“It’s as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid.” That’s what Jamie Griffin says the BP man told her about the smelly, rainbow-streaked gunk coating the floor of the “floating hotel” where Griffin was feeding hundreds of cleanup workers during the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, the workers were tracking the gunk inside on their boots. Griffin, as chief cook and maid, was trying to clean it. But even boiling water didn’t work.

“The BP representative said, ‘Jamie, just mop it like you’d mop any other dirty floor,’” Griffin recalls in her Louisiana drawl.

It was the opening weeks of what everyone, echoing President Barack Obama, was calling “the worst environmental disaster in American history.” At 9:45 p.m. local time on April 20, 2010, a fiery explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig had killed 11 workers and injured 17. One mile underwater, the Macondo well had blown apart, unleashing a gusher of oil into the gulf. At risk were fishing areas that supplied one-third of the seafood consumed in the U.S., beaches from Texas to Florida that drew billions of dollars’ worth of tourism to local economies, and Obama’s chances of reelection. Republicans were blaming him for mishandling the disaster, his poll numbers were falling, even his 11-year-old daughter was demanding, “Daddy, did you plug the hole yet?”

Griffin did as she was told: “I tried Pine-Sol, bleach, I even tried Dawn on those floors.” As she scrubbed, the mix of cleanser and gunk occasionally splashed onto her arms and face.

Within days, the 32-year-old single mother was coughing up blood and suffering constant headaches. She lost her voice. “My throat felt like I’d swallowed razor blades,” she says.

Then things got much worse.

Like hundreds, possibly thousands, of workers on the cleanup, Griffin soon fell ill with a cluster of excruciating, bizarre, grotesque ailments. By July, unstoppable muscle spasms were twisting her hands into immovable claws. In August, she began losing her short-term memory. After cooking professionally for 10 years, she couldn’t remember the recipe for vegetable soup; one morning, she got in the car to go to work, only to discover she hadn’t put on pants. The right side, but only the right side, of her body “started acting crazy. It felt like the nerves were coming out of my skin. It was so painful. My right leg swelled — my ankle would get as wide as my calf — and my skin got incredibly itchy.”

“These are the same symptoms experienced by soldiers who returned from the Persian Gulf War with Gulf War syndrome,” says Michael Robichaux, a Louisiana physician and former state senator, who treated Griffin and 113 other patients with similar complaints. As a general practitioner, Robichaux says he had “never seen this grouping of symptoms together: skin problems, neurological impairments, plus pulmonary problems.” Only months later, after Kaye H. Kilburn, a former professor of medicine at the University of Southern California and one of the nation’s leading environmental health experts, came to Louisiana and tested 14 of Robichaux’s patients did the two physicians make the connection with Gulf War syndrome, the malady that afflicted an estimated 250,000 veterans of that war with a mysterious combination of fatigue, skin inflammation, and cognitive problems.

Meanwhile, the well kept hemorrhaging oil. The world watched with bated breath as BP failed in one attempt after another to stop the leak. An agonizing 87 days passed before the well was finally plugged on July 15. By then, 210 million gallons of Louisiana sweet crude had escaped into the Gulf of Mexico, according to government estimates, making the BP disaster the largest accidental oil leak in world history.

Yet three years later, the BP disaster has been largely forgotten, both overseas and in the U.S. Popular anger has cooled. The media have moved on. Today, only the business press offers serious coverage of what the Financial Times calls “the trial of the century” — the trial now underway in New Orleans, where BP faces tens of billions of dollars in potential penalties for the disaster. As for Obama, the same president who early in the BP crisis blasted the “scandalously close relationship” between oil companies and government regulators two years later ran for reelection boasting about how much new oil and gas development his administration had approved.

Such collective amnesia may seem surprising, but there may be a good explanation for it: BP mounted a cover-up that concealed the full extent of its crimes from public view. This cover-up prevented the media and therefore the public from knowing — and above all, seeing — just how much oil was gushing into the gulf. The disaster appeared much less extensive and destructive than it actually was. BP declined to comment for this article.

That BP lied about the amount of oil it discharged into the gulf is already established. Lying to Congress about that was one of 14 felonies to which BP pleaded guilty last year in a legal settlement with the Justice Department that included a $4.5 billion fine, the largest fine ever levied against a corporation in the U.S.

What has not been revealed until now is how BP hid that massive amount of oil from TV cameras and the price that this “disappearing act” imposed on cleanup workers, coastal residents, and the ecosystem of the gulf. That story can now be told because an anonymous whistleblower has provided evidence that BP was warned in advance about the safety risks of attempting to cover up its leaking oil. Nevertheless, BP proceeded. Furthermore, BP appears to have withheld these safety warnings, as well as protective measures, both from the thousands of workers hired for the cleanup and from the millions of Gulf Coast residents who stood to be affected.

The financial implications are enormous. The trial now under way in New Orleans is wrestling with whether BP was guilty of “negligence” or “gross negligence” for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. If found guilty of “negligence,” BP would be fined, under the Clean Water Act, $1,100 for each barrel of oil that leaked. But if found guilty of “gross negligence”–which a cover-up would seem to imply — BP would be fined $4,300 per barrel, almost four times as much, for a total of $17.5 billion. That large a fine, combined with an additional $34 billion that the states of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida are seeking, could have a powerful effect on BP’s economic health.

Yet the most astonishing thing about BP’s cover-up? It was carried out in plain sight, right in front of the world’s uncomprehending news media (including, I regret to say, this reporter).

The chief instrument of BP’s cover-up was the same substance that apparently sickened Jamie Griffin and countless other cleanup workers and local residents. Its brand name is Corexit, but most news reports at the time referred to it simply as a “dispersant.” Its function was to attach itself to leaked oil, break it into droplets, and disperse them into the vast reaches of the gulf, thereby keeping the oil from reaching Gulf Coast shorelines. And the Corexit did largely achieve this goal.

But the 1.84 million gallons of Corexit that BP applied during the cleanup also served a public-relations purpose: They made the oil spill all but disappear, at least from TV screens. By late July 2010, the Associated Press and The New York Times were questioning whether the spill had been such a big deal after all. Time went so far as to assert that right-wing talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh “has a point” when he accused journalists and environmentalists of exaggerating the crisis.

But BP had a problem: It had lied about how safe Corexit is, and proof of its dishonesty would eventually fall into the hands of the Government Accountability Project, the premiere whistleblower-protection group in the U.S. The proof? A technical manual BP had received from NALCO, the firm that supplied the Corexit that BP used in the gulf.

An electronic copy of that manual is included in a new report GAP has issued, “Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf.” On the basis of interviews with dozens of cleanup workers, scientists, and Gulf Coast residents, GAP concludes that the health impacts endured by Griffin were visited upon many other locals as well. What’s more, the combination of Corexit and crude oil also caused terrible damage to gulf wildlife and ecosystems, including an unprecedented number of seafood mutations; declines of up to 80 percent in seafood catch; and massive die-offs of the microscopic life-forms at the base of the marine food chain. GAP warns that BP and the U.S. government nevertheless appear poised to repeat the exercise after the next major oil spill: “As a result of Corexit’s perceived success, Corexit … has become the dispersant of choice in the U.S. to ‘clean up’ oil spills.”

BP’s cover-up was not planned in advance but devised in the heat of the moment as the oil giant scrambled to limit the PR and other damages of the disaster. Indeed, one of the chief scandals of the disaster is just how unprepared both BP and federal and state authorities were for an oil leak of this magnitude. U.S. law required that a response plan be in place before drilling began, but the plan was embarrassingly flawed.

“We weren’t managing for actual risk; we were checking a box,” says Mark Davis, director of the Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy at Tulane University. “That’s how we ended up with a response plan that included provisions for dealing with the impacts to walruses: because [BP] copied word for word the response plans that had been developed after the Exxon-Valdez oil spill [in Alaska, in 1989] instead of a plan tailored to the conditions in the gulf.”

As days turned into weeks and it became obvious that no one knew how to plug the gushing well, BP began insisting that Corexit be used to disperse the leaking oil. This triggered alarms from scientists and from a leading environmental NGO in Louisiana, the Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN).

The group’s scientific adviser, Wilma Subra, a chemist whose work on environmental pollution had won her a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, told state and federal authorities that she was especially concerned about how dangerous the mixture of crude and Corexit was: “The short-term health symptoms include acute respiratory problems, skin rashes, cardiovascular impacts, gastrointestinal impacts, and short-term loss of memory,” she told GAP investigators. “Long-term impacts include cancer, decreased lung function, liver damage, and kidney damage.”

(Nineteen months after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, a scientific study published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Pollution found that crude oil becomes 52 times more toxic when combined with Corexit.)

BP even rebuffed a direct request from the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, who wrote BP a letter on May 19, asking the company to deploy a less toxic dispersant in the cleanup. Jackson could only ask BP to do this; she could not legally require it. Why? Because use of Corexit had been authorized years before under the federal Oil Pollution Act.

In a recent interview, Jackson explains that she and other officials “had to determine, with less-than-perfect scientific testing and data, whether use of dispersants would, despite potential side effects, improve the overall situation in the gulf and coastal ecosystems. The tradeoff, as I have said many times, was potential damage in the deep water versus the potential for larger amounts of undispersed oil in the ecologically rich coastal shallows and estuaries.” She adds that the presidential commission that later studied the BP oil disaster did not fault the decision to use dispersants.

