Сhapter FIFTEEN
HUMAN BEINGS HAVE become so powerful that we are altering the chemistry of the very atmosphere that sustains us. Scientists have speculated on this possibility since the nineteenth century, but for the average person, it has only recently become a matter of concern.
We tend to assume that the atmosphere reaches the heavens. But air within which life can exist is only five or six miles deep; many of us can easily run that distance. When I interviewed Canadian astronaut Julie Payette for the film series The Sacred Balance, she said that each time she circled the planet on her voyage in space she could see with every sunrise and sunset the thin layer just above the earth—the atmosphere. “We were way above it,” she said. “Below that thin layer is where life flourishes and above it, there is nothing; it's a vacuum.”
If we were to reduce the planet to the size of a basketball, the atmosphere would be thinner than a layer of plastic we use to wrap sandwiches. And that is what we pour our effluents into every time we drive a car and every time our factories send pollutants through their smokestacks.
More than three billion years ago, plants appeared and began to photosynthesize, taking up carbon dioxide and combining it with water and energy from the sun to begin the process of carbon chain formation, which generates all of the molecules necessary for life. A byproduct of the chemical reactions in this process was oxygen. Before there were plants, the atmosphere was toxic for animals like us, since it was heavily laden with carbon dioxide and devoid of oxygen. Plants created the oxygen-rich atmosphere on which we depend and removed the carbon dioxide generated as part of respiration to keep the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at about 280 parts per million (ppm). But for more than a century, modern industrial activities have generated so much carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels that all the plants on land and in the oceans can't keep up with it, and carbon dioxide has been accumulating in the atmosphere.
The fundamental mechanism of global warming is not contentious. Naturally occurring molecules such as water, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide reflect infrared or heat waves. These molecules in the atmosphere act in the way glass on a greenhouse behaves, allowing sunlight to pass through but reflecting heat; hence these molecules are called greenhouse gases. On Mars, which has a very thin atmosphere, temperatures ricochet between the boiling heat of day and the freezing cold of night because there is no blanket of greenhouse gases to keep the heat on the planet. In contrast, Venus is permanently covered with a thick cloud of carbon dioxide, so surface temperatures are in the hundreds of degrees. Earth has had just the right combination of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to stabilize temperatures between day and night and enable life to evolve and flourish.
Careful studies conducted in Hawaii for over fifty years have registered the unequivocal rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 280 ppm in preindustrial times to the present 362 ppm, a 32 percent increase. The upward curve in the rate of increase suggests that if we carry on with business as usual, we will double the concentration long before the end of the century. These studies also suggest that if we were to cut all our emissions by half overnight, thereby bringing our annual emissions to a level that can be reabsorbed by all photo-synthetic activity within the biosphere, it will still take hundreds of years before the temperature changes from what we have already added to the atmosphere will level out, first in the air, then on land, and finally in the oceans. In other words, we have already set in motion an experiment with Earth that will not be fully played out for many, many more generations of humans.
Since the mid-1980s, I had known that the buildup of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide might be on a scale sufficient to affect our climate. But I thought there were far more pressing immediate issues, like toxic pollution, deforestation, and species extinction, and that climate change was a slow-motion disaster that would not really kick in for generations. It was only in 1988, when I first visited Australia, that Phil Noyce, my host, convinced me it was an urgent issue that needed action now. In the autumn of that year, climate experts from all parts of the world, who were gathered in Toronto for a major conference on the atmosphere, warned that the threat of global warming was real and called for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 20 percent in fifteen years.
That year, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of hundreds of climatologists from many countries, to monitor the state of global climate. Sadly, hindsight reveals that had governments responded and met that challenge beginning in 1988, the air today would be cleaner, people healthier, and fossil fuels more plentiful, and we would be saving hundreds of billions of dollars and be well along the path to achieving an emission level that could be absorbed by the biosphere.
At the height of global concern about the environment, governments and nongovernmental organizations planned the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The countries attending the summit agreed to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at the 1990 levels by 2000, but most countries, including Canada, merely called for “voluntary compliance” with the targets. In the meantime, the fossil fuel industry launched an aggressive campaign to discredit the very idea that human activity was influencing climate, and the use of fossil fuels and thus greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise.
