The world revolves around Washington. It was there, in May 1953, that Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass warned a scientific conference that the carbon dioxide being put into the atmosphere when humans burnt ever more oil, coal and gas would heat the planet, with the impacts being obvious by the century.
It was there in November 1965 that President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee released a report saying Plass’s concerns might well be justified.
It was there in January 1982 at another scientific meeting that at American and German scientists warned “the signs are so ominous that we must expect (a large climatic impact) and take action to avoid it.”
And it was there, on Thursday, that The Trump administration announced its intention to pull out of both the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), alongside many other organisations.
By the late 1970s the build up of carbon dioxide was attracting serious attention by ever more alarmed scientists (see, for example, the 1979-1982 CO2 Newsletter I recently uncovered). President Carter’s science advisor asked skeptical scientists to “kick the tires” on these views. The “Charney Report,” produced to meet this request said they could find no reason to doubt that if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled, then there would be a warning of anywhere between 1.5 to 3 degrees.
The incoming Reagan administration was uninterested (or, hostile) to these concerns. By 1985 two things had changed. The scientific consensus around carbon dioxide build-up as a problem had become even firmer, and thanks to the discovery of the Ozone Hole, the credibility of atmospheric scientists was sky-high (sorry about that, but it was there and I had to use it). After a pivotal meeting in Villach, Austria scientists grabbed every alarm lever they could, and pulled. In December, Carl Sagan gave his famous, gripping, testimony, In… Washington.
Various senators, including a certain Democrat of Delaware by the name of Joe Biden, put forward “Climate Protection” Bills.
Speaking to reporters after giving testimony in Washington (where else?) in June 1988, scientist James Hansen famously said “it’s time to stop waffling and say that the greenhouse effect is here.”
Well, if there HAS to be a treaty…
1989 saw a flurry of international summits, both specifically on climate, and “sustainable development” more generally. Not coincidentally, the “Global Climate Coalition”, made up of mostly but not exclusively US oil companies, automobile makers and other usual suspects (on their attacks on the IPCC, which the Trump administration is also pulling out of, see here).
As I wrote when President George HW Bush died, the US could have got in on the ground floor. He didn’t. Once the push for a treaty became inevitable, the Americans decided to make the best of it, and prevent outcomes that would be too challenging (some within the US Department of State had felt bruised over the speed of a treaty to protect the Ozone Layer, a few years earlier.)
The main sticking point for the Americans – and there were competing factions within the Bush administration, which led to some whiplash statements and negotiating positions, at least until the “skeptics” won – was that targets and timetables for emissions reductions by rich nations were not to be included in the any climate treaty. As Bush repeatedly and publicly said “American way of life is not negotiable.”
Only once the offending targets and timetables by rich countries were removed from the negotiating text did the Bush Administration agree that Bush would attend the Rio Earth Summit and sign the “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”
Article 2 of that treaty makes for rueful reading now. It states that the goal is
“to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.”
Fine words butter no parsnips.
Thirty years of dummy spits
However, the idea that rich countries, which had caused the problem and were wealthy, should go first on emissions reductions could only be delayed, not defeated. The first “Conferences of the Parties”, in early 1995 ended with the Berlin Mandate, calling on rich countries to come to the 1997 COP with a plan, which ended up being held in Kyoto Protocol.. This sparked a huge pre-emptive effort against the “Kyoto Protocol” driven by the Global Climate Coalition, with other bad-faith actors adding their two cents (some will have seen the play Kyoto, about the Climate Council), leading the US Senate to vote, 95-0 in favour of a motion that said, in effect, “we’re not cutting until poor countries agree to”
Bush’s son, “Dubya” on the campaign trail had said that power plants would need regulation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. After he won the 2000 Presidential election by a single vote – in the Supreme Court- he pulled the US out of Kyoto (and the Global Climate Coalition shut up shop, its job done).
The US – with help from Australia – pushed a “technology will fix it” line, but once Kyoto was ratified by enough nations to become law, in 2005 (a quid pro quo with Russia, which wanted World Trade Organisation membership), then the US had to re-engage.
Famously at the 2008 G8 meeting Bush said – revealingly – “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”
The 2009 “last chance to save the world” meeting at Copenhagen ended in disarray and the next five years saw the pieces of the dropped vase were glued back together in time for the Paris Agreement, which managed not to mention the dread words “fossil fuels.”
Trump announced in 2017 that he would pull out of the Paris Agreement. That man Biden from 1986 re-entered in 2021, and Paris, and introduced huge incentives for “clean tech” (renewable energy and other more dubious ventures, such as direct air capture under the “Inflation Reduction Act and other pump-priming schemes. Although the IRA should have made big business happy, they decided not to try to defend it in the face of Trump’s obvious hostility.
And now this. A couple of random observations;
As the costs pile up, and reality becomes harder and harder to ignore
The Trump administration is not doing what is in the long-term interest of American capital, which could have made more money via Biden’s IRA. While there was a “logic” to anti-Kyoto activity, this anti-climate crusade seems far more ideological
What next?
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
IF the US goes ahead and pulls out (and there’s little reason to believe they won’t – their claims should be taken both literally and seriously) then several things happen.
There will be an audible sigh of relief from Australia – especially Adelaide – that they lost out on hosting the next COP.
The various academics who critique the whole UNFCCC process as not fit for purpose will try (and sometimes fail) to keep from saying “I told you so.”
There will be a blizzard of academic papers on “multilateralism” and bilateral deals between states, with the focus switching to what cities and technologies can do.
People invested in the COP process will insist it continues, and say the role is to keep the US seat warm for the glorious day in 2029 when a Democratic president restores “order” and “sanity.”
Regardless of what happens, we should remember the following
When Gilbert Plass made his warning, humans (mostly in the West) were pumping out about 6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 314ppm
When the UNFCCC was agreed, emissions were about 23 billion tonnes and the CO2 level was 355ppm
Today, despite all the pledges, all the renewables and so forth, we are pumping out about 40 billion tonnes, and the CO2 in the atmosphere is 428ppm, and galloping upwards.
More emissions means more CO2 hanging around in the atmosphere. More CO2 means more heat in the Earth System, means more extreme weather events and – between them – a remorseless rise in temperatures, with all that that entails.