Knowing that EPA lacked the authority to stop it, BP wrote back to Jackson on May 20, declaring that Corexit was safe. What’s more, BP wrote, there was a ready supply of Corexit, which was not the case with alternative dispersants. (A NALCO plant was located just 30 miles west of New Orleans.)

But Corexit was decidedly not safe without taking proper precautions, as the manual BP got from NALCO spelled out in black and white. The “Vessel Captains Hazard Communication” resource manual, which GAP shared with me, looks innocuous enough. A three-ring binder with a black plastic cover, the manual contained 61 sheets, each wrapped in plastic, that detailed the scientific properties of the two types of Corexit that BP was buying, as well as their health hazards and recommended measures against those hazards.

BP applied two types of Corexit in the gulf. The first, Corexit 9527, was considerably more toxic. According to the NALCO manual, Corexit 9527 is an “eye and skin irritant. Repeated or excessive exposure … may cause injury to red blood cells (hemolysis), kidney or the liver.” The manual adds: “Excessive exposure may cause central nervous system effects, nausea, vomiting, anesthetic or narcotic effects.” It advises, “Do not get in eyes, on skin, on clothing,” and “Wear suitable protective clothing.”

When available supplies of Corexit 9527 were exhausted early in the cleanup, BP switched to the second type of dispersant, Corexit 9500. In its recommendations for dealing with Corexit 9500, the NALCO manual advised, “Do not get in eyes, on skin, on clothing,” “Avoid breathing vapor,” and “Wear suitable protective clothing.”

It’s standard procedure — and required by U.S. law — for companies to distribute this kind of information to any work site where hazardous materials are present so workers can know about the dangers they face and how to protect themselves. But interviews with numerous cleanup workers suggest that this legally required precaution was rarely if ever followed during the BP cleanup. Instead, it appears that BP told NALCO to stop including the manuals with the Corexit that NALCO was delivering to cleanup work sites.

“It’s my understanding that some manuals were sent out with the shipments of Corexit in the beginning [of the cleanup],” the anonymous source tells me. “Then, BP told NALCO to stop sending them. So NALCO was left with a roomful of unused binders.”

Roman Blahoski, NALCO’s director of global communications, says: “NALCO responded to requests for its pre-approved dispersants from those charged with protecting the gulf and mitigating the environmental, health, and economic impact of this event. NALCO was never involved in decisions relating to the use, volume, and application of its dispersant.”

Misrepresenting the safety of Corexit went hand in hand with BP’s previously noted lie about how much oil was leaking from the Macondo well. As reported by John Rudolf in The Huffington Post, internal BP emails show that BP privately estimated that “the runaway well could be leaking from 62,000 barrels a day to 146,000 barrels a day.” Meanwhile, BP officials were telling the government and the media that only 5,000 barrels a day were leaking.

In short, applying Corexit enabled BP to mask the fact that a much larger amount of oil was actually leaking into the gulf. “Like any good magician, the oil industry has learned that if you can’t see something that was there, it must have ‘disappeared,’” Scott Porter, a scientist and deep-sea diver who consults for oil companies and oystermen, says in the GAP report. “Oil companies have also learned that, in the public mind, ‘out of sight equals out of mind.’ Therefore, they have chosen crude oil dispersants as the primary tool for handling large marine oil spills.”

BP also had a more direct financial interest in using Corexit, argues Clint Guidry, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, whose members include not only shrimpers but fishermen of all sorts. As it happens, local fishermen constituted a significant portion of BP’s cleanup force (which numbered as many as 47,000 workers at the height of the cleanup). Because the spill caused the closure of their fishing grounds, BP and state and federal authorities established the Vessels of Opportunity (VoO) program, in which BP paid fishermen to take their boats out and skim, burn, and otherwise get rid of leaked oil. Applying dispersants, Guidry points out, reduced the total volume of oil that could be traced back to BP.

“The next phase of this trial [against BP] is going to turn on how much oil was leaked,” Guidry tells me. [If found guilty, BP will be fined a certain amount for each barrel of oil judged to have leaked.] “So hiding the oil with Corexit worked not only to hide the size of the spill but also to lower the amount of oil that BP may get charged for releasing.”

Not only did BP fail to inform workers of the potential hazards of Corexit and to provide them with safety training and protective gear, according to interviews with dozens of cleanup workers, the company also allegedly threatened to fire workers who complained about the lack of respirators and protective clothing.

“I worked with probably a couple hundred different fishermen on the [cleanup],” Acy Cooper, Guidry’s second in command, tells me in Venice, the coastal town from which many VoO vessels departed. “Not one of them got any safety information or training concerning the toxic materials they encountered.” Cooper says that BP did provide workers with body suits and gloves designed for handling hazardous materials. “But when I’d talk with [the BP representative] about getting my guys respirators and air monitors, I’d never get any response.”

Roughly 58 percent of the 1.84 million gallons of Corexit used in the cleanup was sprayed onto the gulf from C-130 airplanes. The spray sometimes ended up hitting cleanup workers in the face.

“Our boat was sprayed four times,” says Jorey Danos, a 32-year-old father of three who suffered racking coughing fits, severe fatigue, and memory loss after working on the BP cleanup. “I could see the stuff coming out of the plane — like a shower of mist, a smoky color. I could see [it] coming at me, but there was nothing I could do.”

“The next day,” Danos continues, “when the BP rep came around on his speed boat, I asked, ‘Hey, what’s the deal with that stuff that was coming out of those planes yesterday?’ He told me, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I said, ‘Man, that s–t was burning my face — it ain’t right.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I said, ‘Well, could we get some respirators or something, because that s–t is bad.’ He said, ‘No, that wouldn’t look good to the media. You got two choices: You can either be relieved of your duties or you can deal with it.’”

Perhaps the single most hazardous chemical compound found in Corexit 9527 is 2-Butoxyethanol, a substance that had been linked to cancers and other health impacts among cleanup workers on the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska. According to BP’s own data, 20 percent of offshore workers in the gulf had levels of 2-Butoxyethanol two times higher than the level certified as safe by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Cleanup workers were not the only victims; coastal residents also suffered. “My 2-year-old grandson and I would play out in the yard,” says Shirley Tillman of the Mississippi coastal town Pass Christian. “You could smell oil and stuff in the air, but on the news they were saying it’s fine, don’t worry. Well, by October, he was one sick little fellow. All of a sudden, this very active little 2-year-old was constantly sick. He was having headaches, upper respiratory infections, earaches. The night of his birthday party, his parents had to rush him to the emergency room. He went to nine different doctors, but they treated just the symptoms; they’re not toxicologists.”

“It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” Ever since the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, that’s been the mantra. Cover-ups don’t work, goes the argument. They only dig a deeper hole, because the truth eventually comes out.

But does it?

GAP investigators were hopeful that obtaining the NALCO manual might persuade BP to meet with them, and it did. On July 10, 2012, BP hosted a private meeting at its Houston offices. Presiding over the meeting, which is described here publicly for the first time, was BP’s public ombudsman, Stanley Sporkin, joining by telephone from Washington. Ironically, Sporkin had made his professional reputation during the Watergate scandal. As a lawyer with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sporkin investigated illegal corporate payments to the slush fund that President Nixon used to buy the silence of the Watergate burglars.

Also attending the meeting were two senior BP attorneys; BP Vice President Luke Keller; other BP officials; Thomas Devine, GAP’s senior attorney on the BP case; Shanna Devine, GAP’s investigator on the case; Michael Robichaux; Wilma Subra; and Marylee Orr, the executive director of LEAN. The following account is based on my interviews with Thomas Devine, Robichaux, Subra, and Orr. BP declined to comment.

BP officials had previously confirmed the authenticity of the NALCO manual, says Thomas Devine, but now they refused to discuss it, even though this had been one of the stated purposes for the meeting. Nor would BP address the allegation, made by the whistleblower who had given the manual to GAP, that BP had ordered the manual withheld from cleanup work sites, perhaps to maintain the fiction that Corexit was safe.

“They opened the meeting with this upbeat presentation about how seriously they took their responsibilities for the spill and all the wonderful things they were doing to make things right,” says Devine. “When it was my turn to speak, I said that the manual our whistleblower had provided contradicted what they just said. I asked whether they had ordered the manual withdrawn from work sites. Their attorneys said that was a matter they would not discuss because of the pending litigation on the spill.” [Disclosure: Thomas Devine is a friend of this reporter.]

The visitors’ top priority was to get BP to agree not to use Corexit in the future. Keller said that Corexit was still authorized for use by the U.S. government and BP would indeed feel free to use it against any future oil spills.

A second priority was to get BP to provide medical treatment for Jamie Griffin and the many other apparent victims of Corexit-and-crude poisoning. This request too was refused by BP.

Robichaux doubts his patients will receive proper compensation from the $7.8 billion settlement BP reached in 2012 with the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee, 19 court-appointed attorneys who represent the hundreds of individuals and entities that have sued BP for damages related to the gulf disaster. “Nine of the most common symptoms of my patients do not appear on the list of illnesses that settlement says can be compensated, including memory loss, fatigue, and joint and muscular pain,” says Robichaux. “So how are the attorneys going to file suits on behalf of those victims?”