In 1995, to film for The Nature of Things, I attended a conference on climate organized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Geneva. Hundreds of IPCC climatologists from more than seventy nations had painstakingly assessed thousands of scientific papers on weather and climate, and they concluded in 1990 in their first major assessment that global climate was warming, and that the change was not part of a natural cycle. In 1995, the IPCC's second assessment concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” Though it seemed to me a pretty tepid conclusion—in the global arena, delegates are under enormous scrutiny and pressure from groups like governments and industries—this was a powerful warning. The IPCC's third assessment, released in 2001, was even stronger.
In Geneva, I was deeply moved by two delegates I met there. One was a Kenyan farmer who said traditional farmers used the cyclical appearance and disappearance of different plants as the cues to start plowing, planting, and harvesting, but they were having difficulty because these wild indicator plants seemed to be out of phase. Here was a scientifically uneducated farmer, dependent on external signals for his livelihood, reporting signs that climate was changing. I also encountered a South American Indian who told me that even on the equator, where there are not the traditional seasons that we know, plants were behaving in strange, never-before-seen ways.
Unfortunately, these traditional people did not have PhDs and were not fluent in the jargon of science, and like the people living on tropical coral atolls threatened by rising waters and the Inuit of the Arctic reporting on melting permafrost, they were paid little heed.
The IPCC continues its work, especially refining computer models and carefully refuting the arcane objections (satellite readings fail to confirm ground level measurements, sunspots are the primary cause of warming, models have no basis in reality, et cetera) of a handful of nay-sayers, most of whom are funded by the fossil fuel industry. Overall, the enormous undertaking by the IPCC has merely made the warnings of 1988 stronger and more urgent.
Most climatologists believe the evidence is overwhelming that the atmosphere is warming unnaturally, that humans are the major contributor to this warming, and that immediate action is needed to counter the effects. Sadly, the renowned science-fiction writer Michael Crichton, author of The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, has recently published a sci-fi thriller, State of Fear, based on the premise that environmental extremists are creating ecological crises to frighten people into supporting them. It is a preposterous thesis that seems to legitimate the idea that climate change is not real and does not require action.
There have been other books that purport to disprove climate change, many of them written by ideologues who dismiss environ-mentalists out of hand or who have a vested interest in industry. Gregg Easterbrook was an environmental writer for Newsweek and other publications, so his suggestion that environmentalists had been so successful that they had achieved most of their goals was taken very seriously, though it was refuted by many eminent ecologists and experts. Academic Bjørn Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist has been embraced by right-wing think tanks like the Fraser Institute in Vancouver and business organizations. Again, a great deal of effort has had to be made to counter Lomborg's claim that the state of the environment is far better than environmentalists acknowledge.
One of the remarkable aspects of the IPCC work is the consensus of all but a handful of climatologists. Very few new ideas in science achieve such agreement among the overwhelming majority of experts. Consider biology—evolution is the fundamental basis on which our interpretation of life on Earth rests, yet there are hundreds of people with PhDs in biology who believe in the biblical version of Creation and deny evolution. Complete, 100 percent agreement is seldom achieved in science, so when most climatologists agree about something, their conclusions must be considered compelling.
Crichton ends his novel with a rant of his personal opinions, complete with references and footnotes that give the illusion he is writing a scientific treatise. He argues from examples in the history of medicine where consensus has proved to be wrong to discredit the IPCC conclusions. For example, doctors once universally believed that pellagra was the result of bacterial infection when it was actually a dietary deficiency. Physicians used to believe that deliberate bleeding cured a variety of problems and that ulcers could not be caused by bacteria. But in the world of medicine, as Harvard Medical School director Eric Chivian points out, doctors are trained to intervene when the evidence may not be absolute but where the dangers of not acting become too perilous. For example, one cannot be absolutely sure of a diagnosis of appendicitis before operating, because the risks of peritonitis and fatal septicemia from a ruptured appendix are too great. This is comparable to the need to act on global warming—except that here, as Chivian says, “we're dealing with the lives of billions of people.”
Some opponents of reducing greenhouse gas emissions accept that the climate is changing, but they argue that we need a higher level of certainty that we are the cause, and that until we are completely convinced, we can't afford to act. The Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider asks how much certainty is necessary to act. He believes the evidence of human-induced climate change is at least 70 percent certain, a figure that skeptics pounce on as far too uncertain for action. Schneider responds by asking rhetorically, if we were told a sandwich had a 70 percent chance of containing a deadly poison, would we eat it? Of course not. So if we are performing an experiment on the only home we have, planet Earth, what level of certainty do we require, especially if the warnings of scientists are accurate and the consequences of not doing anything will be catastrophic? Even if those scientists are wrong, taking action will lead to enormous benefits in health, greater energy supplies, cleaner environment, and vast economic savings.
