
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |
A professor of biological sciences at Stanford University, he has been arguing
the dangers of human-induced climate change for over two decades. In this
interview, he outlines the 'best guess' global warming scenario which has been
arrived at by the bulk of scientists. He also explains how the challenge
of finding new carbon free energy sources can be met, and why the 1997 Kyoto
Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions was a crucial event for the
world, even if it is not ratified by the United States.
 |  |  |
Should we take comfort in the fact that the aerosols can offset the
greenhouse gases?
Several people have said: 'Well, isn't it a good thing that our industrial
progress has produced not just carbon dioxide but sulfur aerosols, which cool
us back down?' And I've always said I didn't like the idea of using acid rain
to solve global warming, because those aerosols are not only bad for ecosystems
when they rain acids into the lakes and streams and soils, but they're also
part of the air pollutants which, when we breathe, we know from statistical
tests, leads to increased lung and respiratory disease and what we call excess
deaths, which sounds very clinical unless somebody in your family happens to be
susceptible to that kind of air pollution.
Some people want to shove it in the stratosphere--what we call geo-engineering.
That at least wouldn't have health effects. But the aerosol offset is only
partial. And even if it would offset the global warming almost completely,
it's not going to leave the world's climate unchanged, because there'll be
pockets in the world that'll actually be cooler, then other pockets much
warmer, so you'll have blobs of warming and blobs of cooling. And that's a
change, because our water supplies, our agriculture, and our ecosystems, they
live locally, not globally. They don't care about 2 degree global mean change.
They care about what happens in their region. And having regional aerosols
offsetting some of the global effects is not going to prevent regions from
still being disturbed. And we're still going to have climate disturbance if we
try to solve global warming by regional air pollution, to say nothing of the
health effects and the environmental effects of that air pollution.

The other uncertainty concerning the magnitude of the global warming change
has to do with the feedbacks that operate. Some people have argued that maybe
the climate isn't as sensitive as all that, in which case you'd get a smaller
change rather than a bigger one.
Scientists don't have a Hippocratic oath, but we have to tell the truth.
Everybody's truth is relative. But our truth means a wide range of
possibilities that we can imagine. And I can imagine so-called feedback
processes, where if you warm up the earth, you melt snow and ice, which adds
further warming. If you do that, it makes the clouds taller, which makes them
trap more heat, instead of wider. And if I conjure up these feedbacks, I can
end up expecting that we could have climate change that's catastrophic in the
next century.
I can also conjure up another set of feedbacks: The clouds get wider; it
gets drier in between the clouds. There are a number of feedbacks we can
conjure up, which makes it warm up only a degree or so, at the relatively mild
end of the spectrum. Well, most scientists would argue that these very mild
and very catastrophic outcomes are plausible, maybe even a 10 percent chance of
each of them. But the bulk of the likelihood is somewhere between the end of
the world and the "good for you" scenarios that you see all the time in the
newspapers and in the Congressional debates.
The bulk of scientists are pretty straight about saying this is a probability
distribution. And right now our best guess is that we're expecting warming on
the order of a few degrees in the next century. It's our best guess. We do not
rule out the catastrophic 5 degrees or the mild half or one degree. And the
special interests, ..... from deep ecology groups grabbing the 5 degrees as if
it's the truth, or the coal industry grabbing the half degree and saying, "Oh,
we're going to end up with negligible change and CO2's a
fertilizer," and then spinning that as if that's the whole story--that's the
difference between what goes on in the scientific community and what goes on in
the public debate.

Let's say you've convinced everybody that the probable climate change for
doubling would be on the order of a few degrees, in the middle. Then the
question will be asked: Why should that matter to me? Why should I bother
about that?
Well, for many years, when we talk about a few degrees warming, most people
say, "A few degrees? So what? If I change my thermostat a few degrees, I'll
live fine. The trees over there on the north side of the slope are already 5
degrees cooler than the trees on the south side of the slope." Of course, if
you look carefully, you find they have different trees on the north side and
the south side. So the point is that one or two degrees is about the
experience that we have had in the last 10,000 years, the era of human
civilization. There haven't been--globally averaged, we're
talking--fluctuations of more than a degree or so. So we're actually getting
into uncharted territory from the point of view of the relatively benign
climate of the last 10,000 years, if we warm up more than a degree or two.

