THIRTEEN
The U.S. public entered the 2000s with concerns other than climate change on its mind. If anything, the overall mood of the country was complacent. We were coming off the longest period of prosperity in American history. The U.S. budget was in surplus for the first time in memory, and while the dot-com stock bubble burst in March 2000, the real damage to equities was still in the future. Fast forward ten years to 2010, and the mood was anything but complacent. The events of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror, the Great Recession, the return of huge deficits and mass unemployment all contributed to a very different state of mind. One thing hadn’t changed from the previous decade, though: global warming remained a matter of marginal concern for the broad public.
The dispiriting message: Americans were not seeing climate change as a threat during good times, when there were fewer crises to distract the public, nor were they seeing climate change as a threat in bad times, when the public was more attuned to other potential dangers. One reason was the persistent efforts of the deniers to confuse the public. Another major factor: few people in positions of power were asking the public to see climate change as a problem.
A meta factor that has only become more evident over the past twenty years has been an increasing divergence of the interests of the public and matters of public interest. Contributing to this has been the partisanship and political demonization that accelerated with Newt Gingrich’s takeover of Congress in 1994, accelerated during the Clinton impeachment hearings, and has been fueled subsequently by the advent of the Tea Party and the election of Donald Trump. Part and parcel of this syndrome has been the mockery of expertise, an infantile trend of “owning the libs,” and a general trivialization of political discourse.
The decade began with a U.S. presidential election. One of the candidates, Vice President Al Gore, had been a vocal internal advocate for action on climate change during his two terms in the Executive Office Building. During the campaign? Silence.
He talked about Social Security a lot. He talked about jobs. He talked about a lot of things, but he spoke very little about climate change.
For those of us who were looking for a leader to raise the profile of the issue, this was disappointing but not necessarily surprising. Gore’s electoral strategy focused on holding on to the rust-belt states—Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia—and in the minds of his strategists, this meant, among other things, not alienating the big unions such as the United Auto Workers and the United Mine Workers. I felt that this strategy made little sense, since his position on global warming and environmental issues was well known. Hiding those positions during a campaign was not going to fool anyone and would only underscore his reputation as a slick politician.
As for the judgment of his pollsters and strategists that climate change was not an issue for the voters he needed? Unfortunately, they were probably dead right. No one who cared about the issue was going to vote for George W. Bush, an oil guy from an oil state. And certainly anyone concerned about the issue knew that, once elected, Gore would have been a far better advocate for action than Bush.
But would it have hurt Gore to identify climate change as a critical issue facing our planet? He had the credibility of the world’s most august scientific institutions behind him, and he could have made the case that dealing with the threat could be an economic plus, while the consequences of climate change could result in economic disaster. He also could have reassured the unions that he would continue the policies that contributed to the unparalleled prosperity of the Clinton years. In any event, where were the unions going to go? It defied logic that they would turn out for Bush, who came from the most anti-union faction of the Republican Party.
As it turned out, Gore won the popular vote by a substantial margin but lost rust-belt states Ohio and West Virginia. He also lost (but, infamously, may have won) Florida. The deciding factor had nothing to do with climate change or Gore’s environmental policies. Rather it was Ralph Nader, whose presence in the race siphoned off precious votes in two critical states.
Sometime after the election, I caught up with Gore backstage after he gave a talk at New York’s Beacon Theater. I asked why he hadn’t made global warming a part of his campaign. He was quite candid, saying, “What about the UAW?”
Soon after Bush entered office, his administration rammed through a massive tax cut (“We won. It’s our due,” Vice President Cheney famously remarked at the time), and deficits returned with a vengeance. Bush also vigorously started appointing fossil fuel and industry lobbyists to positions relating to climate change and environment, a fox-guarding-the-chicken-coop policy almost as egregious as Donald Trump’s later approach.
If the Clinton years represented a lost opportunity on climate change because of political timidity, during the George W. Bush years, the United States actually retreated from confronting the problem even as the evidence mounted that the effects of climate change were already here in the form of wildfires, floods, and other expensive natural disasters.
Within two hours of Bush being sworn in, his chief of staff, Andrew Card, issued a memo placing a hold on new regulations, withdrawing regulations not yet published in the Federal Register, and postponing regulations that were not yet in effect. This included all environmental regulations. One of these was a Clinton rule on energy efficiency—a key tool to reduce carbon emissions. Ultimately, this rollback was blocked in the courts, but the fight set the tone for the administration: instead of looking for ways to curb greenhouse gas emissions, advocates for action on climate change found themselves desperately trying to hold on to meager climate initiatives implemented by prior administrations.
