Do Climate Change Experts Agree ... Yet?

By Marilyn Berlin Snell, Sierra Magazine. Posted May 8, 2007.

Though the United States is the world's top producer of greenhouse gases, only 13 percent of congressional Republicans believe in human-caused global warming (National Journal), and 13 percent of Americans have never even heard of the phenomenon (ACNielsen). One might wonder what planet these folks are on. Unfortunately, it's the one we all share.

Last summer James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, blamed my profession for this alarming ignorance. Although the stability of the world's climate system is unequivocally threatened by human activities, the U.S. media has muddied the issue by giving time to "fringe contrarians supported by the fossil-fuel industry," he wrote in the New York Review of Books.

As I read Hansen's essay, I began to imagine a conversation that would push beyond climate-change confusion toward solutions. In the margins, I wrote, "industrialist, scientist, politico, venture capitalist" and filled in the names of prominent experts.

A few weeks later, Sierra invited a handful of these luminaries to a daylong roundtable in San Francisco. Their job would be to come up with a practical agenda for the next Congress that would stabilize the climate. It was a tall order, addressed to busy people. Yet their response was immediate, gracious, and affirmative. There is urgency in the air.

On December 14, 2006, the group gathered at the Sierra Club headquarters. Paul Anderson, then chair of Duke Energy (now chair of a Duke spin-off), arrived right on time in a crisp suit and tie, ready to get down to business. Even before they'd finished their morning pastries, he started lobbying the Club's executive director and roundtable moderator, Carl Pope, on what was to become the group's most radical recommendation.

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla announced -- lest anyone get the wrong idea given his presence at the Sierra Club -- that he is a pro-business, free-market Republican. As the roundtable progressed, however, Khosla relaxed, taking his shoes off under the table and tucking a foot beneath himself as he laid out his plan to fight poverty and global warming in one fell swoop. Bettina Poirier, staff director for Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and chief counsel for the Environment and Public Works Committee, listened intently. Two other senior advisors from Boxer's office sat on the sidelines, furiously taking notes.

The man who bridged the public-private worlds was Dan Reicher, who worked at the Department of Energy during the Clinton era and was, at the time of the roundtable, president of a venture capital firm focused on renewable energy. (He now runs Google's climate and energy initiative.)

Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider raced to the discussion from down the street, where he'd just given a presentation to hundreds of scientists at the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting. His hair was slightly Einsteinian upon arrival, but his thoughts were anything but disheveled. Having spent more than 25 years explaining why our planet is getting warmer, he was the roundtable's translator and reality check.

In the morning, the group worked behind closed doors. That afternoon, they were joined by Boxer and former vice president Al Gore for a public session to announce the conclusions they'd reached. The defining moment came when Anderson suggested that the federal government should assign a cost to carbon emissions -- an idea that has been dismissed as political suicide by several past Congresses. But times have changed. How else could one explain the fact that a leader from the energy industry, a special interest many politicians are trying to protect from carbon regulations, is now calling for those very regulations?

My 12-year-old niece, Sophie, a seventh-grader in Phoenix, traveled alone for the first time to be an observer at the gathering. Her last big class report was on this worrisome topic, and it was important for her to see that adults are constructively grappling with climate change. Her presence helped us all remember that we have an obligation to act on behalf of future generations. Time has an ethical dimension, "the fierce urgency of now," as Martin Luther King Jr. called the struggles of his day.

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Marilyn Berlin Snell is the senior writer for Sierra.

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