His latest book, Straight Up, takes on the oil and coal companies, the skeptics, and the press. His unfailing sense of priorities shines through his startlingly thoughtful and brutally blunt writing.

I have one problem with his book — but more about that later.   

As an assistant secretary of energy during the Clinton administration, Romm developed expertise in the area of renewable energy technologies. As a climate blogger, his even greater asset is his intelligence.  

Straight Up is a compilation of posts from Romm’s popular blog Climate Progress. And while one wishes Romm would have stitched the blog posts together into a more coherent narrative — and omitted a few that addressed transitory, fleeting events — his book is absolutely on point in its insistence that climate change long ago ceased to be a scientific issue and, instead, is most clearly a political one.

Take the climate bills pending in Congress. Even though all the proposals on the legislative table are pitifully inadequate to the catastrophic threat of accelerating climate change, Romm’s book makes the subtext crystal clear.

The conflict in Congress is not really about the science. “The conflict is actually a political one between those who believe in government-led solutions and those who don’t.” As Romm points out, a central reason that most political conservatives and libertarians deny the reality of human-induced climate change “is that they simply cannot stand the solution. So they attack both the solution and the science.”  I don’t recall reading that simple truth in The Washington Post, The New York Times, or any other major news outlet — virtually all of which treat the climate debate as though it actually had some legitimacy.

Similarly, I share Romm’s critical take on the news media for their complicity in creating our gathering nightmare.

Having spent 30 years as an editor and reporter at some of the country’s major newspapers, I don’t think the worst offenders in the hierarchy of climate villainy are the executives of Big Coal and Big Oil. They’re simply doing what they’re paid to do: bring us cheap and abundant energy — and defend their industries against the imperatives of the science and the onslaught of environmentalists.

The larger villain, from my point of view, is the mainstream press that has consistently failed to prepare the public for the coming turbulence. The major U.S. news outlets have failed to prominently highlight major climate science findings. They have failed to mention the role of warming in the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. And they have failed, in the name of “journalistic balance,” to distinguish between legitimate, peer-reviewed scientific research and the deliberate obfuscation by a cadre of climate skeptics, many of whom have been funded by coal and oil companies.

As a result, the public has no idea that we are already at a point of no return in terms of staving off climate chaos. 

Citing the dire forecasts from the most recent IPCC report — which significantly underestimate the urgency of the situation — Romm blasts the media for treating climate skeptics “as if they had a scientifically or morally defensible position.”

Moreover, because the media largely continues to report the climate controversy as though it had a middle ground, “they push us closer to the certain catastrophe of inaction,” as Romm writes.

His chilling conclusion:  “It appears to me that today’s media simply can’t cover humanity’s self-destruction.”

In a similar vein, Romm skewers the media for failing to connect the intensification of extreme weather events around the world to our burning of coal and oil.

That connection was established as early as 1995, when Tom Karl, David Easterling, and other scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center concluded that as earth’s temperature increases, we will see more temperature extremes, more intense downpours, and more protracted droughts, among other consequences. Those findings were elaborated in a 1997 Scientific American articled titled “The Coming Climate.”

Nevertheless, Romm points out that the coverage by the majority of the U.S. news outlets of last year’s hellish wildfires in Australia contained no mention of warming-driven heat waves and droughts. Romm cited a Reuters headline which read, “Australia Fires a Climate Wake-up Call: Experts.”  By contrast, ABC News anchor Charles Gibson called them “part natural disaster” and partly the product of arsonists.  ABC’s World News Tonight said not one word about the role of human-induced atmospheric warming in the long heat wave and drought that created such hospitable conditions for the wildfires.

On the economic front, Romm is equally ruthless in his criticism. For one thing, the press and many economists have consistently overestimated the costs of mitigation, starting with the simplest of all remedies: efficiency. In Romm’s view, the U.S. is the “Saudi Arabia of energy waste.”

America has lost its stature as a moral leader in today’s world. The global financial system continues to unravel with devastating consequences. The escalating threat of terrorism, driven by persistent inequity between the world’s rich and poor, seems immune to military solutions.  The global climate stands at the threshold of runaway changes.
        
What is needed is a one-stop solution that transcends traditional coalitions and national antagonisms and brings the nations of the world together in a common global project that addresses all three threats.

In short, what is needed is a coordinated global public-works program to rewire the world with clean energy.   
    
The most immediate benefit is that such an initiative would begin to restore America’s moral leadership in today’s fractured and combative world.  Every country is beginning to feel the impacts of our increasingly unstable climate — and a profound sense of desperation over America’s eight-year refusal to address the threat.
    
On the economic front, the globally destabilizing credit crisis, the heart-stopping plunges of the stock market, the continuing agony of job losses, and the uncertainties surrounding the price of oil are triggering paralyzing fears of a prolonged global economic recession — if not worse.  

The intractable economic gap between rich and poor nations is fuelling despair, malnutrition, disease, and an ominous intensification of anti-American resentment. As a result, terrorism has replaced the old Cold War as the primary threat to international stability.  

Both the financial crisis and the prospect of intensified terrorism pale before the irreversibly destructive potential of runaway climate change. Our physical environment is unraveling rapidly. As the climate continues to warm, deep oceans are heating, violent weather is increasing, the timing of the seasons is changing, and all over the world plants, insects, birds, fish, and other animals are migrating toward the poles in search of stable temperatures.   

A number of the world’s most prominent climate scientists recently declared we are approaching — or have already passed — a point of no return in staving off global climate chaos.  Scientists cite the rapid melting of the Arctic — as well as the recent discovery of large deposits of methane bubbling up from the perforated ocean floor off the coast of Siberia — as potential triggers for runaway changes.

This ominous confluence of global threats underscores the observation by the Brazilian diplomat Raoul Estrada that “we are all in the same boat — and there’s no way half the boat is going to sink.”
    
President Obama’s proposed 10-year clean energy investment of about $150 billion in the U.S. would certainly boost domestic production of windmills and solar panels and help jumpstart the U.S. economy. But it would do nothing to address global economic inequity.  

Moreover, even if we in the U.S. were to dramatically cut our carbon emissions, those cuts would be overwhelmed by the coming pulse of carbon from India, China, Mexico, Nigeria, and all the developing countries which are struggling to feed and educate their people and can scarcely afford massive investments in clean energy.

On the financial front, today’s financial crisis requires the kind of public-works programs initiated in the 1930s by President Franklin Roosevelt to jump the economy out of its current state of exhaustion. Few economists believe the current capital crisis has run its course. But while FDR’s programs were national in scope, today’s globalized economy requires a global initiative to counteract a worldwide economic recession.

A global public-works program — with something like $300 billion a year in predictable North-South capital flows — would provide a much-needed ballast to counteract the wild market swings that have helped destabilize the global economy.

The relentless poverty that afflicts about two-thirds of the world’s people, moreover, requires that such projects provide tangible economic opportunities for the world’s poorest residents. Development economists tell us that every dollar invested in energy in poor countries creates far more jobs and far more wealth than the same dollar invested in any other segment of their economies.  A transition to clean energy would create millions of new jobs in the developing world.

By contrast, Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank, recently revised upward his estimate of how much it would cost the world to keep ignoring climate change; initially he said 20 percent of global gross domestic product, but he now says up to 33 percent.  Explained Stern, “We underestimated the risks … we underestimated the damage associated with temperature increases … and we underestimated the probabilities of temperature increases.”

Finally the threat of escalating climate change transcends national boundaries. Nations recognize sovereignty; nature does not. If there is any issue that contains the seeds for a permanent state of conflict — over food shortages, water scarcity, and displaced populations — it is global warming.

Last year, a National Intelligence Estimate echoed the earlier findings of a group of retired generals and admirals in identifying global climate change as the greatest long-term threat to our national security.

In December, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for a global green New Deal. “The economic crisis is serious,” he said. “Yet when it comes to climate change, the stakes are far higher.”

Here’s the Plan

One potential solution to our increasingly impoverished, polarized, and warming world centers on a coordinated package of policy strategies to propel a rapid global energy transition.  This model is not the only way to accomplish the task. But, unlike most other approaches, it is appropriate to the scope and urgency of the challenge.  
    
The Clean Energy Transition plan includes three strategies:        

• In industrial countries, the withdrawal of subsidies from fossil fuels and the establishment of equivalent subsidies for clean energy sources;    
• The creation of a large fund — perhaps through a small tax on global finance — to transfer clean energy technologies to developing countries; and,  
• The incorporation within a new global climate treaty of a progressively more stringent Fossil Fuel Efficiency Standard that rises by 5 percent per year.

On the subsidy issue, the United States currently spends about $45 billion a year to subsidize carbon fuels. In the industrial countries overall, those subsidies have been estimated at about $250 billion a year.

The industrial nations should phase out subsidies for oil and coal and create equivalent subsidies for clean energy technologies.  (Clearly a small portion of the U.S. subsidies must be used to retrain or buy out the nation’s approximately 40,000 coal miners.)   But the lion’s share of the subsidies would still be available to the major energy companies to retrain their workers and re-tool to become aggressive developers of wind farms, solar systems, and fuel cells.  

If the U.S. were to establish $45 billion in subsidies for clean energy, along with $200 billion in similar subsidies in the other industrial nations, that would mobilize an army of energy engineers and entrepreneurs — with successively more efficient generations of solar film, turbines, and tidal devices — in a burst of creativity that would rival the dot-com revolution of the 1990s.  

