Storms of My Grandchildren (5 page)

We decided to go into greatest detail on automobile efficiencies during the next two years, for several reasons. Vehicles were the fastest-growing source of CO2 emissions, yet the government seemed to be oblivious to the matter. Also, during the course of the A-Team study, I had been invited to give a talk at Exxon/Mobil headquarters, and my discussion of this experience with the A-Team spurred our desire to focus on vehicles.

My talk at Exxon/Mobil was to executives and top engineers of the ten leading automobile manufacturers in the United States, including Japanese and European companies. Afterward, we had a friendly question-and-answer session that addressed climate model uncertainties, causes of climate change in Earth’s history, and my assertion that we must get onto a path resembling the alternative scenario in order to avoid disastrous climate change.

I stayed for the rest of the morning as engineers described their plans. Criticisms of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), which was attempting to force the car manufacturers to deliver major improvements in vehicle efficiency, grew more and more strident. Finally I raised my hand and asked, “Wouldn’t it make sense, instead of fighting CARB, to try to get ahead of the curve by focusing on vehicle efficiency?” The response was, “Dr. Hansen, we have to give the customers what they will buy, and they want higher performance and larger vehicles.”

That evening I noticed several television advertisements showing huge vehicles parked atop mountain peaks (where probably nobody would ever actually drive). This led me to question how much of the desire for size and performance really originated with the customers.

Relying heavily on a recent National Research Council (NRC) study of potential vehicle-efficiency improvements, the A-Team wrote a report considering different degrees of technology infusion, ranging from changes that the NRC deemed “production ready” to emerging technologies.

The A-Team also developed the Auto CO2 Tool and made it available on the Web. Users could make alternative assumptions for technology infusion and view graphs of the results, including reductions in national oil requirements. The Auto CO2 Tool showed that moderately aggressive improvements in efficiency resulted in efficiency gains ranging from 18 percent for subcompact autos to 37 percent for large pickups. Vehicle price increases, ranging from eight hundred to three thousand dollars, generally were covered by reduced fuel costs within a few years.

The Auto CO2 Tool revealed that even without further vehicle-efficiency improvements, if the existing production-ready vehicle-efficiency improvements were made, the resulting reduction in U.S. oil imports by 2050 would be 7 ANWRs, where 1 ANWR is the entire amount of oil that the United States Geological Survey estimates to be recoverable from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Once the vehicles with these moderately aggressive fuel-efficiency improvements were fully phased into the vehicle fleet, which requires about fifteen years, the annual reduction in U.S. oil import costs, with oil at fifty dollars a barrel, would be a hundred billion dollars.

The A-Team was counting on me to write a publishable paper about the results of our study, which, in my opinion, were significant. Our basic conclusion was that existing technology could provide a CO2 emissions path consistent with the alternative scenario in the near term, i.e., a downturn of emissions over the next fifteen years, as opposed to the continual emissions growth that the Energy Department projected. This conclusion applied not only to the transportation sector but also to the industrial, commercial, and residential sectors.

The paper I wrote, “On the Road to Climate Stability: The Parable of the Secretary,” took a novel approach. It included twenty-two graphs and pie charts organized into eight figures, but the text of the paper was written partly as a discussion among three A-Team members: the wizened professor (some combination of York College professor Sam Borenstein and me) and two students, Jorge and Naomi (representing all the other A-Team members). I aimed to provide a more complete picture of the research process by capturing the emotions as well as scientific results.

Unfortunately, journal editors and referees did not like this approach, and my attempts to get the paper published were rebuffed. We lost funding for the education program, and efforts to get foundation funding failed. Carolyn Harris moved back to Washington, where she had once been a high school teacher, and I had a full-time regular job and was writing several other papers (especially “Can We Defuse the Global Warming Time Bomb?”), so the A-Team paper never had the audience it deserved.

Below is the final section of the paper. In the preceding section the A-Team had just completed its report, and the students were musing about whether the nation’s leaders would have the gumption to take the actions necessary to achieve the potential energy efficiencies the team had found, including battling special interests that defend the status quo.

The wizened professor said to them, “But aren’t we getting out of our area of knowledge? We did our best. Let’s give the report and the Auto CO2 Tool to the secretary. He can take it to the Task Force on Energy and Climate.”

The secretary’s debriefing, of course, came from our imagination.

The A-Team waited nervously for the secretary to return from a meeting of the Task Force on Energy and Climate. What could be taking so long?

When they finally saw him coming down the corridor, their faces fell, as he bore an uncharacteristic and distant scowl. Seeing them, he brightened and said, “Why so glum? The Task Force members were enthusiastic about your report and agreed with the thrust of it. They were impressed by your work.”

“The chairman?”

“The chairman liked it too. He agreed with most things that you wrote. He will adopt much of the language in future positions and official statements. He sends his sincere thanks for your efforts.”

“You mean that actions will be taken? Does he expect to meet the CO2 emissions in the A-scenario? How will it be done?”

“I am afraid that will not be in the plans. He agrees with the need for technology development. Maybe in the future it will be possible to slow emissions.”

