearing on global warming.

  The hearings that ensued would mark the emergence of climate change as a political issue. The chairman that day was Senator Tim Wirth of Colorado. Half a year earlier, in January 1988, Wirth had ruminated with his aides about finding a very warm day for a climate-change hearing. What would likely be the hottest day of the year, he had asked. One of them had calculated that late June was a good bet. (To double-check, the aide had called an economist at Harvard, who, somewhat startled, said that he had no expertise on that subject, but, thinking quickly, helpfully recommended that the aide consult the Farmer’s Almanac.)1

  Ever since, there has been a legend that the windows were left open the night before and the air-conditioning was turned off, to make certain that the hearing room would be sweltering. Wirth himself did later refer to some artful “stagecraft.” As it turned out, the room was sweltering, and sweat would glisten on the foreheads of the witnesses. Ensuring that the room would be very hot were the lights that went with two solid banks of television cameras. “Having a hearing is educational,” Wirth would say, quoting a political proverb. “Having a hearing with a television camera is useful; having a hearing with two rows of television cameras is heaven.” For the ethereal issue of climate change, that day counted as heavenly.2

  “The scientific evidence is compelling ,” said Wirth, as he opened the hearings. “Now the Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that trend.” The lineup of witnesses featured some of the strongest voices on climate change. But the most dramatic message came from the leadoff witness. Climate change was no longer an “academic” issue, said James Hansen, an atmospheric physicist and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. A leading climate modeler, Hansen had already become prominent as one of the most apocalyptic in his predictions. And now, wiping the sweat from his forehead in the sweltering room made even hotter by the television lights, Hansen told the senators, the long-awaited “signal” on climate change was now here. Temperatures were indeed rising, just as his computer models had predicted. “We can ascribe with a high degre
e of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming ,” he said. Afterward he summarized his testimony to the New York Times more simply: “It is time to stop waffling.” The story about his testimony and the hearing ran on the Times’ front page.3

  As another witness, Syukuro Manabe, one of the fathers of climate modeling, recalled, “They weren’t too impressed by this Japanese guy who had this accent; whereas Jim Hansen made a bombshell impression.”

  The hearing “became a huge event,” said Wirth. “A lot of people had never seen anything like this before. It got an inordinate amount of attention for a Senate hearing.” One scientist summed up the impact this way: “I’ve never seen an environmental issue move so quickly, shifting from science to the policy realm almost overnight.”4

  Wirth’s hearings demonstrated an increasing interaction between scientists and policymakers. That was accompanied by rapidly increasing cross-border research and network building on atmospheric subjects among scientists around the world. Roger Revelle, who had been there from the beginning of the modern effort, looked at the change with a certain wry amusement. “During the last ten years the literature on the greenhouse effect has proliferated beyond belief,” he noted in 1988. “What started out as a cottage industry with David Keeling as the principal worker has now become a major operation, with a cast of thousands.”5

  The emergence of a global scientific network on climate change had already become clearly evident in 1985, three years before Wirth’s hearings, when a group of scientists met at Villach, in the Austrian Alps. Convinced by the range of evidence, from supercomputer models to what had been learned about the lower carbon levels in the ice ages, they thought that climate change was neither far off nor would it be beneficent. They also concluded that “understanding of the greenhouse question is sufficiently developed that scientists and policymakers should begin an active collaboration.” Their five-hundred-page report called for an international agreement to control carbon.6

  THE HOLE IN THE OZONE: THE ROLE MODEL

  In 1987 a conference convened in Montreal that was also aimed at an atmospheric threat. Out of it came a new international agreement that would have seemed unachievable only a few years earlier. It provided a powerful precedent for environmental collaboration on a global scale.

  Greenhouse gases include not only carbon dioxide but also methane and nitrous oxide, as well as a group of man-made gases called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were first developed in the late 1920s. Though in much smaller concentrations in the atmosphere, chlorofluorocarbons are potent in trapping heat; indeed, it was estimated, ten thousand times more potent, molecule to molecule, than CO2. The use of CFCs had multiplied over the years, from propellants in aerosol cans to coolant in refrigerators.

  In 1985 researchers from the British Antarctic Survey, using satellite data from NASA, saw something that stunned them: a “hole” was opening up in the ozone over Antarctica. The chlorofluorocarbons were eating at the ozone, literally thinning out and depleting the layer in the atmosphere.

  The threat was immediate. Ozone absorbed what would otherwise be deadly concentrations of ultraviolet radiation. The loss of ozone threatened massive epidemics of skin cancer around the world as well as devastating effects on animal and plant life on earth. Such was the fear that in record time—by 1987—some twenty-four countries signed on to the Montreal Protocol, which would restrict chlorofluorocarbons.

  The Montreal Protocol had a direct impact on the climate-change movement. It acknowledged that increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases were dangerous. It dramatically underlined the acceptance of the notion that human activity imposes damage on the earth’s atmosphere. And it demonstrated that countries could come together quickly and agreed to eliminate a common environmental threat. To climate activists, all of that seemed to be a dress rehearsal for what should happen with global warming. There was one striking difference, however. The relevant universe was so much smaller. Fewer than forty companies manufactured chlorofluorocarbons, and just two had half the market. But the whole world burned fossil fuels. Nevertheless, global warming, with all its complexity, was by the summer of 1988 entering the political arena. And a Montreal Protocol approach looked like the most likely template.7

  JAMES HANSEN’S “VENUS SYNDROME”

  Those hearings on that hot day in June 1988 turned James Hansen into a scientific celebrity and a figure who would have much impact on the climate debate thereafter.

