The LOST two decades for attack on Climate Change!!

HOT - Living Through the Next Fifty Years

by Mark Hertsgaard

Mark here relates how we have lost two decades to combat Climate Change::

　

　

Unfortunately, the climate threat cannot be defused so quickly, "This problem will be much harder to solve, because you can't just have two men sit down at a table and agree to stop being stupid," Hubert Reeves, the head of France's national scientific research center, said when I interviewed him in 1991 for "Earth Odyssey." Reeves was referring to the fact that reversing global warming would require sharp reductions in hu-

manity's consumption of oil, coal, and other fossil fuels-the very lifeblood of modern society. In the years since I spoke with Reeves, the task has proven as difficult as forecast; global greenhouse gas emissions rose by 1.1 percent a year during the 1990s, then surged to a 3 percent annual growth rate between 2000 and 2007.

And even that isn't the worst of it. I actually find it relatively easy to imagine humanity shifting to greener sources of energy. After all, we have most of the technologies in hand, many big investors see an opportunity to profit handsomely from deploying them, and scientific necessity leaves little other choice. More troubling is the second reason why the climate crisis is harder to solve: the physical inertia of the climate system. We could have two or two hundred men sit down and agree to stop being stupid-they could even agree to mount the Green Apollo project Schellnhuber urges-and our civilization would still be locked in to worsening climate change for many years to come. Thanks to our past decades of delay, average global temperatures are all but certain to reach 2C above preindustrial levels, probably in the lifetime of Chiara and Zoltan. And we now know that 2C is by no means a safe level.

All of which reminds me why, that day on the Westminster Bridge, I felt not only sad and angry but convinced that a crime had been committed. By then, I had spent five years watching Bush and especially Dick Cheney (arguably the real president during the Bush years, as revealed in journalist Barton Gellman's book Angler) do all in their power to thwart action against global warming. Among hundreds of examples, the Bush-Cheney administration reneged on Bush's campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant; it repudiated the Kyoto Protocol; it urged the IPCC, at the written request of ExxonMobil, to fire the chairman of the IPCC; it installed a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute in the White House Council on Environmental Quality, where he censored scientific reports; it attempted to muzzle James Hansen and other climate scientists; and it rejected all calls to limit America's greenhouse gas emissions. What's more, the administration's intransigence had the effect of blocking international action. After all, if America refused to accept limits, why should China, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, and other big emitters accept them?

Paul O'Neill, the former CEO of the aluminum company Alcoa who served as Bush's first secretary of the treasury, provided the most damning summary of the Bush-Cheney agenda. Early in his first term, Bush asked O'Neill to draft a plan of action on global warming. But O'Neill's plan was completely ignored. Instead, O'Neill told me later, the Bush administration "cherry-picked" the science on climate change to justify taking no action, "just like it cherry-picked the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction" to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The Tobacco Connection

Not all of the blame for America's foot-dragging can be laid at the feet of Bush, Cheney, and their fellow Republicans, though. Schellnhuber lamented the "lost decade" under Bush, but there were actually two lost decades, and the first occurred while Democrats controlled the White House. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he and especially Vice President Al Gore wanted to tackle global warming, but they found the opposition within Washington insurmountable. Congressional Republicans were implacably opposed to any measures that would reduce consumption of fossil fuels, but many Democrats felt the same, not only in Congress but within the Clinton administration itself. Nothing made the point more plainly than the Senate's 95 to 0 vote in 1997 to oppose American participation in any international agreement - that is, the impending Kyoto Protocol - that imposed mandatory emissions reductions on the United States but not on China.

Such powerful bipartisan opposition reflected the fact that curbing greenhouse gas emissions would strike at the heart of America's political economy, not to mention the profits of three of its most powerful industries: oil, coal, and autos. The power of those industries and the reliance of so much of the American way of life on abundant, cheap oil - without it, goodbye, suburbs - helps explain why the United States was slower to address the climate threat than Europe and Japan were, said Everett Ehrlich, who chaired the Clinton administration's interagency deliberations on climate change. "The U.S. is more like an OPEC nation-an energy producer-while the Europeans and Japan are energy consumer nations," explained Ehrlich, Clinton's undersecretary of commerce. "Our natural resource industries are very powerful, and their executives saw dealing with climate change as punitive to their interests. We heard about it repeatedly from them."

The carbon lobby not only complained; it devoted enormous amounts of money and effort to blocking action. For years, America's energy companies had showered politicians with campaign contributions and deployed armies of lobbyists to protect their general interests in Washington. As global warming became an issue in the 1990s, these companies responded by launching a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign aimed at discrediting the science of global warming in the minds of lawmakers, journalists, and the public.

Remarkably, the carbon lobby's attack relied on many of the same tactics and strategies-even the same scientists-that the tobacco industry had previously used to resist government regulation of cigarettes. Just as tobacco companies denied that smoking causes cancer, so the carbon lobby denied that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to human well-being. In each case, the companies cloaked their self-serving claims in a mantle of apparent scientific respectability. No man did more to assist them than Frederick W. Seitz, who had begun his scientific career as a young physicist working on the Manhattan Project, America's ultra-secret World War II project to build an atomic bomb.

You could call Seitz the $45 million man. That's how much money he received from the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in the 1970s and 1980s to fund medical research that blunted public understanding of the health effects of smoking. Much of this research took place at Rockefeller University, an institution founded and subsidized by the Standard Oil fortune, where Seitz was president. On top of his Rockefeller salary, Seitz earned $585,000 from R. J. Reynolds for supervising its health research efforts, according to company documents that Seitz confirmed when I interviewed him in 2006. The research Seitz supervised was mainly concerned with medical issues, but it avoided the central health question facing Reynolds. "They didn't want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking," Seitz told me. Nevertheless, the research served R. J. Reynolds's purposes, for it enabled the tobacco industry to publish newspaper and magazine advertisements for decades citing its multimillion-dollar research program as proof of its commitment to science-and to argue that the dangers of smoking cigarettes were uncertain.

Or, to quote a tobacco industry planning memo from that time, "Doubt is our product."

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To be continued

You need to have Mark Hertsgaard's  book, it is, and will be for years to come, an education on this subject of Climate Change, for you and your children. The book also gives proven ways to combat the hole we have dug ourselves into over the last century or more.