At one level, BP’s cover-up of the gulf oil disaster speaks to the enormous power that giant corporations exercise in modern society, and how unable, or unwilling, governments are to limit that power. To be sure, BP has not entirely escaped censure for its actions; depending on the outcome of the trial now under way in New Orleans, the company could end up paying tens of billions of dollars in fines and damages over and above the $4.5 billion imposed by the Justice Department in the settlement last year. But BP’s reputation appears to have survived: Its market value as this article went to press was a tidy $132 billion, and few, if any, BP officials appear likely to face any legal repercussions. “If I would have killed 11 people, I’d be hanging from a noose,” says Jorey Danos. “Not BP. It’s the golden rule: The man with the gold makes the rules.”

As unchastened as anyone at BP is Bob Dudley, the American who was catapulted into the CEO job a few weeks into the gulf disaster to replace Tony Hayward, whose propensity for imprudent comments — “I want my life back,” the multimillionaire had pouted while thousands of gulf workers and residents were suffering — had made him a globally derided figure. Dudley told the annual BP shareholders meeting in London last week that Corexit “is effectively … dishwashing soap,” no more toxic than that, as all scientific studies supposedly showed. What’s more, Dudley added, he himself had grown up in Mississippi and knows that the Gulf of Mexico is “an ecosystem that is used to oil.”

Nor has the BP oil disaster triggered the kind of changes in law and public priorities one might have expected. “Not much has actually changed,” says Mark Davis of Tulane. “It reflects just how wedded our country is to keeping the Gulf of Mexico producing oil and bringing it to our shores as cheaply as possible. Going forward, no one should assume that just because something really bad happened we’re going to manage oil and gas production with greater sensitivity and wisdom. That will only happen if people get involved and compel both the industry and the government to be more diligent.”

And so the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history has been whitewashed — its true dimensions obscured, its victims forgotten, its lessons ignored. Who says cover-ups never work?

It’s a baffle. While reanalyzing the cap-and-trade fight and responding to Theda Skocpol’s controversial paper on it, my esteemed colleagues Bill McKibben, David Roberts, Joe Romm, and Eric Pooley have evidenced some sharp, and sharply worded, differences with one another. But all appear to agree that one big reason cap-and-trade “crashed and burned” on Capitol Hill, as Pooley phrased it, was the lack of public support: If only there had been a vibrant popular movement out in the country demanding serious action on climate change, things might have ended differently. For the record, I suspect this is true (though I also agree with Romm that other key reasons for cap-and-trade’s failure were outside of environmentalists’ control, particularly the 60-vote hurdle in the Senate imposed by filibuster threats from climate change-denying Republicans).

But here’s what I don’t get. There actually was a popular movement out in the country demanding serious action against climate change during Obama’s first term. In fact, this movement was not only demanding action, it was winning it big time. I’m referring to the grassroots movement that helped to prevent the construction of 174 (and counting) new coal-fired power plants, thereby imposing a de facto moratorium on new coal in the United States. Blocking construction of these plants — and therefore of the greenhouse gases they would have emitted over their 40-plus-year life spans — limited future U.S. greenhouse gas emissions almost as much as the cap-and-trade bill would have done. (And this calculation assumes that cap-and-trade would have worked as well as proponents claimed, hardly a sure thing considering how weakened the bill was during congressional horse trading.)

This popular movement called, and still calls, itself “Beyond Coal.” And although it was spearheaded nationally by the Sierra Club, it was populated and led by local and regional activists. Most of these activists hailed from, and kicked ass in, supposedly red states in the South and the Midwest, where most of the battles over proposed coal plants played out. Crucially, this movement was not comprised solely of the usual environmental suspects. Its leaders deliberately reached out more widely, and collaborated as equals with, a range of citizens: farmers who didn’t want coal plants fouling their agricultural vistas, air, and water; doctors and nurses who knew that burning coal kills at least 13,000 Americans every year while causing tens of thousands of additional heart attacks and asthma afflictions; youth who understood that coal is the most carbon-intensive of the conventional fossil fuels and thus is a dire threat to their futures; public officials, some of whom feared the climate impacts of burning coal but all of whom recognized that coal produces the kind of local air pollution that could discourage other businesses from bringing headquarters, jobs, and economic activity to their jurisdictions; and many more.

To be sure — I can hear your rejoinder already, David — the town meetings, lobbying, letter writing, media work, and demonstrations these activists organized were not the sole reason that 174 coal plants ended up not being built; the falling price of natural gas, along with rising energy efficiency and stagnating electricity demand, were key factors as well. But this grassroots opposition clearly played a decisive role, for in the United States decisions about energy are based at least as much on politics as on economics. Referring to the regulatory boards that make the final call in most states on whether to approve or deny proposed power plants, Thomas Sanzillo, a former deputy comptroller of New York state and a consultant to the Beyond Coal campaign, told me, “If the activists hadn’t been there talking to the regulators and [newspaper] editorial boards and making the case that coal was a bad bet, the [utility board] would have gone forward, because the utilities would say, ‘We can handle the costs,’ and the boards are often good-old-boy boards.”

It is not just puzzling but distressing that the Beyond Coal movement and its achievements are so little known, especially among those seeking solutions to the climate crisis. The information is certainly out there. That quote from Sanzillo comes from a long, detailed report on the Beyond Coal movement that I published last April in Mother Jones, a magazine that is by no means unknown within environmental and progressive circles. I’ve also written about Beyond Coal in The Nation, and I think Grist itself has mentioned it once or twice as well. [Editor's note: Quite a few times, actually.]

Yet the achievements of Beyond Coal continue to go unacknowledged in most climate and environmental discussions of which I’m aware, and I honestly don’t understand why. Is it because mainstream media outlets have (predictably) ignored Beyond Coal — and most environmentalists still implicitly take their cues about what’s true and important from mainstream media? Is it intra-movement jealousy? Is it because Beyond Coal’s victories took place in the states of the South and Midwest rather than on the national stage? Whatever the cause, it is not just baffling but self-defeating for environmentalists to overlook such an important and encouraging political phenomenon. There have been precious few major victories in the fight against climate change, especially within the United States. Surely such victories should be celebrated — and above all learned from — rather than ignored.

OK, you might say, if the Beyond Coal movement was so powerful during the cap-and-trade fight, why didn’t it join the fight? The answer to that question leads, I believe, to one of the key lessons this movement offers.

The Beyond Coal movement was and is based on a very different theory of political activism and social change than the cap-and-trade campaign was. Beyond Coal’s leaders and activists believe that meaningful change comes not from having the smartest policy proposal or appealing to government officials to please care about “the environment” or “public health” or showing officials opinion polls indicating that most Americans support such action. Smarts and ideals are valuable, of course, but they alone will never compel most politicians to challenge the wishes of the richest, most powerful business enterprise in human history, the fossil fuel industry. The Beyond Coal movement believes instead that real change comes from building significant political power at the grassroots level and then bringing that power to bear on public officials, whether in state capitals or in Washington, D.C.

This power can be brought to bear through various means: bombarding officials with emails and phone calls; generating coverage of actions in both the traditional and online media; educating fellow citizens about those actions; participating in election campaigns through get-out-the-vote-work or financial contributions. Whatever the tactics, the goal is to reward officials who side with the movement and punish those who don’t. The goal is never to make politicians your friends, as too many inside-the-Beltway environmentalists seem to assume. It is to make politicians realize that the one thing they value above all else — getting reelected — is jeopardized if they choose to oppose this movement rather than cooperate with it.

“If anything, the Tea Party has taught us this lesson: Rationality does not rule in Washington, D.C. Power does,” says Michael Marx, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Oil campaign. “So we need to be about building power. And showing politicians that there is a price to pay for crossing us. I actually think we can do that from the moral high ground, because climate change is the ultimate moral issue of our times.”

There is a second difference between this kind of organizing and the approach most Washington, D.C.-based environmentalists have in mind when they talk about “building public support.” For the Beyond Coal movement, grassroots organizing is the first priority; it proceeds from the bottom up, from the community level to the national; and it is led by the people being organized — it is their analysis of the problem that determines which strategies are pursued and by what methods. By contrast, building grassroots support is an afterthought for D.C.-based environmental organizations; it is pursued in a top-down manner by inside-the-Beltway policy wonks; and it generally consists of urging local activists to support what the inside-the-Beltway folks have already decided is the correct course of action.

Which is pretty much what happened with cap-and-trade. A small number of environmental groups headquartered in D.C. decided, rightly or wrongly, that cap-and-trade was the way to go. This decision was then announced without much consultation, much less dialogue, with the rest of the U.S. environmental movement. When some activists outside the Beltway dared to question cap-and-trade (“Most ordinary people can’t even understand what cap-and-trade is, much less get behind it,” one young activist complained), they were told in effect to shut up and leave these decisions to the grown-ups. According to sources of mine who must remain nameless, some activists were refused funding from major green donors because they questioned the cap-and-trade strategy. Some youth activists were warned that their future careers would suffer if they didn’t get on board. Given all this, is it any wonder that most climate activists outside the Beltway did not flock to the cap-and-trade banner?

Policy expertise has its place, but it is secondary to building the political power that is necessary to get smart policies adopted and implemented. My old friend and colleague McKibben has written brilliantly about this and, more to the point, put it into practice through the great work he and his colleagues at 350.org have been doing. It’s no coincidence, I submit, that the two biggest victories the U.S. climate movement scored during Obama’s first term — stopping new coal plants and blocking (for now) the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline — were grounded in the grassroots organizing done by the Sierra Club and 350.org, both of whom see such organizing as a means to a larger end: building a popular movement that is strong enough to challenge the fossil fuel industry’s longstanding dominance of government policy.

