The Age of Global Warming: A History (21 page)

The political response was divided between the minority of governments that took seriously the IPCC’s equivocal verdict and those arguing that the need for action overrode it. Despite pressure from the European Community – ‘I hope that Europe’s example will help the task of securing world-wide agreement,’ Thatcher told the conference – the US and the Soviet Union, the world’s two largest carbon dioxide emitters, weren’t budging.
[35]
Yuri Izrael for the Soviet delegation emphasised the doubt and uncertainty of climate change. More scientific research was needed, Izrael concluded.
[36]
John Knauss, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who led the US delegation, said that Washington had refused to set targets because ‘it does not believe in them’, adding, ‘it’s as simple as that.  We are not prepared to guarantee our projections’. American officials thought European targets lacked credibility, which they characterised as political goals not easily put into effect.
[37]

Maurice Strong, recently appointed secretary-general of the Rio Earth Summit, described the evidence of global warming as ‘compelling, if not yet definitive’. It posed ‘the greatest threat ever to global security’. Action had to be taken before the scientific evidence was definitive, Strong told delegates. ‘It is not feasible to wait for the post mortem on planet earth to confirm our diagnosis. If there is ever an instance in which we must act in accordance with the precautionary principle, this surely is it.’
[38]

Michel Rocard, the French prime minister, declared that the time for words was over. ‘What we need now is action,’ Rocard told the conference. ‘The race against time is on. The very survival of our planet is at stake.’
[39]
Despite the appeal for action made at The Hague and the summits at Noordwijk and Bergen, ‘nothing decisive has yet been accomplished’. Beyond the problem of global warming, the world community faced a fundamental question on the enforcement of international environmental law. ‘What point is there in holding meetings and conducting research if there is no certainty that the standards we adopt and the commitments we enter into will actually be respected?’ Rocard asked.
[40]

Acknowledging the need for more research, Mrs Thatcher argued it should not be used as an excuse to delay ‘much needed’ action. ‘There is already a clear case for precautionary action at an international level,’ she said. ‘We must not waste time and energy disputing the IPCC’s report.’
[41]

Her argument did not impress
The Times
science correspondent Nigel Hawkes. ‘Computer models predicting temperature rises very much smaller than their proven margins of error are being used by a prime minister who claims to be a scientist as grounds for imposing economic sacrifices on the entire world,’ Hawkes wrote. ‘A couple of cold winters will take the froth off the debate, and allow us the time we need to discover whether or not the earth is really warming up.’
[42]

By this stage of her premiership, it says much for Thatcher’s commitment to global warming that she was dedicating so much time to it. The week before, Sir Geoffrey Howe, her nominal deputy, had resigned. Before the month was out, she was no longer prime minister. In retirement, her views on global warming appear to have evolved. Her last book
Statecraft
, published in 2002, speaks of her concern about anti-capitalist arguments deployed by campaigners against global warming and the lack of scientific advice available to leaders from experts who were doubtful of the global warming thesis.
[43]

These were not the sentiments of her Geneva speech, her last pronouncement on the subject as prime minister. Instead she used language straight out of the green lexicon, talking of the growing imbalance between ‘our species and other species, between population and resources, between humankind and the natural order.’
[44]
She called for as many countries as possible to negotiate a framework convention on climate change for agreement in 1992 with binding emissions cuts, following the lead taken by European governments. In this endeavour,

the International [sic] Panel’s work should be taken as our sign post: and the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organisation as the principal vehicles for reaching our destination.
[45]

The IPCC did play the role Thatcher envisaged, but the WMO and UNEP – neither of which can be remotely described as purveyors of doubt about global warming that Thatcher said in her 2002 book was needed – were sidelined as negotiating vehicles. The G77 group of developing countries have more leverage within UN fora than inter-governmental arrangements, in which it is easier for OECD countries to hold sway.
*

The previous year, Brazil and Mexico had led an initiative to get increased representation with the formation of a special committee on the participation of developing countries. Both countries had objected to Bolin’s draft of the synthesis report. Frankly admitting that IPCC was a political bargaining process, the report was changed: ‘Recognising the poverty that prevails among the populations of developing countries, it is natural that they give priority to achieving economic growth,’ it now reads. ‘These sentences are of course politically inspired, but they are basically factual,’ Bolin explained.
[46]
Bolin was right. Since the 1972 Stockholm conference, this has been the consistent position of the G77 on environmental issues, right the way through the negotiations to hammer out UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 to the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009.