As for the quality of Bush appointments to sensitive environmental positions, consider Steven Griles, a lobbyist for the coal industry, who was named deputy secretary of the interior, the cabinet department with responsibility for drilling and mining on public lands. During his short time in office, Griles had a “come on in, take a seat, and can I get you a cup of coffee?” policy for mining interests, with visits often brokered by legendary fixer Jack Abramoff. Griles lied to investigators about these ties, ultimately pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, and was sentenced to ten months in prison.
Another typical appointment was Jeffrey Holmstead, who put aside his work as an attorney representing the nation’s worst air polluters to take charge of the division of EPA responsible for regulating air pollution. Bush’s head of NASA for his second term was Michael Griffin, who tried to muzzle James Hansen, the agency’s most celebrated expert on climate change. During an interview with NPR, he was at best blasé about global warming, doubting that “it was a problem we must wrestle with.”
Perhaps his worst appointment was Philip Cooney, named as head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. A former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, Cooney maintained his close ties to the fossil fuel industry in his new position as chief White House advocate for the environment. Cooney went beyond muzzling experts (though he did that too) to actually editing the work produced by them. Specifically, he made 364 editorial changes to the administration’s plan to deal with climate change, most of which, a subsequent House investigation revealed, served to amplify scientific uncertainty and downplay the human contribution to climate change. Here’s a summary sentence from that House report: “The Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers.” The administration was directly contradicting the scientific consensus on the key elements of climate change. Once the scandal was exposed, Cooney was forced to resign.
It was no surprise that the administration refused to abide by the Kyoto treaty on climate change. During one interview, Bush said that Kyoto would have “wrecked” our economy. The 191 countries that ratified the treaty clearly didn’t feel that way about their own economies. Bush did have half a point in arguing that the treaty did not require emissions reductions from China and India, which, even then, were on their way to becoming the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. Still, given the fossil fuel credentials of all his appointments, it stretches credulity to contend that citing China and India was anything more than a convenient excuse.
President Bush clearly wanted nothing to do with climate change, but an opportunity to force him to confront the issue arose in 2004 during his second presidential election. The Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry, had excellent credentials on the issue and a deep bench of advisers conversant with all the ways it might be presented to voters as both a threat to our way of life and an opportunity to spur economic growth. It was an opportunity not taken.
Kerry focused on an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, on jobs, and on affordable health care, and while he gave a couple of speeches on climate change, at no point was it the issue of the day. A campaign team will prep the major media with the issues that the candidate will be focusing on in the coming days. If climate change is not on the list or near the top of the list, the political reporters are not going to focus on the issue. I had numerous conversations with various Kerry campaign aides during that election, and climate was never near the top.
As was the case with the Gore campaign, the real damage of the neglect of the issue was to relegate it to second-class status in the mainstream press. During a presidential election, the political reporters dominate the space in a newspaper or newscast. If the Kerry campaign had featured global warming as an issue, the political press would have covered it, particularly because there was such a sharp contrast between the seriousness with which Kerry took the issue and Bush’s dismissive attitude. And if the political press had covered the issue, it would have told the public that this was serious. Instead, coverage of climate change was mostly buried during the months that politics dominated the news agenda.
There’s a bit of a catch-22 in this. Kerry didn’t make climate change a major issue during the campaign because his advisers told him that it would not help him get elected. They were right, but one reason that it was not a major concern for voters was that no presidential candidate was making an eloquent case that it should be a major concern.fn1
As it turned out, through most of the decade, news coverage of climate change was at best intermittent. Without the rocket fuel of the issue becoming a major issue in a presidential campaign, much of the coverage it did receive had to do with the science or the faux outrage from the right over various trumped-up scandals like Climategate. More in-depth coverage was left to books, and there were plenty to choose from.
In 2006, Al Gore published An Inconvenient Truth, accompanied by a documentary. The film became a sensation, winning two Academy Awards, and the book became a best seller.
There were several other books that year that tackled the issue from various angles. My book, Winds of Change, explored the role of climate in the rise and fall of civilizations. Elizabeth Kolbert published her reporting on climate change in the high latitudes in Field Notes from a Catastrophe, and Australian scientist Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers came out as well. All these books and several more received broad coverage and prominent book reviews. The following year, Al Gore and the IPCC jointly shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on climate change, which is about as much attention as one can get. Did it make a difference in moving public opinion? Unfortunately, it did not.
The problem was not that the public was uninformed, although they were, but rather that the issue had become partisan after the Clinton impeachment, and facts and risks were ignored or adjusted depending on the source. For the most part Democrats understood that climate change was a problem in the 2000s, though not enough felt the threat sufficiently imminent to vote on the issue. Most Republicans, however, saw it as a Democratic issue pushed by bleeding hearts and Greens.
