No area of policy has been affected more directly or adversely by the aborted Presidential election and selection of George W. Bush in 2000 than national policy on climate change and energy. Six and half months into the Obama administration, the national political debate remains polarized, and federal policy will have to move much more quickly than it is moving now to make up for eight years of denial and inaction.
The beginning of the story is well known, Bush's campaign promise to regulate CO2 emissions as a pollutant, his brazen reversal of this pledge, his commitment not to regulate CO2 just days after his inauguration, and the secretive Energy Task Force(chaired by Dick Cheney and created in Bush's second week in office). These actions set in motion a chain of events whose latest chapter is the Waxman-Markey (ACESA) climate and energy bill passed by the House of Representatives in June.
In order to justify its embrace of big oil and coal and its "pollute as usual" policy, the Bush administration needed to rebut the consensus that had formed among client scientists about the danger and causes of global warming. A 2002 White House memo by Frank Luntz warned that
Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate....
Bush did this by outsourcing official climate science to the American Petroleum Institute and ExxonMobil.
Philip A. Cooney, the White House staff member who repeatedly revised government scientific reports on global warming, will go to work for ExxonMobil in the fall, the oil company said today [6/15/2005].
Mr. Cooney resigned on Friday as chief of staff to President Bush's environmental policy council, two days after documents obtained by The New York Times showed that he had edited the reports in ways that cast doubt on the link between greenhouse-gas emissions and rising temperatures.
A former lawyer and lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute, the main lobbying group for the oil industry, Mr. Cooney has no scientific training.
This strategy was of a piece with the policy mindset of Bush's first term. In 2002 an anonymous White House aide told Ronald Suskind, who later reported in the New York Times Magazine,
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"
Some Republican voters did fall for the "new reality" of climate science. According to the Gallup Poll, the share of Republicans who agreed that "changes in Earth's temperature over the last century are due more to human activities than to natural changes in the environment" declined from 52% in 2003 to 42% in 2008, and the number saying that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated in the news increased from 43% (2001) to 59% (2008). The Yale Project on Climate Change and George Mason University report "Global Warming's Six Americas 2009 finds that 58% of people who are "Doubtful" about global warming and 64% of those who are "Dismissive" of it are, not surprisingly, Republicans.
It's safe to assume that some Republicans who did not go along with Bush's rejection of science and reality abandoned party. According to a Pew Poll, by 2009, just 6 % of U.S. scientists still identified themselves as Republicans.
On the other side of the party divide, Democratic voters not only failed to buy Bush-Cheney's "new reality" climate snake oil, but actually believed the information they were receiving from scientists (and their own eyes). The share of Democratic voters saying that the news media generally exaggerate the seriousness of global warming did not increase, according to Gallup, but remained at 18% while the share saying that most scientists believe global warming is occurring rose from 70 to 74%.
Thus the two parties are now deeply polarized as never before over the issue of climate change and the need for action to combat it, and one party has slipped its moorings from reality and turned its back on science.
In response the other party has embraced rationality, science, and scientists. We now, for the first time [?], have a Nobel prize winning scientist in the Cabinet, Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu. Yet six and a half months into the Obama administration, the kinds of strong climate protection policies needed to make up the ground lost during the Bush years are still stymied by the sharp partisan divide and the energy interests that exploit it.
This situation was confirmed in responses to a question at a forum on climate and energy policy held at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government last week, by Secretary Chu, implicitly, and Representative Ed Markey, implicitly. Rep. Markey is co-author of the Waxman-Markey bill that was passed by the House in June.
The question:
The Waxman-Markey bill contains an emissions cap that is only 1% below 1990 by 2020, if we use the conventional reference year that the Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC) used. In contrast, IPCC’s reduction is 25 to 40% reduction by 2020, using that same reference year, so we’re way below that expectation. The IPCC benchmark is aiming for 450 PPM stabilization concentration. Now my question for Secretary Chu is, within the IPCC report they acknowledge that there is only about 50-50 chance that we can avoid a 2 degrees warming, which is catastrophic climate change by aiming for even 450 PPM. Do you acknowledge that fact? And if so, why do we not hear about it, and why do we not hear, and why do we hear that a 1% reduction is enough?
Secretary Chu, acknowledged the scientific point and all but said the 1% reduction by 2020 was the most that is politically feasible:
First the Waxman-Markey bill is shooting for a 450 PPM target.... The original Kyoto Target was 550 [ppm CO2], it’s now 450, because you don’t want to get near the tipping point, but the issue hear is, quite frankly, that you want as strong a bill as possible, but you want a bill, so the real issue is, [to] get it going, for gosh sakes let’s get something going. [emphasis added]
Rep. Markey then added:
Henry Waxman and I negotiated, to the best of our ability, each one of us with lifetime 100% League of Conservation Voters records, the absolute outside limits of what we could do at this time, going from a dead start from the day Pres. Obama was sworn in. We’re going to do more. There was a Clean Air Act of 1990 that was built upon the CAA of 1978, and the CAA of 1970. This won’t be the last time we visit this between now and 2020, 2030, 2050. If we’re right, if we’re about to unleash a technological then we’ll be able to return to this in 5 or 6 years, and then in 10 years, and then in 15 years, to accelerate this revolution so that we are the global leader.
The science is quite clear, I agree with you, and Henry Waxman and I in conjunction with the Speaker, we’ve set the strongest possible goals we could for our country, It’s highly ambitious, with great resistance from many industries in our country, but if we can get it on the books, like the 1990 Clean Air Act, that was the acid rain problem. It turned out that the cost of compliance with that law was 80 to 90 % less than all of the experts projected because of the technological revolution that is unleashed in order to solve the problem. I think the same thing is going to happen here, as happened in the Clean Air Act, as happened in the TeleComm Act, and if we get to it as quickly as possible, the genius here, of Harvard and MIT and CalTech and Stanford will finally have marketplace applications for what is already there in basic research, and we will solve the problem. [I believe this excerpt fairly summarizes his full answer. Emphases added.]
In short, the policy we get with Waxman-Markey is to plan for a 1% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020 through the "cap and trade" allowances and trading system and hope that we do much, much better than that. {I have written here that Waxman-Markey may actually work to prevent greater reductions than 1% below 1990 levels. So far, no one has corrected my analysis, but I look forward to being proved wrong on this point.}
We can all share Rep. Markey's hope, but this plan hardly seems adequate to the size and urgency of the situation.
The legacy of Bush v. Gore has been to put our climate policy in a straight jacket. We must find a way to break out of it rapidly, because we probably do not have much time to head off irreversible consequences.
Video and audio feeds of the entire JFK School Forum event are available here here.