But even if the countries of the North were dramatically to reduce emissions, those cuts would be overwhelmed by the escalating carbon emissions from large developing countries. So a second element of the plan involves the creation of a fund of about $300 billion a year for about a decade to jumpstart renewable energy infrastructures in developing countries.  

That fund could be financed by any number of sources. An extremely promising mechanism involves a very small tax on international currency transactions, named after its developer, the late Nobel prize-winning economist James Tobin. (These transactions occur as a normal part of business as governments and companies exchange yen for dollars and dollars for euros.)  Today, the commerce in currency transactions exceeds $1.5 trillion a day. A tax of a quarter-penny on a dollar on those transactions would net out to about $300 billion a year, which could go toward wind farms in India, fuel-cell factories in Mexico, solar assemblies in El Salvador, and vast, solar-powered hydrogen farms in the Middle East.

In short, the proposal involves a small tax on global finance to preserve the global environment.

Since currency transactions are electronically tracked by the private banking system, the need for a large, cumbersome bureaucracy could be avoided by paying the banks a small fee to administer the fund.  That fee would offset their loss of income from the contraction in currency trading that would result from the tax.  The use of the banks to administer the fund would, moreover, discourage corruption. The plan would require banks to publicly post fully transparent reports on their verification of construction benchmarks to ensure that the funds went directly into clean energy projects.

Perhaps equally as important, the banks’ role in administering the fund could provide a social mission and a sense of purpose for an industry that sorely needs a new, moral facelift.

This arrangement would eliminate the need for a new cumbersome international agency.  The only new bureaucracy that would be required would be a small international auditing agency to oversee the banks’ administration of the fund, to provide equal access for all energy vendors, and to further minimize corruption in recipient countries.

If a currency transaction tax proves unacceptable, a carbon tax in industrial countries or a tax on international airline travel could fill the same function.

Regardless of its revenue source, the fund — on the ground — would be allocated according to a U.N. formula that specifies what percentage of each year’s fund would go to each developing country.

If India, for instance, were to receive $5 billion in the first year, it would then decide what mix of wind farms, village solar installations, fuel-cell generators, and biogas facilities it needed. The Indian government (in this hypothetical example) would then entertain bids for these facilities. As contractors reached specified benchmarks, they would be paid directly by the banks.

As self-replicating renewable infrastructures took root in developing countries, the fund could simply be phased out.  Alternatively, progressively larger amounts of the fund could be diverted to other global environment and development needs.
    
The third element of the plan — which makes it all work — calls on the parties to the successor to the Kyoto Protocol to subordinate the inequitable and ineffective mechanism of international carbon trading to a simple progressive Fossil Fuel Efficiency Standard which goes up by 5 percent per year.  This mechanism, if incorporated into the Protocol, would harmonize and guide a global energy transition in a way that emissions trading can not.  

Under this approach, every country would start at its current baseline to increase its fossil fuel energy efficiency by 5 percent every year until a global 70 percent reduction is attained. In other words, a country would produce the same amount of goods as the previous year with 5 percent less carbon fuel.  Alternatively, it would produce 5 percent more goods with the same carbon fuel use as the previous year.  

Since no economy grows at 5 percent for long, emissions reductions would outpace long-term economic growth.  

(In this context, domestic “cap-and-trade” schemes could be valuable tools to help countries initially meet their national goals. Al Gore’s plan to make the U.S. electrical grid 100 percent carbon free in 10 years, for one example, would fit comfortably into this framework.)  

For the first few years of the efficiency standard, most countries would likely meet their goals by implementing low-cost or even profitable efficiencies — the “low-hanging fruit” — in their current energy systems.  After a few years, however, as those efficiencies became more expensive to capture, countries would meet the progressively more stringent standard by drawing more and more energy from new, clean energy installations — most of which are 100 percent efficient by a Fossil Fuel Standard.

That, in turn, would create the mass markets and economies of scale for renewables that would bring down their prices and make them economically competitive with coal and oil.

This mechanism would also be far easier to monitor than emissions trading, with its morass of legalistic and excruciatingly arcane loopholes. A nation’s compliance would be measured simply by calculating the annual change in the ratio of its total carbon fuel use to its gross domestic product.  That ratio would have to change by 5 percent a year.  

A project of this scope would create millions of new jobs — especially in in developing countries.  It would begin to turn impoverished and dependent countries into trading partners.  It would counteract the economic desperation that gives rise to so much anti-U.S. sentiment. It would jump the renewable energy industry into being a central, driving engine of growth of the global economy.  

One hopeful accident of timing is that the climate crisis does coincide with other trends. The economy is becoming truly globalized. The globalization of communications now makes it possible for anyone to communicate with anyone else anywhere else in the world.  And, since it is no respecter of national boundaries, the global climate is now impacting every corner of the world.

Ultimately, a global public-works program to rewire the world with clean energy has the potential to bring the people of the world together around a common global project to preserve both a robust global economy and, hopefully, a stable and secure human habitat.

Finally, given this extremely ominous moment in history, a project of this kind could — most optimistically — provide the foundation for a new, more cooperative and proactive kind of peace: peace among people, and peace between people and nature.

The environmental establishment continues to peddle the notion that we can solve the climate problem.

We can’t.

We have failed to meet nature’s deadline. In the next few years, this world will experience progressively more ominous and destabilizing changes. These will happen either incrementally — or in sudden, abrupt jumps.

Under either scenario, it seems inevitable that we will soon be confronted by water shortages, crop failures, increasing damages from extreme weather events, collapsing infrastructures, and, potentially, breakdowns in the democratic process itself.

—–

Start with the climate activists, who are telling us only a partial truth.

Virtually all of the national and grassroots climate groups are pushing hard to reduce carbon emissions. The most aggressive are working to change America’s entire energy structure from one based on coal and oil to a new energy future based on noncarbon technologies — as they should.

The Step It Up campaign inspired more than 1,500 protests in all 50 states this year, and is hoping to build on that impact by joining forces with the 1Sky climate campaign. The Campus Climate Challenge is planning a new and more energetic clean energy campaign. Focus the Nation continues to exhort colleges and universities around the country to green their campuses. Al Gore’s dedication to bringing the climate crisis to public attention won him a well-deserved Nobel Prize, and he’s using his newfound credibility to push even harder for action against climate change. The large Washington-based environmental groups are pressing to improve climate and energy bills that are moving through Congress — even though the bills are clearly inadequate to the challenge before us.

But even assuming the wildest possible success of their initiatives — that humanity decided tomorrow to replace its coal- and oil-burning energy sources with noncarbon sources — it would still be too late to avert major climate disruptions. No national energy infrastructure can be transformed within a decade.

All these initiatives address only one part of the coming reality. They recall the kind of frenzied scrambling that is characteristic of trauma victims — a frantic focus on other issues, any other issues — that allows people to avoid the central take-home message of the trauma: in this case, the overwhelming power of inflamed nature.

—–

Within the last two years, a number of leading scientists — including Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), British ecologist James Lovelock, and NASA scientist James Hansen — have all declared that humanity is about to pass or already has passed a “tipping point” in terms of global warming. The IPCC, which reflects the findings of more than 2,000 scientists from over 100 countries, recently stated that it is “very unlikely” that we will avoid the coming era of “dangerous climate change.”

The truth is that we may already be witnessing the early stages of runaway climate change in the melting of the Arctic, the increase in storm intensity, the accelerating extinctions of species, and the prolonged nature of recurring droughts.

Moreover, some scientists now fear that the warming is taking on its own momentum — driven by internal feedbacks that are independent of the human-generated carbon layer in the atmosphere.

Consider these examples:

• Despite growing public awareness of global warming, the world’s carbon emissions are rising nearly three times faster than they did in the 1990s. As a result, many scientists tell us that the official, government-sanctioned forecasts of coming changes are understating the threat facing the world.

• A rise of 2 degrees C over preindustrial temperatures is now virtually inevitable, according to the IPCC, as the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is approaching the destabilizing level of 450 parts per million. That rise will bring drought, hunger, disease, and flooding to millions of people around the world.
• Scientists predict a steady rise in temperatures beginning in about two years — with at least half of the years between 2009 and 2019 surpassing the average global temperature in 1998, to date, the hottest year on record.
• Given the unexpected speed with which Antarctica is melting, coupled with the increasing melt rates in the Arctic and Greenland, the rate of sea-level rise has doubled — with scientists now raising their prediction of ocean rise by century’s end from about three feet to about six feet.
• Scientists discovered that a recent, unexplained surge of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere is due to more greenhouse gases escaping from trees, plants, and soils — which have traditionally buffered the warming by absorbing the gases. In the lingo of climate scientists, carbon sinks are turning into carbon sources. Because the added warmth is making vegetation less able to absorb our carbon emissions, scientists expect the rate of warming to jump substantially in the coming years.
• The intensity of hurricanes around the world has doubled in the last decade. As Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research explained, “If you take the last 10 years, we’ve had twice the number of category-5 hurricanes than any other [10-year period] on record.”
• In Australia, a new, permanent state of drought in the country’s breadbasket has cut crop yields by over 30 percent. The 1-in-1,000-year drought exemplifies a little-noted impact of climate change. As the atmosphere warms, it tightens the vortex of the winds that swirl around the poles. One result is that the water that traditionally evaporated from the Southern Ocean and rained down over New South Wales is now being pulled back into Antarctica — drying out the southeastern quadrant of Australia and contributing to the buildup of glaciers in the Antarctic — the only area on the planet where glaciers are increasing.