So you're saying that globally averaged, there is a significant difference
in this shift in degrees upward?
Globally averaged, more than a few degrees is significant. After all, when ice
sheets came down to Manhattan Island (you can find the scratches from the ice
still in Central Park on the rocks), that was 20,000 years ago. It took about
10,000 years for nature--not us--to warm the earth up. Well, it warmed up 5 to
7 degrees Celsius, something like 10 Fahrenheit. It did that in 5,000 to
10,000 years. The average rate of change is one degree or so per thousand
years.
Now, what happened? The trees that are now in Canada (the spruce trees and the
arboreal forest) and the oaks that we now have in the middle Atlantic states,
for example, they were all compressed far to the south, in-in the current US
southeast, 20,000 years ago. They moved over the 10,000 year transition to
where they now are. In their process of moving, giant species like the saber
tooth cats and the mammoths went extinct, not just due to climate change, but
that was a piece of the story.
Today, we're talking about humans modifying the climate so that if we're lucky,
we only get another degree in the next century. That's one degree per century,
not one degree per millennium, which is the natural average rates. It could be
several degrees per century, is our best guess. Compare that to this, to the
degree per millennium of history, and now ask one more factor: How are the
species of trees, for example, and birds and so forth, how are they going to
migrate? In history, they just migrated. Now they have to cross factories,
farms, freeways, and urban settlements. So if you have the combination of
fragmented habitats with nature getting into smaller and smaller patches, now
you change the climate ten times faster than the history for which they have
experience, this seems to me an absolute prescription for an extinction crisis
where we lose a large fraction of the species now on earth. The real question
is: Does anybody care?

Let's say you've convinced me and I do care. Now we turn to the notion of
mitigation. I say: Yes, I'd like to do something about it, but I've just
realized that most of our energy in the world comes from fossil fuels. What
makes you think this is even a feasible problem to solve?
It's certainly not feasible that we're going to solve the underlying cause of
greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere in a decade, or even two. How did we
in the western countries get rich? We had a Victorian Industrial Revolution.
We had sweatshop, polluted cities, coal-burning power plants, and industry and
so forth. Then we got tired of the loss of quality of life associated with
that kind of crowding, social inequity, and pollution. And through sets of
rules and through inventive technology, we invented a better system. We're
still hooked on it, but we're more efficient than we were. Now we talk to
China and India and other developing countries. And we're talking about global
warming. They're saying, "Wait a minute. You guys used the Victorian
Industrial Revolution to get rich. Now you're telling us there's a reason we
can't do the same thing."
So it's very difficult to expect that the world is going to automatically
overnight turn off its addiction to carbon-based energy. We're going to be on
it for a while. But that doesn't mean that we can't begin right now (in fact,
we should have begun three decades ago) developing the kinds of technologies
that we need over the next several decades to replace the more polluting
Victorian industrial technologies. I mean, after all, what is the internal
combustion engine that we all love to drive around in? It's a Victorian
technology. The next phase up is what we call hybrid cars, with a mix of
electric batteries and so forth. And the phase after that is fuel cells.
They're three or four times more efficient. They don't produce nearly as many
pollutants. They don't require a large balance of payments deficit for
oil-importing countries. Well, they're coming. The question is: Are we going
to let them come at the slow rate that they'll happen naturally? Or should we
say we can protect the climate at the same time that we can have industrial
development?
What we really need is a global technology policy to try to accelerate the rate
of development of clean technologies, and to help especially the developed
world not just develop by old technologies, but to literally leapfrog over the
Victorian Industrial Revolution right to high tech, saving themselves air
polluted cities at the same time that they move to more efficient systems. But
it won't happen automatically in less than a half a century. We need
planetary-scale policy if we're going to accelerate it so that it happens in
decades, not in a century, and if we're going to prevent doubling or tripling
of CO2 along the way.