Now, as Obama’s second term begins, these two groups have joined hands to sponsor a new effort to pressure the president and federal officials in general to take much stronger actions against climate change during the next four years: the “Obama Climate Legacy and Clean Energy” campaign, which kicks off with a rally in Washington, D.C., on President’s Day weekend, Feb. 17.

Grassroots organizing is not a quick fix. It takes time, humility, and the kind of sustained financial support that few environmental foundations have been willing to provide. But the history of the climate fight — indeed the history of most of America’s progressive reforms, from civil rights and anti-war to economic justice to environmental stewardship and more — suggests that building a robust grassroots movement is a prerequisite to achieving strong and lasting results. It is past time to acknowledge this lesson and apply it as broadly as possible in the fight to preserve a livable climate for our children.

Read more on Theda Skocpol’s report on the failure of cap-and-trade: a summary by Philip Bump; responses from Bill McKibben, Eric Pooley, Joe Romm, and Mike Tidwell; three (count ‘em: one, two, three) posts from David Roberts; and a followup post from Skocpol herself.

Look out, Minneapolis and Portland. Long Beach is making its move, aiming to surpass you as America’s Most Bike Friendly City. Does that sound odd for a city whose chief claim to environmental fame has been its massively polluting port and offshore oil facilities — a city that, like the rest of Southern California, has long been in thrall of the car?

Bike racks in Long Beach help attract customers to local businesses.Photo: Umberto Brayj

Well, all that’s changing, and the change is coming from the top. Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster, who says he tries to bike 100 miles a week, actually laughs about the car addiction of his mega neighbor to the north. “I love that scene in L.A. Story where Steve Martin gets behind the wheel, backs out of his driveway, and drives to his neighbor’s driveway,” Foster says. “He won’t even walk as far as his neighbor’s house!”

Of course, there are still plenty of cars in Long Beach (though Foster himself drives an electric one), but bicycles are getting more respect, not to mention resources, than ever before. With help from state and federal grants and pressure from local cycling enthusiasts, the city government has installed 130 miles of bike trails, established protected bike lanes (that is, lanes separated from vehicular traffic by physical barriers) on major commuter thoroughfares, created bike boulevards that enable kids and parents to bike or walk safely to and from school, and installed 1,200 new bike racks.

Perhaps most innovative has been the city’s effort to establish bike-friendly shopping districts — the first in the country, officials say — engaging local merchants by showing them how, contrary to common belief, biking can actually bring more customers and vitality to shopping districts.

Photo: Waltarrrrr“The math is pretty simple,” says April Economides, the principal of Green Octopus Consulting and the leader of the city’s outreach to local businesses. “You can park 12 bikes in the amount of space it takes to park one car. And someone who shifts from owning a car to a bicycle tends to have more discretionary income, because, for a commuter, the typical cost of a bicycle is $300 a year, compared to $7,000 a year for a car.”

Economides, a vivacious 36-year-old whose family owns one of the best-known restaurants in town, describes herself as a “social change agent” who leverages the power of small business. “At first, most merchants didn’t think about bikes or even had a negative view of them,” she says. “My job was to educate them about how biking can put more money in their pockets.”

Kerstin Kansteiner, whose Berlin coffee shop is a member of the East Village Arts Bike-Friendly Business District, confirms the point. “I see it every day,” she says. “The bike racks outside our shop increase our visibility and bring us more customers. People on bikes stop at places they haven’t visited before because they don’t have to try to find parking.”

Lauren Lilly, the 28-year-old co-owner of Yellow 108, a sustainable clothing business that sells its hats and sunglasses in Whole Foods and other retailers nationwide, says the company moved to Long Beach from L.A. last year “because we saw Long Beach as an up-and-coming area, and it’s a lot less expensive.” Her showroom is located on one of Long Beach’s bike boulevards. “We saw lots of bike commuters going by, and that’s our core demographic: working professionals who want to live a healthy, planet-friendly lifestyle.”

Cyclists even get their own traffic signals in Long Beach.Photo: WaltarrrrrIn the Belmont Shore neighborhood, a green sharrows lane extends for a mile through an upscale shopping district. The lane is not physically separated from vehicular traffic, but it feels almost as safe to a bicyclist. ”Putting green paint down is a sign that the city authority says that bikes belong here,” says Charlie Gandy, a consultant to the city government. “In southern California it’s assumed that bikes don’t belong, but this sends a different message. That’s also important for the larger public education campaign around the role of bikes in our community.”

Local officials concede that making Long Beach the most bike-friendly city in America is still more an aspiration than a reality. Still, boosting cycling reinforces a new narrative for Long Beach, says Allan Crawford, the bicycle coordinator in the city’s Department of Public Works. “Long Beach has always been seen as the poor stepchild to L.A., but now we’re recreating our image,” he says. “We’re saying, especially to young people, Long Beach is a lot cheaper than L.A., and it’s not sterile like Orange County [Long Beach's neighbor to the south]. It’s easy to get around here, we encourage a car-light lifestyle, it’s still a great beach town, and there’s all these hip places to enjoy, too.”

Not everyone is pleased, of course. A taxi driver named Kenny says bike lanes only reduce parking spots and slow traffic flow, especially because cyclists are “lackadaisical” — by which he seems to mean they don’t pedal as fast as cars want to travel.

Mayor Foster says there is an element of truth to such complaints, but only a tiny one. “Parking is always an issue,” he says. “But I drive [the commuter thoroughfares of] Third Street and Broadway every day, and I don’t wait any longer for [traffic] light changes than I did before.”

Then he quotes an ancient philosopher: “I like a line by Aristotle, ‘Beware the barrenness of a busy life,’” Foster says. “Sometimes I can’t remember at the end of a day what I did the past eight hours. That’s moving too fast. A bit slower pace in life is a good thing.”

Correction: This story originally stated that Long Beach had installed 50 new bike racks. That referred only to the number of racks installed through the bike-friendly business program. The total number, corrected above, is 1,200.

For more about the economic impacts of bicycles, read Grist’s Bikenomics series.

Sir Richard Branson in his WhiteKnightTwo aircraft.Photo: Dave Malkoff

This story has been corrected and updated since its original publication. See below for details.

Here’s a new idea for how to deal with climate deniers: Blast them into space.

The proposal came yesterday during a freewheeling panel discussion among California Gov. Jerry Brown, Virgin Group Chair Sir Richard Branson, and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chair Rajendra Pachauri. Kicking off a conference on “Extreme Climate Risks and California’s Future” held at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Brown pledged to protect his state from the “huge problems” posed by climate change, including from efforts by climate science deniers to impede climate action.

“Our biggest problem is to deal with the skepticism and denial of the cult-like lemmings who would take us over the cliff,” said Brown, a Democrat, eliciting cheers and laughter from an audience of roughly 200 policymakers, businessleaders, and activists. “The skeptics and deniers have billions of dollars at their disposal … But I can tell you we’re going to fight them every step of the way until we get this state on a sustainable path forward.” 

“It’s sad that in America you don’t talk about climate change because of Republicans,” said the British Branson, who described “exciting breakthroughs” in Virgin’s efforts to develop low-carbon aviation fuels. Showing particular promise is an algae-based fuel that, Branson said, could reduce aviation’s carbon emissions by 80 to 90 percent. 

When Brown complained about officials from the US government’s housing agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who he said were obstructing California’s efforts to do energy efficiency upgrades on buildings, Branson joked that perhaps such officials should be given “a one-way ticket to space.  I’ll be happy to oblige.”

That suggestion resurfaced a dozen minutes later when Pachauri, after lamenting the resistance of unnamed individuals and institutions to addressing climate change, commented, again in a joking tone, “Those who are becoming obstacles in implementing what is rational should be made the responsibility of Sir Richard [Branson] to give this one-way ticket to outer space.  Of course space would be unfortunate to get some of these guys.” 

Listing the threats climate change poses to California, Brown repeatedly emphasized water issues. The snow pack of the Sierra Nevada mountains, source of roughly 25 percent of California’s fresh water, has begun melting more quickly, he noted. That can lead to bigger floods, which threaten levees in the Central Valley and San Francisco Bay delta.

“The levees can break, and that is bad, real bad,” Brown said, since it could halt delivery of fresh water to the Central Valley — the source of most of the fruits and vegetables consumed in the United States — and to the businesses and millions of residents in southern California.

Meanwhile, added the governor, “the fire season, which has already lengthened in California by one month, will get longer. We’re going have to put more money into protecting ourselves, whether it be San Francisco and Oakland airports being underwater during extreme weather events, or [fires] in the Oakland Hills.”

“[Dealing with all] this is going to cost money, and the longer we wait to reduce carbon emissions, then the more expensive mitigation and the adaptation are going to be,” said Brown. 

Closing the conference, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Brown’s predecessor as governor, dodged a question about the climate views of fellow Republicans running for president, but did criticize “simple-minded attacks like with Solyndra,” the solar company whose bankruptcy has been a favorite theme for congressional Republicans and Fox News in recent months. Critics use the Solyndra example “to say the entire solar industry is a failure,” complained Schwarzenegger, “even though at same time there were auto dealers that failed, fast food restaurants that failed, and no one talked about that” as proof that those industries were failures. He urged green proponents to talk about how “solar has really helped our economy [in California]. It’s grown 10 times faster than any other economic sector.”

