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

by Daniel Yergin

  There are other practical aspects. China is deeply embedded in the global mesh of international trade and finance; indeed, it is that engagement that has been the foundation of its growth since 1979. Climate change is an issue that China encounters, it seems, at almost every economic conference. Threats of trade restriction from its major trading partners in retaliation for not reducing emissions cause considerable alarm. Vocal constituencies in the United States and other countries call for the imposition of border taxes or border adjustments on countries, preeminently China, that do not sign on to a specified international climate regime. Some of this sentiment is protectionism in disguise—somewhat off target since the bulk of China’s exports are low carbon in their intensity. But the Chinese leadership hardly wants to be the country accused of standing in the way of global cooperation on climate, let alone bear the potential costs. China concluded that its embrace of climate change policies would be a key element in its overall relations with the United States and Europe, and in mitigating political and trade tensions. President Hu Jintao summed it up in the autumn of 2009, with a resounding call at the United Nations for a “win-win” approach on climate change between developed and developing countries.4

  INDIA: “THE CLIMATE AGNOSTIC”

  India and China are often lumped together as though they share the same perspective. They do share a deep common interest in the Himalayan water tower that supplies their rivers. But India’s overall position is quite different. While it uses coal to produce most of its electricity and also burns a great deal of biomass, India produces only about 5 percent of the world’s CO2 compared with China’s 23 percent, which makes sense as India’s economy is only about one quarter the size of China’s. India’s traditional approach to international climate change negotiations was to reiterate even more strongly that it is a developing country with much poverty and that it and its economic growth should not be penalized for emissions that industrial countries have been putting into the atmosphere for over two centuries. Moreover, in the words of Environment minister Jairam Ramesh, it was the “kiss of death” for an Indian politician to be seen agreeing with the United States or the European Union on climate change policy.

  But as India becomes more integrated into the world economy, the perspective is changing. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appointed Ramesh to the Environment ministry, he instructed him, “India has not caused the problem of global warming. But try and make sure that India is part of the solution.”

  Thereafter the tone changed. “The most vulnerable country in the world to climate change is India,” Ramesh said in a parliamentary debate. “We are dependent on monsoons . . . they are the lifeline of our country . . . We are depressed when the monsoons fail and happy when the monsoons are good... The uncertainty caused by climate change on the monsoons is of first and overriding priority for India.”

  The second point of vulnerability was the state of the glaciers. “What happens to the Himalayan glaciers will determine the water security of our country.” But he went on to say that it was a matter of great uncertainty as to whether the glaciers are receding as a result of global warming or from “the natural process of cyclical change.”

  For an environment minister, Ramesh offered an unusual perspective: “The climate world is divided into three,” he said. “The climate atheists, the climate agnostics, and the climate evangelicals. I’m a climate agnostic.” To Ramesh, in his words, the “bread and butter” local issues of water and air pollution loom “more important and more urgent than climate change.”5

  After World War II, the powers that were trying to negotiate a postwar settlement—the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—became known as the Big Four. There is a new Big Four when it comes to negotiating an international climate regime—the United States, the European Union, China, and India, with Brazil as an increasingly important interlocutor. That became clear at the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009.

  “HOPENHAGEN”

  The Copenhagen conference—otherwise known as COP 15—was intended to be the successor to Kyoto, and expectations for a new global agreement were high. Billions of dollars had been spent on climate research in the 12 years since Kyoto. There was now much greater consensus among governments and in the media on climate change. The United States had a new president who was building his energy policy around climate change; the U.S. House of Representatives had passed a cap-and-trade bill; the European Union was completely on board; and China and India, along with other developing countries, had moved along toward internalizing climate as an issue. No wonder that in the run-up to the Copenhagen conference, it had been nicknamed “Hopenhagen.”

  A total of 113 heads of state or government attended Copenhagen, and just ferrying around all the delegations turned into a logistical nightmare when there were tens of thousands NGO activists who were also trying to get around town. The conference hall itself could accommodate 15,000 people; 40,000 tried to sign up; and eventually 27,000 got accredited.

  Despite all the preparation, there was no agreement in advance on the basic issues. It was clear that the United States could not agree at Copenhagen to a legally binding treaty since the Senate had not yet passed climate legislation. It was no less clear that the major developing nations would not agree to be treated the same as the developed countries. But if they were not, then it would be much more difficult to get the U.S. Senate to agree to a climate bill.

  The combination of the number of delegations, the overall size of the crowd, and the sharp disagreement on the basic questions—all these led to a chaotic conference that was, as the days went by, becoming more and more frustrating for all involved. It was possible that there would be no agreement at all.

  Barack Obama flew in early one morning toward the end of the conference, with the intention of leaving later in the day. Shortly after his arrival, he was told by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “Copenhagen was the worst meeting I’ve been to since eighth-grade student council.”