But these technologies, even though they're more efficient, they still
basically use fossil fuels. A fuel cell will still use methanol as the feed
stock for hydrogen. You still have the problem that even if everything is more
efficient by quite a big factor, and you have a growing population in India and
China with a growing standard of living, a vastly increased energy resource,
that that's fighting against any efficiencies you make. Do you have to
basically attack the issue of where your energy comes from?
Those of us who argue that we should have at least an initial technology
strategy to try to go to more efficient technologies (fuel cells, switching
from coal to gas), we recognize that those still produce CO2. But
I'd much rather see CO2 double in 2150 than in 2050. Because the
rate at which climate changes is dramatically important for how much damage it
does, because it affects our capacity to adapt, and it especially affects
nature's capacity to adapt.
At the same time, if we had a price on carbon, if we weren't all allowed to
use the atmosphere as a free sewer, then the inventive genius of our industrial
folks (and they're really quite clever; they just need incentives) to invent
non-carbon-based alternatives would be stimulated. As long as the price of
energy remains so that a bottle of mineral water in the store costs three times
more per gallon than gasoline at the pump, we haven't got incentives for that
kind of development.
So I think that yes, in the short run, we go toward efficiency. In the long
run, we have to deal with the overall size and scale of the human population.
It has to start to stabilize. And we have to begin to develop those
technologies that have much less impact. But in the end, we can't keep growing
indefinitely, because we will run out of room and we'll run out of atmospheric
capacity to continuously absorb our wastes.
There are U.S. Congressmen who would say that it's not fair because it
only involves developed countries and not the developing countries; and since
these countries will become the major emitters in the next 20 years, it doesn't
make sense.
The criticism I've heard of Kyoto is, "It's not fair to countries like the U.S.
or Japan because the developing world is left out." But there are two big
facts to remember. Number one, if you look at all the carbon dioxide that's
been emitted into the atmosphere in the last 100 years, 80 percent of it came
from the rich countries, only 20 percent from those poor countries. And we
have a factor of 10 or more per capita use of those fossil fuels. So how dare
us ask those groups, which have had a minority share in the problem, to all of
a sudden have an equal share in the solution when they're relatively
impoverished, and we use that very pollution to get rich? We obviously have to
take the first steps--in any world, in any ethics, at least that I personally
share.
On the other hand, that having been said, we can't leave the developing world
out very long, because if only the rich countries participate, then we can't
make a very big difference. Because the big numbers in terms of how much junk
we're going to throw in the air column, when the now developing countries with
large population start emitting at anywheres near per capita rates that we
have, we can't let that happen unless we're looking at a quadrupling of
CO2 over the next century or two, which to me is unacceptable.
So what that means is, we have to begin allowing the developing world to
leapfrog past the Victorian Industrial Revolution to new technologies. And
that's going to involve having them in the game. But they're not even going to
listen unless we have ten years to show them that we're serious, by taking the
first step. And how can somebody who created 80 percent of the problem not be
responsible for taking the first step?

So the developed world has to pay for this, you're saying, initially?
The developed world (a) created the bulk of the problem, and (b) has the bulk
of the resources to fix it. Obviously, it has to pay for it initially.
And we're going to be inheriting the pollution that comes from China and
India and Indonesia and so forth, over the next century. So it's in our
interests to help them pick a development path that's different than the one
that we used 100 years ago to get to our status, and namely that's switching
toward more high technology and less polluting energy systems as they
develop.

The other argument you hear from industry is that the U.S. economy is the
economy which drives the world. It's one third of the world economy. It's the
main reason everything's working. And if you put a tax on energy or you try
and transfer wealth from the US to developing countries, you threaten
this.
Well, there's been a lot of specious nonsense in the climate change debate.
And one of the worst exaggerations are those people who say that Kyoto protocol
and any climate policy is going to bankrupt the western countries. I actually
saw somebody have the nerve in a Detroit newspaper to say they were going to
lose 68,500 jobs, which is below the noise level of how many jobs will be
created the next few decades. This is pseudo-precision if ever there was any.
We haven't got a clue that that's going to happen at all. They completely
neglected the fact that in the process of increasing the price of conventional
energy, this sends signals, market signals, to whole new industries which
spring up to deal with efficiency.
So what we're really talking about is not a threat to the economy at all.
We're talking about a threat to certain industries and interests. And that's
real. If I were a coal miner, I'd be very worried about climate policy. And
that's legitimate. And I think we as a decent society have to think about
transitions to help people in those positions. But that doesn't mean that the
overall economy is going to be damaged.
The other factor is: This stuff cited all the time about how expensive it is,
forgets the fact that we're not going to have to solve the problem alone in the
U.S. or Japan; that we can look around the world and find the cheapest place to
abate carbon, and do that; or we don't have to abate carbon by just dropping
fossil fuel injected CO2. We can reduce methane or nitrous oxide,
which we can do through agriculture. And a lot of the initial steps can be
done for free. In fact, we can make money doing it.
And our own economies are not perfectly efficient. This is what's called the
"no regrets market failure". That's the fancy lingo, which basically says we
don't all have the best motors, the best lightbulbs, the most efficient cars
and industrial processes. We're not perfect. That the industry standard is way
ahead of the industry practice. And therefore, if climate policy forced us to
be more efficient, we actually would be replacing inefficient technologies with
more efficient ones that would cost us less money to buy them than the money
we're saving in fuels.
So therefore it's utter nonsense to argue that there's some bankruptcy from the
western economies from the Kyoto policies, because it makes unrealistic
assumptions that special interests just keep pushing, because they don't want
to see their individual clients hurt. And there will be individual clients
that will be hurt.