Fresh from a movie set where he’d spent the afternoon “banging a guy’s head into the wall,” Schwarzenegger praised Brown for pioneering California’s pursuit of solar power and energy efficiency during his first term as governor, in the 1970s. “California is 40 percent more energy-efficient than the rest of the United States,” said Schwarzenneger. “I tell people in Washington, you don’t have to have any debates, just follow California’s example and you’ll be 40 percent more efficient. That would be the equivalent of closing 75 percent of all coal-fired power plants, which is like taking 300 million cars off the road.”

“We need to ease off using fuels [from] below the ground and increase use of fuels above the ground,” Schwarzenegger added. “In one hour the sun provides the equivalent of a year’s energy use by everyone on earth. Let’s use that energy!”

So, how does Brown propose to pay for his ambitious climate protection agenda? Noting that California is the eighth-largest economy in the world, the governor declared, “We have a huge amount of capital in California. This is not Greece … When something is important, you can find the money.” Referring to efforts to build a new home for the San Francisco 49ers, Brown added, “When a few people wanted to build a stadium to play 10 games of football a year, they found the money. If we can find $1 billion for relatively trivial reasons, we can find that money for more important things.”

The crowd applauded enthusiastically, overlooking how the governor had just conflated spending by investors seeking private profit with spending by government on behalf of the public good. That’s no small sleight of hand, given the severe budget problems in California. In 2009, the state briefly had to issue IOU’s when legislators could not agree on a budget; this year, Republicans’ refusal to increase taxes has led to massive cuts in education, health care, parks, and other public services.

Asked as he left the stage how he actually planned to pay for the climate actions he had just outlined, Brown told Grist, “I’m going to the people.” The governor hopes to place an initiative on the ballot next November that would authorize higher taxes on California’s wealthiest citizens. “Thousands of people have signed on, we’ve raised a couple of million dollars [to promote the initiative], and I’ll be raising more,” Brown said. “That’s how we’re going to do it, and I think we can win.”

No word yet on how much money will go to buying tickets for the denier crowd.

Editor’s Note:

This article by Mark Hertsgaard was criticized following publication by Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said that the article badly misquoted his remarks at the “Extreme Climate Risks and California’s Future” conference.  Via email, Dr. Pachauri denied he said anything about giving climate change deniers “a one-way ticket to space.”  That joking comment, Pachauri went on, was actually made by Sir Richard Branson, the chair of the Virgin Group, and it referred not to climate change deniers but to officials with the US government housing authorities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who were allegedly obstructing California’s efforts in energy efficiency.  Branson agreed, through a spokesperson, that it was he who made the “ticket to space” comment.  

Hertsgaard had sought, prior to publication, to verify the accuracy of his article by checking his notes of the discussion against video that had been shot of the conference and was supposed to be posted on Gov. Brown’s official website, but the video of that portion of the conference was not yet available.  The video was, however, added to the website over the weekend, and Hertsgaard viewed it on Sunday afternoon Pacific Time.

The video shows that there were in fact two occasions during the discussion when the notion of a “one way ticket to space” was discussed.  Branson and Pachauri are correct that on the first occasion (which comes roughly 40 minutes into the video), it was Branson who made the comment, and that he was referring to the federal housing officials.  On the second occasion, at roughly 55 minutes into the video, it is Dr. Pachauri who reprises the phrase, though he does not direct it specifically at climate change deniers; indeed, it is not absolutely clear to whom Pachauri is referring when he says, again with a joking tone, “Those who are becoming obstacles in implementing what is rational should be made the responsibility of Sir Richard to give this one way ticket to outer space. Of course space would be unfortunate to get some of these guys.”

Hertsgaard and the editors of Grist regret not making the specifics of these two exchanges clear in the original version of the article. We have now revised and corrected the text to reflect the quotes documented by the video.  Hertsgaard and the editors also apologize for any misunderstandings that may have arisen from the article.  Finally, they remind everyone concerned that the comments in question were, after all, only a joke.

The Emerald City — green in more ways than one.

This post is adapted from Mark Hertsgaard’s new book Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.

If you’re a Seattleite, come meet Hertsgaard at a Grist Happy Hour and see him talk about the book at Town Hall Seattle on Feb. 3, 2011.

As a father living in the era of global warming, I have my good days and my bad days. The bad days you can probably imagine. Writing this book has taught me more than I’d like to know about our climate dilemma: about how drastically our civilization must change course to avoid catastrophe, how stubbornly some people and institutions resist even minor shifts in direction, and how destabilizing the impacts that are already locked in are likely to be.

But I have good days as well, and these are usually inspired by stories that show that the climate fight is not hopeless after all. One of my best days came in June of 2008, when I went to Seattle to interview Ron Sims. As the chief executive of King County, Sims was the top elected official of a municipality that encompasses the city of Seattle, some of its suburbs, and the corporate headquarters of Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, and Boeing. Over the past 15 years, Sims had pioneered a fresh, farsighted, effective response to climate change that local governments across the United States and around the world were beginning to copy. He had linked his climate policy to a larger agenda of advancing social justice and pro-business economic development. And he had done this while remaining strikingly popular with voters, winning three straight elections by comfortable margins.

What most set Sims apart was the two-track climate strategy he employed. “We absolutely need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, but we also have to adapt to the impacts we can no longer prevent,” he told me outside his office in downtown Seattle. “The scientists say our region will see warmer, wetter winters in the future. The snowpack [atop the Cascades east of King County] will shrink. That means there won’t be enough water for everyone if we don’t get going on adaptation.”

Although Sims’ ecological commitment was ardent enough to earn him the nickname “Mr. Salmon,” his argument for taking early action to prepare for climate change was based on tough-minded economics. “We think people and businesses will want to move to King County in the future because we took action to prepare for the world of 2050,” he said. “We’re taking steps to make sure we’ll have enough water, we’ll have levees that don’t break, we’ll have alternative energy sources, economic growth in the right places, a green work force. There are going to be winners and losers under climate change. I don’t want King County to be a loser.”

One of Sims’ ideas was to make climate change central to the mission of every department in county government. “Ron is always telling us, ‘Ask the climate question,’” said Jim Lopez, Sims’ deputy chief of staff. “That means: Check the science, determine what conditions we’ll face in 2050, then work backwards to figure out what we need to do now to prepare for those conditions.”

“A levee breach here would cost $46 million a day”

The stories told by the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest often bear an uncanny resemblance to the tale of Noah’s ark. As in the Bible, the native stories include one or more morally upstanding people who, joined by children (but not animals), are loaded into a gigantic canoe to ride out the storm while bad people are left to perish.

That so many such stories exist suggests that flooding was a recurrent aspect of ancient life in the Pacific Northwest. Then as now, storms blew inland from the ocean and traveled east until they collided with the Cascade Range, where they dumped precipitation in the form of rain or snow. Modern science tells us that higher temperatures will cause more precipitation to fall as rain rather than snow and also cause more of the snowpack to melt. As a result, more water will flow down the mountains, increasing the likelihood of flooding in the flatlands that stretch westward through King County to the sea.

One day, I went with Mark Isaacson, the director of King County’s Water and Land Resources Division, to a commercial neighborhood along the Green River, a zone of low buildings separated by half-empty parking lots. It was hard to believe this was some of the most economically valuable real estate in King County. But a levee breach here, Isaacson said, would cost the local economy $46 million a day.

“Many of these buildings are warehouses that supply food and other critical goods to Seattle,” he explained. “Restaurants receive 1,200 deliveries a day. Starbucks has a big distribution facility here, quite a few medical supply companies, too. If a levee broke, the roads here would be underwater, and all those deliveries would stop.” The levees protected 65,000 jobs that generated $3.7 billion of income a year, Isaacson added.

Farmers had built levees along the Green River 50 to 60 years ago, said Isaacson, but those levees were little more than mounds of earth extending along the riverbanks. They were sufficient to protect farmland that could afford to flood occasionally, but inadequate when billions of dollars of commerce were at risk. Like all the departments in King County government, Isaacson’s had been told by Sims to ask the climate question. Once they did, Isaacson said, “My colleagues and I knew right away that we had to upgrade our levees. The problem is, that gets really expensive. Our budget was nowhere near big enough. The only way I could see it happening was with a tax increase, but I was very reluctant to suggest that.”

But when Isaacson outlined the problem, Sims didn’t flinch. “Ron told me, ‘We have to do it. But we have to explain to people why their taxes have to go up, why it’s in their interest that these improvements get made.’ And that’s pretty much what happened. My staff outlined a program of levee improvements and calculated that the cost would average $40 per household in the Green River valley region. Then we reached out to mayors of towns in the valley and to the public. We had open meetings where we explained the situation. People didn’t grumble much. Even towns not located right next to the river agreed to pay, because they understood that their economic well-being would suffer if the levees broke.”

The tax increase, approved by the voters in 2007, increased Isaacson’s budget tenfold. Instead of the $3.4 million per year he had received in the past, the flood control program was allocated $335 million over the next 10 years — monies to be used for repairing some 500 levees and revetments in the county’s flood defense system.

Ron Sims“I can’t put my head in the sand”

If the ancient tales of the Pacific Northwest are any guide, preparing against floods may be the easy part. Native peoples appear to have passed down not a single story concerning drought. But then the Pacific Northwest is famous for its frequent rains, at least west of the Cascades. The future will be different.

There will be much less
water available as climate change intensifies, and as Sims saw it, the task of government was to prepare people and institutions to live with less water. “People didn’t want to believe there were going to be water shortages,” he recalled. “After all, this is a place where it always rains. But I said, ‘This is what the science says. We have to respect it.’ The reason we have so many ecological problems today is because we didn’t listen to science.”

