Red Sky At Morning

Introduction:

The environmental movement has suffered a series of setbacks at the hands of the Bush Administration. In this winter of our discontent it is important to remember that liberal ideas in western society continue to be dominant, in theory if not always in practice. Liberal ideas, the primacy of the public interest over private interests, so thoroughly set the framework for our thinking about government that even the Bush Administration has to use the language of liberalism, with often comic effect. From Roosevelt’s New Deal, through the activism of the 1950s, 60s and 70s the U.S. has undergone more positive social changes than at any time in our short history. While the President dithers, people at the state and local levels are addressing the big environmental and social issues that are bearing down on us: global warming, social and economic equity, and conservation of ecosystems. These issues will increase in urgency with time and the longer our government refuses to deal with them, the more costly the solutions will be. Although no administration has been as hostile to the environment as Bush’s, in fairness it should be noted no previous administration has dealt with global warming either.

Bush’s ideological cohorts define themselves primarily by what they are not; that is, they are definitively not liberals, but since liberalism defines our political possibilities they have few ideas with which to work. Bush’s support for teaching creationism in public schools, for example, is a combination of political calculation and intellectual sloth. President Bush and his fellow travelers are trying to hold back a rising tide, but they cannot repeal the laws of physics. As the world becomes warmer, more populated, and ecosystems more stressed, we will have to be more intelligent in our economic and political choices, we will have to plan better, and we will have to manage natural systems far more than we have in the past. In this brave new world the advantage will accrue to those people and societies that plan and manage best. Conversely those who do not use care and foresight will only have force and violence to fall back on. In the 1960s and 70s the federal government made a good start on environmental legislation and made substantial progress on air and water pollution, forest protection and public health. We spoke with Gus Speth about some of the history of environmental legislation and policy, in which he was actively involved, and what needs to be done next.

ER: Dean Speth, what is your background?

GS: I had three great years at Yale Law School and towards the end of that time I had a brainstorm: Why don't we create an environmental legal group modeled on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund? I got some fellow law students together, and we approached the Ford Foundation. We got initial funding from the Ford Foundation, and in the end it became The Natural Resources Defense Council. So I got into the environmental field due partly to my interest in environment and partly wanting to do something constructive with my law training. As it happens we got NRDC off the ground in 1970 at the beginning of the most fertile period in the development of U.S. environmental law and policy.
      Then, in 1977 I had the opportunity to go into the Carter Administration at the Council of Environmental Quality. While I was there we prepared the Global 2000 study, released in 1980. That was when I realized we had spent ten years working hard on domestic issues, but internationally things were still going downhill. I realized that the biggest environmental problems were the more global, international ones.
      When I left the Carter Administration, dismissed by the voters, I went to the McArthur Foundation, and they gave us the support to start the World Resources Institute, which has a focus on global-scale environmental issues. I had a wonderful decade doing that.
      Then I went to the United Nations for six years as an administrator of the U.N. Development Programme, which was a marvelous opportunity to focus more on the global poverty issue than the environmental issues, though we built many strong environmental programs when I was at UNDP. Towards the end of that period I was approached by Yale to be the dean at the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Now it's been six years here as dean, and it's been an extraordinarily rewarding experience working with young people and with an interdisciplinary faculty. We have on the faculty ecologists, chemists and other natural scientists, but we also have anthropologists, economists, sociologists, lawyers and a number of other disciplines. It's about half and half between the social sciences and the natural sciences.

ER: That stretches the boundaries of what a School of Forestry does.

GS: Yale’s is the country's oldest forestry school; it started over 100 years ago. In the early 1970s the school had the foresight to begin to transform itself into a school of environmental studies and environmental management. Now the forestry part of the school is perhaps 20 percent, and 80 percent addresses a wide range of other environmental management challenges.

ER: There was a different worldview in the 1970s, more consensus about environmental issues. It seems like everybody was on board then, even President Nixon.