The projected effects of rising greenhouse gas levels are based on the amount of fossil fuels burned, methane liberated from landfills, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCS) released, and so on. But it is known that there are massive deposits of methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, frozen beneath the permafrost in the Arctic and on the ocean floor. Inuit people in the circumpolar countries have been warning for years that permafrost is melting, something even the rabidly anti-climate-change senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, has finally acknowledged is happening in his state as dozens of villages report their buildings are sinking. As permafrost melts, it will liberate massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere, accelerating the warming process far beyond the predictions of current computer models in what is called a positive feedback loop: rising levels of greenhouse gases induce warming, which melts permafrost, which in turn releases more greenhouse gas, which accelerates the warming even more.
In addition, the well-documented melting of polar ice sheets may have catastrophic effects on the movement of heat through ocean currents. There are enormous movements of water masses through the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In the North Atlantic, water from the equator absorbs heat, which is moved by currents northward along the coast of Europe, raising the winter temperature above the levels expected for that latitude. As that water mass releases its heat and cools on its passage along the coast of Europe, it curves around and sinks at its northernmost point, slowly making its way south deep in the ocean. It is like a continuous stream of water through the ocean.
As ice sheets and glaciers melt more rapidly, fresh water floods the ocean and interferes with the current. This flooding can happen rapidly and has occurred in the past, shutting down the ocean currents and thereby bringing about a colder period or ice age in Europe. It seems counterintuitive that global warming might shut down the “heat engine” of this current and cause a catastrophic cooling of Europe, but in November 2005, scientists reported in Nature that currents appear to have slowed by 30 percent.
EVEN AS THE SKEPTICS persist in their claim that the IPCC scientists are missing or ignoring bits of evidence that “disprove” climate change, there are two types of evidence I find overwhelming. One comes from nature itself. If warming occurs, animals and plants that live within a certain temperature range will be forced to move to stay within that range. For organisms on mountainsides, that can be achieved by moving up. In a Nature of Things program entitled “Warnings from Nature,” scientists documented that very kind of movement. In another case, a bird-watcher in the American Midwest has carefully recorded the comings and goings of birds through the seasons for fifty years. Her records clearly show that migratory birds are now arriving in her backyard up to two weeks earlier and leaving up to two weeks later. It's hard to believe that observational biases could be responsible for these results.
For me, the most powerful data are the annual atmospheric carbon dioxide levels extracted from the Antarctic ice sheets. In the topmost layers recording the most recent years, the carbon dioxide signature inflects sharply upward, rises steeply over the past decade and a half out of the background “noise,” and now reaches a height beyond anything ever seen.
BY 1997, GLOBAL CONCERN about climate change had grown enough to warrant a gathering of delegates from most countries in the world at Kyoto, Japan. They were meeting to discuss a protocol for reducing emissions, with a goal of reaching a balance between emissions and the absorptive capacity of the biosphere. Collectively, humans were producing twice as much greenhouse gas, especially carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, as Earth could reabsorb, so overall emissions had to be reduced by 50 percent. But since countries like Canada, Australia, and the United States were disproportionately high emitters, our targets would eventually have to be reduced by 85 to 90 percent.
I found myself reluctantly attending this conference along with staff of the David Suzuki Foundation. I say reluctantly because, at these massive international affairs, much of the decision making goes on behind closed doors while groups such as ours merely buzz around like annoying gnats.
Kyoto is the cultural hub of Japan, and stepping out of the Shinkansen (bullet train), we were confronted with that strange contradiction of Japan, the traditional domes and pagoda shapes of its temples and the garish signs and monuments in plastic. After dropping off our luggage in our tiny hotel rooms, we walked through a light rain past the many shops and malls packed with Japanese shoppers. We were in a hurry, with little time to sightsee or shop or even seek out some good restaurants. When we reached the meeting halls, we were greeted by Green-peace's large blowup of Godzilla, the fire-breathing monster, created by garbage, a perfect metaphor for humanity's effects on the planet.
The halls were filled with the babble of people, official delegates from dozens of countries, environmentalists and other NGOs, lobbyists for the fossil-fuels industry, and the media. Altogether, it was a mélange of perspectives and priorities. At the meetings, leading scientists talked about the latest evidence for climate change, environmental groups called for serious cuts in emissions, and government delegates wrestled with lobbyists working to sabotage the process by driving it off the rails. The Australian delegation complained bitterly that their country was special, a big country with a sparse population that had few rivers for hydroelectric power and therefore was dependent on highly polluting coal-fired plants.
