The Age of Global Warming: A History (25 page)

Of the world’s top ten per capita carbon dioxide emitters in 2000, six are outside Annex I, including the top three, Qatar (with per capita emissions three times those of the US and nearly six times the average of the developed world), the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait.
[25]
Neither is per capita GDP a criterion for inclusion. By 2009 for example, non-Annex I South Korea had per capita GDP of $23,407, just $278 less than the EU’s at $23,685.
[26]

Instead of being based on objective criteria, the Annex I dividing line closely follows the 1980 Brandt Line, purportedly delineating the unbridgeable chasm dividing the rich North from the poor South. Thus Annex I countries comprise the old OECD (i.e., excluding Mexico, Chile, Israel and South Korea, which were not OECD members at the time) plus the countries of the former Soviet bloc, but excluding the Soviet Union’s Asian republics, such as Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. The resulting North-South demarcation, as carved in stone in global warming agreements, is a product of history. It has a political explanation, but no objective economic justification.

With the Montreal Protocol, developing countries had not engaged early in the process or
en bloc
. After it came into force in 1989, developing countries asserted their need for new and additional transfers, agreement being reached at the London ozone conference in July 1990, when the Chinese and Indian delegations announced that they were recommending that their countries ratify the protocol. Coming late to the party had a cost, because the developed nations, led by the US, had already settled the Protocol’s main terms. They weren’t going to make the same mistake twice. In 1989, Brazil and Mexico pressed for increased developing country representation in negotiations to tackle global warming, creating a Special Committee on the Participation of Developing Countries. The following year, the UN resolution establishing the INC specified that it should be open to all member states.

Putting developing countries on an equal footing had profound implications for the conduct of the negotiations as well as their outcome. The Montreal Protocol was negotiated by around thirty countries. Typically the climate change COPs have been attended by one hundred and fifty or more countries and more than one thousand, three hundred delegates.
[27]
Progress is achieved through UN-style consensus rather than majority voting, meaning that there must be no stated or formal objections to a decision.
[28]

Given all these constraints, to have produced a treaty signed by over one hundred and ninety nations was the result of a diplomatic
tour de force
. Michael Oppenheimer, an astrophysicist subsequently specialising in atmospheric physics and chemistry, was in Kyoto as science adviser to the Environmental Defence Fund. Al Gore, Oppenheimer said, was the only person with the history, understanding and reputation to bring it together. ‘If this fails, a large part of the blame falls on the administration.’
[29]
He was wrong on both counts.

There was one person who could and did bring the negotiations to a successful conclusion and that was Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, the Argentine diplomat who chaired the negotiations over a period of thirty-two months. The resulting agreement was, Estrada wrote two years later, the ‘best compromise the international community was able to reach at that time’.
[30]
It was a diplomatic accomplishment of the highest order. ‘I thought Raúl did a strong, credible job in a most challenging negotiation,’ Tim Wirth told the author.
[31]

To have blamed Gore if the conference had broken up without an agreement or for its failure to produce a treaty which met the requirements of the Byrd-Hagel resolution would also have been unfair. But it wasn’t in the interests of NGOs like the Environmental Defence Fund to point their finger in the direction of the South, but at America and its most prominent environmentalist.

At a symbolic level, though, Gore invited the charge because he had made it himself: Western civilisation was the root cause of the environmental crisis. Nature was in crisis because Western man was sick. ‘Ecology and the human spirit’ is the somewhat Germanic sounding subtitle of
Earth in the Balance
, in which Gore set out these and other thoughts. At other times, Gore conceded that Western man might not be wholly to blame. Thinking about human beings and the environment led him to pose the biggest environmental question of all. Had God made a mistake when giving mankind dominion over the earth?
[32]

Gore’s ecological philosophy brought together an American tradition of environmentalism, extending from Thoreau and Muir, with crankier elements imported from Europe, notably Schumacher. What made Gore unique was that no ecologist before him had attained high political office, let alone being a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States. The harsh criticism Gore directed at the preceding and succeeding administrations contrasts with the Clinton administration’s performance with respect to the Kyoto Protocol, the subject of the next two chapters.

*  Reinstein argues that the success of the Montreal Protocol was achieved at an acceptable cost because negotiators used a ‘bottom-up’ approach, working closely with businesses on what was technically and economically feasible, in contrast to the ‘top-down’ negotiation of emissions caps under Kyoto which depend on ‘technological forcing’ of low cost substitutes for fossil fuels that do not exist at present (Robert Reinstein, ‘Ozone Protection and Global Climate Change: Is the Montreal Protocol a Good Model for Responding to Climate Change?’, 1996).