GS: It was an amazing period; everybody was on board. The journalists were intensely interested, with Walter Cronkite leading the charge. The public was concerned and involved. When the word went out that fluorocarbons in aerosol spray cans were damaging the ozone layer, there was a huge drop in their use and in the production of CFCs, voluntarily, even before there was any action under the Montreal Protocol.
      The major effort at that time was to take environmental issues to Washington.
The civil rights movement had shown that when the states were not going to respond adequately, if you wanted to get action on issues you had to go to Washington, so that's where we went.
      Out of Washington came amazing bipartisan support for ten to twelve major pieces of environmental legislation. This was in the 1970s and we haven't seen anything like it either before or after. In 1970 EPA was established and the Council of Environmental Quality was established. The business community was somewhat caught off guard. Things moved faster than they could oppose. I was trying many lawsuits during that time and taking cases to court one after the other, as were my colleagues at NRDC, and it was hard to lose. .
      What drove all of this was the fact that the environmental problems were so visibly apparent. They were acute issues. There were disgusting sights, disgusting water, disgusting air. There were plans to put roads through neighborhoods, to build power plants nearby, to strip mine and clearcut. These were easy targets because they were affecting people with noise and smells and risks and destruction, and the country's economy was so big that these were now not isolated things that you couldn't notice. The Santa Barbara oil spill was the straw that broke the camel's back of the status quo.

ER: What changed since then?

GS: I would say almost everything has changed, and I don't think it has changed simply as a result of electing people hostile to the environment, though we have certainly done that. There have been many fundamental things going on. One is that our efforts worked. We cleaned up a lot of America, so the problems are not as much in your face anymore. The problems are in Indonesia, the problems are in the stratosphere, the problems are in the future and they're chronic; they're difficult to understand and difficult to see. Climate change is a perfect example. That's one part of the dynamic.
      The issues of greatest concern today are more chronic and more difficult to understand, more remote in time and space and psychology generally. At the same time things look better because we succeeded in meeting many of the original environmental objectives of the late sixties and early seventies.
      I think another part is that those in industry, who want to fight back are no longer caught off guard. They're well financed, they do huge public mis-education campaigns; they have vast lobbying forces with big campaign contributions. They are more sophisticated now. When they want public relations ammunition, they fund conservative think tanks that are prepared to churn out the information they want.
      In the meanwhile the environmental community has grown large and has become institutionalized. I'm not one who believes the environmental community has become ossified or lost its way or become bureaucratized, but the concern and the groups that represent that concern are now part of the mainstream American culture. The novelty has worn off.
      In the meanwhile we have had a move to the right in the country. It's a basic shift that has affected a wide range of issues and the attitude about government. Market fundamentalism and a shift in perception about what Washington can do for the country has impacted a range of issues including the environment but by no means only the environment.
      Finally there's been a politicization of the environmental field. You can track this in the voting charts of the League of Conservation Voters. Twenty-five years ago there was a difference between the parties, but it was not nearly as pronounced as it is now. In the 1970s we in the environmental community had a lot of bipartisan support. We're at the point now where it's hard to find a Congressional Democrat without a good environmental record and hard to find a Republican with a good one. The split between the parties is now huge. All of this has combined to make the situation today fundamentally different from the 1970s.

ER: It seems like the stakes are higher now, if that is possible.

GS: As all of this has happened we're now faced with issues that are far more serious than the ones we tackled in the early seventies, in particular climate change. Global warming is an emergency; it's not something that’s going to happen in the future, it's happening now and it's serious. Every day reports come out in Science, Nature, and Geophysical Letters and other journals with scary news about what's going on at the poles, about the impacts of warming on biological diversity and on ecosystem function and stability.

ER: Even if we stopped adding greenhouse gases today, global warming will continue just because of momentum.

GS: The Europeans are talking about trying to stabilize carbon dioxide levels that will allow the temperature not to exceed two additional degrees Celsius of global average warming. We've already added about 0.6 degrees Celsius, and we are committed to doubling this due to past actions. With two degrees of increase of the global average you're talking maybe four or six degrees at the poles; at that point you're talking about the Greenland ice sheet melting. When I talk to scientists they don't think that it's possible to call this uncontrolled experiment on the planet to a halt at 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide, which is about what you ought to associate with about two degrees global average. [Scientists have called global warming an uncontrolled experiment because we don’t have a spare planet to leave untreated as a control. Ed.] They think it's going to shoot right beyond that and talk about 550 ppm and more. So we are facing a huge threat and a huge challenge.

ER:What are the most serious challenges we have to deal with?

GS: We are faced with some serious challenges particularly with climate, and also biodiversity loss and declining water supplies in many areas. To me those are the three most dramatic challenges. Lest we get mired in these problems, I think the important thing to appreciate is what we can do about them.

ER: The states are taking action on climate change when the federal government won’t. This is the reverse of what happened with the civil rights movement, and the environmental movement of the 1970s.