  After sitting in a confusing meeting with a group of leaders, Obama turned to his own staff and said he wanted, urgently, to see Premier Wen Jiabao of China. Unfortunately, he was told, the premier was on his way to the airport. But then, no: word came back that Wen was still somewhere in the conference center. Obama and his aides started off at a fast pace to find him. Time was short, for Obama himself was scheduled to leave in a couple of hours, hoping to beat a blizzard that was bearing down on Washington.

  At the end of a long corridor, Obama came upon a surprised security guard outside the conference room that was the office of the Chinese delegation. Despite the guard’s panicked efforts, Obama brushed right passed him and burst into the room. Not only was Wen there but, to Obama’s surprise, he found that so were the other members of what was now known as the BASIC group—President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, President Jacob Zuma of South Africa, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India—huddling to find a common position. For their part, they were no less taken aback by the sudden, unexpected appearance of the president of the United States. But they were hardly going to turn Obama away. He took a seat next to Lula and across from Wen. Wen, overcoming his surprise, passed over to Obama the draft they were working on. The president read it quickly and said it was good. But, he said, he had a “couple of points” to add.

  Thereupon followed a drafting session with Obama more or less in the role of scribe. At one point the chief Chinese climate negotiator wanted to strenuously disagree with Obama, but Wen instructed that this interjection not be translated.

  Finally, after much give-and-take, some of it heated, they came to an agreement. There would be no treaty and no legally binding targets. Instead developed and developing countries would adopt parallel nonbinding pledges to reduce their emissions. That would be accompanied by a parallel understanding that the “mitigation actions” undertaken by developing countries be “subject to international measurement, reporting and verification.” The agr
eement also crystallized the prime objective of preventing temperatures from rising more than 2°C (3.6°F). The BASIC leaders tossed it to Obama to secure approval from European leaders, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the UK. The Europeans did so, but only reluctantly, as they wanted something much stronger. Obama then took off, beating the snowstorm back to Washington. Back in Copenhagen the strom still raged. The agreement was “rated” by the entire conference, though with no great enthusiasm and indeed with some irritation on the part of many of the delegations. It was not adopted.

  The Copenhagen Agreement was not a ringing international compact but rather more of a holding action; the outcome drove home that the United Nations was too big and unwieldy to hammer out a climate action plan. The answer has now to be sought in what has been described as the “variable geometry” of international relations—bringing together those who share interests in a specific problem and have the ability to act on it. In this case, the “variable geometry” would involve a much smaller number of nations but those who represented the largest part of GDP would—and the largest share of emissions. That meant going back to the Major Economies; that is, back to what had originally been called the Major Emitters when George W. Bush had begun to assemble them in Washington, D.C., in 2007 in search of a more workable alternative to the United Nations for negotiating on climate change.6

  Copenhagen was not the only disappointment for those who had hoped for major progress on a climate regime. A second disappointment was what didn’t happen in the U.S. Congress. In contrast to the House of Representatives, it was much more difficult to get a climate bill through the U.S. Senate. Part of the reason was mathematics. A quarter of the total votes in the House of Representatives for Waxman-Markey had come from the more liberal states of New York and California, owing to their populations. But in the Senate, those two states had only two votes each. Moreover, in the Senate, rules meant that passage would require 60 out of 100 votes. Senators from coal-burning states and energy-producing states were not enthusiastic. Given the deep recession and the slow recovery, many senators were concerned about the economic impact of a climate bill. And given the meltdown on Wall Street, some were hardly enthusiastic about creating a vast new financial market in trading carbon. After the Republicans won the House of Representatives in 2010, a climate legislation became even less likely.

  “THE HEALTH OF THE HIMALYAS”

  More or less concurrent with Copenhagen was a chipping away of the credibility of the IPCC itself. In what became known as climategate, somebody hacked into the e-mails of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, which was one of the main research centers supporting climate research and the work of the IPCC. To many climate scientists and activists, the e-mails were being taken out of context and grossly misconstrued. But the way others read the e-mails was that some prominent scientists had turned to “tricks” to come out with the results they had wanted and went out of their way to denigrate and isolate those who might disagree. The particular trick that aroused the most controversy was the blending of data sets that did not agree with one another in a way that more clearly produced an upward graph of rising temperatures. Several subsequent investigations, while offering some criticisms, generally exonerated the researchers involved, saying that they did not deviate from “accepted practices within the academic community” in their handling of the data.7

  However, a great controversy had been stirred, and the fourth IPCC report, issued in 2007, became a target. The father of the IPCC, Bert Bolin, had laid down the principles of great care and not going beyond the evidence. But the “indispensable man” in coordinating climate research had passed away in 2007. And now it was noted that in the newest IPCC report, the summary for policymakers was much more categoric than the overall report. Moreover, some errors became evident. The source for the report on melting in the Andes was a hiking magazine based on interviews with mountain guides. But the biggest controversy erupted over the dramatic assertion that the Himalayan glaciers, including the one that fed the river Ganges, were melting so fast that they could disappear by 2035 “if not sooner.” It was among the starkest predictions in the entire fourth IPCC report.