18

China Syndrome

It’s the economy, stupid.

Clinton-Gore campaign war room, 1992

Ours are survival emissions. Theirs are luxury emissions.They have two people to a car and yet they don’t want us to ride buses.

Shukong Zhong, China’s chief negotiator, Kyoto, December 1997
[1]

As a teenager, the future vice president and his sister read and talked about
Silent Spring
. A happy and vivid memory, Al Gore recalled. Rachel Carson’s picture hangs in his office and her example inspired Gore to write
Earth in the Balance
.
[2]
It is one of the most extraordinary books by any democratic politician seeking high elective office, for it constitutes an attack on Western civilisation and a fundamental rejection of two of its greatest accomplishments – the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions.

Searching for a better understanding of his own life and how he was going to rescue the global environment, Gore concluded that modern civilisation was suffering from a spiritual crisis.
[3]
Although one of a number of environmental crises, global warming symbolised the collision between civilisation and the Earth’s ecological system.
[4]
Global warming turned the internal combustion engine into a more deadly threat than any military foe America was ever likely to face.
[5]
The current generation might even experience a year without a winter, Gore warned.
[6]

Western man had only escaped the Malthusian trap by making a Faustian pact.
[7]
Men were to blame, for Western civilisation had emphasised a ‘distinctly male’ way of relating to the world. A solution might be found by ‘leavening the dominant male perspective with a healthier respect for female ways of experiencing the world’.
[8]
Western civilisation was a dysfunctional family, impelled by addiction to inauthentic substitutes for direct experience of real life, leading to the frenzied destruction of the natural world. It was well known, Gore observed, ‘that the vast majority of child abusers were themselves abused as children’.
[9]

The chain of abuse went back to the two philosophers who anticipated the Scientific Revolution. ‘The unwritten rules that govern our relationship to the environment have been passed down from one generation to the next since the time of Descartes, Bacon, and the other pioneers of the Scientific Revolution.’
[10]
Gore reinterpreted medieval metaphysics as an ecological philosophy connecting man to nature in a web of life, matter and meaning, now lost to the modern world. By breaking with Aristotleanism, Bacon and Descartes had separated man from nature and science from religion. For them, facts derived from science had no moral significance. ‘As a consequence,’ Gore wrote, ‘the scientific method changed our relationship to nature and is now, perhaps irrevocably, changing nature itself.’
[11]
If science had kept its link with religion, Gore thought humans might not be threatening the earth’s climate balance.
[12]

Bacon was morally confused, because he had argued that science was about the advancement of knowledge and making scientific discoveries without reference to any moral purpose. The divorce of facts from values and morality had terrible consequences in the twentieth century, Gore argued, Bacon and the scientific method thereby contributing to the extreme evils perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin.
[13]
Gore’s accusation against science shows an extraordinary misreading of history. The Nazis did not commit their crimes because they lacked values, but because their values were evil. Moreover the Nazis enacted the most environmentally friendly laws in Europe. They passed anti-vivisection laws (Gore criticised Bacon for dissecting animals for the sake of knowledge) but used humans instead. Nazi ideologists rejected the proposition that science is morally neutral, most horribly in their racial theories. Similarly, Stalin supported Trofim Lysenko’s genetic theories, not because of their superior explanatory power, but because they conformed to Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Yet Gore’s assault on the Scientific Revolution met with silence from leading academies and societies. Collectively scientists tolerated an extraordinary attack on the integrity and morality of their discipline because they were united by a common enemy – global warming and fossil fuel interests.

The book was well timed. Bill Clinton’s Arkansas had one of the worst environmental records in America. Environmental policy was not, as Clinton admitted, his strong suit. Gore gave Clinton a signed copy. ‘I read it, learned a lot, and agreed with his argument.’
[14]

With Gore as vice president, there was no debate within the new administration on the science of global warming. Gore regularly hosted breakfast seminars with leading scientists, exposing agency heads to what scientists were thinking. Bob Watson, who worked in the White House during President Clinton’s first term, recalls Gore being an avid reader of
Nature
. He would often telephone, ‘Bob, what do you think of this paper?’ In preparing scientists for the seminars, Watson would tell them to speak for a maximum of seven minutes, as Gore will interrupt and ask questions. Gore’s biggest strength was in synthesising and connecting issues and Watson had no hesitation in putting him in front of a pure science audience.
[15]