As one prominent climate scientist said recently, “We are seeing impacts today that we did not expect to see until 2085.”[1]

—–

The panic among climate scientists is expressing itself in geoengineering proposals that are half-baked, fantastically futuristic, and, in some cases, reckless. Put forth by otherwise sober and respected scientists, the schemes are intended to basically allow us to continue burning coal and oil.

Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, for example, is proposing to spray aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting earth. Tom M. L. Wigley, a highly esteemed climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), ran scenarios of stratospheric sulfate injection — on the scale of the estimated 10 million tons of sulfur emitted when Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991 — through supercomputer models of the climate, and reported that Crutzen’s idea would, indeed, seem to work. The scheme was highlighted in a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times by Ken Caldeira, a climate researcher at the Carnegie Institution.

Unfortunately, the seeding of the atmosphere with sun-reflecting particles would trigger a global drought, according to a study by other researchers. “It is a Band-Aid fix that does not work,” said study co-author Kevin Trenberth of NCAR. The eruption of Pinatubo was followed by a significant drop-off of rainfall over land and a record decrease in runoff and freshwater discharge into the ocean, according to a recently published study by Trenberth and other scientists.

The noted British ecologist James Lovelock recently proposed the idea of installing deepwater pipes on the ocean floor to pump cold water to the surface to enhance the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide. Others suggest dumping iron filings into the ocean to increase the growth of algae which, in turn, would absorb more carbon dioxide.

These proposals fail to seriously acknowledge the possibility of unanticipated impacts on ocean dynamics or marine ecosystems or atmospheric conditions. We have no idea what would result from efforts to geoengineer our way around nature’s roadblock.

At a recent conference, Lisa Speer of the Natural Resources Defense Council noted, “These types of proposals are multiplying around the world, and there is no structure in place to evaluate if any of them work. People are going after these gigantic projects without any thoughtful, rational process.”

What these scientists are offering us are technological expressions of their own supercharged sense of desperation.

—–

To be fair, the reality that faces us all is extremely difficult to deal with — as much from an existential as from a scientific point of view.

Climate change won’t kill all of us — but it will dramatically reduce the human population through the warming-driven spread of infectious disease, the collapse of agriculture in traditionally fertile areas, and the increasing scarcity of fresh drinking water. (Witness the 1-in-100-year drought in the southeastern U.S., which has been threatening drinking water supplies in Georgia and other states.)

Those problems will be dramatically intensified by an influx of environmental refugees whose crops are destroyed by weather extremes or whose freshwater sources have dried up or whose homelands are going under from rising sea levels.

In March, the U.S. Army War College sponsored a conference on the security implications of climate change. “Climate change is a national security issue,” retired General Gordon R. Sullivan, chair of the Military Advisory Board and former Army chief of staff, said in releasing a report that grew out of the conference. “[C]limate instability will lead to instability in geopolitics and impact American military operations around the world.”

One frequently overlooked potential casualty of accelerating climate change may be our tradition of democracy (corrupted as it already is). When governments have been confronted by breakdowns, they have frequently resorted to totalitarian measures to keep order in the face of chaos. It is not hard to imagine a state of emergency morphing into a much longer state of siege, especially since heat-trapping carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for about 100 years.

Add the escalating squeeze on our oil supplies, which could intensify our meanest instincts, and you have the ingredients for a long period of repression and conflict.

Ominously, this plays into the scenario, thoughtfully explored by Naomi Klein, that the community of multinational corporations will seize on the coming catastrophes to elbow aside governments as agents of rescue and reconstruction — but only for communities that can afford to pay. This dark vision implies the increasing insulation of the world’s wealthy minority from the rest of humanity — buying protection for their fortressed communities from the Halliburtons, Bechtels, and Blackwaters of the world while the majority of the poor are left to scramble for survival among the ruins.

The only antidote to that kind of future is a revitalization of government — an elevation of public mission above private interest and an end to the free-market fundamentalism that has blinded much of the American public with its mindless belief in the divine power of markets. In short, it requires a revival of a system of participatory democracy that reflects our collective values far more accurately than the corporate state into which we have slid.

Unfortunately, we seem to be living in an age of historical amnesia. One wonders whether our institutional memory still recalls the impulses that gave rise to our constitution — or whether we have substituted a belief in efficiency, economic rationalization, and profit maximization for our traditional pursuit of a finely calibrated balance between individual liberties and social justice.

—–

From a more personal viewpoint, an acknowledgement of the reality of escalating climate change plays havoc with one’s sense of future. It is almost as though a lone ocean voyager were suddenly to lose sight of the North Star. It deprives one of an inner sense of navigation. To live without at least an open-ended sense of future (even if it’s not an optimistic one) is to open one’s self to a morass of conflicting impulses — from the anticipated thrill of a reckless plunge into hedonism to a profoundly demoralizing sense of hopelessness and a feeling that a lifelong guiding sense of purpose has suddenly evaporated.

This slow-motion collapse of the planet leaves us with the bitterest kind of awakening. For parents of young children, it provokes the most intimate kind of despair. For people whose happiness derives from a fulfilling sense of achievement in their work, this realization feels like a sudden, violent mugging. For those who feel a debt to all those past generations who worked so hard to create this civilization we have enjoyed, it feels like the ultimate trashing of history and tradition. For anyone anywhere who truly absorbs this reality and all that it implies, this realization leads into the deepest center of grief.

There needs to be another kind of thinking that centers neither on the profoundly dishonest denial promoted by the coal and oil industries, nor the misleading optimism of the environmental movement, nor the fatalistic indifference of the majority of people who just don’t want to know.

There needs to be a vision that accommodates both the truth of the coming cataclysm and the profoundly human need for a sense of future.

That vision needs to be framed by the truly global nature of the problem. It starts with the recognition that this historical era of nationalism has become a stubborn, increasingly toxic impediment to our collective future. We all need to begin to think of ourselves — now — as citizens of one profoundly distressed planet.

I think that understanding involves a recognition that a clean environment is about far more than endangered species, toxic substances, and the “dead zones” that keep spreading off our shorelines. A clean environment is a basic human right. And without it, all the other human rights for which we have worked so hard will end up as grotesque caricatures of some of our deepest aspirations.

Fortuitously, the timing of the climate crisis does coincide with other worldwide trends. Like it or not, the economy is becoming globalized. The globalization of communications now makes it possible for anyone to communicate with anyone else anywhere else in the world. And, since it is no respecter of national boundaries, the global climate makes us one.

At the same time, the coming changes clearly suggest that, to the extent possible, we should be eating locally and regionally grown food — to minimize the CO2 generated by factory farming and long-distance food transport. We should also be preparing to take our energy from a decentralized system using whichever noncarbon energy technologies are best suited to their natural surroundings — solar in sunny areas, offshore wave and tidal power in coastal areas, wind farms in the world’s wind corridors, and geothermal almost everywhere. (It may even be feasible to maintain a low-level coal-fired grid, of about 15 percent of current capacity, as a back-up for days the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.) But it’s critical to stop thinking in terms of centralized energy systems and to begin thinking in terms of localized, decentralized technologies.

At the level of social organization, the coming changes imply the need to conduct something like 80 percent of our governance at the local grassroots level through some sort of consensual democratic process — with the remaining 20 percent conducted by representatives at the global level.

—–

For some years, I have been promoting a policy bundle of three specific strategies as one model for jump-starting a global transition to clean energy. Those policies, which are spelled out in my book Boiling Point and on my website, include:

• Redirecting more than $250 billion in subsidies in industrial countries away from coal and oil and putting them behind carbon-free technologies;

• Creating a fund of about $300 billion a year for a decade, to transfer clean energy to poor countries; and
• Adopting within the Kyoto framework a mandatory progressive fossil-fuel efficiency standard that would go up by 5 percent a year until the 80 percent global reduction is attained.

The initial impulse behind these strategies was to craft a policy bundle to stabilize the climate — and at the same time create millions of jobs, especially in developing countries. Initially, I, along with the other people who helped formulate them, envisioned these solutions as a way to undermine the economic desperation that gives rise to so much anti-U.S. sentiment. They would, we hoped, turn impoverished and dependent countries into trading partners. They would raise living standards abroad without compromising ours. They would jump the renewable energy industry into a central driving engine of growth for the global economy and, ultimately, yield a far more equitable, more secure, and more prosperous world.

Unfortunately, given all the apathy, indifference, and antagonism to taking real action, nature has now relegated that earlier vision to the rear-view mirror.

But this kind of global public-works plan, if initiated in the near term, could still provide a platform to bring the people of the world together around a common global project that transcends traditional alliances and national antagonisms — even in today’s profoundly fractured, degraded, and combative world. Along the way, it could also provide decentralized stand-alone energy sources for disconnected social communities in a post-crash world.

The key to our survival as a civil species during an era of profound natural upheaval lies in an enhanced sense of community. If we maintain the fiction that we can thrive as isolated individuals, we will find ourselves at the same emotional dead end as the current crop of survivalists: an existence marked by defensiveness, mistrust, suspicion, and fear.

As nature washes away our resources, overwhelms our infrastructures, and splinters our political alignments, our survival will depend increasingly on our willingness to join together as a global community. As the former Argentine climate negotiator, Raul Estrada-Oyuela, said, “We are all adrift in the same boat — and there’s no way half the boat is going to sink.”[2]

To keep ourselves afloat, we need to change the economic and political structures that determine how we behave. In this case, we need to elevate the ethic of cooperation over the deeply ingrained reflex of competition. We need to elevate our biological similarities over our geographical differences. We need, in the face of this oncoming onslaught, to reorganize our social structures to reflect our most humane collective aspirations.

