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The battle to avert the climate changes we are seeing today was lost in the 1990s. During that decade, the scientific consensus jelled, but nations dithered on any actions to avert the threat, and the big emerging nations chose a path to industrialization that locked in massive future emissions, a decision that future historians may well rank as the fateful turning point that put our civilization on a course for self-destruction. Could it have been otherwise?
Today, a number of observers say no, we could not have done anything about climate change back then. According to this logic, in the 1990s—the decade when we needed to begin to take action if we were to forestall the changes we are seeing now—there wasn’t the political will necessary to begin a global shift away from fossil fuels, and even if that political willpower existed, the alternative sources of energy were too inefficient and expensive to fill the breach.
It’s a reasonable argument, and if it was the case, it constitutes an utterly damning indictment of modern society. It would be saying, in effect, that the most advanced civilization in the history of humanity could not come to grips with a threat of its own making despite forty years of warnings about the consequences of business as usual.
I don’t buy it. For one thing, implicit in this argument is the assumption that the wealth and power of modern civilization are based on one particular source of energy—fossil fuels. If true, that would be equally damning, because it would imply that luck, not human ingenuity, fed economic growth since fossil fuels came to dominate in the twentieth century.
On the contrary, there was nothing inevitable about fossil fuels. Most of the renewable sources being pursued today were under active development more than one hundred years ago, before fossil fuels crowded out all other energy sources except hydroelectric, and later nuclear. Our reliance on fossil fuels became self-reinforcing as cheap oil and coal in the early twentieth century created a massive installed base committed to further exploitation of these fuels. With economic power comes political power, and fossil fuels expanded their reach with the help of explicit and implicit subsidies. The explicit subsidies for oil have been whittled down in recent years, but they are still with us to the tune of about $85 billion for the United States and European Union.
It’s the implicit subsidies, however, that show the true power of the fossil fuel lobby. These fuels are only cheap if we ignore the negative costs associated with their production and use. These costs range from air pollution; ecosystem damage; the poisoning of rivers, lakes, and oceans through oil spills; to debilitating and life-shortening respiratory ailments. And then there are the vast array of negative economic impacts associated with climate change. The International Monetary Fund, hardly a hotbed of environmental activism, estimated that added together these explicit and implicit subsidies amounted to 6.3 percent of global GDP in 2015, or $4.7 trillion (and $649 billion in the United States). A good part of the implicit subsidy comes from the nearly 90 percent of the fossil fuel emissions that go into the atmosphere without paying any price at all, but that contribute not only to global warming but premature deaths from air pollution, impaired health, and other costs to society. A study involving a collaboration of researchers from Harvard and three British universities published in 2021 in Environmental Research estimated that pollution from fossil fuels accounts for 8.7 million deaths a year and has shortened the average life span by more than a year.
A group called Ecofys tried to show just the monetary costs imposed on the European Union in 2012 in a handy chart. They broke down the €250 billion by the source of the external cost:
© Ecofys 2014 by order of: European Commission
Had modern economies used taxation to incorporate these costs into the price of fuels, society would have been shifting toward less-polluting renewables long before climate change became an issue.
Historically, society dealt with the “externalities” (as economists refer to these unaccounted costs) through legislation such as the Clean Air Act. As the scope of the threat of global warming came into focus in the 1980s and 1990s, it also became clear to those conversant with the problem that something was going to have to replace fossil fuels. The missed opportunities of earlier decades became irrelevant; the question was what could be done now or in the near future to meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Were alternative sources of energy ready to absorb the shift to renewables had society acted in the 1990s? The simple answer is yes. Early in the decade, there were a number of onetime opportunities to put the world on a different path. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 offered an extraordinary chance to reset what was then perhaps the most energy inefficient and greenhouse gas intensive economy ever to despoil the planet. Consider the East German car, the Trabant, which basically amounted to a device whose primary purpose was to create air pollution. For the cost of producing about ten times the pollution of other cars of its era, the lucky buyer got a vehicle that could accelerate from zero to sixty (its top speed) in twenty-one seconds, which meant that it would trail a good bicyclist until the very end. Simply modernizing Soviet bloc industry for efficiency offered a freebie that would produce both profits and a vast reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which is why, after reunification, Germany could seem to both grow and reduce its emissions at the same time.