  India’s Environment Ministry commissioned a study by Indian scientists that challenged the assertion. It said that while there was melting among many glaciers, one glacier was actually advancing. “Himalayan glaciers are retreating,” said the scientist who wrote the report. “But it is nothing out of the ordinary.” In what was considered one of the striking comments, the minister’s report said that the Gangotri glacier, which feeds the river Ganges, receded fastest in 1977 and today is “practically at a standstill.”

  The Indian government’s study stirred a storm of protest. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, dismissed it as “arrogant” and “voodoo science” of the ilk associated with “climate change deniers and school boy science.” But then it emerged that the 2035 date was itself not the result of careful research but rather the product of a phone interview with an Indian scientist in 1999 by an English science magazine. The assertion had then been picked up in a report by an environmental group and then was “copied straight into the IPCC impacts assessment.”

  “The health of the Himalayan glaciers is a cause for concern,” said Jairam Ramesh, India’s Environment minister. “But the alarmist concern of the IPCC that these would disappear by 2035 is not based on an iota of scientific evidence.” And the scientist who had given the 1999 telephone interview now said that his comments were “speculative” and that he had not given a date. He also said that he was not an “astrologer.” He did, however, emphasize that the glaciers were in a “pathetic state.”

  In due course, the IPCC made a correction and apologized.

  Subsequent reports bolstered the IPCC in its overall scope and mission, but some damage had been done to the process, and the result was to suggest a wider band of uncertainty than had been thought prior to autumn of 2009. And, at least for a time, public-opinion polls globally showed declining interest in global warming and reduced urgency and support for climate change policies.8

  “EXTREME WEATHER”

  Like the weather itself, public opinion on climate is variable. But in the summer of 2010, the traditional distinction broke down in the minds of policymakers and the public between the short-term, highly variable fluctuations of weather and the long-term trends of climate, which unfold over decades and centuries and millennia. Some political leaders began to shift from the risks of climate change to the dangers of climate disruption. Extreme weather struck simultaneously around the world. Drought hit parts of the United States, torrential rains poured down on others, while the East Coast sweltered from unusually hot days that tried both tempers and the limits of the power system. Over Pakistan and western China, huge storms loosed massive flooding of a kind no one could remember. In Pakistan alone, this displaced 20 million people, all grasping for food, water, and shelter. Day after day large parts of Russia were burned by the sun. Temperatures were consistently over 100 degrees, and fires raged, creating storms of smoke that choked Moscow and turned Red Square, even from a few hundred feet away, into a ghostly silhouette. A third of Russia’s wheat crop was ruined, leading to a ban on grain exports and sending wheat prices spiking on the world market. “Our country has not experienced such a heat wave in the last 50 or 100 years,” said President Dmitry Medvedev. “Unfortunately, what is happening now... is evidence of the global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past. This means that we need to change the way we work, change the methods that we used in the past.”

  “Everyone is talking about climate change now,” he added.

  That included Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who had previously said that climate change would mean that Russians would need to buy fewer fur coats. On a visit to a scientific research station in northern Russia in Au
gust 2010, he said, “The climate is changing. This year we have come to understand this when we faced events that resulted in fires.” Nonetheless, Putin said he was still waiting for an answer to the question of whether climate change is the result of human activity or of “the Earth living its own life and breathing.”9

  MAKING THE PLEDGE AT CANCÚN

  After the disappointment and, to some, the debacle at Copenhagen, the next major meeting a year later at Cancún seemed to get climate regulations back on track. Yet what was described as the relative success of Cancún was a function, at least in part, of much lower expectations.

  Some 193 nations signed on to the accord at Cancún, which offered—after a year of torturous negotiation—what the United States, the European Union, and the BASIC countries had agreed to in Copenhagen. A central element of the agreement was the adoption of specific pledges by countries for emissions reductions. The agreement also established a process of monitoring and verification. Under this system, mitigation efforts undertaken with domestic resources would be monitored domestically, while those taken with the help of international resources would be monitored internationally. To boost transparency of domestic actions, a system of international consultations and analysis every two years was agreed to. As part of it, information will be shared in an international forum that includes technical experts. Reconfirmation of the long-held goal of keeping temperature rises to within two degrees Celsius—though one regarded by many as overly optimistic—was another key element of the Cancún agreement.

  But Cancún left much still up in the air. Most significantly, Cancún kicked down the road the question of whether to renew for another term the Kyoto Protocol, due to expire in 2012. While the sharp differentiation between the responsibilities of developed and developing countries set out in Kyoto was increasingly seen by developed countries as untenable, developing countries still generally hold fast to this concept. One possibility was to replace the Kyoto agreement with an agreement that was acceptable to both developed and developing countries. This would likely mean an agreement that does distinguish between the two groups in terms of historical emissions, but that acknowledges the reality that the largest emitters now come from both sets of countries, and that there should be a more equitable sharing of burdens. In short, much has to be done to shape a new framework.