“But you said he agreed with our analysis and would adopt the language in official statements. We showed that it was practical and beneficial to reduce emissions with existing technology, no?”

“Well, he did not entirely agree with the report. He did not think that energy needs would be slowed or that CO2 emissions could be reduced.”

“But didn’t we show that it was possible with existing technology? What did he say about that part of the report?”

The secretary paused. “He said that part of the report was…naïve.”

“Well,” the professor interjected, “there are other important components to energy use and CO2 emissions. What about energy efficiencies in households and buildings?”

“The Task Force agrees there is great potential for savings in the United States. It is up to Congress and the states to lead. There will be an effort to cooperate with Congress, especially on gasohol.”

“Gasohol?”

“Yes. Didn’t you agree that it could be done in a way that would be marginally useful?”

“We didn’t spend much time on it,” Jorge said. “We looked into it enough to conclude that the assumptions of the Berkeley professor who had argued that gasohol took more energy to produce than it provided were not necessarily right.”

“However,” said the professor, “gasohol is surely a minor player in the overall energy and CO2 problems. Why give it priority?”

The secretary looked away and didn’t answer. He seemed to be musing about the larger picture.

A long period of silence was broken by the professor. “What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” the secretary said thoughtfully. “We are all team players.”

Naomi ended another period of silence by asking, “Do you think we are naïve?”

The secretary hesitated, but he had regained his composure. “Naïve is an interesting word. It has more than one connotation. Perhaps we are all naïve.”

M
Y PRESENTATIONS TO THE CLIMATE TASK FORCE had been ineffectual. Our A-Team results helped make clear that the energy policies needed to safeguard climate would also be in the best interests of the nation, but I had failed to get that work published in a science journal.

Fortunately, in June 2003 I received another opportunity to communicate: an invitation to give a presentation to the most effective levels at the White House. The invitation was from Jim Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), who was widely recognized as the most powerful person in the Bush-Cheney administration on climate matters, aside from, of course, the president and vice president.

I am not sure why I received the invitation in 2003. Perhaps it was again because of my published statements about the importance on non–carbon dioxide climate forcings, which the vice president had read at the first Task Force meeting.

I had the impression that the administration respected me but was leery. For example, I was invited to go with the U.S. delegation to the G8 Environmental Futures Forum in Spoleto, Italy, in October 2001. However, I had a special status: I was with the U.S. delegation, but I was not officially part of it. That way, if I said anything that was not appreciated by the administration, it would not be misinterpreted as a position of our government. I realized that I was considered to be a maverick. Everyone was aware that I had complained publicly about the White House’s alteration of my testimony to Al Gore’s Senate committee during the first George H. W. Bush administration. My complaint had caused a good deal of consternation, and John Sununu, Bush’s chief of staff, attempted to have me fired. I was able to keep my job because John Heinz, Republican senator from Pennsylvania, intervened on my behalf. All seemed to be forgiven now, but wariness remained.

I should note again here my political inclinations. I am a registered Independent. I believe that the United States would benefit from a third party. (I did not vote for the Texan who saw Martians in his front yard, but I probably would vote for someone like Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York.) Our biggest problem, in my opinion, is due to the role of money in government, the special interests, epitomized by hordes of lobbyists in expensive alligator shoes. The issues that most influence my preference in political candidates are campaign finance reform and environmental and climate change policies. I supported the Gore-Lieberman campaign, to which I contributed a thousand dollars.

Yet early in the Bush-Cheney administration I was hopeful of a turn toward more effective actions regarding climate change. The Clinton-Gore administration had been ineffectual in this matter—and that is being generous; emissions actually increased substantially under their leadership. I thought that Bush would surely oppose the Kyoto Protocol, which deserved many of its criticisms, but that he might be able to work effectively with the business community and Congress if he chose to take actions. Also, I had the impression that Ari Patrinos might be listened to. Patrinos was an outstanding scientist at the Department of Energy who had supported research on climate change. From exchanges with him, I knew that he was helping with position statements related to climate.

Of course, by June 2003 it was clear that Bush would pull no “Nixon goes to China” act with regard to climate change. But I had not yet been openly critical of the administration, so maybe I would be listened to in this trip to the White House. On this visit, I would have enough time for a clearer presentation, and I unambiguously titled my talk “Can We Defuse the Global Warming Time Bomb?” But before discussing my talk, I need to describe the situation.

The U.S. policy on global warming in June 2003 remained as it was in June 2001, when President Bush had given a well-prepared Rose Garden speech defining the country’s position on the subject in detail, including many valid statements. The vice president and Climate Task Force members stood with Bush as he delivered the speech, which bore Patrinos’s imprint. The president noted: “My cabinet-level working group has met regularly for the last ten weeks to review the most recent, most accurate, and most comprehensive science.”

The impression the speech created, aided by a widely distributed photo of Bush closely surrounded by Task Force members in the Rose Garden, was misleading in one critical sense. The most important policy position that the president promulgated was not arrived at on the basis of the Climate Task Force meetings, and science had little to do with that key decision.