Estimates of emissions reductions related to the collapse of the Soviet zone run to 40 percent, and that does not even include such side effects as a decade-long reduction of meat consumption related to the economic collapse. A study published in Nature in 2019 estimated that the change in diet resulted in total emissions reduction of 7.6 billion tons of GHG in the ensuing decade.
Once European nations realized that they would at least have to appear to try to reduce GHG emissions, there was a scramble to get credit for this obvious way to game whatever treaty obligations might come in the future. These were real reductions, but they underscored another leitmotif of the global warming era—most nations would prefer to appear to achieve greenhouse gas reductions through accounting trickery than bite the bullet and actually do something.
The emissions gains achieved in modernizing the former Soviet states mostly had to do with energy efficiency, which could improve profits and reduce costs in a vast array of enterprises beyond the antiquated infrastructure of the Soviet bloc. Energy efficiency is perhaps the one genuine success story of the climate change era.
Amory Lovins, a physicist and founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, has championed energy efficiency and renewables since the 1970s. He claims that gains in efficiency, particularly in reducing the energy intensity (the amount of energy used in a unit of production), have resulted in thirty times the GHG reductions of the adoption of renewables since 1995, and that these efficiency improvements are the reason that emissions have not increased as fast as economic growth in the United States. According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), since 1980, U.S. GDP increased by 149 percent while electricity use only increased by 26 percent. Part of this had to do with structural changes in the economy (the shift from manufacturing to services), but a significant part came from increases in efficiency.
In 1990, Lovins coined the term “negawatt” to underscore how money could be made and pollution reduced by focusing on efficiency. These efficiency gains have continued through both Democratic and Republican administrations. This underscores the point that emissions reductions are possible when there isn’t a powerful vested interest that loses when those gains are made. ACEEE asserts that energy efficiency in 2015 was the third-largest source of electrical power in the United States, ranking only behind coal and natural gas but ahead of nuclear power.
While most of the focus in the 1990s was on what the developed nations might do to reduce emissions, the real opportunity for dealing with climate change lay in the emerging nations and how they would power their industrialization and development. This was the true tragedy of the 1990s. The path not taken in the industrialization of the emerging nations turned out to be the world’s best opportunity to reduce future emissions.
The concept, as expounded at countless conferences and international get-togethers, was to build out the energy infrastructure using a mixture of renewables rather than recapitulate the fossil-fuel-intensive path that the developed nations had followed during their industrialization. The phrase, repeated countless times in the 1990s, was to use “leapfrogging” technologies (it may well be that Thomas Johansson, the renewable energy expert, and colleagues introduced the phrase with regard to energy, as they used it in 1987 in an influential study on sustainable energy published by the World Resources Institute). There were many ways of doing this. Lovins argued that rather than building out expensive grids it made sense for the least developed nations to focus on distributed power generation using a mix of renewables appropriate to a region.
It didn’t happen; no frogs leaped. The St. Louis Fed dates China’s industrialization to 1988. Between 1990 and 2019, Chinese greenhouse gas emissions increased more than fourfold, rising from half the emissions of the United States to about twice our number (as noted, the United States has remained relatively stable thanks largely to massive improvements in energy efficiency). India’s have more than tripled (it is now the third-biggest GHG-emitting nation in the world), as have Indonesia’s.
Had China been incentivized to use a portfolio of renewables, that commitment would have provided economies of scale and incentives to accelerate technological progress in solar, wind, and other alternatives. The same would apply to other big emerging nations. Billions of tons of greenhouse gases that are now in the atmosphere might not have been emitted.
Instead, China and India heavily relied on fossil fuels for industrialization, and along with a changing climate got air pollution problems so severe that the mere act of going outside in their major cities now shortens your life. This was not inevitable. Leapfrogging technological progress has been accomplished in other areas. Much of Africa, for instance, has basically skipped the stage of land lines for telecommunications and gone straight to wireless.
Why this never happened with electrical power might be summed up in one word: coal. China had vast reserves in 1990, the fourth-largest in the world. If you didn’t care about the costs to climate and health that came with burning coal, this domestic resource would be irresistible as a source of energy to power industrialization. And in 1990, China didn’t care.