There is no body of expertise — no authoritative answers — for this one. We are crossing a threshold into uncharted territory. And since there is no precedent to guide us, we are left with only our own hearts to consult, whatever courage we can muster, our instinctive dedication to a human future — and the intellectual integrity to look reality in the eye.

—–

Footnotes:

[1] Author’s conversation with Dr. Paul Epstein, of the Center for Health and the Global Environment of Harvard Medical School, September, 2006.

[2] Raul Estrada-Oyuela, Argentine negotiator, at the U.N Convention on Climate Change in Kyoto, Japan, December, 1997.

With growing numbers of scientists declaring that the global climate crisis is approaching a point of no return, there is a huge and bewildering disconnect between our physical world and our political environment. Our government’s response to the prospect of runaway climate impacts is one of paralysis.

The negligence of the Bush administration is understandable. The White House has become the East Coast branch office of ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy. The fossil-fuel lobby is essentially writing the administration’s climate and energy policies. As a result, climate change has become the preeminent case study of the contamination of our political system by money. This is not political conservatism. This is corruption disguised as conservatism.

How hot will it have to get?

The case of Congress, however, seems a bit different. The inaction of Congress in the face of a civilization-shattering threat seems less like corruption and more like simple, old-fashioned, bipartisan cowardice.

Several Republican senators and representatives are offering puny efforts to address the climate crisis — all of them lame given the urgency and magnitude of the challenge. Congressional Democrats, given their widespread support for the Iraq war and the War on Terror, should be using climate change as a key issue to distinguish themselves from their Republican counterparts. But their equally ineffective approaches testify to the failure of our political system to effectively engage nature’s challenge.

Even those congressional Democrats who acknowledge the threat seem petrified by the prospect of any meaningful action. For starters, virtually all their proposals center on market-based “cap and trade” mechanisms, which are dismally inadequate in the face of the problem. We cannot trade our way to deep cuts in our emissions. Carbon trading is most useful as a fine-tuning instrument — to help countries achieve the last 10 or 15 percent of their obligations. It is not the workhorse vehicle to propel a 70 percent energy transition. We cannot finesse nature with accounting tricks.

What is missing from all of their deliberations is the sense of desperation and helplessness shared by all of us who are shaken by each new terrifying report about our increasingly unstable climate.

One group is trying to shake Congress out of its lethargy. The Climate Crisis Coalition is launching a drive called ClimateUSA to put the issue of global climate change squarely on the agenda of the November elections. The goal: to get as many congressional incumbents and challengers as possible to take a visible public position on the issue. The group is drawing on the volunteer energy of the more than 40,000 people who have signed a web-based People’s Ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.

Those volunteers will present candidates in a number of key districts with the group’s platform. The candidates, in turn, will be asked either to endorse that platform or to put forth their own positions on the climate issue.

The group’s three-part platform calls for:

• The withdrawal of federal subsidies for coal, oil, and natural-gas development — as well as the withdrawal of some subsidies for carbon-intensive agriculture — and the establishment of subsidies to jump-start a renewable-energy economy based on wind, solar, tidal power, biomass, small-scale hydropower, and other sustainable energy and agricultural technologies.

• The ratification by Congress of the Kyoto Protocol and the formulation of a post-Kyoto framework that would result in a rapid worldwide transition away from fossil fuels to clean-energy technologies.
• The enactment, as a preliminary step, of the non-nuclear version of the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act to begin reducing carbon-dioxide emissions.

As the positions of both incumbents and challengers are collected, they will be posted on the ClimateUSA website so voters will know where candidates stand. This is, at best, a very small step toward the very large goal of preserving a hospitable planet.

It is understandable that ExxonMobil, Peabody, and their allies — both in and out of Washington — are deploying immense resources to fight off a clean-energy transition. After all, such a transition threatens the survival of their multibillion-dollar industries.

It is much less understandable why our elected representatives are willing allies in a process that will soon drag the rest of us straight to the bottom of climate hell.

The much-discussed Kyoto Protocol takes effect today, Feb. 16. In the face of the United States’ continuing refusal to ratify the international agreement, a group of progressive activists is launching a drive to gather millions of signatures from U.S. citizens for a “People’s Ratification of the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty.” Ross Gelbspan, a Grist contributor and author of two books on climate change — The Heat Is On and Boiling Point — explains why you should put your coffee mug down and sign the petition today.

What on earth is a person supposed to do?

History and nature are on a collision course. And we are trapped at ground zero.

The future of the world’s climate is in your hands.

As the signals from the climate become excruciatingly urgent, the Bush administration turns its back on the challenge, the U.S. press remains in denial, and the environmental establishment agonizes over its own relevance. All the while, we are, as the British paper The Independent put it, sleepwalking into the Apocalypse.

What on earth is a person supposed to do?

The existential choices are few and barren. We can try to find a safe haven in, say, New Zealand — but there’s no escaping a global threat. We can defy a history of futility and try, yet again, to appeal to the humanitarian instincts of ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy. We can go into hibernation for four more years. Or we can try, as individuals and organizations, to bring the U.S. in line with the rest of the world.

That’s what a small group is attempting with today’s launch of a nationwide signature-gathering drive for a People’s Ratification of the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty. Last year, longtime New York-area activists Ted Glick, Connie Hogarth, and the Rev. Paul Mayer put together the Climate Crisis Coalition, an umbrella group that includes environmentalists, religious leaders, campus organizers, peace groups, and activists working on indigenous rights, environmental justice, and human-rights issues. (I am an honorary member of the CCC.)

Drawing on the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Nuclear Freeze movement of the early 1980s, and the more recent — and stunningly successful — campaign to ban landmines, the CCC hopes to provide powerful testimony that millions of Americans are far ahead of their government in standing up to what is arguably the greatest challenge ever to face humanity. “We … recognize that the Constitution of the United States grants us the ultimate authority of government,” reads the petition in part, continuing, “we hereby ratify the Kyoto Protocol and demand that our elected representatives follow suit.”

While acknowledging that the current goals and timetable of the protocol are inadequate, the coalition is pledging its support for future rounds of the agreement, which could reduce emissions by as much as 70 percent.

It may be a long shot. But it’s the best shot we’ve got.

Feeling the Heat

In late January, Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, declared that the world has “already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere” and called for immediate and “very deep” cuts in emissions if humanity is to survive.

Pachauri’s declaration came alongside new findings unveiled on Jan. 24 by a commission of scientists from the U.S., the U.K., and Australia, which declared that the world is about 10 years — or about 2 degrees Fahrenheit — away from irreversible climate change. The scientists calculated that the “point of no return” will arrive when concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide reach 400 parts per million (ppm). For most of the 20th century, these carbon concentrations increased by about 1 ppm per year. In recent decades, that rate rose to 1.5. Today it’s more than 2 ppm per year. Grand total: 379 ppm, and counting. It’s a level of atmospheric carbon this planet has not experienced for 420,000 years.

As if on cue, about a week later, researchers with the British Antarctic Survey reported that the massive West Antarctic ice sheet may already have begun to collapse. Citing recently discovered increased glacial flows into the Antarctic Ocean, Chris Rapley, head of the survey, noted: “The last IPCC report characterized Antarctica as a slumbering giant in terms of climate change. I would say it is now an awakened giant.”

Also in late January, Britain’s Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research released giant computer models created by the combined power of more than 95,000 computers in 150 countries. The models dramatically increased the estimate of future warming from between 4 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit to as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit. “The danger zone is not something we are going to reach in the middle of this century,” said the center’s Myles Allen. “We are in it now.”

Adding to the grim picture, a recent Christian Science Monitor article noted that the 850 new coal-fired power plants that India, China, and the U.S. are planning to build would generate up to five times more carbon dioxide than would have been avoided by the Kyoto Protocol.

What on earth is a person supposed to do?

Meanwhile, several leading environmental groups in the U.S., which pushed so hard to get the Clinton administration to adopt the Kyoto Protocol, have put the issue of American ratification on the back burner. Instead, they are focusing on domestic actions to prepare for what they hope will be the eventual reentry of the U.S. into climate negotiations.

By contrast, the CCC, driven by the urgency of the situation, wants to generate popular support now for the 141 nations that have ratified or accepted the protocol and that plan to ramp up the treaty’s goals in the next round of talks, perhaps by as much as 400 percent.

With support from Global Exchange, Greenpeace USA, and Rainforest Action Network, petition organizers believe that, given the current political climate, the time is right for this kind of grassroots initiative.

The Bush administration’s intent to undermine Kyoto became crushingly clear, yet again, two months ago in Buenos Aires, when it neutered the next round of talks planned for this coming May. The talks had been intended to focus on much larger and more rapid emissions-cutting goals, but as a result of U.S. intransigence, they have been reduced to a mere informational seminar, which prohibits the mention of any action plan whatsoever.

The U.S. action left the Kyoto talks not even a “foothold,” according to Michael Zammit Cutajar, former executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. “It’s a finger-hold, like hanging on by your nails.”

What on earth is a person supposed to do?

Sign this petition. Prove what CCC believes — that, despite the media’s criminal negligence of the climate crisis, you know about it, and you care. And that there is an untapped reservoir of receptivity among the general public, if only because so many people have been so startled by changes in the weather that they know intuitively something is terribly wrong.