In December 1990, UN General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change (INC). Four intensive rounds of negotiations in the course of 1991 were marked by procedural wrangles and failure to produce a draft negotiating text. A fifth round in February 1991 was marked by deadlock. According to Daniel Bodansky’s account of the INC negotiations, ‘States still seemed engaged in a battle of nerves, hoping that, with the Rio Summit fast approaching, the other side would blink first.’
[47]

In April – less than two months to go before the summit – INC chairman Jean Ripert held extended meetings with key participants in Paris. No one blinked. 

‘Don’t go wobbly on me, George,’ Thatcher is reported to have told President Bush on facing down Saddam Hussein in 1990. On climate change, the Europeans wanted Bush to wobble. The prospect of the Rio Earth Summit without a convention on climate change was being taken right down to the wire.

*  With coal, the ratio of hydrogen to carbon is 0.5 to one; with natural gas, it is four to one, i.e., the proportion of carbon in natural gas is one-eighth that of coal.

*  Mostafa Tolba, UNEP executive director at the time, complained that governments took the preparation of the framework convention away from UNEP. ‘It has been speculated that the developed countries were not yet ready for the positive action and concrete action advocated by the UNEP executive director.’ Other than his testimony, there is little evidence to support this view. Mostafa K Tolba with Iwona Rummel-Bulska,
Global Environmental Diplomacy: Negotiating Environmental Agreements for the World, 1973–1992
(1998), p. 95.

15

A House Divided

I say this on climate change: we’re not going to enter into commitments we don’t keep.

President Bush, 7
th
June 1992
[1]

Negotiations on the climate change framework convention were marked by what the head of India’s delegation described as a ‘fundamental and irresolvable difference’ between the US and European Community.
[2]
Apart from the INC’s first session, US negotiators maintained the line that they would not accept any text which bound them to timetables and targets for carbon dioxide emissions. Diluted formulations calling for countries to commit to measures ‘aimed at’ stabilising emissions were rejected.

The negotiations stalled.

Less than two months before the summit, British and American negotiators hammered out a compromise. Britain’s environment secretary, Michael Howard, was sent to Washington to persuade key members of the administration that the President could sign the convention.

If history judges George H.W. Bush’s supreme achievement to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion, then global warming could have been designed to wrong foot him. In the post-Cold War New World Order, America found itself isolated. Fundamentally an internationalist, it would have been hard for Bush to stay away from the most numerous gathering of world leaders ever assembled. But there was no upside for him in going to Rio. Election year made the politics harder still and Bush did not have the political skills to pull it around. Bush lacked Nixon’s cynicism in his handling of the Stockholm conference twenty years earlier or Bill Clinton’s deftness in negotiating the Kyoto Protocol but not putting it to a vote in the Senate. 

In the 1988 election, the Bush campaign had decided that the environment was critical to winning key battleground states. To win suburban voters in these states, the strategy was to go to the right on tax, defence and crime and to the centre on childcare and the environment. On election night, exit polls gave Bush and Dukakis a dead heat on the environment and Bush wound up winning New Jersey, Illinois and California, the last Republican candidate to do so.
[3]

This was more than ‘read my lips’ campaign rhetoric. William Reilly, president of the Conservation Foundation, provided briefings to both presidential campaigns. Mostly ignored by the Dukakis camp, they were devoured by the Republicans. Bush hosted a dinner with leading environmental campaigners, the candidate sitting between Russell Train, who led the US delegation at the Stockholm conference, and Reilly. After the election, William Ruckelshaus, the Environmental Protection Agency’s first administrator, suggested to Bush he appoint Reilly to lead the EPA.

Reilly became the first environmentalist to head the EPA. He would not have many allies in the administration, except the most important one. On one occasion, budget director Richard Darman commented, ‘The problem is we have an environmentalist running the EPA and,’ pointing to the Oval Office, ‘the bigger problem is we’ve got an environmentalist sitting in there.’
[4]
According to Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater, Bush regarded people like Atwater as necessary tools, but had come into politics to work with people like Reilly.
[5]
Bush’s interest in environmental policy was genuine, a conservationist in the mould of Teddy Roosevelt averse to command-and-control solutions to environmental problems.
[6]

The priority of the senior White House staff was different: improving America’s economic performance. With Bush mostly focused on foreign policy, Reilly’s was an isolated voice. Nonetheless, the Bush administration notched up a number of achievements, notably the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, which pioneered the use of tradable emissions permits.