The Greenpeace display outside the conference hall in Kyoto
The insurance industry was the one large group in the business community that took climate change very seriously. Their actuarial data were dramatic—claims for climate-related damage like fires, floods, droughts, and storms were rising dramatically, as were the number of insurance companies going out of business.
The European Union (EU) was very concerned about climate change and wanted serious cuts in the range of 15 percent below 1990 emission levels. Aligned against them were the JUSCANZ countries (Japan, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), which formed a bloc working to water down the target. There were enormous debates about whether to allow Canada, and similar countries, to be given credit for the fact that its boreal forest absorbed carbon dioxide, therefore acting as a “carbon sink”; others wanted “emissions credits” to be traded so that polluting countries or industries could avoid reducing their emissions by paying for someone else's “share” of the atmosphere.
In such surroundings, the cynics could suggest the final decisions and targets were far too shallow to be effective and far too expensive for what would be achieved. But I believe the final outcome of the Kyoto deliberations was extremely important for what it signified. Kyoto signaled the recognition that the atmosphere is finite, that human activity has saturated it with emissions from fossil-fuel-burning vehicles and industries, and that we are adding more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than the biosphere can handle. For the first time, governments and industries had to acknowledge that there can't be endless growth.
The atmosphere is not confined within national boundaries; it is a single entity shared by all people and organisms on Earth. The industrialized nations created the problem with their highly productive fossil-fuel-dependent economies. As an illustration of the disparity between the industrialized and nonindustrialized nations, Canada's 30 million people use as much energy as the entire African population of 900 million. In 1976, when I first visited China, which had thirty times Canada's population, it was using the same amount of oil and gas as Canada. I wrote at the time that if every Chinese wanted a motorbike, the results would be devastating. Now, a quarter of a century later, most Chinese aren't interested in bikes; they want cars, and with a booming economy and a growing middle class, more and more can afford them.
In 1997, the challenge was how to divvy up the atmosphere equitably. Countries like the United States, Australia, and Canada were heavy emitters, whereas countries like Russia were “under-emitters,” since their antiquated and polluting industries were not globally competitive and were being forced to shut down; on a per capita basis, therefore, Russian people already had a lower emission output than the global emission target to be set at Kyoto. So, it was argued, such countries should be allowed to sell their “unused” share of the atmosphere to companies or countries that might not meet the target. This was a ludicrous idea, however, because even the lower emission rates were above the rates that would have to be reached to enable all greenhouse gases to be absorbed by plants. Allowing others to pay for the low emitters' “share” of the atmosphere was merely a loophole permitting those who had enough money to keep on polluting.
Alberta sent a delegation to lobby against the Kyoto negotiations. I remember Rahim Jaffer, the right-wing Reform party's member of Parliament from Edmonton, Alberta, loudly denying the evidence that climate change was happening, even though the overwhelming majority of delegates were not disputing the science. Europeans were appalled at the intransigence of the official JUSCANZ delegates, especially from the United States, which is the largest emitter on the planet; they were determined to set lower emissions targets. A stalemate loomed between those calling for significant reductions on the order of 15 percent below 1990 levels and those arguing that such goals were far too costly and ineffective. I didn't have access to the official Australian and American delegates, but environmentalists from the two countries were out-spoken in their condemnation of the position of their governments. Many American environmentalists pinned their hopes on the arrival of U.S. vice president Al Gore.
Day after day the circus continued, as environmental groups performed a variety of stunts to try to gain attention from the media. Randy Hayes, the head of the Rainforest Action Network, led a conga line through the building to protest the position of his own country, the United States. I've always admired Randy for his originality and daring in the way he does things. I attended another conference in Japan at which he infuriated journalists by calling Japan an “environmental bandit.”
At Kyoto, the David Suzuki Foundation called a press conference in which we used stacks of pop cans to illustrate the disparity in energy use by industrialized and developing countries. Energy use by an average person in African countries like Zimbabwe was represented by 1 can, India and China by 5 and 15 cans, respectively, and Japan and European countries by 55 to 65 cans. Canada came near the top with 96, and the U.S. was tops with a whopping 120 cans. It made for a great photo.
Press conference using pop cans to represent greenhouse gas emission levels. Left to right: me, Steven Guibeault (Greenpeace Canada), and Louise Comeau (Sierra Club Canada).
