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While evidence continues to mount that humans are
heating the globe, the world's nations squabble over a complex fix
too timid to solve the problem.
But we can stop global
warming--by calling an end to the Carbon Age.
by Ross Gelbspan
The United States is constantly warning against the danger posed
by "rogue states" like Iraq or North Korea. But last November we
behaved very much like an outlaw nation ourselves by unilaterally
scuttling climate talks at The Hague, Netherlands. More than half of
the world's industrial nations declared their willingness to cut
their consumption of fossil fuels to forestall global warming, but
when the United States would commit to nothing more than planting a
few trees and buying up cheap pollution allowances from poor
countries, the talks collapsed.
The meeting was probably irrelevant anyway. As the three years of
frustrating negotiations fell apart, the United Nations-sponsored
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had
previously projected an increase in average global temperatures of 3
to 7 degrees Fahrenheit this century, raised its upper estimate to
10.4 degrees. To restabilize the climate, declared the 2,000 eminent
climatologists and other scientists, humanity needs to cut its
greenhouse-gas emissions ten times more than the 5.2 percent
reductions discussed at The Hague.
As heat records continue to be broken and extreme weather events
intensify around the world, the reality of global warming is sinking
in--everywhere, it seems, except on Capitol Hill. At the 1998 World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the CEOs of the world's 1,000
biggest corporations surprised organizers by voting climate change
the most critical problem facing humanity. European countries are
planning drastic reductions in their CO2 emissions, while growing
numbers of corporate leaders are realizing that the necessary
transition to highly efficient and renewable energy sources could
trigger an unprecedented worldwide economic boom.
This growing international consensus may show us the way to a
workable global solution. Instead of The Hague's torturous haggling
over the complex minutiae of virtually meaningless goals, the
earth's nations could jointly initiate an aggressive worldwide
effort to halt and turn back the ominous heating of the globe--and
come out stronger, safer, and richer.
The alternative is dismal and frightening. A recent report from
the National Climatic Data Center predicts ever harsher droughts,
floods, heat waves, and tropical storms as the atmosphere continues
to warm. "We found that extreme weather events have had increasing
impact on human health, welfare, and finances," said the Center's
David Easterling. "This trend is likely to become more intense as
the climate continues to change and society becomes more vulnerable
to weather and climate extremes."
This vulnerability is underscored by a financial forecast from
the world's sixth-largest insurance company. Previous reports from
property insurers had emphasized the financial risks to the industry
itself, but last November Dr. Andrew Dlugolecki, an executive of the
United Kingdom's CGNU, released a study projecting that
infrastructure and other property damage, bank and insurance
industry losses, crop failures, and other costs of unchecked climate
change could bankrupt the global economy by 2065.
And the coming changes will occur 50 percent faster than
previously thought, say researchers at the Hadley Center, the UK's
leading climate-research agency. Previous estimates of the rate of
climate change have been based on projections of the earth's
capacity--at current temperatures--to absorb carbon dioxide through
its vegetation and, to a lesser extent, its oceans. For the last
10,000 years, these natural "carbon sinks" have maintained
atmospheric carbon levels of about 280 parts per million. Since the
late 19th century, however, human use of coal and oil has escalated
dramatically, leading to our present atmospheric carbon level of
about 360 parts per million--a level not experienced in 420,000
years. In a blow to the United States' hope that planting forests in
developing countries could absolve it of the need to conserve
energy, Hadley's researchers found that photosynthesis slows as the
climate warms. Plants' absorption of CO2 diminishes, and soils begin
to release more carbon than they absorb, turning what had been
carbon sinks into carbon sources.
Similarly, a team led by Sydney Levitus, head of the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Ocean Climate Laboratory,
found that while oceans absorb heat, that effect can be temporary.
During the 1950s and '60s, the group found, subsurface temperatures
in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans rose substantially while
atmospheric temperatures remained fairly constant. But in the 1970s
atmospheric temperatures trended upward--driven, in part, by warmth
released from deep water. "[O]cean heat content may be an early
indicator of the warming of surface, air, and sea surface
temperatures more than a decade in advance," said Levitus. Later
this century, his researchers predicted, the oceans may release even
more heat into an already warming atmosphere.