In the American West, the traditional response to water shortages has been to go out and find — or steal — more of it. But the shrinkage of the snowpack makes that unlikely. In theory, reservoirs could be built to capture the snowmelt before it flows downstream and disappears into the Pacific. But most of the region’s river basins already contain all the reservoirs they can accommodate.

Sims proposed a set of initiatives that respected ecological realities but upset bureaucratic tradition and popular sensibilities. Rather than seeking to increase the gross supply of water, he fought to maximize the net supply. He did so both by using forestland as a natural reservoir and, most controversially, by reusing wastewater before it was released to the sea. The latter idea provoked a fierce political battle that eventually had to be settled by the state legislature.

The morning we met, Sims took me to the site of one of the toughest fights in that battle, the Brightwater wastewater facility. The idea behind recycled water is simple: Instead of using pure water for all human purposes, why not substitute recycled water for watering golf courses, irrigating landscapes, and supplying factories? The Brightwater facility would take in wastewater, run it through filters to remove contaminants, then pump it out for delivery to non-household customers. In effect, using reclaimed water would allow the county to use the same volume of water twice.

That sounded unobjectionable except for the yuck factor: The reclaimed water had previously been used to wash people’s dishes, fill their bathtubs, and flush their toilets. Sims said most people, however, got past this problem: “We explained that reclaimed water would be carefully filtered and never used for drinking, bathing, or irrigating crops.” The real objections, he continued, as we drove east from Seattle, were economic. “The golf courses don’t mind reclaimed water,” he said. “The pushback came from water agencies that had been selling the golf courses water. One of the [agency] people asked me, ‘Do you know how much money we make from golf courses?’ It’s money! We have to get past the question of who’s making money on things and do what’s right for the community as a whole.”

Water agencies resisted Sims, accusing him of a power grab aimed at stealing their business. The former mayor of Seattle, Paul Schell, charged that Sims’ proposal would raise the price and lower the quality of water in the city. The state legislature eventually joined the fray, blocking the plan for three years. But in the end, Sims triumphed. What was his secret?

“I just didn’t back down,” he replied. “King County had the right of approval over the water planning process and we exercised that right. And we had the science on our side, which was crucial. I told water agencies, ‘We’re going to have less water in the future. You may not like it, but that’s a fact.’ As an elected official, if I know what’s coming, I can’t put my head in the sand and wish it weren’t true. I have to listen and act.”

The Brightwater plant is located 20 miles from Seattle on 114 acres of wooded land in neighboring Snohomish County. The site used to house an auto junkyard, but the wrecks had been cleared away as part of a program to protect nearby Little Bear Creek and add forty acres of hiking trails. After bouncing up a rocky driveway, our vehicle stopped above a huge construction site. Below us, bulldozers snorted exhaust while workers in hardhats hoisted rebar. “This plant relies on an advanced membrane bioreactor treatment technology, the most ecologically friendly filtration system in the world,” said Gunnar Goerlitz, the project manager. “When it opens in 2011, it will be the largest plant of this type in the world, capable of treating 36 million gallons of sewage a day.”

Of the 36 million gallons treated, 15 million will receive only secondary-level treatment and be pumped through a tunnel into Puget Sound. The remaining 21 million gallons will receive additional treatment from the bioreactors, which separate solids and bacteria from water molecules, and be distributed to end users. Some of the water will go to a golf course near Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, but most will be added to the Sammamish River, boosting the flow of agricultural water in the area.

Gunnar confirmed that the Brightwater plant had encountered strong opposition: “When the planning of this facility began in 1999, lots of people didn’t like the idea of including purple pipe [the color used for reclaimed water]. When we got to the design stage in 2002, we asked whether we should put in purple pipe. Ron said, ‘You bet.’ It cost $26 million, but it would have cost much, much more if we had to come back later and retrofit it, because you’d have to dig up all the tunnels again.”

Looking down on the construction site, Sims smiled with undisguised satisfaction. “When people in the year 2050 look at this plant, they’ll say, ‘Those old-timers did this right,’” he said. “Every other water treatment plant is going to have to be retrofitted. Not this one. We did this one right.”

Read another post about Hertsgaard’s book: “If you’re under 25, you should be pissed about climate change“

Students in Portugal.Photo: 350.org

From the standpoint of human survival, it makes no sense: Our media and political systems are losing focus on climate change long before the problem is solved — indeed, while it manifestly continues to get worse. You can help change that on Oct. 10. That’s the date of a Global Work Party intended to celebrate climate solutions and press governments for change. Some 4,483 actions (and counting) are planned in 174 countries, says Jamie Henn of 350.org, one of the groups coordinating the event. “To build a grassroots movement that can challenge Big Oil and deliver real climate action, we need to root that movement in community solutions to the climate crisis,” says Henn. “By making climate solutions real and visible, we can build broader support for the type of transformation we need.”

In the Bronx on Oct. 10, residents will partner with the New York City Housing Authority to apply reflective coating to the roof of an NYCHA building, lowering its energy use. In Oakland, activists will upgrade community gardens and launch a statewide Clean Energy bike tour. In Berlin, a Silent Climate Parade featuring fifty dancers dressed as carbon dioxide molecules will highlight how human societies can produce fewer of them. In the Maldives, President Mohammed Nasheed will climb onto the roof of the presidential palace to install solar panels. You can join a local event, or organize your own, by visiting 350.org.

Taking action is the surest antidote I know to the despair that tempts anyone who gazes unflinchingly at the climate challenge. It also helps to study past social movements and realize that the path to victory can begin in the most unexpected places. Consider the striking parallels between the eighteenth-century campaign to end slavery in the British Empire and today’s climate fight: just as the slave trade was central to Britain’s prosperity, so the fossil fuel industry and its allies are the most powerful sector of the modern global economy. And just as the victims of slavery were distant unknowns to most Englishmen and -women, so the victims of climate change mostly live in strange, far-off lands (including the future) and thus have no vote.

As Adam Hochschild documents in his magisterial Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, abolitionists were as discouraged in 1792 as climate advocates are today, and for apparently good reason. True, the abolitionists had scored important successes. After five years of grassroots organizing, they had won over a majority of the English public to the previously marginal opinion that the slave trade should be outlawed. And in the spring of 1792, the House of Commons had approved a bill that limited aspects of the trade. The House of Lords, however, rejected the bill, and when war with France broke out the next year, the momentum for reform seemed spent. Yet the war proved to be the abolitionists’ savior. When a maritime lawyer named James Stephen discovered that British ships were supplying slaves to French colonies in the Caribbean, it enabled abolitionists to argue that the slave trade was helping the enemy. That turned the tide, and both houses of Parliament voted to ban the slave trade entirely.

Historical analogies are never perfect, but Hochschild says that the U.S. climate movement may now be facing its own 1792 moment. “The House of Representatives passed a weak climate bill last summer that was then rejected by the Senate,” he observes. “Meanwhile, the recession and two wars seem to command all of the political attention.” But the abolitionists’ victory shows that fortunes can change, if activists can recognize and exploit opportunities. The abolitionists won, Hochschild says, because “they were absolutely brilliant organizers who saw what worked and went for it. They were not afraid to hitch their campaign to the war fever against France, for example. I’m not an organizer, so I don’t want to tell climate activists what to do. But I do think we need to take the recession and wars and figure out a way to make them work in our favor, challenging as that may be. Because those are the political conditions we face now.”

There is one huge difference, however, between the fights against slavery and against climate change. It took fifty years for British abolitionists to halt legal slavery. Climate activists have much less time to reverse civilization’s trajectory. Which is all the more reason to do your part on Oct. 10.

My daughter Chiara, age five, is a member. So is my goddaughter Emily, age twenty-two. So are the thousands of Pakistani children now suffering after record monsoon rains left 20 percent of their country — an area the size of Great Britain — underwater.

In fact, every child on earth born after June 23, 1988 belongs to what I call Generation Hot. This generation includes some two billion young people, all of whom have grown up under global warming and are fated to spend the rest of their lives confronting its mounting impacts.

For Generation Hot, the brutal summer of 2010 is not an anomaly; it’s the new normal.

One wouldn’t know it from most media coverage, but the world’s leading climate scientists have concluded that last summer’s rash of extreme weather — including record heat across much of Europe (especially Russia) and the United States — was driven in no small part by man-made global warming. Of course no single event can ever be definitively attributed to global warming; weather results from many factors. But according to the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization, the extraordinary heat, rains, drought and flooding that occurred this summer fit the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s projections of “more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming.” In other words, dangerous climate change is no longer tomorrow’s problem; it is here today.

But for most of us, the other scientific shoe has yet to drop. Aside from a fundamentalist few, most people around the world, in rich and poor countries alike, accept that climate change is real and has already begun to occur. Nevertheless, many non-specialists still do not grasp the most fiendish aspect of the climate problem: we can’t turn it off.

No matter how many solar panels, electric cars, and other green technologies we humans may embrace, the fact remains that more severe climate change is locked in for decades to come. The reason is the physical inertia of the climate system: the fact that carbon dioxide can remain in the atmosphere for centuries. Even if global greenhouse gas emissions were magically halted overnight, sheer physical inertia would keep average global temperatures rising for another 30 years at least, scientists say.