The JUSCANZ allies were at loggerheads with the European Union, which wanted an aggressive approach to reducing emissions. Again, cynics argued that EU nations could make deeper cuts more easily. For example, Germany was aided by the fact that when East and West Germany were united, the antiquated, polluting plants of East Germany were shut down, thereby reducing the unified country's overall output and making it easier to meet targets. Since then, however, Germany has become the world leader in wind power, erecting windmills at home and exporting the technology abroad. Germany stands as a shining example of the opportunities created by taking the challenge seriously. Great Britain was also phasing out its outmoded coal-burning plants and therefore would find it easier to meet any target. Since then, however, Prime Minister Tony Blair has committed the United Kingdom to a 60 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 and promises that cuts can be ramped up even further if the science demands it. Now that is a serious commitment.
BECAUSE OF JUSCANZ OPPOSITION, it began to look as if the proceedings would fail. But then Vice President Gore arrived. Environmentalists adored him because, as he described in his book Earth in the Balance, he understood the issues.
In 1988, while preparing for the radio series It's a Matter of Survival, I had interviewed Gore when he was visiting Canada, and he sent shivers up my spine as he answered my questions; I had never heard a politician state the environmental situation so clearly, and he articulated the solutions that were needed to overcome the problems. At the end of the interview, I turned off the tape recorder and begged him to immigrate to Canada so that I could work to get him elected prime minister.
Then I asked more seriously, “How can journalists like me help politicians like you?” His answer surprised me and put me on the path I have followed to this day. He said, “Don't look to politicians like me. If you want change, you have to convince the public there is a problem, show them there are alternatives, and get them to care enough to demand that something be done. Then, every politician will trip over himself trying to get on the bandwagon.” Watching Gore perform as a presidential candidate in 2000, I felt the prescience of his advice to me. He didn't talk about the environment during his campaign because the American people weren't ready for it.
I had read Gore's book when it came out. It was a powerful document that I found very moving because he considered the environmental challenges from the standpoint of his Christian faith, parenthood, and politics. He didn't separate them into different areas but folded them together to come up with an integrated outlook and response. He pointed to the problems as he had encountered them as a journalist and politician, considered the implications as a parent and religious person, and outlined a program to respond to the threats, one that was both politically and economically sound. Upon his arrival in Kyoto, the environmental NGOs flocked around him as he brokered a deal with the EU countries. I later met an American environmentalist who had criticized Gore and the administration of U.S. president Bill Clinton for being too slow and too cautious, and he had been punished by being excluded from any further access to meetings with Gore. That's politics.
Much to the disgust of the private U.S. lobbyists, Gore settled for a target of a 6 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2010. This was in 1997. Even if he had succeeded Clinton as president for two terms, he wouldn't be in office when the United States would be held to account for achieving the target, so it could be suggested he had nothing to lose by advancing the deal. Environmentalists hailed Gore as the savior of the Kyoto Protocol, which was signed by the attending delegates and would become law pending ratification by enough nations.
At the time, I was deeply disappointed because I knew Gore understood the implications of global warming and knew that deeper cuts were needed. In his book, he had called for massive investments in more efficient use of fossil fuels and in developing alternative energy sources, so a 6 percent cut seemed too trivial. But thinking now about the enormous lobbying pressure, I see his brokerage of an actual cut as a major step. The deal allowed Australia a huge concession—it would be the only industrialized country permitted to set an emissions target above 1990 levels (8 percent). All the others were expected to come in below that level.
I have never understood the Australian plea for special dispensation. Canada has the longest marine coastline of any country in the world, but the entire boundary of Australia is ocean, and the first consequence of warming of the oceans is expansion—sea levels will rise as warmer water expands, and the impact on Canada and Australia will be immense. Canada, as a northern country, could complain that its energy needs are greater than those of other countries because of the cold climate, but Prime Minister Jean Chrétien ratified the Kyoto target in the knowledge that 70 percent of the public wanted it.
David Suzuki Foundation gang at Kyoto. Left to right: Sarika, Tara, Severn, Me, Catherine Fitzpatrick, Ted Ferguson, and David Hocking.
Whenever I land in Australia, I am always struck by the fact that the country has vast amounts of something Canadians would love to have more of—sunlight. Yet driving through the cities of the nation, one has to look very hard to see a solar panel anywhere. In many poor tropical countries, water barrels on top of houses or stands are simply heated by the sun. How can Australia justify opposition to Kyoto when all of its hot water could be provided by free, nonpolluting sunlight? With its vast desert expanses, Australia should be harvesting sunlight with immense solar collectors, developing innovative ways to exploit this resource, and finding markets for solar technology. It is disgraceful that John Howard, the prime minister, has sided with the United States, and theirs are the only two industrialized nations refusing to abide by what is now an international treaty.