The other thing they say is that it wouldn't make any difference anyway.
It's such a trivial contribution to the carbon problem that it would be offset
in a few years.
If Kyoto is the only thing that happens, it only makes a 5 or a 10 percent
difference on the time frame of a century. Nobody rational is arguing that
Kyoto's the only thing that should happen. It's step one. Now, what happens
is, the developed countries that created the problem take step one and show
that they're serious and they're willing to do something about what they've
created, and that they're sending the right signal to the developing world.
Now step two involves getting the developing world in and helping to set up an
international set of partnerships for technology transfer and development.
That's very important. And step three is, in the process of developing these
alternative technologies, what you then do is, you make the future cheaper.
How does that work? We're expecting to run out of oil eventually. Right?
We've been going up, up, up. The U.S. has already gone over the top and
imports a good fraction of its oil. Well, the same thing's going to happen in
the world. We're going to go to the maximum production some time shortly after
the turn of the century. In that case, prices are going to go up. We'll have
to switch to alternatives. So if climate policy pushes us in that direction
anyway, it means those alternatives, when they come online 10-20-30 years down
the line, will come online cheaper than if we wait till then to need them,
because we'll have put the research effort now. So what that means is that we
make the future cheaper in the long run and have less disruption then, by these
kinds of policies.
So what we are doing is, we're spending a little bit of a premium up front in
order to have environmental pollution reduced and in order to have a safer,
more viable and sustainable set of technologies in the future. The question
is: Is this generation willing to make an investment in the future? And I
think the answer is yes, but only when people aren't confused by that baffling
debate where the "end of the world" and the "good for you" types are constantly
getting attention on and off in the political and the media debate.

You talk about specious nonsense from industry. On the green side, I've
interviewed people from environmental groups who've said they don't like coal,
they don't much like gas, they don't like oil, they don't like nuclear, they
don't like hydro. And with a straight face, they'll say the world's energy can
be supplied from solar and wind and biomass.
The world's energy system is going to have to be mixed. We can't just have one
kind. There was a report a long time ago called A Time To Choose.
Well, we don't want to choose one. We want to choose a lot. There's a concept
in economics called the marginal dollar. Where do I invest my next marginal
dollar? Well, the first thing I do is, I split it into small change and I
invest in a lot of things, because it's not clear what the price of all these
alternatives are going to be until we start inventing them. What was the price
of computers and their ability when we first started distributing them widely,
20 years ago? Prices were high. Capability was low. Now the prices are
infinitesimal in terms of the capability, relative to what we had before.
The same kind of thing could be expected to happen in energy and in other kinds
of industries. But you have to have experience. The economists call it
learning by doing. Now, how do you learn by doing? You got to do. And you're
not going to do if there's not an incentive to start. So that's the role of
government: to help provide those incentives, to get these fledgling and
alternative technologies the practice and experience so that we can begin to
get the prices down, get the bugs worked out, rather than to wait till we have
an absolute certain crisis, and then we go into crisis mode and we have
terrible dislocation.
Best analogy I have is: When OPEC (for political reasons, not for
environmental reasons) dramatically raised the price of oil in 1973, well, this
was very disruptive to the world economy. People literally died in India and
Pakistan because it coincided with the drought, and the price of fertilizer
skyrocketed at the same time the droughts occurred. What we learned in that
was two things. One is, you can't have radical price rises in a short period
of time. That really does hurt the economy. It's the steepness. The second
thing we learned is that over the next ten years the rate of energy efficiency
improvement, instead of creeping along at 1 percent efficiency improvement per
year, took a dramatic jump, went up a factor of several above that, because the
price was high and people had an incentive to invent more efficient
technologies.
So if we continue to have an artificially depressed price of energy (which is
especially true in China, it's true in the U.S. and in other places where they
don't charge the full price for the damages that our current energy create),
then we don't have the incentives to develop the alternatives. And without
incentives, how can we expect industries to get the "learning by doing"
experience that we need in order to have these technologies come online cheaper
and more efficiently over the next few decades?