Even before its official launch, the petition gathered some impressive signatures. Renowned environmental leaders Lester Brown and Barry Commoner have signed on. So have writer Bill McKibben and Michael Shellenberger, cofounder of the Apollo Alliance and coauthor of “The Death of Environmentalism.” [Editor's note: McKibben is a member of Grist's board of directors.] Others include Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), singer and songwriter Pete Seeger, actor Edward Asner, and prominent religious leaders such as Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton of Detroit. The petition has garnered support from Energy Action, the Green House Network, the Just Transition Alliance, KyotoUSA, the Alliance for Affordable Energy, MADRE, the Green Energy Network, New York Climate Rescue, the cosmetics company Aveda, and others.

With today’s debut, the members of the CCC stress that their campaign reflects values that transcend the goal of reducing carbon emissions. In its final paragraph, the petition declares that the very act of signing affirms “our allegiance to the democratic process, our fundamental and mortal relationship with this Earth, and our essential solidarity with every other member of the human family.”

Stand up and be counted.

What else on earth is a person supposed to do?

People’s Ratification of the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty

When faced with a grave threat to a livable future for ourselves, our children, and future generations, it is our duty as Americans to respond.

To date, some 141 nations have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which enters into force in February 2005, in order to arrest the intensifying destructiveness of global climate change.

In contrast, the United States, which generates 25 percent of the world’s polluting carbon emissions with only 5 percent of its population, refuses to join in this worldwide effort to keep this planet hospitable to civilization.

We recognize the current goals of the Protocol are too low — and its timetable too long — to effectively halt the escalating instability of the global climate.

We also recognize the Kyoto Protocol is the only existing diplomatic framework through which the entire global community can address this unprecedented challenge.

We further recognize that the Constitution of the United States grants us the ultimate authority of government.

Therefore, as citizens of the United States, we hereby ratify the Kyoto Protocol and demand that our elected representatives follow suit.

Additionally, we pledge to support subsequent phases of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions by 70 percent. This global transition to clean energy would address nature’s demand for a stable climate even as it generates millions of clean-energy jobs.

Finally, we declare, through this act of ratification, our allegiance to the democratic process, our fundamental and mortal relationship with this Earth, and our essential solidarity with every other member of the human family.

To sign this petition, click here.

Boiling Point
By Ross Gelbspan,
Basic Books, 256
pages, July 2004

Journalist Ross Gelbspan’s new book, Boiling Point (out in late July from Basic Books), reveals how politicians, big oil and coal, the media, and even activists have fueled the climate crisis — and how we might still avert disaster. This excerpt traces what Gelbspan describes as a corrupt relationship between the Bush administration and the fossil-fuel industry.

Under the administration of George W. Bush, the White House has become the East Coast branch office of ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal, and climate change has become the preeminent case study of the contamination of our political system by money.

With its heavy bankrolling of the Bush campaign in the 2000 presidential election, the fossil-fuel industry won a victory beyond its wildest dreams. That industry’s long-running campaign of climate-change denial and public deception rapidly became presidential policy. In short order, President Bush reneged on his campaign promise to cap emissions from coal-burning power plants, unveiled the fossil fuel-friendly Cheney energy plan (a fast track to climate chaos), and withdrew the U.S. from the Kyoto negotiations. Then, in a truly Orwellian stroke, the White House altered a U.S. EPA report, removing all references to the dangerous impacts of climate change on the United States.

Apologists for the administration have justified its climate policies by citing politically conservative principles — the withdrawal of onerous regulations, a belief in unencumbered free markets, and the appeal of corporate voluntarism.

In fact, the Bush climate policies have nothing to do with political conservatism. Rather, they represent corruption disguised as conservatism.

Cheney and Bush.

Photo: White House.

For starters, many White House watchers have already documented this administration’s strong ties to the fossil-fuel lobby. The president tops the list of past oil company executives, followed by Vice President Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton, the country’s largest oil-field services firm. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice served on Chevron’s board of directors, while Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans worked for a Denver oil and gas company, Tom Brown, Inc. Philip Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, was formerly head of the climate unit of the American Petroleum Institute, the main lobbying arm of the oil industry, and a group that is among the most rabid critics of climate science.

Bush’s electoral success, moreover, was heavily funded by big coal and oil. His 2000 presidential win can in large measure be traced to his victory in West Virginia, a state no other Republican presidential candidate had ever won. That win resulted from the substantial support of the state’s coal industry. One coal executive alone, James Harless, raised $275,000 for the Bush campaign in West Virginia, five times more than Al Gore raised there.

Five months after Bush’s inauguration, a West Virginia Coal Association official told a meeting of the organization: “You did everything you could to elect a Republican president. Now you are already seeing in his actions the payback … for what we did.”

That “payback” came in the form of an about-face on a campaign promise Candidate Bush made in 1999 — to repeat nationally what he had done as governor of Texas, imposing a carbon dioxide emissions cap on the state’s coal-fired power plants. In a letter to four Republican senators, Bush said he was backing away from the cap because of the “incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change and the lack of commercially available technologies for removing and storing carbon dioxide.”

Particularly pleased by Bush’s flip-flop was Irl Englehardt, chair of the Peabody Group, the country’s biggest coal company. Englehardt had donated $250,000 to the Republican National Committee, and served as an adviser to the Bush-Cheney Energy Transition Team. On May 17, 2001, when the Cheney task force unveiled its new energy plan, it not only called for an expanded role for nuclear power and the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, but for the construction of between 1,300 and 1,900 new power plants, most of them powered by coal. Within a week of the plan’s unveiling, the Peabody Group — a privately held entity for its entire 120-year life — made an initial public offering (IPO) of shares and went public. Overnight, its stock jumped from $24 to $36.

Exxon, Exx Off

If the administration’s energy plan was covered with the fingerprints of the country’s biggest coal company, its climate policies appear to have been directly dictated by the planet’s largest oil company.

Robert Watson.

Photo: IISD.

Just weeks after Bush assumed office, ExxonMobil official Randy Randol sent a memo to the White House, which was subsequently obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council through a series of Freedom of Information Act requests. The memo cited a quote from Robert Watson, chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “The United States is way off meeting its targets. A country like China has done more, in my opinion, than a country like the United States to move forward in economic development while remaining environmentally sensitive.” Clearly, Watson’s assertion did not sit well with the memo’s authors, who went on to ask: “Can Watson Be Replaced Now At the Request of the United States?”

ExxonMobil recommended that the Bush administration remove Watson, along with two officials instrumental in producing the U.S. National Assessment on Climate Change, an EPA document that the White House would seek to eviscerate in the spring of 2003. In their place, the oil giant recommended appointing longtime climate “skeptics” John Christy and Richard Lindzen.

Ultimately, the Bush administration did scuttle Watson’s reappointment. But, apparently fearing a major backlash, it decided not to back such vocal contrarians as Christy and Lindzen.

Harlan Watson.

Photo: IISD.

ExxonMobil achieved an even greater success in directing Bush administration climate change diplomacy. Urged on by the company, the White House hired Harlan Watson (no relation to Robert) as its chief climate negotiator. In May 2002, Watson announced that the U.S. would not participate in the Kyoto process for at least 10 years, saying that the White House “wanted no part” of a 2005 international review of greenhouse gas reductions. “The next time we take stock on climate change,” he said, “has been set by the president at 2012.”

In November 2002, in an effort to improve its environmental image, ExxonMobil trumpeted its investment in hydrogen fuel research. But the company’s disingenuous plan was not to derive hydrogen from water, a process that generates no carbon emissions, but to make it from oil and coal — a process that emits so much carbon dioxide as to virtually neutralize the climate-friendly benefits of the new fuel. Two months later, in his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush revealed his own petroleum-based hydrogen initiative. It exactly embraced the ExxonMobil strategy, preserving America’s oil infrastructure at the expense of climate destabilization.

ExxonMobil and the Bush administration have also united in sowing climate change disinformation and deception among U.S. citizens. By 2001, ExxonMobil had replaced the coal industry as the major funder of prominent “greenhouse skeptics,” a handful of “experts” who spout bogus science, raising doubts about climate change to preempt the public’s demand for action. By 2003, ExxonMobil was giving more than $1 million a year to an array of right-wing organizations opposing action on climate change — including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Frontiers of Freedom, the George C. Marshall Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the American Council for Capital Formation Center for Policy Research.

The striking success of the fossil-fuel lobby’s disinformation strategy is reflected in two Newsweek polls. The first, in 1991 — prior to the industry’s global-warming misinformation campaign — found that 35 percent of Americans saw global warming as a serious problem. By 1996, that share shrank to 22 percent — despite the advent of far more conclusive science, documenting human-caused global warming.

The usefulness of bogus science was not lost on the Luntz Group, a private consulting firm advising Bush on climate policy presentation. “Americans … believe all environmental rules and regulations should be based on sound science and common sense,” said a Luntz memo. “Similarly our confidence in the ability of science and technology to solve our nation’s ills is second to none. Both perceptions will work in your favor if properly cultivated.”

Sure enough, a new effort by the “skeptics” surfaced in spring 2003. A study by lead authors Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and published in an obscure journal, Climate Research, concluded that the 20th century is neither the warmest century, nor the century with the most extreme weather, of the past 1,000 years. Both researchers had previously contended that the recent warming was due, almost entirely, to solar variations — a finding long since disproved by peer-reviewed scientific studies.

As it turns out, the report by Baliunas and Soon was funded in part by the American Petroleum Institute. It was also coauthored by Craig Idso and Sherwood Idso, whose Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide has been funded by the coal industry and ExxonMobil.

James Inhofe.

Photo: U.S. Senate.