That grim prediction was echoed by a report from the
International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, which cast doubt on the
ability of farmland or forests to soak up the vast amounts of CO2
that humanity is pumping into the atmosphere. "There is no natural
'savior' waiting to assimilate all the anthropogenically produced
CO2 in the coming century," the report concluded.
The inadequacy of the percentage goals haggled over at The Hague
was underscored by a research team led by Tom M. W. Wigley of the
National Center for Atmospheric Research, which estimated that the
world must generate about half its power from wind, sun, and other
noncarbon sources by the year 2018 to avoid a quadrupling of
traditional atmospheric carbon levels, which would almost certainly
trigger catastrophic consequences. Writing in the journal Nature,
Wigley's team recommended "researching, developing, and
commercializing carbon-free primary power technologies . . . with
the urgency of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo space
program."
Far from recognizing that urgency, the United States' official
position seems to be to minimize the severity of global warming.
This recalcitrance can be traced to a relentless disinformation
campaign by the fossil-fuel lobby to dismiss or downplay the climate
crisis. For years, coal and oil interests have funded a handful of
scientists known as "greenhouse skeptics" who cast doubt on the
implications and even existence of global warming. Enormous amounts
of money spent by their corporate sponsors have amplified the
skeptics' voices out of all proportion to their standing in the
scientific community, giving them undue influence on legislators,
policymakers, and the media.
But with the skeptics being marginalized by the increasingly
united and alarming findings of mainstream science, industry PR
campaigns have taken to exaggerating the economic impacts of cutting
back on fossil fuels. On the other side are more than 2,500
economists, including 8 Nobel laureates, who proclaimed in a 1997
statement coordinated by the think-tank Redefining Progress that the
U.S. economy can weather the change, and even improve productivity
in the long run. Industry is also attacking the diplomatic
foundations of the Kyoto Protocol--the international agreement The
Hague meeting was meant to implement--claiming that the United
States would suffer unfairly because developing countries were
exempted from the first round of emissions cuts. Yet the rationale
for this exemption--that since the industrial nations created the
problem, they should be the first to begin to address it--was
ratified by President George H. W. Bush himself when he signed the
1992 Rio Treaty.
The central mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol, as promoted by the
United States, is "emissions trading." That system was intended to
find the cheapest way to reduce global carbon levels. It allocated a
certain number of carbon-emission "credits" to each country, and
then permitted nations with greater emissions to buy unused credits
from other countries--for example, by financing the planting of
trees in Costa Rica.
But international carbon trading turned out to be a shell game.
Carbon is burned in far too many places--vehicles, factories, homes,
fields--to effectively track even if there were an international
monitoring system. Trading also became a huge source of contention
between industrial and developing countries. In allocating emission
"rights," for instance, all countries were given their 1990 emission
levels as a baseline, but the developing nations argue that this
would lock in the advantages of the already-industrialized First
World. Many developing countries advocate what they claim is a far
more democratic, "per capita" basis for allocating emissions, which
would grant every American the same quantity of emissions as, say,
every resident of India. (Currently, the average American is
responsible for about 25 times more CO2 than the average
Indian.)
A second level of inequity embedded in emissions trading is that
industrialized countries could buy as many credits from poor
countries as they want, banking those big, relatively cheap
reductions indefinitely into the future. So when developing
countries are eventually obliged to cut their emissions, they will
be left with only the most expensive options, such as financing the
production of fuel cells or solar installations.
Finally, carbon trading in itself can only go so far; its optimal
use would be as a fine-tuning mechanism to help countries achieve
the last 10 to 15 percent of their obligations. Measured against
what it would take to actually cool the planet, emissions trading is
ultimately a form of institutional denial.
Despite U.S. obstructionism, several European countries are now
setting more ambitious goals. The United Kingdom last year committed
to reductions of 12.5 percent by 2010, and a royal commission is
calling for 60 percent cuts by 2050. Germany is also considering 50
percent cuts. Holland--a country at particular risk from rising sea
levels--just completed a plan to slash its emissions by 80 percent
in the next 40 years. It will meet those goals through an ambitious
program of wind-generated electricity, low-emission vehicles,
photovoltaic and solar installations, and other noncarbon energy
sources. And a number of developing countries are voluntarily
installing solar, wind, and small-scale hydro projects, despite
their exemption under the Kyoto Protocol from the first round of
cuts.
