This is the third of four parts of the Introduction to Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin 2007).
To read more about the book, visit the Breakthrough Institute.
4.
Before we wrote the essay "The Death of Environmentalism," the two of us had spent all of our professional careers, about thirty years between us, working for the country's largest environmental organizations and foundations, as well as many smaller grassroots ones. Like most of our colleagues, we tended to see global warming as a problem of pollution, whose solution would be found in pollution limits.
In 2003 we started to break away from the pollution and regulation framework. With a small group of others we created a proposal for a new Apollo project. We proposed a major investment in clean-energy jobs, research and development, infrastructure, and transit, with the goal of achieving energy independence. The political thinking was that this agenda would win over blue-collar and swing voters and Reagan Democrats in the presidential battleground states of the Midwest, and excite the high-tech creative class at the same time. And by putting serious public investment on the table—$300 billion over ten years—we hoped we could break through the logjam that had divided business, labor, and environmental groups for years.
But more than any short-term political calculation, Apollo, we hoped, would be the vehicle for telling a powerful new story about American greatness, invention, and moral purpose.
After we created the Apollo proposal, we did what new political coalitions on the left tend to do: round up endorsements from other groups. And while we succeeded in getting endorsements and letters of support for Apollo's principles from businesses, unions, and most of the large national environmental groups, we were baffled, and then angered, by what happened next.
Environmental lobbyists told us that while they supported Apollo's vision, they would do nothing to support it in concrete ways, either in Congress or during the 2004 elections. Those of us who had created Apollo had made the decision to focus on jobs and energy independence, because they were far higher priorities among voters than stopping global warming. In particular, we discovered that investment in clean-energy jobs, to get free of oil, was more popular with voters than talk of global warming, clean air, and regulation. But environmental leaders thought our nonenvironmental and nonregulatory focus was a vice, not a virtue.
Fearing that it would distract Democrats' attention away from stopping the George W. Bush administration's energy bill, which included billions in new subsidies for coal and oil, environmental leaders eventually asked us to keep Apollo legislation from being considered by Congress. Still the good soldiers, we did as we were asked, and Apollo was, briefly, withdrawn. But it hardly mattered: the Bush energy bill passed anyway.
5.
Frustrated with the environmental lobby's policy literalism, and annoyed by the uninspired, small-bore, complaint-based agenda of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, we set out in the summer of 2004 to write an essay about the politics of global warming.
We started by interviewing the environmental leaders and funders who determine global warming strategy in the United States. By the time we finished, we were convinced that the environmental approach was inadequate, at the policy and the political levels, to deal with the monumental nature of the crisis. We concluded that the problem wasn't with environmental leaders so much as with their conceptual models, policy frameworks, and institutions.
The intensity of the reaction to our essay surprised, delighted, and occasionally frightened us. Many imagined that we had claimed environmentalism was dead. The response from the most literal-minded was that environmentalism couldn't be dead because they themselves were (a) environmentalists and (b) alive. Others didn't understand how we could be so concerned with global warming and not be environmentalists, implying that such a position was a contradiction in terms.
Happily, many people read the essay and, whether they agreed or disagreed, considered our thesis that "modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live." Our intention was, in part, to question whether the category of "the environment" made sense any longer. If "the environment" includes humans, then everything is environmental and the concept has little use other than being a poor synonym for "everything." If it excludes humans, then it is scientifically specious, not to mention politically suicidal.
In the end, the most gratifying aspect of the experience was being told by environmentalists and nonenvironmentalists alike that the essay had had a powerful impact on their thinking and their work. Some told us that they read and discussed the essay in small groups of friends and colleagues. Local environmental leaders told us that they had become more focused on creating a new kind of development than on "protecting the environment."
Today, a new Apollo-like proposal for energy independence seems to appear every few months, including from the campaigns of presidential candidates. The story of America as an innovative nation, the increasing importance of high-tech research and development, and the role of strategic public investment have all emerged as key talking points for anyone concerned about global warming or energy independence. And billions of dollars in new investments are pouring into the sector, and even major players in the old energy economy see the opportunity and are positioning themselves to take advantage of it. All of these are the makings of a new dream, and a new story, about America and the world.
6.
The political environment for action on energy independence and global warming has undergone a dramatic shift since 2004. Motivated by their anger with government inaction and the Bush administration's outright interference, climate scientists increasingly started speaking out about the need for bold action. In the summer of 2006, Al Gore wrote a best-selling book and starred in a widely seen movie, An Inconvenient Truth, that were compelling—and terrifying—presentations about global warming.
In lieu of action by Congress, progress on climate has come from other quarters. California enacted historic legislation reducing the state's greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020, and other states are likely to follow. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in the spring of 2007, that the Clean Air Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant causing global warming. And sustainability is today one of the hottest topics in politics, the corporate world, and the media.
The twenty-year effort by environmentalists to educate the public about the facts of global warming has gotten us halfway there. Lawmakers and the media now understand the seriousness of climate change and are committed to action. Federal legislation to cap greenhouse gas emissions, and create a mechanism for them to be traded, is inevitable.
To seize the new opportunities being offered, we must first face up to four inconvenient truths about global warming. The first is that those developed nations that ratified the Kyoto treaty on global warming have made little headway in actually reducing their own emissions. In late 2006, the United Nations announced that, since 2000, the emissions of the forty-one wealthy, industrialized members of Kyoto had gone up, not down, by more than 4 percent.[10]
The second inconvenient truth is that China and India long ago rejected any approach to addressing climate change that would constrain their greenhouse gas emissions or their economic growth. For years, energy experts had expected that China would overtake the United States as the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter by 2025. It turns out that China will gain that dubious distinction by 2008.[11] The governments and the people of China and India are increasingly concerned about global warming, to be sure, but they are far more motivated by economic development, and to the extent that the battle against global warming is fought in terms of ecological limits rather than economic possibility, there's little doubt which path these countries will take.
The third inconvenient truth is that even if we were to drastically limit the greenhouse gas emissions produced by power plants and automobiles, we would still need a strategy to slow the rapid rate of deforestation. Destruction of rain forests contributes an estimated 25 percent of all greenhouse gases, far more than vehicles contribute.[12] Perversely, some of the deforestation in Indonesia and Brazil is driven by the rising demand for land to grow biofuels.[13] In the nearly twenty years since the United Nations held an environmental conference (the last one was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992), foreign governments and philanthropists have invested billions in conservation and "sustainable development" pilot projects in the Amazon region. During that time, deforestation accelerated. And when the forests are gone, they can no longer play their ecologically crucial roles of storing carbon and cooling the atmosphere.
The fourth inconvenient truth about the crises we face is that global warming has arrived and will have increasingly serious consequences, even if we stop emitting all greenhouse gases tomorrow. Climatic changes will lead to increasingly severe, more destructive, and more deadly hurricanes, tornadoes, and monsoons. The melting of ice sheets will raise sea levels and increase the threat of flooding, agricultural collapse, and food shortages. In other parts of the world, global warming will likely trigger droughts, water scarcities, and famines.