The economics presented a greater challenge. In his book, Gore strongly criticised the Bush administration for threatening to torpedo the Rio summit because of its refusal to sign up to targets and timetables. Ratcheting back emissions to their 1990 level was a target the US could ‘easily’ meet.
[16]
Here debates within the Clinton administration in the run-up to Kyoto were similar to those in the Bush administration before Rio. ‘Al has discovered it’s a lot easier to write a book about the subject than to grapple with the economic costs,’ one of Clinton’s top aides said, ‘but he’s getting the hang of it.’
[17]

From his position in the State Department, Tim Wirth advocated an aggressive plan for significant cutbacks in greenhouse gas emissions. The plan was scaled back as Clinton listened to warnings of senior economic advisers, notably Larry Summers and Janet Yellen of the Council of Economic Advisers. ‘The spin is that we won,’ an economic adviser told the
New York Times
. ‘We agreed there needed to be goals, even aggressive goals. But there also needed to be escape hatches, in case the economic effects turned out to be a lot more damaging than we thought.’
[18]

Rescuing the environment was not the central organising principle of the Clinton administration. Within four weeks of being sworn in, Clinton announced what was – deficit reduction to induce a bond market rally, encourage private investment to spur productivity, job creation and growth. He proposed cutting spending and raising taxes. Gore argued for a broad-based tax on energy. Clinton called the BTU energy tax his toughest tax call, particularly after he had dropped his election pledge of a middle-class tax cut. Lloyd Bentsen, the treasury secretary, joined Gore in pressing him. ‘Finally, I gave in.’
[19]
A few days later, Clinton announced the BTU tax in his State of the Union speech in February.

Environmentalists were thrilled. A retrospective paper by one called it ‘brilliantly conceived in every way. It was simple, clean, easy to administer and raised significant revenue’.
[20]
The BTU tax quickly became the most controversial part of Clinton’s deficit reduction package. Manufacturers claimed it would cost more than half a million jobs. When the Senate deleted the BTU tax two months later and substituted a 4.3 cents a gallon gas tax, Clinton’s relief was palpable. ‘The bad news was that the gas tax would promote less energy conservation than the BTU tax; the good news was that it would cost middle-class Americans less.’
[21]

The loss of the BTU tax was enormously consequential. Even when Democrats controlled Congress, taxation as a policy response to global warming was not politically feasible. So the Clinton administration turned away from energy taxes to champion the major environmental policy innovation of the Bush administration – tradable pollution permits. Emissions trading had solved a politically intractable problem that had stalled progress on tackling acid rain and led to a market-based way that enabled the Bush administration to propose the most ambitious target of a fifty per cent emissions cut with the most creative means.
[22]
Although Gore had been a bystander in the Clean Air Act debates, emissions trading and flexible market mechanisms became the central plank of the Clinton administration’s negotiating strategy.

Transposing a mechanism designed to cut emissions from the chimneys of a few dozen power stations in one country to creating a market for the right to emit a gas used in processes too numerous to count, a gas, moreover, that is part of a naturally occurring cycle and therefore influenced by land use changes, then extending the market to cover developed countries and, through the Clean Development Mechanism, to embrace virtually every country in the world, posed technical, legal, verification and compliance challenges several orders of magnitude more complex. 

Carbon taxes would have been simpler, easier and cleaner. Focusing negotiators on setting quantities, in the form of emissions caps, rather than setting prices, in the form of taxes, also created irresistible incentives for gaming. It incentivised countries to target emissions reductions that would have happened anyway (essentially the position of the European Union) or to negotiate trading mechanisms to take advantage of other nations’ emission reductions that were happening anyway, principally those caused by the collapse of the Soviet bloc (the American goal). 

The outcome was very different from the Montreal Protocol. All the reductions of CFCs and other substances controlled by the Montreal Protocol occurred as a direct result of regulatory actions designed to reverse the depletion of the ozone layer.  On the other hand, the interest of the Annex I parties in negotiating the Kyoto Protocol was to free ride to the greatest extent possible reductions that would have happened anyway or existed only on paper.

The Clinton administration’s journey along this road began in October 1993 with its climate change action plan. The forty-nine-page document listed forty-four actions designed to meet the president’s personal commitment to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by the end of the decade (they actually increased by 16.1 per cent compared to the 3.4 per cent fall needed to return to 1990 levels).
[23]
It was thin stuff. All the actions were voluntary and the plan involved only $1.9 billion in new and redirected spending between 1994 and 2000. 