China produced and consumed about 1.2 billion tons of coal in 1990, toward the beginning of its massive push to become an industrial power. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s it steadily increased its production and consumption of coal, with consumption peaking in 2018 at about 4.6 billion tons, or nearly four times its consumption in 1990. To put this in perspective, the coal consumption of the world’s biggest economy, the United States, in 1990 was 896 million tons of coal at a time when the U.S. economy was between 5.5 (purchasing power parity) and 16 (on the basis of GDP) times the size of China’s. In 2018, with the U.S. economy still about 40 percent larger than China’s in terms of GDP, the United States burned 688 million tons of coal, or 15 percent of the amount burned by China.
The impact of China’s choice of a development path has been breathtaking. As COVID showed, China’s air pollution can be cleaned up in the blink of an eye. Once the carbon pollution migrates higher into the atmosphere, however, it stays there for more than a human life span.
Burning coal to release its energy results in the coal’s carbon binding with oxygen in the atmosphere. This produces CO2 in a multiple of the weight of the coal burned. The rough figure one can use is that burning 1 ton of coal produces about 2.9 tons of CO2. China now releases half the global total of more than 14 billion tons of CO2 emissions from coal, with China’s total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels coming in at about 10 billion tons annually.
Once China embarked on this path, it only required simple arithmetic to see what was coming in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. India, another prime candidate for the adoption of leapfrogging technologies, also chose coal, and its leapfrogging involved jumping over Germany, Japan, and Russia to become the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Recall that the world was already seeing changes in climate by the mid 1980s as a result of greenhouse gas overloading in the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. In other words, at a point when greenhouse gases already were having a meaningful impact on climate, China, India, and other emerging nations powered a massive pulse of industrialization with an energy source that was known to be the worst offender in terms of producing more greenhouse gases.
The impact of coal-related emissions comes from their accumulation over time. The oceans and the land seem to be able to absorb roughly 5 billion tons of CO2 a year. Since 1990, China has averaged that amount of CO2 emissions just from coal alone, with total annual GHG emissions soaring to 270 percent of earth’s annual absorptive capacity by the late 2010s. To put this another way, China’s choice of fuels for development has overburdened the globe’s capacity to absorb CO2 by increasing amounts every year since 1990, meaning that even if the entire rest of the world had reached net-zero CO2 emissions thirty years ago, greenhouse gas concentrations would still have grown, and temperatures would have continued to rise. And, of course, China was not alone among emerging nations in choosing to power development with coal. In retrospect, given the consequences we are now dealing with, and given what was known at the time, the decision to use coal as the fuel for economic development by the big emerging economies has to rank as the most self-destructive choice in the history of modern civilization. Now a group of financial institutions, including Citi, HSBC, and BlackRock, are proposing to buy Asian coal-fired plants and retire them ahead of their normal schedules to reduce future emissions. This wouldn’t be necessary if the plants hadn’t been built in the first place.
So why didn’t these emerging nations choose another path?
With regard to China, one surprising factor was the international and domestic shockwaves that followed after the government violently put down the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Thomas Johansson was part of a Chinese council for international development cooperation that formed in the early 1990s. He described it as an attempt by the Chinese government to reengage with the international community after suffering widespread condemnation for its actions during the Tiananmen protests. The council consisted of about two dozen senior Chinese officials and an equal number of experts convened from around the world. Johansson was there to provide ideas about energy options. He remembers that in the years following the protests, the government became obsessed with maintaining stability, and the perceived key to stability was economic growth to provide food and jobs for their one billion people.
The pressure came not just from the trauma of Tiananmen, but from what ordinary Chinese saw going on around them. “By the 1990s, many Chinese had access to television,” says Johansson, “and they saw how people lived in other parts of the world.” The officials were aware of environmental issues, he says, but stability came first. “They wanted to learn from the West about renewables, and they did learn,” says Johansson, “but it took them a while to catch up.”
In the meantime, China turned to coal as the fuel for the double-digit economic growth that was their goal. The path to coal was also greased by corruption. A large coal-fired power plant offers a more tempting opportunity for a “commission” than smaller scale and scattered renewables projects, says Johansson, particularly as there were fossil fuel interests ready to open their wallets.
Another issue, he says, was that the West was completely tone-deaf in the way that it tried to convince other countries to adopt renewables. While the Chinese were worried about pushing economic growth immediately, they were being told by the West that they should be limiting fossil fuels to prevent a problem in the future. Instead, Johansson argues, renewables and efficiency should have been pushed as a way to spur economic growth at the local level. “It would have converted a long-term discussion into a near-term local benefits issue,” he says. “If you do energy right, you solve a host of problems—local development, energy security, health benefits—and get climate mitigation as a side benefit.”
