Changing the Climate

It's hard to remember how popular the environmental idea was at the end of the 1980s. The movement had survived the crude efforts of the Reagan administration to kill it off. (Remember James Watt? Remember Treasury Secretary Don Regan advising that the best defense against a thinning ozone layer was a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses?)

A barge loaded with American garbage circled the world as one country after another refused to let it land. The beaches of Long Island and New Jersey were awash in medical waste. Time magazine's "Man of the Year" in 1988 was actually a planet: our "Endangered Earth." A serious environmentalist would soon become vice president of the United States.

So what happened? Carbon dioxide happened. If you want to understand the death of environmentalism, you need to understand the gas on which it choked. Carbon dioxide (CO2) was fatefully different from all the pollution that had come before it. Unlike carbon monoxide -- the key ingredient in nasty brown smog, the pollutant that helped kill Londoners breathing coal fumes -- carbon dioxide, ironically, is essentially nontoxic.

But CO2 is the inevitable byproduct of fossil-fuel combustion. It's not something going wrong; it's what's supposed to happen when you burn coal or oil or gas. But its molecular composition traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space, thus causing the phenomenon we now know as global warming -- a phenomenon that will produce temperatures by century's end higher than at any time since before the beginning of primate evolution. And to solve it? There's really only one way, which is to reduce the amount of CO2 we produce. That is, burn less coal and oil and gas.

Which is why it's not like the environmental problems we faced in the past. We can't solve it with a new law or a catalytic converter on our tailpipe. We need to upend the entire way we go about powering our lives, which is to say upend our economies and daily habits. And for American politicians, channeling American voters, that has always seemed far too much to contemplate.

The definitive declaration came early on, from the first President Bush, as he prepared reluctantly to attend the huge 1992 environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro, when the worry about global warming was supposed to start yielding real results. Bush announced, "The American way of life is not up for negotiation."

And he was right. The Clinton administration talked a good game on climate change -- after all, Al Gore had written that confronting it should become the "central organizing principle" of human civilization today -- but Bill Clinton didn't spend much political capital doing anything about it. The big lobbying pushes were for things like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which in some ways were all about extending the "American way of life" to other parts of the world.

The Clintonites didn't take on Detroit and the auto unions over the spread of suvs, and they didn't take on Congress' opposition to the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse-gas reductions. And when Clinton was done governing, America was emitting 15 percent more CO2 than when he'd begun. George W. Bush has been much worse rhetorically, but in practical terms we merely sail on as before.

The environmental movement, predictably, has been unable to do much about it. The movement had a pretty good run: It was strong enough to take on pesticide manufacturers and river-damming engineers with some success. But those matters were peripheral to the American way of life. This matter is central.

Scientists estimate that human beings worldwide would need to reduce carbon emissions by 70 percent to 80 percent immediately in order to keep climate disruption from further worsening. Think about that, and perhaps you can understand why a political movement strong enough, barely, to protect blue whales and whooping cranes might be having a bit of trouble -- and why any attempt to deal with climate change will mean something that looks very different from environmentalism as we've known it so far. Something that's relevant to the scale of the problem.