The Age of Global Warming: A History (41 page)

The political debate in the US was also fundamentally different. In parliamentary systems, legislators are subject to strong party discipline. Even in Canada, with its federal system and hydrocarbon-rich provinces such as Alberta, the Prime Minister Jean Chrétien obtained every vote of his Liberal party caucus to ratify Kyoto. None of Canada’s major parties challenged the scientific rationale for action.
[31]

In the US, there was a debate.
*
In July 2003, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, directly attacked the scientific consensus. ‘If the relationship between public policy and science is distorted for political ends,’ Inhofe argued, ‘the result is flawed policy that hurts the environment, the economy and the people we serve.’
[32]
He ridiculed science writer David Appell for claiming global warming would create greater chaos than the two world wars, and cited political scientist Aaron Wildasky’s description of global warming as the mother of all environmental scares. ‘Much of the debate over global warming is predicated on fear, rather than science,’ Inhofe said. ‘After studying the issue over the last several years, I believe that the balance of the evidence offers strong proof that natural variability is the overwhelming factor influencing climate.’
[33]
Concluding, Inhofe asked: ‘Could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it.’
[34]

At the beginning of the nineties, corporate America responded to the rising wave of environmentalism in much the same way as big business elsewhere: it rode it. Coca Cola’s Don Keough provided Maurice Strong with some top marketing and public relations executives for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Strong was thrilled. ‘Since no organisation has a more sophisticated capacity for marketing, this was a gift indeed,’ Strong wrote. ‘Thus were our key messages promulgated throughout the world.’
[35]

Strong asked Swiss industrialist Stephan Schmidheiny to mobilise business support. Schmidheiny set up the Business Council for Sustainable Development. It produced a business manifesto,
Changing Course
, co-signed by forty-seven chairmen and CEOs, including two from oil companies (Chevron and Shell) and three auto manufacturers (Volkswagen, Nissan and Mitsubishi). The largest number was from US corporations.
*

Changing Course
could have been vintage 1972 Barbara Ward in arguing that environmental degradation and rich countries’ over-consumption prevented the development of poorer ones. ‘These two sets of alarming trends – environment and development – cannot be separated.’
[36]
The world was moving on. ‘The national income of Japan’s one hundred and twenty million people is about to overtake the combined incomes of the 3.8 billion people in the developing world,’ the authors of
Changing Course
wrote, just as Japan was entering two lost decades at the end of which, by one measure, it had been over-taken by China as the world’s second largest economy.
[37]

Global warming was acknowledged as politically the most difficult issue. ‘We cannot return to the lower energy scenarios of the past nor change our energy systems drastically,’ i.e., little change of course in
Changing Course
.
[38]
‘We foresee a gradual shift to a more sustainable mix of energy sources,’ – hardly a ringing endorsement of the prospects for a post-fossil fuel economy.
[39]

After Rio, a split began to develop within the US business community and with the rest of the world. Leading the challenge was the Global Climate Coalition, comprising oil companies, automakers, utilities and trade associations such as the US Chamber of Commerce.

Formed in 1989 in response to James Hansen’s testimony, initially it had a watching brief. That changed after the 1992 presidential election. To win support for Al Gore’s BTU tax, the Clinton administration did a deal with Senator Robert Byrd – a cut in taxes on coal in exchange for higher taxes on oil. According to William O’Keefe, who led the Global Climate Coalition, it fostered the perception that the new administration was deeply hostile to the use of liquid petroleum products.
[40]

In the run-up to Kyoto, there was a twin-track campaign highlighting the economic consequences of capping carbon dioxide emissions. The first was an advertising campaign through the summer of 1997: ‘The UN Climate Treaty isn’t Global ... and it won’t work.’
[41]
The second focused on the Congress and the Senate in particular. Byrd asked the coalition to help find co-sponsors for what became the Byrd-Hagel resolution, ending up with sixty-four. ‘We communicated a lot with members of the Congress to support the resolution,’ O’Keefe recalled.
[42]
  

The ninety-five to zero vote in favour of Byrd-Hagel was the coalition’s high point. Environmental NGOs battered its members with shareholder proxy campaigns and membership haemorrhaged. Before Kyoto, BP broke ranks and quit. In 1999, Ford Motor Company left. Ford chairman, life-long environmentalist William Ford, told a Greenpeace business conference the following year, ‘I expect to preside over the demise of the internal combustion engine.’
[43]
Shell, Texaco and Daimler Chrysler also left and it was disbanded in 2002.