It didn’t help matters that the developed nations were basically telling the Chinese and Indians to “do as we say and not as we do.” The Chinese looked at the West and saw that renewables were not a top priority, even though up to that point it was the developed countries that had created the problem of overloading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. In the early 1990s, emissions per capita in the United States were nine times those in China and twenty-seven times those of the average Indian. And yet we were telling them not to use the fuels that we used to power our economic growth and also telling them to spend their own money developing the alternatives. Worse, they knew that there wasn’t even a consensus in the United States that global warming was a threat to be addressed. Given all this, opting for renewables was a deal they could refuse, even if it meant that down the road we all would suffer.
China, India, and other emerging nations could have industrialized using far less coal. In 1990, China emitted more greenhouse gases to produce one dollar of GDP than any country in the world. The same was true in 2014. In 1990, the United States used little more than one-third the emissions of greenhouse gases to produce one dollar of GDP than China did. By 2014, China had narrowed that gap but still created nearly twice the emissions of the United States to produce a dollar of GDP. That same year, France, with its heavy reliance on nuclear power, emitted nearly 80 percent fewer greenhouse gases to produce a dollar of GDP. Coal was not and is not a necessary evil for economic development.
Still, if China, India, and other nations had adopted an alternative path to industrialization in the 1990s, it would have required a united front of the developed world to create the mix of incentives and disincentives to encourage these countries to pursue an energy source other than the massive reserves of coal located within their borders. As noted, something close to the opposite was the case.
This is where public opinion comes into play.
In 1993, the year rapid climate change became an ominous possibility, the newly inaugurated Clinton administration got a brutal baptism in how hard it would be to do something about greenhouse gas emissions. President Clinton’s first budget contained a proposed BTU tax that would tax fossil fuels while exempting alternatives such as wind and solar. It was billed as a revenue-raising measure that would encourage energy conservation, reduce pollution, and reduce dependence on foreign oil. Inside the administration, it was also viewed by Vice President Al Gore and others as a vital step in dealing with the recently emerged threat of climate change.
It never had a chance. According to Christopher Leonard’s Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America, the oil tycoons had begun preparing to spread confusion and denial as early as 1991, when they sponsored a Cato Institute meeting that brought together climate change deniers and like-minded business interests to plan how to derail action on global warming. When the BTU proposals arose, the fossil fuel lobby was prepared.
Opposition arose from all quarters. The National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and farmer associations banded together and spent $2 million on ads on how the tax would hurt the economy. The Koch brothers poured millions more into another of their astroturf organizations, Citizens for a Sound Economy, to pressure key politicians such as David Boren, the senator from Oklahoma (an energy state) who chaired the Senate Finance Committee.
Most of the backlash focused on costs rather than anything related to climate, but the message was loud and blunt: threatening fossil fuel interests puts one’s political future at risk. Anthony Leiserowitz says the backlash almost cost Clinton his ability to govern. A number of congressional representatives lost their seats in the subsequent midterms in 1994, and many were said to have been “BTUed.” Along with Clinton’s ban on assault weapons, which galvanized the National Rifle Association, the BTU tax was one of the factors that swept Newt Gingrich into power, basically neutering the possibility of any grand initiatives Clinton might have pursued in other areas like health care.
If you were a political creature in the mid-1990s, the lesson of the BTU debacle was that there was a new third rail of politics. Whatever momentum climate change might have had with the incoming Clinton administration dissipated with that defeat. Worse, the reaction poisoned political opinion on using taxes to address climate change, thus nullifying perhaps the most efficient way to address the problem.
The BTU tax debacle showed the power of the fossil fuel lobby, and now that the beast was awakened to the threat of climate change action, it quickly adapted the playbook perfected by lobbyists during the political battles over tobacco and the ozone hole. The climate change denial movement was born. Just as a hurricane draws power from the energy stored in warm ocean waters, the climate denial movement found wellsprings of energy in the individualistic, antigovernment, anti-elitist streak in the American public.
The Republican Party had begun its move toward libertarianism during the Reagan years, and now GOP politicians were being asked to support global action to face an evolving threat. Tim Wirth, a Democrat who chaired the Senate hearings on global warming in 1988, remarked to me in the 1990s that climate change was one issue on which Republicans “lose all reason,” because they saw it as a Trojan horse for world government.