Will Kyoto make a difference? Many opponents of Kyoto, including U.S. president George Bush, have argued that its fatal flaw is the exclusion of the developing nations, especially India and China, as signatories. It's an argument that doesn't hold water.
If India and China follow our path of profligate energy use and pollution, no matter what the rest of the world does, the ramifications will be overwhelming. But we cannot compel them to take a different path if we do not show that we recognize the problem and are acting to reduce the hazards. If we don't set the example, we will have no moral credibility with other countries that look to us as role models. And finally, Canada (and especially the province of Alberta), Australia, and the United States are among the richest jurisdictions on Earth. If we argue that acting to minimize the hazards of climate change is too expensive, when will we be able to afford to act? And if we don't change our ways, why should India, China, Brazil, or Indonesia behave any differently?
THE FINAL AGREEMENT AT Kyoto was completed late at night on the last day of the meeting. As delegates blearily congratulated each other, few could have anticipated the challenges that lay ahead. The Kyoto Protocol would not come into effect until individual countries comprising a total of at least 60 percent of the world's population had ratified it. The ratification process would take years, and Canada, for one, had called for “voluntary compliance” to meet the target, even though experience already indicated this would never work. The private sector always opposes government regulation and, when pressured, promises to work things out voluntarily—but it never works. In the years since Kyoto, Canada's emissions have increased steadily to a point where, if we now wish to meet the goal, emissions will have to be cut by 32 percent. Hurricane Katrina revealed the folly and cost of ignoring the advice of experts, and Canadians should demand that our so-called leaders weigh scientific and technological advice far more heavily than the yelling of economists and industrialists.
Even though Gore took credit for the Kyoto agreement finally being adopted, he knew it would not pass through the United States Congress. When he ran for the U.S. presidency in 2000, he hardly talked about the environment at all. Upon election as president, George W. Bush quickly indicated he would not support the ratification of Kyoto. Since the largest energy user (and polluter) refused to consider reducing emissions, it was difficult to get the rest of the world to ratify the protocol.
As the United States' largest trading partner and foreign source of energy, Canada was under enormous pressure not to ratify. After Prime Minister Jean Chrétien went ahead and ratified the Kyoto Protocol in December 2002, I was thrilled to receive a letter in January 2003 thanking the foundation for making it possible for him to do so. His letter concluded: “Your personal efforts and those of your foundation have been an important part of the consultation process and have also contributed to informing Canadians about the issues.”
Canada's signing was a very significant step but did not deliver the numbers needed to make the protocol internationally binding. The last country that could make that difference was Russia. I don't know what kind of pressure the United States exerted to keep President Vladimir Putin from signing, but I am sure it was considerable. Russia was in a position to blackmail both the Americans, who wanted Kyoto to fail, and the rest of the world, which needed the signature. Although I have no idea what finally tipped the balance, I would be amazed if it was because Putin wanted to do the right thing for the planet. Instead, I suspect he received assurances from the EU that there would be economic benefits to be had by signing. Nevertheless, in an atmosphere of despair and pessimism among environmentalists, Russia ratified Kyoto on November 18, 2004, thereby making the protocol international law ninety days later, on February 16, 2005—seven years after it was completed and a mere five to seven years before its end.
Iraq and Katrina should be wake-up calls to an administration that sometimes behaves like an international renegade, but the Bush–Cheney administration remains focused on its own course and agenda. I have absolutely no doubt that reality—more and more severe weather events, droughts, fires, climbing oil prices—is going to awaken the United States from its slumber on this issue.
I vividly remember the shock of realization that the Soviet Union was advanced in science and engineering in the fall of 1957 when Sputnik was launched. Americans did not cry “we can't do anything about it” or “it's too expensive” as they took on the challenge of the space race. Instead, money, energy, and resources were poured into the effort that not only succeeded in winning spectacularly with the manned lunar landing, but spun off a revolution in telecommunications, astronomy, and space research. And today, Nobel Prizes continue to be awarded to Americans disproportionately because of that commitment to science and engineering.
If we can get this great entrepreneurial nation to devote even a fraction of what is spent on military budgets and homeland security to use energy more efficiently and find energy alternatives, there will be a revitalization of the economy with green initiatives.