The prospect of the administration’s differences being played out under the floodlights of the Rio Earth Summit meant that, one way or another, the divergence between the environment candidate and the priority accorded the economy needed to be resolved. That posed a particular challenge for an administration held together by loyalty to the president and, when John Sununu was chief of staff, the discipline he exerted, rather than a shared sense of mission. Reilly recalls remarking to Barbara Bush at a social event on how well everyone got on with each other. ‘They’re all old friends, except for you Bill,’ the First Lady replied. ‘You’re the only one we didn’t know.’
[7]
When loyalty gave way to other agendas, as happened during the Rio conference, the result was spectacularly damaging.

This vulnerability was accentuated by another. As a communicator, Bush did not use speeches to build a case, but to convey sentiments (‘a kinder, gentler nation’, most famously) or state policy positions (‘the day of the open cheque book is over’, with respect to the Earth Summit).
[8]
This mattered when the global warming policy adopted by the Bush administration ran counter to where the rest of the world was heading. It needed advocacy, but the administration had no advocate.

Technically, the Bush White House was unusually well equipped to appraise the science and economics of global warming. Sununu held a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MIT and had worked on thermal transfer problems. Darman held a Harvard Ph.D. Robert Watson, who later worked in the Clinton White House and succeeded Bolin as chairman of the IPCC, described Sununu and Darman as ‘incredibly bright’.
[9]
Michael Boskin, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, had devoted much of his career as a Stanford professor to studying the interface between technology and the economy. Allan Bromley, the White House science adviser, was a nuclear physicist. (During his confirmation hearings, Al Gore tried to convince Bromley that Bromley did not understand the greenhouse effect.)
[10]
Bromley wrote a memoir of his time in the White House. There was no question that Sununu and Darman considered many of the claims of environmental activists to be seriously overblown, ‘but they were prepared to listen to any reasonable argument. What they refused utterly to do was to stipulate that we were
already
in a crisis, as many of the activists demanded as a basis for discussion’.
[11]

Of them, Darman was the most sceptical. He first brought Hansen’s claims to Sununu’s attention.
[12]
Darman’s approach to micro-economic policy was much more conservative than on fiscal and size of government issues. He deployed a cost-benefit approach that a particular environmental measure would cost X thousand dollars per fish saved, a mode of analysis he’d learnt from David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director.
[13]

Early in the Bush presidency, some of the leading global warming advocates had a meeting with Sununu, Darman and Bromley. Sununu probed the computer models. Did they couple the atmosphere and the ocean? No, came the reply. Sununu pointed out that the thermal capacity of the oceans could not be ignored. Computer models that only took account of the atmosphere were meaningless. Although his interlocutors were not happy that the White House chief of staff was unsupportive, Sununu authorised a large increase in funding for climate modelling.
[14]
In two years, spending more than doubled to $1.03bn.
[15]

Reilly and Sununu often clashed. Shortly after James Baker’s speech on global warming, Reilly made a similar speech on the subject. The next day, Sununu rang to tell him it wasn’t administration policy. Reilly replied that he has taken the same line as Baker. ‘He has?’ asked Sununu, ‘I’ll talk to Jim.’ Baker subsequently announced he was rescuing himself from involvement in the area to avoid potential conflicts of interest over his personal investments. ‘You’ll never win against the White House,’ Baker’s deputy, Bob Zoellick, told Reilly.
[16]

In October 1989, Bush asked Bromley to chair the White House climate change working group. The next month he and Reilly led the US delegation to the Noordwijk ministerial conference. ‘Neither we nor anyone known to us had any detailed economic or technical understanding of what would be involved in achieving this level of emissions [reductions],’ Bromley recorded.

The lack of economic analysis was astonishing … I asked the head of one of the major European delegations how exactly his country intended to achieve the projected emissions goals and was told, ‘Who knows – after all it’s only a piece of paper and they don’t put you in jail if you don’t actually do it.’
[17]

At the Malta summit with President Gorbachev in December 1989, when the two announced the end of the Cold War, Bush said he would host a White House conference on the environment and global warming the following spring. The Council of Economic Advisers studied the economics of global warming, its conclusions forming part of the Council’s 1990 annual report published in February that year. Its chairman, Michael Boskin, was concerned at reliance on primitive attempts to model the climate and the failure of other governments to analyse the economics. Global warming champions were environment ministries. Their lexicographical preference, to use Boskin’s term, was to treat the impact on economic performance as ancillary. Boskin alerted the economic ministries of other governments, but was frustrated that they continued to take a back seat to environment ministries.
[18]