GS: There are now close to thirty states that are putting in place measures that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Many states are enacting renewable energy portfolio goals. New York's goal is a 25 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2015. This is a dramatic change. Other states, such as Connecticut, have greenhouse gas reduction goals for the state. The Connecticut goal is to reduce total greenhouse gas emissions 10 percent below the 1990 level by 2020. That goal has been endorsed by a number of northeast states, and these states are now developing a regional cap and trade program like the one in Europe. Other states are regulating carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, such as Massachusetts; at least one other state, California, is regulating carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles. [Soon after this interview Governor Schwarzeneger announced an ambitious timetable to reduce California’s carbon emissions. Ed.]

We've got this encouraging array of things happening at the state level. The most important thing we can do now on climate is to get every state to adopt an automobile objective like California's, to regulate carbon emissions from power plants like some states are doing, to have a renewable energy portfolio goal like New York, and to have an overall state goal like Connecticut’s.
Things are moving at the state level and at the local level in many places. That's extraordinary, and it will eventually force Washington's hand. In fact, I think the whole position of the Bush Administration is so radically out of touch with reality that it will crumble in the not-to-distant future. When you have former Secretary of State James Baker and others saying we need to do something to protect climate, things are changing in a major way politically. It looks like the last people to get the word will be those in the White House, but they will get the word pretty soon I think. The question will be whether they will do enough.

ER: Businesses need to plan, and the administration's head-in-the-sand approach isn't helping most of them.

GS: Another encouraging thing that's happening is that many farsighted business leaders are seeing the handwriting on the wall. There are scores of companies now that are "voluntarily" reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. I’d put voluntarily in quotation marks because they are anticipating that they are going to be regulated one day. They can achieve a lot of corporate and social learning by getting there now, and they can achieve some competitive advantages by doing it now. If they're multinationals they're regulated in Europe anyhow under the European plans. I think they see this coming, and they're moving ahead of the curve, but it's good to see and it's good to know that Alcoa and Dupont and others can dramatically reduce their emissions. That's encouraging. A lot of these companies are networked together on the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Much of the insurance industry, including the big reinsurance giants in Europe — Swiss Re and Munich Re — are pushing hard to get responsible action on climate, recognizing that extreme weather events are a tremendous risk for them. You've got banks, different companies, and different sectors looking at the question of exposure to, climate risk, and taking these issues more seriously than our federal government. That is being driven by some big money such as CalPERS in California, demanding more responsibility in climate issues. [The California Public Employee Retirement System is the largest in the U.S. Its investment portfolio exceeds $113 billion. Ed.]
      There's an investors summit meeting coming up at the U.N. on climate risk. [The U.N. Foundation organized a meeting held on May 10, 2005 where over 300 institutional investors met to assess the risk posed to their portfolios by climate change. Ed.] There are many environmentally-screened mutual funds now and other screened investment programs, and this is helping to drive the process.
      Another thing that's helping to drive this process is the figurative shot across the bow by a handful of state attorneys general who are suing utilities and others and letting them know that they are going to be held liable for climate damages one day just as the asbestos and tobacco industries have been held responsible for the damage they have done.
      As all this is happening, the business community is responding and the financial and insurance industries are responding. It's not nearly enough, it's too slow, it's late and it's not the sea change that we need, but it does show that there are many people who have common sense and are responding climate change.

ER: India and China are becoming big contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and we have no credibility or leverage to get them to slow it down.

GS: They have to be part of the Kyoto Protocol in the future, or whatever protocol it winds up being. The Chinese greenhouse gas emissions rival ours already. There's much that we will need to do through international agencies to provide incentives to turn the tide in these developing countries. Until the climate-friendly technologies become the cheaper ones, I think the industrial world of rich countries are going to have to provide powerful incentives for the developing world. China is contemplating building hundreds of coal plants. Getting emissions under control can't happen that way.
What should be the goal for the developing world? I don't think you can tell them that they have to start reducing emissions right away, but you can say, your goal ought to be to dramatically and sharply increase your energy efficiency and reduction in your greenhouse gas emissions per unit of output. Output growth for them should overwhelm the decrease in carbon intensity, but eventually they will have to start reducing emissions also.

ER: We could help by monitizing that and start making it to their economic benefit. When alternative energy is cheaper, people will use it.