The coalition was advised by Don Pearlman, a Washington attorney with a wide range of clients, including OPEC members. Pearlman had a reputation for his ferocious intelligence and unrivalled knowledge of the labyrinthine negotiating texts spawned by the Rio Convention. ‘I respected how well he did his job,’ Bob Watson, IPCC chairman at the time, told the author.
[44]
Helping bring about Watson’s ouster turned out to be the coalition’s parting shot. There was considerable opposition to Watson’s reappointment within the US business community. The incoming Bush administration was persuaded that, in O’Keefe’s words, Watson was ‘too much of an advocate’.
[45]

Watson won some votes, but lost those of Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. The US had already announced its support for India’s Rajendra Pachauri. The choice would have unexpected consequences. By turns aggressive and dismissive, Pachauri’s reaction to widely publicised mistakes in the Fourth Assessment Report did little to enhance the IPCC’s battered credibility.

In the mythology of global warming, fossil fuel firms prevented the US from joining the EU and other developed nations in leading the world to a virtuous low carbon future. There was a simpler explanation. There were never enough votes in the Senate for a simple majority, let alone the sixty votes needed to avoid a filibuster, to pass cap-and-trade. In 2003, the McCain Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act was defeated fifty-five to forty-three. By voice vote two years later, the Senate passed a resolution calling on Congress to enact a comprehensive and mandatory market-based scheme to stop or slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions without inflicting ‘significant harm’ on the economy.
[46]
It was a hollow statement. An amendment to the Energy Bill, calling for voluntary action sponsored by Chuck Hagel, was carried by sixty votes to twenty-nine. A competing one sponsored by McCain and Lieberman that called for mandatory caps went down by thirty-eight to sixty votes.

Two years later, the Senate debated another cap-and-trade proposal, this time targeting a sixty-three per cent reduction by 2050 (similar to the UK’s Climate Change Bill). The legislation never made it out of committee.

By then, an alternative path had opened up. In a five to four judgement, the Supreme Court required the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the 1972 Clean Air Act.  ‘Perhaps the most important decision ever handed down in the annals of environmental law,’ Lisa Jackson, EPA administrator in the Obama administration has called
Massachusetts v. EPA
.
[47]
It was also perhaps the most stupid. The Court might as well have instructed King Canute to reverse the incoming tide.

While there is a clear rationale to regulating what comes out of automobile tail pipes to reduce local air pollution, global warming is a global phenomenon. In the Court’s opinion, because US motor vehicles accounted for six per cent of global emissions of carbon dioxide (four per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, as the Chief Justice wrote in his dissent), they made a ‘meaningful contribution’ to greenhouse gas concentrations.
[48]
‘While it may be true that regulating motor vehicle emissions will not by itself
reverse
global warming, it by no means follows that we lack jurisdiction to decide whether EPA has a duty to take steps to
slow
or
reduce
it.’
[49]

Having the jurisdiction is one thing. Having the means is something else. Even if EPA regulations reduced fuel burn by fifteen per cent from 2016, and assuming US vehicle emissions remain at the same percentage of global emissions for a hundred years, it would delay the full effect of a century’s worth of global warming by ten months, from 1
st
January 2116 to 25
th
October 2116.
*
†
This assumes people don’t change their behaviour. If, in response to finding that a tank of gas taking them farther, Americans decided to drive more miles, the smaller the effect will be on emissions. If they don’t, lower demand for oil will mean lower oil prices, making it cheaper for drivers elsewhere in the world to use their cars more and emit more carbon dioxide.    