The Council of Economic Advisers did some preliminary cost/benefit and risk analysis. Boskin brought in outside expertise, notably Yale economist William Nordhaus, a former Carter administration official and the leading economist in the field. The Council noted that there was ‘an extremely high level of uncertainty’ regarding possible future climate change. Unlike policies to combat depletion of the ozone layer, there were no low-cost substitutes for fossil fuels.
[19]
The cost of gradually reducing US carbon dioxide emissions by twenty per cent over the course of the next one hundred and ten years was estimated at between $800bn under optimistic scenarios to $3.6 trillion under pessimistic ones, between thirty-five to one hundred and fifty times greater than the EPA’s estimates of the costs of completely phasing out CFCs by the end of the twentieth century.
[20]

The study estimated the impact on the economy of carbon dioxide reduction policies by reference to the 1973 and 1979 oil price shocks and their impact in reducing the energy intensity of economic activity. With no growth in energy consumption between 1973 and 1985, carbon dioxide emissions were flat. But these were also years of economic weakness. Although caused by many factors, ‘higher energy prices clearly played an important role’, the report said. Policies designed to stabilise emissions could halve the growth rate of the global economy.
[21]

Reducing emissions was even harder for the US because of its dependence on coal-fired power stations, which contributed fifty-six per cent of America’s electricity in 1986. Canada, France and Sweden generated more than eighty per cent of their electricity from nuclear, hydroelectric or geothermal sources.
[22]
Germany had a similar reliance on coal, but had an ace up its sleeve.

With the costs of substantially slowing carbon dioxide emissions likely to reach trillions of dollars, what, the report asked, might be the benefits? Most sectors of industrialised economies were not climate sensitive. Estimates of the impact on world agriculture of a doubling of carbon dioxide ranged from $35–70 billion a year on pessimistic scenarios, with the US losing $1 billion annually, to small net gains.
[23]
By comparison, trade-distorting agricultural policies were reckoned to cost $35 billion a year for the world and $10 billion a year for the US.
[24]

The report concluded that without improved understanding of the impacts and likelihood of global warming, there was no justification for imposing large costs on the American economy. The adoption of many small programmes, each of which failed a standard cost-benefit analysis, could significantly slow economic growth and eliminate jobs, the Council warned. Any strategy to limit aggregate emissions without worldwide participation was likely to fail, the report stated.

The Bush administration was the only Western government to seriously analyse the economics of global warming, widening the rift between it and the rest of the West. This became particularly evident in April at the White House conference on the environment. Held in a Marriot hotel, the president gave the opening and closing addresses. ‘Two scientists, two diametrically opposed points of view – now where does that leave us?’ Bush asked in his first address, pointing to a couple of scientists who had been arguing about the science on a TV talk show.
[25]
Unimpressed, was the verdict of many participants. After a round of polite applause, European delegates quickly headed for the lobby with critical comments for reporters. Germany’s environmental minister, Klaus Töpfer, criticised the US. ‘Gaps in information should not be used as an excuse for worldwide inaction,’ Töpfer told the
Washington Post
.
[26]
Lucien Bouchard, Canada’s environment minister, chimed in: ‘The price of inaction is too high.’
[27]
Bert Bolin, who managed to get an invitation although he had not been on the original guest list, criticised those hiding behind ‘the concept of uncertainty’. Because of the inertia of the climate system and the energy stored in the oceans, Bolin told the conference, ‘We are [therefore] committed to a further change [of the climate] of perhaps [an additional] fifty per cent.’
[28]
Fifty per cent of what? Bolin didn’t say.

Administration officials tried to push back. ‘Up until now, the conferences I’ve been to haven’t focused at all on economics,’ Reilly told a journalist. ‘I don’t trust a commitment that is made without some knowledge of the cost.’ But Allen Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists was dismissive. ‘This conference is yet another example of the yawning chasm between George Bush’s campaign rhetoric on global warming and the reality of his administration’s policy of inaction.’
[29]

Not everyone was hostile. ‘President Bush is absolutely correct,’ said Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Nikolay Laverov on Bush’s comments linking environmental wellbeing and economic welfare. ‘The two are interwoven, and that is what differentiates this conference from other conferences of this kind.’
[30]

Negative reactions to the president’s speech prompted a change of heart. Reilly suggested to Bush and Darman’s deputy, Robert Grady, that it was possible to cool it down and join the ranks of the concerned without abandoning the administration’s opposition to targets and timetables.
[31]
Grady produced a draft. ‘Above all,’ the president said in his closing address, ‘the climate change debate is not about research versus action, for we’ve never considered research a substitute for action.’
[32]

Travelling in the president’s car, Bush asked Reilly if the speech had gone all right. Reilly began to answer but Bush cut him off: ‘I know; I showed I give a shit.’
[33]