Clearly, new technologies are bounded by the laws of physics. Many energy
people I've spoken to can never imagine the so-called new renewables being a
big players. As we go forward, we have the situation where it seems to get
less likely that Kyoto is ratified. And some things are happening, like the
shutting down of nuclear plants and large hydro plants, which seem to indicate
going backwards. What are your views on this?
The first major thing to do is to get efficiency improved. We are not
anywheres near as efficient as we could be. The engineering capabilities are
way ahead of the state of the art. That's step one. Step two is to see to it
that the developing world doesn't pick the wrong branch point. China doesn't
have to pick the coal branch. It can go gas. And the efficiency in China,
India, places like that, are vastly lower than it is here, and we're already a
factor of two lower than Japan.

But China would have to import gas if it used gas, and so would India, which
would be expensive for them. It would cut back their chance of
developing.
Part of the problem we have is geopolitics. There's more than enough gas in
Russia to deal with lots of needs for China. But if I were Chinese, would I
trust the Russians with my industrial jugular, having the gas pipeline?
Probably only if there were international guarantees in the pipeline. So now
we're looking at a situation where we end up, because of historical animosities
and distrusts, picking sub-optimal strategies for energy because we haven't got
a good global geopolitical strategy. And what that means is that we need to
set up international guarantees, just like we have peacekeeping forces.
President Carter once said that energy was the moral equivalent of war. Well,
he was proved right in the Persian Gulf War many years later. And I think
that we'll again be seeing that. And one of the things that we could do is, we
can set up international guarantees for trade, so that Russia, who could sure
use the foreign exchange, could sell gas to China, who would certainly like to
cut the air pollution in Beijing. And there's a perfect bargain waiting to
made, if only somebody could watch the pipeline and have everybody assured that
it would be a viable alternative.
So while the technologies that we're going to see in the foreseeable future are
not going to stop us from probably doubling CO2, why not delay it
till at least the end of the next century? And let's hold it to a doubling and
not go to the quadrupling that we're going to see by the middle of the century
after that, with business as usual. We can't prevent some climate change, some
damages, but we sure can slow the amount and the rate. And that's very
important. But in the end, if we don't control the number of people in the
world and start becoming satisfied with standard of living that will be higher
than now but not growing very rapidly, then we will not be able to go on
indefinitely without having climatic or other consequences to deal with in the
long-term future.

What happens if Kyoto isn't ratified? Are you still optimistic?
Kyoto had two critical elements, which will be true in any agreement, whether
Kyoto is ratified or not. Element A: You can't solve a problem [of the global
commons] by yourself. Individuals, firms, and countries can't do it. It takes
countries working together. It takes an international rule. That's not a
trivial accomplishment.
The second accomplishment is that the people who did most of the damage and
have most of the wealth have to take the initial steps. So we're dealing with
a combination. For effectiveness, you need to have a planetary scale
operation. And for equity and fairness, you need to have differentiated (as
they call it) responsibilities as to who pays. I think those are going to be
the principles of any agreement that takes place in the future.
And if Kyoto doesn't happen now, several years from now as the climate
continues to drift up, as the super-hurricanes happen, as people's politics
changes, as species extinctions become more and more in the news and people
become aware of them, there will again be demands for international regimes,
and we won't have to re-invent them. We'll be able to build from Kyoto. So
even if it goes down, it's done its job of getting two important principles out
in front of the global community and accepted by the vast bulk of the nations
of the world.

Why aren't Congressmen more receptive to this now?
Congress operates on the basis of short-term interests. They worry about
constituents back home. And there's a mythology in America that we're entitled
to absolutely cheap energy for the indefinite future. And that's gotten us in
a lot of problems: air pollution, acid rain, balance of payments deficits, and
now climate change. And in order to get unhooked from our addiction to this
kind of cheap energy, will involve transitions. And those transitions can have
some pain. Now, what politician ever wants pain now, if that pain can get
stalled until the next elected person in the future? And there are some
politicians like that, but there aren't too many. And as a result of that,
it's very easy and convenient to say, "Oh, well, no new taxes."
But when you read the polls in the US, most people believe that they want to
have educated populace, they believe they want to have a clean environment, and
they're willing to pay for it. I think the politicians are over-estimating the
backlash they think they're going to get from people. I think the backlash is
going to be bigger when the problems descend on us in the future and they say,
"Why didn't you fix it when you knew you had time?"

> home
> the debate
> carbon diet
> faqs
> stories in ice
> discussion
> beyond fossil fuels
> water world
> program excerpt
> graphs
> resources/links
> synopsis
> NOVA
> FRONTLINE
> wgbh
New Content Copyright ©2000 PBS Online and WGBH/NOVA/FRONTLINE
|