Some environmental NGOs disguised their disappointment. Others couldn’t. The Sierra Club said the administration had looked global warming in the eye and blinked. The National Wildlife Federation compared it to date rape. And there was an endorsement the administration could have done without. Fred Singer, a leading scientist opposed to the scientific consensus, wrote that the voluntary measures made ‘a certain amount of sense’.
[24]

Losing both houses of Congress in the November 1994 mid-term elections put the Clinton administration’s climate policies on the defensive at home when its presence was required on the international stage. In March 1995, Helmut Kohl addressed the first COP in Berlin. There was a certain irony as Kohl urged delegates to remember the lesson of Berlin. Never again should walls of enmity be erected between peoples and nations, Kohl declared, for the Berlin Mandate institutionalised a new division across the world between North and South.
[25]

The demarcation line had been agreed at a late stage in the negotiations on the Climate Change Convention three years earlier at an INC session in Paris during Holy Week. There were various attempts to define developed and developing countries. GDP per capita was felt not to be a good measure, as there were lots of countries in between. Because there were more developing countries, it was easier to define the developed countries, which was done on the basis of membership of the OECD (a definition that put Turkey in an anomalous position as a developing country which was also an OECD member) plus Eastern Europe.
[26]

Angela Merkel, the German environment minister, had to fashion a compromise to reconcile the contradictory demands of North and South. Growing up in East Germany, Merkel was versed in the uselessness of inflexibility. She was helped by Britain’s environment secretary, John Gummer, one of the most pro-European members of John Major’s government who had replaced the Atlanticist Michael Howard two years earlier. Gummer’s views were closely aligned with mainstream European attitudes and was an early admirer of Merkel. ‘Very, very able,’ Gummer found her.
[27]
China had to be kept onside, recognising Chinese sensitivities to anything that appeared to them to infringe their sovereignty (at times, Gummer recalls negotiators spent longer debating the rights and wrongs of the Boxer Rebellion than climate change). In Gummer’s view, the difficulties America had over China were not fundamentally about climate change, but sprang from fears about China’s rivalry with the US.

Apart from the EU and the G77 plus China, the other main negotiating bloc was the US-led Umbrella Group, loosely comprising Australia, Canada, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, the Russian Federation, and the Ukraine as a counter-weight to the EU. Merkel’s strategy was to target Canada’s environment minister, Sheila Copps, the leading left-winger in Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government. Copps was peeled away from the Umbrella Group, which helped convince the Chinese delegation that they should have confidence that Annex I parties genuinely accepted overwhelming responsibility for taking action to tackle global warming.
[28]
Shuttling between two rooms, one with developed countries, the other with developing countries, she produced a compromise text at six in the morning and declared the Mandate adopted despite protests from OPEC members.
[29]

Throughout the rest of the negotiations, OPEC was carefully managed. At COP2, OPEC members were bought off with a fund to compensate oil producers for the loss of income resulting from policies to cut carbon dioxide emissions. There is evidence that Japan offered Saudi Arabia a side deal in return for its cooperation at Kyoto.
[30]

No threats or inducements could subsequently shift the G77 plus China from what they had wrung from COP1. The text of the Berlin Mandate states that the process will not introduce any new commitments for Parties not included in Annex I.
[31]
Its implications went further than a literal reading might suggest, which neither added nor subtracted anything to what was already in the text of the convention, as it precluded even specifying what the obligations of non-Annex I parties in the original convention might be.

Other than the State Department, the Berlin Mandate did not receive high level attention in the Clinton administration. Although American negotiators in Berlin recognised that it might go down badly on the Hill, agreeing it was seen as a ‘tactical step to keep the process moving’.
[32]
It proved a grave miscalculation.

A decade and a half on, the man who discharged the Berlin Mandate believes it was the only basis on which the process could have been taken forward.
[33]
As host, Japan would by custom hold the presidency of the conference. Internal splits meant it was unable to field a candidate of sufficient standing. Before taking up his new post as Argentina’s ambassador to Beijing, Raúl Estrada-Oyuela was elected chair of the Ad Hoc Group of the Berlin Mandate.

As an Argentine, Estrada brought to the job the economic perspective of his fellow countryman, Raúl Prebisch, the intellectual grandfather of the development half of sustainable development. The two got to know each other when they were living in Washington in the early 1970s where their sons went to the same kindergarten. A decade later, Estrada attended Prebisch’s funeral in Santiago; a complicated affair, with Prebisch’s two concurrent wives each taking a share of his ashes.
[34]
Some of Estrada’s most penetrating economic analyses of the climate change issues owe much to Prebisch’s economics.