Some major industrial players are also reading the handwriting on
the wall. British Petroleum, despite its attempts to drill in the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, is investing substantial resources
in solar power. The company, which now promotes itself as "Beyond
Petroleum," anticipates doing $1 billion a year in solar commerce by
the end of the decade. Shell has created a $500 million
renewable-energy company. In fact, most of the major oil
companies--with the notable exception of ExxonMobil--now acknowledge
the reality of climate change. In the automotive arena, Ford and
DaimlerChrysler have invested $1 billion in a joint venture to put
fuel-cell-powered cars on the market in 2004. And William Clay Ford
recently declared "an end to the 100-year reign of the internal
combustion engine."
While some environmentalists dismiss these initiatives as
"greenwashing" (see "Greenwash,
Inc.,"), they mark an enormous change in industry's public
posture. Only a year or two ago, working through such groups as the
Western Fuels Association and the Global Climate Coalition, the oil
and coal companies sought to dismiss the reality of climate change
and cast doubt on the findings of the IPCC. Today, with these
arguments largely discredited, the Global Climate Coalition has
essentially collapsed. Oil and auto executives are beginning to
choose a new approach: to position their firms as prominent players
in the coming new-energy economy. (This doesn't preclude
backsliding. In March, conservatives' complaints persuaded Bush to
break a campaign promise to regulate CO2 emissions from power
plants--thus hanging out to dry EPA chief Christie Todd Whitman, who
had widely promoted the idea, and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill,
who has called for a crash program to deal with climate change.)
U.S. labor unions are also facing up to the future, working with
environmentalists on an agenda to increase jobs while reducing
emissions--witness the recent call by AFL-CIO president John Sweeney
and Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope for a "package of
worker-friendly domestic carbon-emission reduction measures."
Building and maintaining the necessary new energy facilities will
take an army of skilled workers, which organized labor can
provide.
Despite these encouraging developments, the United States
continues to obstruct rather than lead the world in addressing
climate change. Former president Clinton blamed the media, saying
that until the public knows more about the threat there will not be
sufficient popular support to address the issue in a meaningful way.
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, oilmen both, are more inclined to
protect the petroleum industry's short-term profitability than to
promote its inevitable transformation.
Thus, the public debate is still stuck in the ineffective Kyoto
framework. So two years ago, a small group of energy executives,
economists, energy-policy specialists, and others (including the
author) fashioned a bundle of strategies designed to cut carbon
emissions by 70 percent, while at the same time creating a surge of
new jobs, especially in developing countries.
At present, the United States spends $20 billion a year to
subsidize fossil fuels and another $10 billion to subsidize nuclear
power. Globally, subsidies for fossil fuels have been estimated at
$300 billion a year. If that money were put behind renewable
technologies, oil companies would have the incentive to aggressively
develop fuel cells, wind farms, and solar systems. (A portion of
those subsidies should be used to retrain coal miners and to
construct clean-energy manufacturing plants in poor mining regions.)
The strategy also calls on all nations to replace emissions
trading with an equitable fossil-fuel efficiency standard. Every
country would commit to improving its energy efficiency by a
specified amount--say 5 percent--every year until the global 70
percent reduction is attained. By drawing progressively more energy
from noncarbon sources, countries would create the mass markets for
renewables that would bring down their prices and make them
competitive with coal and oil. This approach would be easy to
negotiate and easy to monitor: A nation's progress could be measured
simply by calculating the annual change in the ratio of its carbon
fuel use to its gross domestic product.
A global energy transition will cost a great deal of money
(although not nearly as much as ignoring the problem). Until
clean-energy infrastructures take root, providing clean energy to
poor countries would cost several hundred billion dollars a year,
say researchers at the Tellus Institute, an energy-policy think tank
in Boston. A prime source for that funding would be a "Tobin tax" on
international currency transactions, named after its developer,
Nobel prize-winning economist Dr. James Tobin. Every day,
speculators trade $1.5 trillion in the world's currency; a tax of a
quarter-penny on the dollar would net about $300 billion a year for
projects like wind farms in India, fuel-cell factories in South
Africa, solar assemblies in El Salvador, and vast, solar-powered
hydrogen farms in the Middle East. Unlike a North-South giveaway,
the fund is a transfer of resources from the finance sector--in the
form of speculative transactions--to the industrial sector-in the
form of productive, wealth-generating investments. Banks would be
paid a small percentage fee to administer the fund, partly
offsetting their loss of income from the contraction of currency
trading. Creation of a fund of this magnitude would follow the kind
of thinking that gave rise to the Marshall Plan after World War II.