Predictably, the study was seized upon by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, who asserted that this new science showed that natural variability, not human activity, was the “overwhelming factor” influencing climate change. Inhofe received double the campaign contributions from energy companies during the 2002 election than from any other business sector.

In short order, 13 leading climate scientists from the U.S. and U.K. declared in a letter to the American Geophysical Union that the anomalous late 20th century warmth cannot be explained without taking into account the contributions of human activities.

Most telling, perhaps, was another piece of fallout from the Soon-Baliunas controversy that received little news coverage. Three editors of the journal that published the skeptics’ study resigned in protest after they were forbidden from writing an editorial pointing out the methodological errors of the flawed paper by the industry-funded researchers.

While Inhofe attempted to disguise the administration’s fossil fuel-friendly policies under the cloak of “sound science,” the White House worked to scuttle the most thoroughly researched projections of coming climate impacts inside the United States.

The report, known as the “U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change,” is a meticulously peer-reviewed document, drafted during the Clinton administration. The National Assessment details a range of anticipated, mostly harmful, impacts across U.S. geographical regions and ecosystems.

When previous Bush administration efforts failed to discount and discard the document, the politically conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is partly funded by ExxonMobil, sued the White House Council on Environmental Quality to remove the National Assessment from circulation. In a press release, the CEI dismissed the assessment as “junk science” being used “by global warming alarmists” to hamstring business.

Then, in August 2003, the attorneys general of Maine and Connecticut made an extraordinary discovery. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, they unearthed emails indicating that the White House had secretly urged the private, right-wing CEI to sue it — the White House — in order to have the National Assessment withdrawn.

“It appears that certain White House officials conspired with an anti-environmental special interest group to cause the lawsuit to be filed against the federal government,” said Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe, who complained to the U.S. Department of Justice along with Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

Survival of the …?

Stepping back, it becomes clear that the climate crisis represents a titanic clash of interests. It pits the survival, as we know it, of the biggest commercial enterprise in history — big coal and oil — against the survival of the planet and its people. It also pits the fossil fuel industry-dominated Bush administration against the rest of the world.

Oil in a day’s work.

Photo: U.S. EPA.

As of this month, 123 countries have ratified or acceded to the Kyoto Protocol. Several industrial nations have also committed themselves to carbon cuts greater than those mandated by the protocol. Moreover, a substantial number of developing countries that are not required to cut their emissions in the first round of the protocol have begun to do so anyway. Clearly these governments would not be undertaking such massive and wrenching changes if they had any doubt about the climate crisis.

When Bush withdrew the U.S. from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, he triggered a profound swell of outrage throughout the rest of the world. Given the accelerating momentum of climatic instability — and the willingness of the rest of the world to begin addressing it — the rage against the United States’ indifference to humanity’s common future will only grow worse.

In the early 1990s, when the science was still uncertain, denial and resistance by the fossil-fuel lobby could be excused as a predictable, business-as-usual response. But with the science now so robust, and negative impacts so visible, this behavior is inexcusable. In 2003 alone, 35,000 people died as the result of Europe’s worst heat wave ever, while the World Health Organization reported that climate change is already claiming 160,000 lives annually. If temperatures climb as projected, then the corrupt policies embraced by U.S. industry and government could put the future of civilization at risk.

The industry-driven campaign goes far beyond traditional public relations spin. It has led to the capture of the White House, to gross distortions of science and truth, and to the corporate dictation of public policy. Not that such corruption of the political process by powerful special interests is new to our republic. But the magnitude of the potential consequences is unprecedented.

Our fossil fuels have brought us to a level of abundance and prosperity that was unimaginable a century ago.

Today they are propelling us forward into a century of disintegration.

Inside the Beltway, the climate movement is comatose.

During the Clinton-Gore years, while the U.S. dragged its feet in international climate negotiations, the major national environmental groups allowed themselves to be used by the administration. Seduced by the former vice president’s rhetoric, the groups watched their issue disappear from the political arena when Al Gore sacrificed his convictions to his ambitions and made global warming the subject of a personal vow of silence during his presidential campaign.

The inability of the nation’s large, mainstream environmental groups to mobilize the public around the immense threat of climate change — and their failure to forge alliances with public-health, development, corporate-accountability, and labor activists — paved the way for the do-nothing climate agenda of President Bush.

In the wake of that failure, the responsibility for mobilizing the public has fallen on the shoulders of local climate activists. And the magnitude of their challenge — in both the political and natural arenas — is truly daunting.

Lip service is no service.

Taking his cues from ExxonMobil and the coal industry, Bush reneged on his promise to cap power plant emissions. Next, he withdrew the U.S. from the Kyoto Protocol. He then released his energy plan — a fast track to climate disaster. Finally, he dismissed predictions by the U.S. EPA and other agencies of serious pending climate impacts in the U.S.

The public response to the Bush agenda might have been different had the national groups put their energies into relentlessly trumpeting the truth about the climate crisis. Because the truth speaks for itself: Around the world, the deep oceans are heating, the tundra is thawing, ice shelves are breaking up, sea levels are rising, fish, insects, birds and ecosystems are migrating, violent weather is increasing, and the timing of the seasons has changed — all from a 1-degree Fahrenheit temperature increase. The scientific consensus is that temperatures will rise an additional 2 to 10 degrees by the end of this century. The world’s property insurers saw their losses increase six-fold between the 1980s and the 1990s. Two years ago, the biggest insurer in Great Britain, CGNU, said that unchecked climate change could bankrupt the global economy by 2065.

Nature’s message is remarkably simple: Cut carbon emissions quickly, globally, and dramatically, or prepare for a future of environmental and economic disintegration.

Don’t Follow These Leaders

Only strong leadership could stave off these catastrophic consequences at this late date. Unfortunately, that leadership has not come from the big, D.C.-based environmental groups. Too often, these organizations are at the mercy of funders whose agendas range from protecting wetlands to keeping disposable diapers out of landfills. “These groups are running around trying to put out all these fires,” environmental journalist Dianne Dumanoski has written, “but nobody’s going after the pyromaniac.”

Even those groups that do focus on climate change seem trapped in a Beltway mentality that measures progress in “politically realistic” nibbles. For example, before Bush withdrew the U.S. from the Kyoto negotiations, representatives of several major environmental groups — World Wildlife Fund, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Natural Resources Defense Council — spent considerable energy and talent bird-dogging excruciatingly minute and arcane provisions of the climate treaty, rather than mobilizing their supporters and focusing public outrage on the obstructionism of U.S. negotiators.

To wit: When the E.U. decided it would meet at least half its emissions reductions obligations domestically — and limit the amount of cheap offsets it would buy in developing countries — the U.S. held out for achieving its entire obligation through such offsets. The troika of U.S. environmental groups worked futilely to get the U.S. to agree to some small percentage of domestic cuts, when they should have held a series of press conferences exposing U.S. recalcitrance. By trying so hard to be inside players, these environmentalists effectively marginalized themselves.

One of the most visible environmental groups, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, eloquently acknowledges the urgency of the threat but resists calls for emission-cutting regulations, relying instead on the voluntary efforts of a few climate-conscious corporations. But history has proved that a voluntary corporate approach does not work. Without strong government leadership — and a set of binding regulations to allow companies to make policy changes in lockstep to avoid jeopardizing their competitive standing — even the best-intentioned corporations cannot significantly slow climate change.

Over-the-Hill policies?

Even more disturbingly, some environmental professionals actually accommodated the agenda of the fossil fuel lobby. In 1997, the coal and oil industries spent $13 million on an anti-climate campaign, which led to a Senate resolution not to ratify any climate change accord that exempted developing countries from first-round emissions cuts. In response to the resolution, Gore did an about-face and called on developing countries to consider first-round emissions cuts. Shortly thereafter, one prominent group, Environmental Defense, began pressuring delegates from poor countries to cut emissions — in direct contradiction of the U.N. framework on climate change. (Under that framework, which was approved in 1992 by the first President Bush, only industrial countries are required to cut emissions in the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol, on the basis that they are largely responsible for causing climate change and possess the resources to begin to mitigate it. Developing countries are slated to begin cutting emissions in subsequent rounds.)

By kowtowing to the power structure, U.S. environmental groups suffered a significant loss of credibility with their overseas counterparts during climate negotiations. In one closed-door meeting during the 1999 round of climate talks in Bonn, Germany, the head of an Indian nongovernmental organization blasted the U.S. environmental groups for being so eager to preserve access to the White House that they were turning their backs on the climate issue, as well as on all those donors who assumed the groups would be acting on behalf of the planet.

“You are supposed to be the conscience of the global environment,” the leader told U.S. environmentalists, “but instead you are more concerned with acting like junior cabinet ministers.”

There’s Something Happening Here

If there is a silver lining to this dark cloud, it is that out of the vacuum of national leadership, a new climate movement has emerged. It is scattered in pockets throughout the country: in Olympia, St. Paul, Boston, Portland, New Orleans, Austin, and San Francisco, and in countless churches and campuses where dedicated activists, impatient with the lack of activity on the national front, are taking matters into their own hands.

These local climate groups have the freedom — and the potential for effectiveness — that many national groups lack. Their funders are, in many cases, more flexible. They are not constrained by the Beltway-bounded mentality that reduces grand possibilities to disappointing increments. They are less vulnerable to attacks from the fossil fuel lobby, which generally has a minimal local presence. They enjoy more intimate contact with local news outlets and legislators, and more personal engagement with supporters.