The promise remained until her words spurred actions behind the scenes, culminating in an infamous March 6 letter to President Bush from senators Chuck Hagel, Jesse Helms, Pat Roberts, and Larry Craig. That letter drew attention to Whitman’s remarks and asked the president to clarify the “Administration’s position on climate change, in particular the Kyoto Protocol, and the regulation of carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act.”

Bush responded with a March 13 letter to Senator Hagel in which the president reversed his position on carbon dioxide, stating that it was not a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. He claimed that important new information warranted the reevaluation, specifically a Department of Energy report concluding that caps on carbon dioxide emissions would reduce the use of coal and raise the price of electricity.

Suskind describes Cheney as a puppeteer pulling strings. According to Suskind, Whitman went to the Oval Office on the morning of March 13 hoping to argue her case, but instead Bush read to her portions of the letter reneging on his pledge to regulate carbon dioxide. As Whitman left the Oval Office, Cheney arrived expressly to pick up the letter—which he pocketed and took to his weekly policy meeting with Republican senators.

Whether this turn of events was, as Suskind describes, the “clean kill” of a puppeteer is not the important point. Rather, as Bowen puts it, the episode was a “knockout punch to facts-based consensus-building decision-making.” The decision not to regulate carbon dioxide had been made two weeks before the first meeting of the Climate Task Force, which was supposed to consider the evidence.

In retrospect, I had made at least two mistakes. The first was my wording in the alternative scenario paper. I aimed to draw attention to the importance of non–carbon dioxide climate forcings, but only to give them their proper due, not to allow an escape hatch for carbon dioxide. My alternative scenario required, in addition to absolute reductions of the non-CO2 forcings, aggressive efforts to slow the growth of carbon dioxide emissions. Specifically, the annual growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which was averaging 1.7 ppm per year at the end of the twentieth century, would need to slow to 1.3 ppm per year by 2050 in order to achieve the alternative scenario. If this happened, additional climate forcing would be limited to about 1 watt and additional warming, after 2000, would be less than 1 degree Celsius. However, as mentioned earlier, to achieve such a slowdown in the growth rate would require a strong emphasis on energy efficiency, as well as a steady increase in the use of renewable energies or other energy sources, such as nuclear power, that produce little or no carbon dioxide.

In contrast, on March 19, ten days before the first Climate Task Force meeting, President Bush and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham discussed with the media the need to increase the supplies and the use of fossil fuels. Abraham specifically mentioned plans to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling and coal mining, and generally noted the need to open up federal lands and offshore regions to such drilling and mining. As mentioned, Abraham argued that many new coal-fired power plants would be needed.

My second mistake was my failure to emphatically state to the Task Force that the administration’s energy plans, as described by Abraham, were in dramatic conflict with the alternative scenario. That conclusion should have been obvious from my presentations to the Task Force as well as from a reading of the alternative scenario paper. But did Task Force members pay sufficient attention or read the handouts we provided? If I had made an explicit, unequivocal statement to start off my presentation at the first Task Force meeting, I may have gotten their attention and perhaps provoked more useful discussion. But then, I probably would not have been invited back—which wouldn’t have been such a loss, as the second Task Force meeting, the one including Richard Lindzen, had not been fruitful.

My alternative scenario paper, with its emphasis on the importance of non–carbon dioxide climate forcings, was controversial immediately upon its publication in 2000, in part because environmentalists recognized the possibility that it could be misused by those who preferred there be no restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions. This matter warrants discussion, because it relates to the topic of how science research should be communicated to the public and policy makers, and so I return to it at the beginning of chapter 5. For the moment, though, I want to note that my emphasis on the importance of the various other climate forcings was likely the reason that I was invited to the White House in 2003.

In addition to CEQ chairman Jim Connaughton, presidential science adviser Jack Marburger was expected to attend my White House presentation, along with significant officials from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and other members of the administration.

This group would likely be a more significant one than the Climate Task Force as far as implementing specific government actions. The vice president and cabinet members might have been top policy makers, but OMB and CEQ are where things happen. They receive guidance from above but have flexibility in deciding what actually gets done. The highest levels of government usually have little time or inclination to interfere with technical decisions.

Connaughton and CEQ were known to have the day-to-day power within the administration on global warming and climate change matters. Marburger, although he had the title of White House science adviser, and had visited my laboratory in 2002 to hear about global warming, may have been either ineffectual or uninterested in the topic—or perhaps was not as well trusted by the vice president.

On the other hand, Mark Bowen does a remarkable job of documenting, in detail, the activities of Connaughton and his staff, especially Connaughton’s chief of staff, Philip Cooney. Bowen’s evaluations are based on documents, including e-mails and letters, some obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. They include exchanges between Cooney and Kevin O’Donovan, the vice president’s special assistant for domestic policy, described as Cheney’s point man on climate, as well as exchanges among Cooney, Connaughton, and the president’s political adviser Karl Rove.

Bowen makes clear that editing and censorship of science that cannot be rationalized under reasonable scientific standards was carried out by Cooney and others under Connaughton’s direction and approval. Bowen also concludes that one of the phone calls from the White House to NASA headquarters in December 2005, which ignited a so-called “shitstorm” and attempts to isolate me from the media (events discussed in chapter 7), was probably from Connaughton.