GS: I don't know if this is the best way to do it but we need some type of climate bank that would provide sufficiently below-market investment resources for climate-friendly technologies and related initiatives.
It's no mystery how to successfully engage the developing countries: it requires determination and significant resources. It's a total cop out to sit on our hands and say, Well, until India and China start behaving on this issue we're not going to do anything either, which is the position that the Senate took in the Byrd-Hagel resolution. [The Byrd-Hagel resolution passed the U.S. Senate 95-0 in 1997 saying the U.S. would not ratify the Kyoto treaty if it harmed the U.S. economy. However no consideration was given to the harm to the U.S. economy caused by climate change. Ed.]
Meanwhile, I think both Mr. Byrd and Mr. Hagel, as well as the two Alaskan senators, have gotten a little religion on the subject. Didn't I read somewhere that they both had voiced some alarm because the melting permafrost up there was so visible? [Ten years ago climate models indicated that climate change would show up first in the higher latitudes. Reuters reports in July 2004 that of 213 native Alaskan villages, 184 face flooding and erosion. Senator Stevens (R-Alaska) has expressed concern and will likely be looking for federal money for seawalls, dikes and relocation. Ed.]

ER: What can individuals do, either by themselves or collectively?

GS: The other dimension where we're beginning to see some response that could be helpful is in individual actions. It's not the dominant consumer pattern, but there is a demand for hybrid vehicles, and there are a number of people who are beginning to think again about solarization and increased energy efficiency in their homes and offices and transportation systems. It's beginning to catch on again.
Eventually we're going to have to get serious about capturing carbon; that is, taking carbon out of emission gases and out of the atmosphere. We shouldn't forget about the forest sector; we shouldn't forget about geologic storage of carbon, and even the possibility of scrubbing carbon directly out of the atmosphere. If we overshoot 450 or 550 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and we want to reduce it, the only way to do that is to grow a lot more trees and have some type of artificial atmospheric carbon removal. Engineers are looking at that now.

ER: Costs of prevention compared to cleanup or mitigation might help sell to the public.

GS: We looked recently at an econometric model that examined a carbon tax that could stabilize U.S. emissions between now and 2030. Let's say we want to stabilize between now and 2030, which isn't enough for the U.S., the cost of that is less than one-half of one percent of GDP in 2030.
This is consistent with econometric modeling that's been done in the United Kingdom where they have made a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent by 2050. They estimate that it will cost 1 percent or 2 percent at most of their GDP by 2050 to do that, so these are not big costs in terms of the risks involved, certainly.

ER: It would help morale if nothing else if people could tie in to meaningful community action.

GS: People have access to what’s going on in their cities, to what they're doing in their states, to what they're doing in lodges and associations that they belong to, and in universities, in a way that they don't in Washington.
      We could have a green university movement in this country. Yale's greenhouse gas emissions exceed those of thirty-two countries, and I bet Harvard's do too and lots of other places. The larger student bodies and larger operations are worse, I suspect, so you could get a real benefit out of a massive shift in the universities in this country. What if the universities started investing their endowments in a climate-friendly way? You can build from things that look like modest efforts or almost symbolic efforts and all of a sudden they're not symbolic at all.
      If the churches across the country are doing things, the temples and synagogues, hospitals, and all kinds of people make commitments to move ahead, pretty soon it adds up. You can act as a consumer at different levels: household associations and other associations. Many people in this country are investors of some type of another and you can be a climate-friendly, environmentally responsible investor.
      We need to bring this issue into our politics at all levels. There are many things that we can do as consumers, as investors, as voters and as employees. It's going to take all of that. If scientists are right, we're rapidly moving into a desperate situation on climate. I go to bed at night saying, Well, I hope these guys are badly wrong because if they're not, we're in real trouble.

ER: The science community has to do a better job of communicating what climate change means.

GS: I think the scientific community has to give much more leadership on this issue than it has. Even the few scientists who get involved in discussions, the ones who think they're speaking out a lot, are probably not speaking out enough, and they are in such a minority.
      I joke sometimes and say that I think all the scientists the government is funding on climate should go on strike until the government starts using the research results they've already produced. But that is facetious, because so many important things are coming out now from current research. We need to be monitoring the oceans and watching the Arctic and the Antarctic like a hawk. The scientists do have to give more leadership on this.
      I'm afraid it's too late already to head off some serious things, but if we want to head off the worst we have to get busy. Only the scientists can communicate these technical and difficult issues to the public, and only the scientists have the credibility to convince people.
      You asked about other kinds of movement. We need the outpouring of public support that we had in the early seventies. Maybe we are seeing the beginnings of that. The other thing that could happen which would precipitate it would be some type of event that would dramatize this issue like the ozone hole did for ozone depletion. One would think that we have these events already in the Arctic. It may take some major event like that to galvanize all the forces of society for change.

Additional Reading:

Red Sky at Morning. James Gustave Speth 2004, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.