Not every future summer will be as punishing as 2010 was, but more and more will be. Members of Generation Hot who live in New York City, for example, will endure roughly twice as many extremely hot summer days in the 2020s as they do today, according to the New York City Panel on Climate Panel, a group of scientific, government, and business leaders advising the city government.

Growing enough food will also be a challenge. Corn, one of the world’s key staple crops, does not reproduce at temperatures above 95 degrees F. During the 20th century, the breadbasket state of Iowa experienced three straight days of 95 F temperatures once per decade — not a big problem. By 2040, Iowa is projected to experience such hot spells in three summers out of four.

It’s not that we weren’t warned. I date the beginning of Generation Hot to June 23, 1988 because that is when humanity was put on notice that greenhouse gas emissions were raising the temperatures on this planet. The warning came from NASA scientist James Hansen’s testimony to the U.S. Senate and, crucially, the decision by The New York Times to print the news on page 1, which in turn made global warming a household phrase in news bureaus, living rooms, and government offices the world over.

As the father of a five-year-old, it infuriates me that Hansen’s warning, and countless subsequent ones, has gone unheeded. As a journalist, I have helped expose some of the tactics that energy companies and their allies employed to block action. Often the cynicism has been breathtaking. For example, the science advisers to the corporate-funded Global Climate Coalition privately told the group’s board of directors — way back in 1995! — that the science behind climate change was “well established and cannot be denied,” a fact the board then censored from the group’s public outreach materials. Last July, lawmakers in Washington refused to pass modest climate legislation even as the northern hemisphere sizzled under what will likely be the hottest summer on record.

“This was a crime,” Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the climate adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, told me, referring to the past two decades of global inaction. But the wrong people are being punished. My daughter and her peers in Generation Hot have been given a life sentence for a crime they didn’t commit; they will spend the rest of their lives coping with a climate that will be hotter and more volatile than ever before in our civilization’s history. Meanwhile, the perpetrators of this crime continue to reap record corporate profits, win political re-elections, and get invited onto national TV and radio programs.

The battle to prevent climate change, feeble as it was, is over. Now the race to survive it has begun. If humanity is to win this race, we must change the way we think about the climate problem. Humanity has left behind what I call the first era of global warming — when we argued about whether it was real and how to stop it — and entered a new, second era of the problem, where the paradigm has shifted in a fundamental but still largely unrecognized way.

In the second era of global warming, the traditional goal of climate policy — limiting global emissions — is more important than ever but no longer sufficient. To be sure, we need to reverse global warming, and quickly — before the earth passes tipping points that could trigger irreversible climate change. At the same time, however, we must now prepare our societies for the many impacts already in the pipeline. In short, we face a double imperative: we must live through global warming even as we halt and reverse it.

A handful of cutting-edge leaders around the world have taken this lesson to heart and begun to put in place protections against the projected impacts, including better sea defenses, more efficient water supplies, and improved emergency and health care systems. Probably the most far-sighted work is taking place in the Netherlands, which has launched a well-funded, politically tough-minded 200 Year Plan to adapt to climate change. (No, 200 is not a typo.) Most countries, however, like most private companies and local communities, are doing little or nothing to prepare for the storm bearing down upon them.

It’s now September, the end of summer, and my five-year-old has started kindergarten. It’s a huge transition, as every parent knows. Meanwhile, the oldest members of Generation Hot are embarking on their own huge transition. Now 21- or 22-years-old, they are leaving childhood behind for the adult world of work, marriage and children.

But a third transition, just as huge, awaits each and every member of Generation Hot. One of the key facts of the 21st century is that climate change is going to get worse, perhaps a lot worse, before it gets better. Like it or not, the kids of Generation Hot will have to learn how to cope with the consequences — not only for their health and economic prospects but their emotional well-being.

Many members of Generation Hot are active in the climate fight, but they cannot succeed without much more hel
p from their elders. The threat of nuclear annihilation — the other great peril of the last 50 years — called forth a powerful movement of parents, especially mothers, that eventually helped convince the superpowers to choose a safer course. Now, parents across the country and around the world should mount a similar campaign to preserve a livable future for our children, the precious young people of Generation Hot.

We can’t all go cold turkey.

PORT SULPHUR, La. — Captain Pete, as everyone in town calls him, has been an oysterman nearly his entire life. He started as a boy, learning the trade from his father, who had learned it from his father. Working fourteen-hour days from leased oyster beds in Barataria Bay, 40 miles south of New Orleans, Captain Pete’s family supplied the city’s premier vendor, P&J Oyster Company. When P&J closed its doors on June 10, it was front-page news in New Orleans — one more in a string of casualties of BP’s deep-sea oil catastrophe.

“It took 50 days for BP’s oil to reach our beds,” Captain Pete tells me as he steers a flatboat out to survey the damage one steamy afternoon. Video he shot a few days before showed streaks of oil the texture of jello staining the marsh grasses that shelter his oyster beds. “Those grasses will shrivel and die,” he says in an accent so thick I struggle to comprehend him. With time, and a respite from additional oil, the grasses could grow back and oyster harvesting resume, he adds. But this year’s harvest is a total loss, and since BP’s gusher clearly isn’t going to be plugged anytime soon, much more oil is certain to slather those grasses.

So it makes sense that Captain Pete would welcome President Obama’s moratorium on deep-sea drilling. Except he doesn’t. The captain lost his house in Hurricane Katrina five years ago, and now the BP disaster may bankrupt the family business, which was helping to put his son through college. But the moratorium? To Captain Pete, it’s one more lunacy imposed on coastal Louisiana by outside “experts,” a group he neither trusts nor respects. Invoking an analogy I heard countless times during a week of reporting there, he asks, “When a airplane crashes, do you ground every plane in the country? No. You find out what caused the problem and fix it. You don’t punish the entire industry.” He points a well-muscled arm toward the dozens of other shrimp and fishing boats docked nearby. “Sixty percent of these guys work on oil rigs, or they service rigs, during the [seafood] off-season,” he explains. “The economy here was just getting back on its feet after Katrina. This moratorium will kill us.”

Anyone who is serious about the United States kicking its oil habit in the wake of the BP disaster must confront the realities of Louisiana, a state whose economy, politics, and self-image have been saturated in oil for more than a century. They must have an answer for Captain Pete and other locals who are cursing BP even as they wonder how they will support their families if the oil and gas industry—widely regarded as the source of the best-paying blue-collar jobs in Louisiana—goes under. “We see the same reaction from people in the coal country of Appalachia and the timber lands of the Pacific Northwest,” says Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “They may criticize the corporations doing the resource extraction, but they still want the extraction to continue because it’s the only jobs they know. The only way to approach these folks with integrity is to offer them a prosperous alternative. If you support a drilling moratorium, which the Sierra Club does, you also have to support a massive shift toward green jobs.”

Plotting a green energy future for Louisiana, however, has been too daunting a task for most environmental groups. “Our side hasn’t made a blueprint for Louisiana because this state is seen as so pro–oil and gas,” observes Jerome Ringo, a former Louisiana oil worker who has been chair of the National Wildlife Federation and president of the Apollo Alliance. “To be honest, I doubt Louisiana will ever get off oil completely. But we do need to diversify our energy mix. We need to think about where our state goes 10 years from now and invest in the green jobs of the future.”

But Louisiana can surprise you. Who knew that this petrostate boasts by far the strongest solar tax credit in the country? Passed in 2007, the 50 percent credit cuts the cost of installing a solar system in half. Combine that with Obama’s 30 percent federal tax credit and a Louisiana homeowner gets an 80 percent discount to go solar and live off the grid—not a bad choice in a region where storms regularly knock out the conventional power supply.

Even parts of the Louisiana business community—long a bastion of the oil and gas industry—may be seeing the light. With great fanfare, Greater New Orleans, Inc. in May launched its Green N.O. coalition, which recognizes “the double bottom line of diversifying the economy while sustaining the environment.” A study by the global consulting firm McKinsey estimates that pursuing sustainable business opportunities could create 90,000 jobs in Louisiana. Beth Galante, executive director of the New Orleans office of the nonprofit Global Green USA, sees this shift within the business community as “winning a major battle in the war” to sway local public opinion. “To get a chamber of commerce that is dominated by one of the most conservative oil and gas industries in the country to invest time and money in green energy is huge,” she argues. “The political philosophy of many Americans, especially in the South, is that whatever makes money is good. This will help people realize there are great opportunities in green energy.”

Great opportunities but also great challenges. It’s not only apoliticals like Captain Pete who oppose Obama’s moratorium. The legislator who sponsored the solar tax credit (and numerous other green energy measures), State Sen. Nick Gautreaux (D), condemns the ban. So does Rep. Charlie Melancon, the Democrat hoping to oust Republican David Vitter from his Senate seat in November. Melancon’s district is ground zero for the BP disaster—he broke down weeping during a Congressional hearing while describing the devastation of its ecosystems, jobs and way of life—but a great many jobs in his district derive from the oil and gas industry.

It may be shocking to read in The Nation, but a blanket moratorium on new deepwater drilling may not be the best policy to pursue in the wake of the BP disaster. No state in the union is more addicted to oil than Louisiana; the oil and gas industry is responsible for roughly 25 percent of the state’s economic activity. If you abruptly cut off a hardened heroin addict, you can kill him; there is a reason physicians prescribe methadone rather than cold turkey. Louisiana absolutely needs to kick its oil habit; but it must do so through a planned, orderly transition or it will not work.