And some of their accomplishments have been impressive. Local activists helped push the mayor of Seattle to commit that city to exceed the Kyoto targets. They spearheaded the approval by Bay Area voters of a $100 million bond for wind and solar energy in San Francisco. In New England, they helped officials forge an extraordinary agreement between the New England governors and the premiers of seven Canadian Provinces to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2010 — and by 75 to 85 percent thereafter. The Tufts University Climate Initiative, designed to bring the university’s emissions within Kyoto limits, is being replicated in schools around the country. In April, a group of colleges and universities in Pennsylvania announced they will begin buying wind-generated electricity.

Will these kinds of efforts solve the climate crisis? Not a chance, given the need to reduce worldwide carbon emissions by 70 percent through a global transition to clean energy. Ultimately, truly reversing climate change will take a coordinated set of macro-strategies with global reach. (For one example, see “Toward a Real Kyoto Protocol” on my website.)

Does that mean this work is not important? To the contrary, it is critical. The local activists are creating the base of political support that is necessary to achieve any large-scale strategy to control climate change. Every time a city or campus or religious organization works to cut carbon emissions, it is sending a strong message about the importance of climate change, and the political primacy the issue deserves — a message that may ultimately prove even more important than the emissions reductions themselves.

As it expands its base and forges new alliances, the network of local climate activists may gain the necessary leverage to pressure members of Congress into legislative alliances around the climate issue. And those alliances could translate into the kind of aggressive national policies needed to control climate change and power a worldwide transition to clean energy. At the very least, this network is bringing the message home in a way the national groups have thus far failed to do.

Bush’s contempt for nature and the freedom he has given the carbon lobby to dictate his climate policy may yet shock the national environmental groups into newfound effectiveness. That effectiveness might best be achieved by joining forces with local climate activists around the country — and supporting the uncompromising positions of those who are dedicating their lives to this threat.

Absent the rapid mobilization of climate advocates at every level — and the pooling of all their energy, creativity, and resources into a coordinated, no-holds-barred campaign — we will soon be crossing the threshold into climate hell.

In hot water in the Antarctic.

Photo: Michael Van Woert, NOAA.

And like the North Pole, it is melting from the top down.

Over the last year, in the wake of steady alarms from leaders of the insurance industry, growing numbers of oil and auto company executives have been undergoing a quiet but profound sea change in their responses to global warming.

At long last, that change is rapidly engulfing the general public.

The most formidible fortress of denial remains at the center of the country’s political establishment, where campaign strategists and spin-meisters have insulated the presidential candidates from the increasingly harsh outcries of nature.

The Climate, It Is A-Changin’

When James McCarthy of Harvard University, cochair of a working group for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, announced his discovery last month of a mile-wide stretch of open water at the North Pole, it triggered a national catharsis. Despite controversy over the uniqueness of the polar meltdown, the finding loosed a barrage of pent-up fears about climate change that have been building just below the surface of public discourse.

From Time magazine to the New York Times to the Late Show with David Letterman, commentators began weighing in. Some of the dismay may be a bit overstated. The melting at the pole is, after all, only one more piece of confirmatory evidence of what is happening to the planet. But coming on the heels of an accumulation of findings about the heating of the oceans, the break-up of Antarctic ice shelves, the melting of glaciers, the thawing of the tundra, the changing timing of the seasons, and the warming-driven spread of infectious disease, the news from the far north has at long last galvanized public opinion.

Sizzlin’ cities.

The corporate community, ever alert to future impacts on global commerce, has already begun to anticipate the implications of the climate crisis.

The property insurance industry, especially in Europe, has led the charge with a drumbeat of alarms over the increasingly severe losses due to extreme weather events. In the 1980s, the industry lost an average of $2 billion a year because of floods, droughts, and intense storms. For most of the 1990s, that figure increased more than sixfold, exceeding $12 billion a year. The $89 billion in losses just in 1998 surpassed the total of all such losses for the entire decade of the 1980s. The head of the Reinsurance Association of America has said that unless the climate is stabilized, it could bankrupt the entire industry.

For their part, the oil and auto industries have ventured tentatively into clean energy technologies — partly to improve their public images, but partly to prepare themselves for the inevitable new energy economy.

Mazda recently joined Ford and Daimler-Chrysler in a $1 billion joint venture to produce fuel-cell powered cars by 2003. British Petroleum’s new ads portray BP as standing for “Beyond Petroleum.” BP now anticipates doing $1 billion a year in solar commerce within the decade, and Shell is investing $500 million in renewable technologies.

Since December, the Global Climate Coalition, the main industry group opposing action on global warming, has seen its membership hemorrhage as Ford, DaimlerChrysler, General Motors, Texaco, the Southern Company, and others have defected from the group. (The last major holdout — ExxonMobil — has become increasingly isolated in the oil industry.)

Even more telling was a little-noticed vote in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. At the conclusion of this year’s Forum, which includes the CEOs of the world’s 1,000 largest corporations as well as many heads of state and finance ministers, participants were asked to vote on which of five scenarios (involving issues of trade and globalization) were most threatening. The participants rejected those choices and voted climate change as the most urgent problem facing humanity.

Soon thereafter came an extraordinary public acknowledgement from William Clay Ford, chair of Ford Motor Co., that the same SUVs that provide the company’s largest profit margins are also contributing to the destabilization of our climate. That statement set off a competition between Ford and General Motors to make promises about producing more fuel-efficient vehicles.

By contrast, diehard deniers of climate change like ExxonMobil and the coal-touting Western Fuels Association look downright presidential.

Not Al He’s Cracked Up to Be

Al Gore, who cast a spotlight on global warming in 1992 with his heartfelt book Earth in the Balance, has turned his back on the issue.

Little trees won’t solve big problems.

Photo: Steve Holmer, American Lands.

In July, the White House proclaimed that the U.S. can meet much of its obligation to reduce emissions by planting trees rather than by moving the country away from coal and oil to high efficiency and renewable energy. That announcement was Gore’s preemptive defense against the expectation that George W. Bush will attack him by citing the call in Gore’s book to phase out the internal-combustion engine. The new White House policy lets Gore shun that position in favor of more tree plantations. That strategy is akin to prescribing a manicure to a cancer patient.

Gore again turned his back on the climate issue when he asked President Clinton to release millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve last week. While election-year pressures may have required him to open the tap to lower heating oil prices, Gore could have used the occasion to highlight the negative impacts of fossil fuels and announce a long-term energy policy based on efficiency, conservation, and renewable energy sources.

To avert catastrophic climate change, we must — in a very short time — reduce global emissions from fossil fuel burning by 70 percent. At best, if we reforested barren areas and preserved existing forests, they would be capable of absorbing only 15 percent of our climate-altering carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Al talk and no action.

Photo: Warren Gretz, NREL/PIX.

Not content with being the major obstacle to diplomatic progress toward implementing the Kyoto Protocol, the Clinton-Gore administration could drive the final stake through the heart of the international climate change treaty with this tree-planting scheme.

Because of U.S. inaction, European countries are now going it alone. Holland will cut emissions 80 percent in the next 40 years. Germany is planning 50 percent cuts. Britain pledged reductions of 60 percent in the next 50 years. They will meet those goals not by planting trees but by replacing coal and oil power with fuel cells and solar, wind, and biomass facilities.

For his part, George W. Bush has acknowledged that climate change may pose a threat. But he resists the Kyoto Protocol, claiming it would hamper U.S. business.

Some Bush supporters, meanwhile, have launched a new round of disinformation — this time misrepresenting a study by a team of scientists led by James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for
Space Studies.

Hansen’s team argues that while CO2 is the dominant greenhouse gas, several other pollutants — methane, CFC’s, and soot — may be seriously accelerating the pace of climate change. These gases trap in more heat than does CO2 but remain in the atmosphere for a much shorter time. Hansen et al. suggest that tackling these other emissions first might slow the rate of change and buy more time to deal with the greater challenge of decarbonizing the world’s energy supplies.

Predictably, several already-discredited global-warming skeptics distorted the study, saying it proves we don’t need to cut our coal and oil use. That dishonesty is consistent with the track record of their sponsors — ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Greening Earth Society (a.k.a. the Western Fuels Association).

Making a Clean Break

Given the accelerating pace of climate change and the mainstream corporate community’s growing acknowledgement of the problem, it could become an irony of history if a business-backed Bush administration proved more receptive than Gore to the kind of sweeping action the climate crisis requires. A comprehensive solution, after all, would substantially enlarge foreign markets, especially in developing countries.

Shiny, happy solar panels.

Photo: Warren Gretz, NREL, PIX.

A properly framed global transition to clean energy would create millions of jobs all over the world. It would allow poor countries to grow without regard to atmospheric limits — and without the burden of imported oil. It would transform the fledgling renewable industry into a central driving engine of growth for the global economy.

The new U.S. president could begin with three fairly simple strategies:

• Remove the $20 billion a year in federal subsidies for fossil fuels and put an equivalent amount behind renewable energy (and job retraining for coal miners). That would create an incentive for oil companies to follow the subsidies and become aggressive developers of wind turbines, solar systems, and fuel-cell technologies.
• Promote the adoption in the Kyoto Protocol of a progressively more stringent fossil-fuel efficiency standard, under which every nation would work to improve its fossil fuel efficiency by 70 percent, starting at its current baseline. Because that would require the large-scale substitution of clean energy technologies, it would create the mass market to make renewables as inexpensive as fossil fuels. (International carbon trading could be used to supplement and fine-tune a wholesale energy switch).
• Create a large fund to provide clean energy to developing countries. One promising source of revenue, a Tobin Tax, would extract a quarter of a penny per dollar on international currency transactions that today total $1.5 trillion per day. This $0.0025 tax would yield $300 billion a year to finance wind farms, solar assemblies, and fuel-cell factories in developing nations around the globe. This is not a do-good, liberal giveaway plan. Given the coming pulse of carbon from poor countries, this represents a critical investment in our own national security. (For a more thorough exposition of these strategies, see my article Rx for a Planetary Fever, published in the American Prospect.)