  To many in the political arena and the public, Hansen became the voice of science on climate, which created discomfort for other climate scientists who thought that he was too categoric. Science, the magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, summed up the issue in an article titled “Hansen vs. the World on the Greenhouse Threat” by reporting “what bothers . . . his colleagues” is that he “fails to hedge his conclusions with appropriate qualifiers that reflect the imprecise science of climate modeling.”8

  A few weeks after his hearing, Senator Tim Wirth wrote to Roger Revelle soliciting his views. The message he got back was quite different from what he had heard from Hansen and others in the hearing room. Indeed, it was a word of caution. “We must be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes clearer,” said Revelle. “It is not yet obvious that this summer’s hot weather and drought are the result of a global climactic change or simply an example of the uncertainties of climate variability.” Revelle added, “My own view is that we had better wait another ten years before making confident predictions.” Revelle wrote to another congressman that it might actually be twenty years before humans understood the negative and positive implications of the greenhouse effect. He believed humans should “take whatever actions would be desirable whether or not the greenhouse effect materializes.” His list included a much larger role for nuclear power and launching a major program to expand forests, because the trees would capture and sequester what would otherwise be additional carbon in the air. “It is possible,” he said in his letter to Wirth, “that such expansion could reduce carbon dioxide emissions very drastically, to a quite safe level.”9

  Hansen and Revelle came to the subject from different backgrounds and perspectives. Revelle started as a geologist, but Hansen had found his way into the climate studies via an interplanetary course through outer space. Hansen had written his physics Ph.D. on the atmosphere of Venus and was working on a Venus orbiter space vehicle shot in 1976 when a postgraduate student asked his help on calculating the atmospheric effects of some of the greenhouse gases. “I was captivated by this greenhouse problem,” Hansen later explained. He shifted his research to the earth’s atmosphere and to modeling it, although continuing his work on the other planets in the solar system.

  Decades of science fiction writers had imagined life on earth’s nearest neighbors. But telescopic observation and unmanned space vehicles had established that the atmospheres of Mars or Venus ensured that life in any form that humans would recognize was most unlikely. Mars, with a very thin atmosphere, was freezingly cold. Venus, with an atmosphere super rich in CO2, was hellishly hot—almost 900°F on the surface. This space research informed understanding of the earth’s climate. “Clearly a great deal stands to be gained by simultaneous studies of the earth’s climate and the climate on other planets,” Hansen and colleagues had written in 1978. Indeed, he was to say decades later, the differences in Mars’s and Venus’s atmospheres “provided the best proof at the time of the reality of the greenhouse effect.” Venus came to play an even more direct role. It became, because of its CO2-soggy atmosphere and burningly hot temperatures on the ground, the metaphor for an irreversible “runaway greenhouse effect,” what Hansen would dub the “Venus Syndrome.” It would prove to be a metaphor of great—and persuasive—power.10

  THE HOT SUMMER OF 1988 AND THE “WHITE HOUSE EFFECT”

  Just a few days after the Wirth hearings, the World Conference on a Changing At
mosphere convened in Toronto. It was the first time that large numbers of scientists, policymakers, politicians, and activists had gotten together to discuss climate change, and they did so with great urgency and sense of mission. The conference called for the world community to adopt coordinated policies to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions.11

  The hot weather led to much greater attention to the Toronto conference, as with the Wirth hearings, than would otherwise have been the case.

  Although climate change was a longer-term phenomenon, the signal that James Hansen had identified seemed to reverberate over the rest of the summer of 1988 in an almost Biblical unfolding of weather-related plagues: intense heat waves, widespread droughts, impaired harvests, blazing forest fires in the West, navigation troubles on rivers as water levels fell. The electricity supply was balanced precariously, straining to meet the surging demand for air-conditioning.

  All of this contributed to an increasingly pervasive anxiety that the environment was degrading.

  That anxiety was captured in Boston Harbor on the first day of September. The Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, was well ahead in the polls against Vice President George H. W. Bush in the 1988 race to succeed Ronald Reagan. Dukakis was campaigning as an environmentalist, and Bush wanted to take him on in his home territory and on his core issues. So Bush boarded an excursion boat to cruise around Boston Harbor. Accompanied by a gaggle of reporters and cameras, he delighted in pointing out the vast amount of garbage floating in the harbor, which he attributed to the lapses of Dukakis’s governorship. (Dukakis would reply that the garbage was the fault of the Reagan administration for foot dragging on promised cleanup funds.) Presenting himself as a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican,” Bush promised to be an Environmental President. Among his pledges was the noteworthy statement that “those who think we are powerless to do anything about the ‘greenhouse effect’ are forgetting about ‘the White House effect.’” And the president added, “I intend to do something about it.” For the first time, a potential president had made greenhouse gases and climate change a campaign issue—and he had promised international collaboration to address it.12