Massachusetts v. EPA
revolved around whether the EPA’s refusal to regulate gas emissions presented a risk of harm to Massachusetts that was both ‘actual’ and ‘imminent’.
[50]
In the opinion of the Chief Justice, arriving at such a conclusion required such an attenuated chain of causation that it went to the very outer limit of the law.
[51]

To demonstrate injury to Massachusetts, the Court cited a report by the National Research Council that identified a number of environmental changes that, in the Court’s opinion, had ‘already inflicted significant harms’. These included the retreat of mountain glaciers, reduction in snow cover extent, earlier spring melting (harmful to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts?) and accelerating sea level rise.
[52]
*
A 10–20cm rise in sea levels during the twentieth as a result of global warming, had already begun to ‘swallow’ Massachusetts’ coast land, the Court asserted.

In his dissent, Chief Justice Roberts described this as ‘pure conjecture’.
[53]
Boston’s rising sea level had been caused by land subsidence. The anticipated sea level rise over the course of the twenty-first century could be less than the margin of error of the model used to estimate the elevation of coastal land. ‘It is difficult to put much stock in the predicted loss of land.’
[54]

Should carbon dioxide – without which there would be no plant life and only single celled life-forms and funguses – be defined as a pollutant, as defined by the Clean Air Act? For the Court, the matter was straightforward: carbon dioxide is a physical and chemical substance emitted into the ambient air. By the same definition, so is the most important greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere – water vapour.

On 7
th
December 2009 – the opening day of the Copenhagen climate conference – the Obama administration announced its endangerment finding on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, as required by the Supreme Court. ‘This administration will not ignore science or the law any longer,’ Lisa Jackson said. The EPA was now ‘authorised and obligated’ to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.
[55]

As president-elect, Barack Obama videotaped some remarks on climate change. A federal cap-and-trade system would cut emissions by eighty per cent by 2050. Not only would this save the planet, ‘it will also help us transform our industries and steer our country out of this economic crisis’.
[56]
With its upside down economics, the speaker might have been one of the professors of the political school of the grand academy of Lagado.

*  In reality, Denmark’s electricity market is so tightly integrated into Germany’s that, in practical terms, it is part of the German market. Wind power accounts for only seven percent of the combined market. Paul-Frederik Bach,
The Variability of Wind Power
(2010), p. 26.

*  In 2005, solar received €54.53 per kWh – over six times the €8.53 per kWh for wind. Manuel Frondel, Nolan Ritter, Christoph M Schmidt, Colin Vance,
Economic Impacts from the Promotion of Renewable Technologies: The German Experience
(2009), Table 1.

*  In Australia, political argument between the parties broke out in 2009 after opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, who supported the Rudd government’s climate change policies, was deposed and replaced by sceptic Tony Abbott.

*  They were Kenneth Derr of Chevron, Maurice Greenberg of AIG, Charles Harper of Conagra, Allen Johnson, retired chairman of 3M, Samuel Johnson of SC Johnson, Frank Popoff of Dow Chemical, former EPA Administrator, William Ruckelshaus, of Browning-Ferris, Paul O’Neill of ALCOA and treasury secretary under George W. Bush, and Edgar Woolard of DuPont.

*  EPA regulations for new vehicles project average light vehicle emissions of 295g of CO
2
for the 2012 model year falling to 250g per mile for the 2016 model year.
EPA and NHTSA Finalize Historic National Program to Reduce Greenhouse Gases and Improve Fuel Economy for Cars and Trucks
(April 2010), p. 4.

*  On the (more correct) basis of the Chief Justice Robert’s dissenting opinion that US motor vehicles account for four per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the full effect would be postponed by less than seven months.

*  Nowhere in the Court’s opinion is there any discussion of the potential benefits of longer growing seasons and stronger plant growth that might arise from having more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.