In a recent conversation, Anthony Leiserowitz expanded on that thought. He described climate change as “the policy problem from Hell …. You could not design a problem less suited to our psychology and our politics.” For one thing, as the GOPers feared, “it was the mother of all collective-action problems—90 percent of the solutions involve structural change that we can only do collectively,” meaning with government involvement. Dealing with the problem also required treaties and international cooperation, and with that came issues of agreements impinging on U.S. sovereignty in a host of activities.
Leiserowitz says that it is no coincidence that the denier movement is most evident in four English-speaking countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, and England. Three of those countries are former colonies with recently conquered frontiers. With that history came strong subcurrents of individualism. All four are major fossil fuel producers. “If your worldview is focused on individual freedom and is characterized by an antiregulation, anti-taxation bias,” he said, then addressing the problem is your worst nightmare. “On the one hand they don’t believe the threat, but rather see action to avert global warming as the real threat.” Using the analogy of explosives, he said that “uniquely, the U.S., Canada, and Australia have the nitro-abundant fossil fuels and the glycerin-receptive politicians” as the ingredients of an explosive situation. He argues that there was no better distillation of those two strands than the network funded by the Kochs.
Little wonder, then, that the emerging nations saw hypocrisy and mixed messages coming from the West, particularly the United States, on climate change. Moreover, from the Western point of view, the stumbling blocks to collective action were not trivial. The biggest was summed up by the phrase “free rider.” The big emerging nations said, in effect, why should we limit our use of cheap fossil fuels when we didn’t create the problem, you did, and our per capita emissions are a tiny fraction of yours? The developed nations’ retort was that the world could stop climate change only if all countries limited emissions, and the big developed economies should not be forced to put their exporters at a structural cost disadvantage to those in emerging economies.
Lovins, Johansson, and others would say that this was a false choice—that the emerging economies could have developed along other energy paths (with Western help). That message, however, never got traction in the 1990s. Johansson believes that one reason is that the fossil fuel industry successfully framed the problem as dealing with a far-off, unproven threat, rather than an alternative, economically viable way to develop.
Negotiators didn’t solve the free-rider problem in the 1990s and still haven’t solved it. One solution was and is that any treaty needed to be compulsory, but of course that raised issues of sovereignty. To get a sense of the degree to which the free-rider issue gained traction in U.S. domestic politics, consider what happened to Al Gore before he went to Kyoto to negotiate binding emissions on behalf of the United States. He was hobbled by the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (passed 95 to 0), which held that the United States could not be signatory to any mandatory reduction of greenhouse gas emissions unless the agreement held developing nations to similar reductions in the same period.
I looked at the impasse on climate negotiations and proposed my own solution, which I felt dealt with the free-rider problem and brought the developed and emerging economies into the same boat. I published it as an op-ed in The New York Times. In a nutshell, I suggested coming up with an overall goal for emission reductions, dividing the world into three giant regions that included both developed and emerging nations, and then letting those regions achieve an overall reduction anyway they wanted.
Two weeks after this op-ed came out, I participated in President Clinton’s White House Conference on Global Climate Change. Such is the White House’s convening power that the participants included an elite group of economists, academics, scientists, and industry leaders, really all the people you would want at a conference to mobilize action on climate change. Nothing was mobilized. Why not was summed up in an almost bemused comment by President Clinton. Echoing FDR, who famously remarked to a group of activists, “You’ve convinced me, now go out and make me do it,” Clinton remarked that he wanted to take action on climate change, but that he could not get ahead of the public on the issue, basically telling the participants that there was no public pressure for him to do anything and he couldn’t do anything without it.
One of the goals of the White House conference was to educate the public about the threat so that they would, in fact, make Clinton act on climate change. It didn’t work. Polling out of Stanford University showed that while Democratic concern about climate change remained roughly unchanged before and after the education outreach, GOP concern actually dropped from 67 percent to 55 percent. Much of that drop was attributed to increased partisanship in relation to the Clinton impeachment. It speaks volumes about the fragility of momentum on climate change action that it could be derailed by a president lying about sex.
So it was that the 1990s ended with the scientific clock still trailing reality but rapidly catching up, while the clock of public opinion had barely started ticking. Most in the developed world thought the problem was way off in the future, while those in emerging nations were largely unaware that climate change was even an issue.