Without that investment, the nations of Europe could be a collection
of impoverished, squabbling states instead of the fruitful and
prosperous trading partners we have today.
This approach has another precedent, in the Montreal Protocol,
the treaty that ended the production of ozone-destroying chemicals.
It was successful because the same companies that made the
destructive chemicals were able to produce their substitutes. The
energy industry can be reconfigured in the same way. Several oil
executives have said in private conversations that they can, in an
orderly fashion, decarbonize their energy supplies. But they need
the governments of the world to regulate the process so that all
companies can make the transition simultaneously, without losing
market share to competitors.
The plan would be driven by two engines: The
progressive-efficiency standard would create the regulatory drive
for all nations to transform their energy diets, and the tax
generating $300 billion a year for developing countries would create
a vast market for clean-energy technologies. It has been endorsed by
a number of national delegations--India, Bangladesh, Germany,
Mexico, and Britain, among others. While the plan will require
refinement, it is of a scale appropriate to the magnitude of the
problem.
Ultimately, the climate crisis provides an extraordinary
opportunity to help us calibrate competition and cooperation in the
global economy, harnessing the world's technical ingenuity and the
power of the market within a regulatory framework that reflects a
consensus of the world's citizens. The very act of addressing the
crisis would acknowledge that we are living on a finite planet and
foster a new ethic of sustainability that would permeate our
institutions and policies in ways unimaginable today. It could
subordinate our current infatuation with commerce and materialism to
a restored connection to our natural home, ending the exploitative
relationship between our civilization and the planet that supports
it.
Angry nature is holding a gun to our heads. Drought-driven
wildfires last summer consumed 6 million acres in the western United
States. Last fall, the United Kingdom experienced its worst flooding
since record-keeping began 273 years ago. In Iceland, Europe's
biggest glacier is disintegrating. And the sea ice in the Arctic has
thinned by 40 percent in the last 40 years.
We have a very small window of opportunity. The choice is clear.
The time is short.
Ross Gelbspan is author of The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis,
the Cover-up, the Prescription (Perseus Books, 1998). He
maintains the Web site http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200105/www.heatisonline.org,
a project of the Green House Network.
Life in a Warmer World by Paul Rauber
Unless we take drastic action--and soon--global warming threatens
to plunge the world into a series of climatic crises. The following
are some of the impacts foreseen by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, from a report published in February:
Average temperatures will increase by 10.4øF over the next 100
years.
Heavier flooding, especially in coastal cities, will affect 200
million people.
Deserts will expand, particularly in Asia and Africa. Crop
yields will decline, and droughts will grow more severe.
The Gulf Stream may slow down, which would result in a
dramatically colder northern Europe.
The Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets will shrink
significantly, raising sea level by almost 3 feet this century and
causing the inundation of low-lying islands like Samoa, the
Maldives, Mauritius, and the Marshalls. Over the course of the
millennium, sea level could rise by 20 feet.
Endangered species will disappear as habitat dwindles. Coastal
ecosystems will flood, freshwater fish will be unable to migrate to
cooler regions, and animals already adapted to cold may be left with
nowhere to go.
Incidence of heat-related deaths and infectious diseases like
malaria and dengue fever will increase, spreading beyond what are
now the tropics.
How to End--and Reverse--Global Warming by
Paul Rauber
Turning down the earth's thermostat will take a 70 percent
reduction in our current global level of carbon emissions. That's a
big job--but not impossible. Here's one blueprint to get there:
Redirect the $300 billion the world currently spends on
subsidies for fossil fuels to renewable power: solar systems, wind
farms, geothermal, and fuel cells.
Require every country, whether developed or not, to commit to
specific reductions in carbon emissions every year--say, 5
percent--until the goal of 70 percent is met.
Fund renewable-energy projects in the developing world through a
tax on international currency speculation. Such a tax could raise
$300 billion a year to help other nations avoid the industrial
world's mistakes. Combined with the progressive reduction schedule
above, it would provide a monetary incentive for innovation and
introduction of renewable technologies. This isn't the only possible
formula, but any approach to reversing the warming of the earth's
atmosphere must be at least as ambitious. The transformation will be
dramatic, but not necessarily painful--unless we delay too long.
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