Moreover, the president of the United States, George W. Bush, dismissed the threat, so that scoffing at global warming became something of a loyalty test for Republicans. This led to the bizarre situation in which some of the states most at risk for climate change had governors who dismissed, derided, and ducked the issue. Then governor of Florida Jeb Bush helped pioneer the feint “I’m not a scientist” when asked about the issue. He also questioned whether scientists agreed that it was caused by humans (he’s since changed his public views). Subsequent Republican governors Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis only grew more bombastic about the issue even as global warming inflicted economic harm on their state. Texas governor Rick Perry dismissed global warming as a “phony mess.” Sonny Perdue, governor of Georgia through most of the 2000s, was steadfast in his dismissal of the problem and maintained this position when he became Trump’s secretary of agriculture.
I suspect that all the politicians who dismiss global warming despite its threat to the economies of their states made a political calculation that their voters cared more about their leaders hewing to the party line than acknowledging climate change as a real and present danger.
It’s tempting to explain this as an issue of education and, in fact, Pew research has shown that around the world, more-educated people are more concerned about climate change than the lesser educated. But that same study by Pew in 2019 showed that four of the ten most highly educated nations on earth—Australia, Canada, the United States, and Israel—had a relatively low percentage of people who cited climate change as a major concern. As Anthony Leiserowitz pointed out, three of those countries are English-speaking former frontier colonies, have major interests in fossil fuels, and also have an active denier movement (as Australia’s former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull put it in a 2020 debate on the Murdoch empire’s impact on global warming, they “have turned this issue of physics into an issue of values or identity”). As for Israel, the low level of concern about global warming (the lowest of thirty-eight nations in the Pew study) is a bit of a mystery, since Israel could be hurt by a number of climate change impacts such as sea level rise, stresses on fresh water, and temperature rises that have already made parts of the Middle East uninhabitable. It could be that Israelis have plenty on their minds with hostile neighbors threatening war on a daily basis, or it could be that Israelis feel that their extraordinary technological expertise will keep them safe. They might be mindful, however, that climate change will impact their neighbors who don’t have Israeli expertise, and that could be destabilizing for Israel as well.
Just three weeks after President Bush was inaugurated for his second term in 2005, the Kyoto Protocol came into force—on paper. In fact, there was very little force behind it. Thanks to Senate Resolution 98, introduced by Senators Byrd of West Virginia and Hagel of Nebraska and passed 95 to 0 in 1997, there was no chance that the United States would ratify the treaty, because it did not impose emissions reductions on China, India, and other developing nations.
Here’s what was supposed to happen with the Kyoto agreement: by 2012, the developed nations were supposed to lower their greenhouse gas emissions to at least 4 percent under 1990 levels. Looked at from this narrow perspective, the treaty was a success because thirty-six nations handily beat that goal (although most of the success came from the modernization of the former Soviet states and the economic pullback during the Great Recession of 2008–2009, which cut global emissions by 14 percent).
If the goal, however, was to stabilize international GHG emissions, the treaty was an utter failure. Globally, emissions from combustion grew by 58 percent between 1990 and 2012 (the date chosen for the first test of the treaty’s performance). Much of that increase came from China, which, for instance, accounted for 71 percent of the increase in emissions in 2012. That same year, U.S. emissions dropped by 4 percent.
Clearly, the greenhouse gas situation would be better today had China and India joined a treaty requiring emission reductions. A combination of incentives and disincentives might have guided the two giant nations toward development paths less dependent on fossil fuels. This does not let the Bush administration off the hook. What incentive did China have to agree to cut emissions when the president of the world’s largest economy was actively disputing that climate change posed any threat at all—and also refusing to abide by the treaty?
The first decade of the twenty-first century ended as the hottest decade since reliable global temperature records began in the 1800s. And yet the decade ended with most of the public still thinking that the impacts of climate change were speculative and way off in the future and that the role of humans in climate change was still a matter of active debate among scientists. Following the end of the decade, Anthony Leiserowitz offered a depressing accounting of change in public opinion. He found that a group he labeled “dismissive” (those who believed that global warming was a hoax) more than doubled between 2008 and 2010 to 16 percent of the public, and the segment of the public he called “alarmed” dropped from 18 percent to 10 percent. He attributed this to a “perfect storm” of economic factors, disgust with Washington, and the efforts of deniers. Thus, the decade ended with less public alarm and more doubt about climate change, even as most of the major scientific questions about whether global warming posed a threat had been long since settled.