As the general denial of climate change melts, what will soon emerge is a recognition of the extraordinary promise of its solution — a dramatic expansion of the overall wealth in the global economy and the simultaneous extension of the baseline conditions for a more peaceful world.

When the promise becomes as palpable as the fear, the pace of political and economic change may finally match the escalating pace of climate change.

Another beautiful sunset.

Evidence is mounting that drastic climatic changes are under way, driven by the 6 billion tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that humans pump into our atmosphere each year.

In 1998 alone, we saw a crippling ice storm in Quebec and New England; uncontrolled fires in Brazil, Mexico, and Florida; killer heat waves in the Middle East, Texas, and India; Mexico’s worst drought in 70 years, followed by intense floods; massive flooding in China, which left 14 million people homeless; the worst flood in the history of Bangladesh, which left 30 million people homeless; an extensive drought in Vietnam; and 9,000 hurricane casualties in Central America.

Most alarming is the accelerating rate of climate change. As recently as five years ago, most climate scientists said they expected to see significant signs of climate change in the middle of the next century. Now they are seeing those signs today.

Last summer, I took part in a gathering that hammered out a new set of strategies for dealing with our mounting climate and energy problems — the World Energy Modernization Plan. We hope it can redirect the debate about climate change solutions and ultimately lead us toward sustainability. But it will be an uphill battle.

Negotiation Aggravation

First, a review of where we stand.

Even as the climate becomes increasingly unstable, the U.N.-sponsored negotiations on the Kyoto climate change treaty are limping toward terminal stagnation, and perhaps even collapse, largely because of U.S. intransigence.

Last summer, Republicans in Congress, spurred by the wealthy and powerful fossil-fuel lobby, passed a bill prohibiting the EPA from taking any action even “in contemplation” of implementing the Kyoto treaty. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) cosponsored a resolution demanding “significant participation” from developing countries as a condition of U.S. ratification, then pushed through a bill forbidding the Clinton administration from spending any aid money to secure that participation.

Meanwhile, U.S. negotiators are butting heads with the European Union, insisting that the U.S. be allowed to meet its treaty obligations with unlimited international emissions trading — though such trading is unmonitorable and unenforceable, given the immense number of carbon source points and the lack of a unified regulatory system. And while wealthy nations want to use 1990 emissions levels as a basis for allocating emissions rights, many developing nations argue those rights should be allocated on a per capita basis.

All this squabbling surrounds proposed emissions cuts in the range of 5.5 percent. But what we really need to restabilize the climate are cuts of 60 to 70 percent, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries. What nature requires, in short, is a massive global transition to renewable energy sources and high energy efficiency.

Wind instruments.

Photo by Warren Gretz, NREL/PIX.

Resistance to this shift, especially in the U.S., has been based on the fear of massive economic disruption from emissions reductions. That fear is misplaced.

A global transition to renewable and high-efficiency energy sources would substantially expand the stability, equity, and total wealth of the global economy. It would allow every national economy to develop without regard to atmospheric limits. It would raise living standards in the developing nations without compromising economic achievements in the industrialized nations.

A Clan with a Plan

In June 1998, 16 economists, energy company presidents, scientists, and policy experts, including this author, met at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School to develop a new approach to combating climate change.

The World Energy Modernization Plan, which emerged from those discussions, is designed to begin to moderate the worldwide impacts of climate change as well as reduce volatility in today’s dangerously unstable global financial structure.

The “solution” as we see it involves three primary interactive and mutually reinforcing strategies:

The first is a change in subsidy policies. Today, the U.S. government spends about $20 billion each year subsidizing fossil fuels. Globally, government subsidies for fossil fuels are estimated at $300 billion. If these fossil fuel subsidies were withdrawn, it would result in more accurate fuel prices, which would help reduce oil and coal consumption.

A solar system.

Photo by Warren Gretz, NREL/PIX.

Putting this money into subsidies for renewable energy development would provide major incentives for the world’s energy companies to invest in fuel cells and solar, biomass, and wind power, boosting renewable energy into the big leagues of global industry. At the same time, a portion of the money formerly spent on fossil-fuel subsidies could be used to retrain displaced coal miners and other fossil-fuel industry workers for jobs in the renewable energy industry or elsewhere.

A second strategy is the adoption of a progressively more stringent fossil-fuel efficiency standard for all countries as part of the Kyoto Protocol, as a complement to — or substitute for — the ineffectual scheme of emissions trading.

To use one example from the electrical generating sector, a normal coal-fired generating plant achieves about 35 percent efficiency. By contrast, a high-efficiency, gas-fired cogeneration facility achieves from 75 to 90 percent efficiency. Simply by switching from coal to gas-fired cogeneration, we could cut our emissions from the electricity sector by more than 50 percent. Similar efficiencies can be achieved in transportation, industrial use, heating, and cooling.

Globally, a progressive fossil-fuel efficiency standard adopted by both developing and industrialized nations would create an immediate worldwide market for renewable energy. If each nation — beginning at its current baseline — were to commit to increasing its fossil-fuel efficiency by specified rates at designated intervals, that would also sidestep the current impasse between industrialized and developing nations over the equity of the emissions “cap-and-trade” regime envisioned in the Kyoto Protocol. (It’s worth noting that by a fossil fuel standard, all non-carbon renewable energy sources are 100 percent efficient.)

The establishment of progressive efficiency and renewable standards — together with the elimination of regulatory barriers to competition — would allow free energy markets based on the dual criteria of efficiency and price.

We believe that these elements, along with shifts in subsidies, would be enough to initiate an energy transition in the industrial world.

Sharing the Wealth

Unfortunately, the largest sources of greenhouse gases in the coming decades will not be the U.S., Japan, and Western Europe. They will be China, India, Mexico, Brazil, and all the developing countries working to stay ahead of the undertow of chronic poverty.

Any viable strategy for addressing climate change requires the transfer of climate-friendly energy technologies to the developing nations — virtually all of which would be happy to switch to solar, wind, and hydrogen and virtually none of which is capable of financing that transition by itself.

The third strategy in the World Energy Modernization Plan centers on a vehicle for f
inancing this major transition to clean, efficient energy in the developing world. We propose a tax on all international currency transactions. These transactions today total about $1.3 trillion per day. A quarter-of-a-penny tax per U.S. dollar on those transactions would yield from $200 to $300 billion a year (after other costs) to finance wind farms in India, solar assemblies in El Salvador, cogeneration plants in South Africa, and fuel-cell factories in Russia.

James Tobin, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, initially conceived of the tax as a method for stabilizing international capital flows. Of all the various mechanisms that have been proposed, a tax on currency transactions seems to be the most equitable, non-discriminatory, and broad-based. It would be spread throughout the whole capital structure and be virtually “invisible” to consumers.

However, there are other funding sources with comparable revenue-raising potential, including taxes on carbon-based fuels, taxes on airline tickets, and diversion of those portions of defense budgets dedicated to protecting the security of oil commerce.

Regardless of the financing mechanism, a fund of this type could galvanize the economies of the poor nations in much the same way that the post-World War II Marshall Plan galvanized the economies of Western Europe, turning dependent and impoverished allies into robust trading partners.

A global energy transition would create millions of jobs all over the world. It would go far toward reversing the widening economic gap between industrialized and developing countries. And, in short order, the renewable energy industry would become the central, driving engine of growth in the global economy.

Can We Get There from Here?

Given the short-term political outlook — nations bickering over grossly inadequate emissions cuts, the U.S. Congress refusing to consider even modest changes — a plan of this magnitude seems hopelessly unrealistic.

But significant changes are already afoot, beginning with the emerging fissure within the fossil-fuel community. British Petroleum, Sunoco, Shell, Texaco, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, and other companies are now breaking ranks with the rest of the oil and automaking industries. Two years ago, John Browne, the CEO of BP, made an eloquent statement about the perils of climate change and followed it up with an announcement that BP anticipates doing $1 billion a year in solar commerce during the next decade. Shell is investing $500 million in renewable energy sources. DaimlerChrysler and Ford have announced a partnership to begin marketing fuel-cell powered cars by the year 2002. And in February, Shell and DaimlerChrysler announced a project to run the entire economy of Iceland on hydrogen fuel.

There are changes beyond the business community as well. The issue is finally registering on the public’s radar screen. All over the world, citizens are extremely alarmed about increasingly unstable and violent weather. People are worried about their futures and their children’s futures.

Just as the physical climate is changing rapidly, so is the social and political climate surrounding this issue. A plan that may seem utterly out of reach today could become far more realistic — even inevitable — in a very short time.

Absent such a transition, of course, the outlook is frightening and depressing. The accelerating changes to the global climate — the disintegration of Antarctic ice shelves, the die-off of Alaskan forests, alterations of El Niño patterns, the northward migration of infectious diseases, the continuing succession of severe storms, altered drought and rainfall patterns, and temperature extremes — will do more than tear holes in the global economic fabric. Climate change may well prove the undoing of our organized civilization.

Unless we choose to act now.