John Williams has been making wine in California’s Napa Valley for nearly 30 years, and he farms so ecologically that his peers call him Mr. Green. But if you ask him how climate change will affect Napa’s world famous wines, he gets irritated, almost insulted. “You know, I’ve been getting that question a lot recently, and I feel we need to keep this issue in perspective,” he told me. “When I hear about global warming in the news, I hear that it’s going to melt the Arctic, inundate coastal cities, displace millions and millions of people, spread tropical diseases and bring lots of other horrible effects. Then I get calls from wine writers and all they want to know is, ‘How is the character of cabernet sauvignon going to change under global warming?’ I worry about global warming, but I worry about it at the humanity scale, not the vineyard scale.”

Williams is the founder of Frog’s Leap, one of the most ecologically minded wineries in Napa and, for that matter, the world. Electricity for the operation comes from 1,000 solar panels erected along the Merlot vines; the heating and cooling are supplied by a geothermal system that taps into the earth’s heat. The vineyards are 100 percent organic and — most radical of all, considering Napa’s dry summers — there is no irrigation.

Yet despite his environmental fervor, Williams dismisses questions about preparing Frog’s Leap for the impacts of climate change. “We have no idea what effects global warming will have on the conditions that affect Napa Valley wines, so to prepare for those changes seems to me to be whistling past the cemetery,” he says, a note of irritation in his voice. “All I know is, there are things I can do to stop, or at least slow down, global warming, and those are things I should do.”

Williams has a point about keeping things in perspective. At a time when climate change is already making it harder for people in Bangladesh to find enough drinking water, it seems callous to fret about what might happen to premium wines. But there is much more to the question of wine and climate change than the character of pinot noir. Because wine grapes are extraordinarily sensitive to temperature, the industry amounts to an early-warning system for problems that all food crops — and all industries — will confront as global warming intensifies. In vino veritas, the Romans said: In wine there is truth. The truth now is that the earth’s climate is changing much faster than the wine business, and virtually every other business on earth, is preparing for.

All crops need favorable climates, but few are as vulnerable to temperature and other extremes as wine grapes. “There is a fifteenfold difference in the price of cabernet sauvignon grapes that are grown in Napa Valley and cabernet sauvignon grapes grown in Fresno” in California’s hot Central Valley, says Kim Cahill, a consultant to the Napa Valley Vintners’ Association. “Cab grapes grown in Napa sold [in 2006] for $4,100 a ton. In Fresno the price was $260 a ton. The difference in average temperature between Napa and Fresno was 5 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Numbers like that help explain why climate change is poised to clobber the global wine industry, a multibillion-dollar business whose decline would also damage the much larger industries of food, restaurants, and tourism. Every business on earth will feel the effects of global warming, but only the ski industry — which appears doomed in its current form — is more visibly targeted by the hot, erratic weather that lies in store over the next 50 years. In France, the rise in temperatures may render the Champagne region too hot to produce fine champagne. The same is true for the legendary reds of Châteauneuf du Pape, where the stony white soil’s ability to retain heat, once considered a virtue, may now become a curse. The world’s other major wine-producing regions — California, Italy, Spain, Australia — are also at risk.

If current trends continue, the “premium wine grape production area [in the United States] … could decline by up to 81 percent by the late 21st century,” a team of scientists wrote in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. The culprit was not so much the rise in average temperatures but an increased frequency of extremely hot days, defined as above 95 degrees Fahrenheit. If no adaptation measures were taken, these increased heat spikes would “eliminate wine grape production in many areas of the United States,” the scientists wrote.

In theory, winemakers can defuse the threat by simply shifting production to more congenial locations. Indeed, champagne grapes have already been planted in England and some respectable vintages harvested. But there are limits to this strategy. After all, temperature is not the sole determinant of a wine’s taste. What the French call terroir — a term that refers to the soil of a given region but also includes the cultural knowledge of the people who grow and process grapes — is crucial. “Wine is tied to place more than any other form of agriculture, in the sense that the names of the place are on the bottle,” says David Graves, the co-founder of the Saintsbury wine company in the Napa Valley. “If traditional sugar-beet growing regions in eastern Colorado had to move north, nobody would care. But if wine grapes can’t grow in the Napa Valley anymore — which is an extreme statement, but let’s say so for the sake of argument — suddenly you have a global warming poster child right up there with the polar bears.”

A handful of climate-savvy winemakers such as Graves are trying to rouse their colleagues to action before it is too late, but to little avail. Indeed, some winemakers are actually rejoicing in the higher temperatures of recent years. “Some of the most expensive wines in Spain come from the Rioja Alta and Rioja Alavesa regions,” Pancho Campo, the founder and president of the Wine Academy of Spain, says. “They are getting almost perfect ripeness every year now for Tempranillo. This makes the winemakers say, ‘Who cares about climate change? We are getting perfect vintages.’ The same thing has happened in Bordeaux. It is very difficult to tell someone, ‘This is only going to be the case for another few years.’”

The irony is, the wine business is better situated than most to adapt to global warming. Many of the people in the industry followed in their parents’ footsteps and hope to pass the business on to their kids and grandkids someday. This should lead them to think farther ahead than the average corporation, with its obsessive focus on this quarter’s financial results. But I found little evidence this is happening.

COPENHAGEN — The Chinese premier Wen Jiabao will meet one-on-one with President Barack Obama soon in Copenhagen to try to reach agreement on a new international climate treaty, according to He Yafei, the vice chairman of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

“Yes, I believe so,” responded He in the hallways of Copenhagen’s Bella Center late this afternoon, when he was asked if Wen and Obama, the heads of government of the world’s two climate superpowers, would meet to resolve outstanding differences.

Wen, whose country is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases on an annual basis, arrived in Copenhagen yesterday for the U.N. climate summit. Obama, whose country is the world’s largest emitter on a cumulative basis, is due to arrive in time for the summit’s concluding sessions on Friday, Dec. 18. Together, the two countries are responsible for 42 percent of the world’s annual emissions, making their actions crucial to the effort to combat global warming.

Hu and Obama in Beijing in November. Photo: The White HouseIn a major break from previous climate change diplomacy, Obama and Chinese president Hu Jintao agreed in Beijing in November that both nations would limit their future emissions — the first time the two climate superpowers had made that promise to the international community — and work together for a successful outcome to the Copenhagen summit.

But as the summit approaches its final 24 hours, the difference between the proposals on the table and established climate science remain vast. A document leaked this afternoon from the United Nations agency organizing the summit, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, stated the the proposals currently on offer will lead to an estimated global temperature rise of 3 degrees C over pre-industrial levels, well beyond what scientists believe is safe and what virtually all governments assembled here rhetorically support. The governments of the U.S. and other members of the Group of 8 rich industrial countries pledged in July 2009 to limit global temperatures to 2 C. More than 100 nations, mainly the poor and island states that are most vulnerable to sea level rise and other impacts of climate change, have called on the Copenhagen summit to endorse a goal of 1.5 C.

“Anything more than that, and we’ve had it,” said Mohammed Nasheed, the president of Maldives.

At a press conference this afternoon in Copenhagen, He said that, according to Premier Wen, the final text of the agreement under discussion in Copenhagen could include a limit of 2 degrees C as a “long-term,” aspirational goal.

But “to make it a balanced approach,” He added, the text should make it clear that the fight against poverty is to remain the top priority for developing countries.

Responding to an American demand for transparent verification of China’s promised future emissions cuts, He said that China was ready to engage in “dialogue and co-operation that is not intrusive, that does not infringe on China’s sovereignty.”

Meanwhile, at a press conference held immediately before China’s, U.S. House of Representatives member Henry Waxman of California, the co-sponsor of the Waxman-Markey climate bill that passed the House over the summer, contradicted mainstream science by repeatedly asserting that the emissions reductions that the Obama administration has pledged are  “completely consistent” with the 2 C limit.

“The targets we set out in our legislation, and that the president has articulated — a 17 percent cut in emissions by 2020 and an 85 percent reduction by 2050 — are consistent with what the science says is needed to prevent the [world from crossing] tipping points and the dire consequences that would bring,” Waxman told the press conference. Crucially, these proposed cuts on the part of the U.S., which await action by the U.S. Senate, are based on a 2005 baseline. When compared to the 1990 baseline that is the international standard, the proposed U.S. cuts amount to a mere 4 percent by 2020.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other leading scientific bodies around the world have concluded that reductions of 25 to 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 are necessary to give the world a realistic chance to limit temperature rise to 2 C.

“That is the determination we have made,” Waxman responded in the hallway after the press conference when asked about the contradiction between his statement and the prevailing scientific consensus. “Many environmental organizations have said that [our goals] are consistent [with 2 C]. And as Congressman Markey just said, I think we may actually end up doing much more than is projected once we get going. The important thing is to get started.”

“We’re trying to find a way to work together for the betterment of the planet,” Pelosi told the press conference. Noting that she had visited China in May and was “very impressed” by its progress in solar and other alternative forms of energy, Pelosi indicated that China’s recent pledge to reduce the energy intensity of its economy 45 percent by 2020 was a sign of progress. “China is still a net emitter, but without these [alternative energy] measures, things would be much worse.”

Earlier in the day, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the U.S. would “work toward” the provision of $100 billion in aid to developing countries to help them shift to low-carbon energy and to adapt to the impacts of climate change, and that the U.S. would pay “its fair share.” But Clinton gave no further details about how much of the $100 billion would come from the U.S., how much would be new money rather than a reshuffling of existing commitments and how much of it might come from private sector investments.

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