Fast Forward – Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming is the title of a book just out from two international relations heavyweights at Brookings. Strobe Talbott was deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration and William J. Antholis worked at the National Security Council and at State, and was director of studies at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Big guns.
Their short book has some interesting and useful perspectives. They give a good, brief history of the international climate negotiations that have taken place under the aegis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, including an insider’s account of what happened in Copenhagen this past December. Bottom line? They advocate “…less reliance on the cumbersome UN-led pursuit of a legally binding global treaty, a process that has been on slow forward.” What to do? The US, EU, China and India “…should form the core of an expanding circle of countries that develop their energy policies and regulate their emissions in an increasingly coordinated fashion.”
The book analogizes the climate crisis to the doomsday implications of the Cold War. The authors draw hope from the fact that we managed to avoid blowing our planet apart from 1945 to 1989. They also look closely at the gradually constructed trust in and success of the post-war Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that allowed it to evolve into the World Trade Organization. They offer the intriguing idea of a General Agreement to Reduce Emissions (GARE) that “…would perform the GATT-like function of setting rules, arbitrating disputes, and creating incentives for still other countries to coordinate in reducing emissions.”
Better yet, because of the damnably complex – and corrupt – domestic politics, and mostly because of the US Senate, the idea of an “agreement” on climate reductions is particularly appealing. We could, conceivably, have federal legislation, as Waxman-Markey stipulates, that would allow for the US to enter into an agreement with other countries with similar climate and energy trajectories. “In short, reciprocal domestic laws obviate the need for a treaty.” Thus, among other things, would be born a robust global carbon market. (I’m not entirely sure why this couldn’t happen absent federal law. We now have a series of regulatory initiatives from EPA, that are, not incidentally, mandated by a Supreme Court decision, which are going to drag this country, in some cases, kicking and screaming, into reducing its GHG output. So, if we’ve got that going, why not enter into a GARE?)
Messrs. Talbott and Antholis also give some good insight into the history of the American politics of all this, from George H.W. Bush’s time through Barack Obama’s. What I do find a little disturbing sometimes in analyses of politics by international relations experts – and you don’t get more expert than these two – is the blind spot they seem to have for special interests’ influence. Do we somehow give away the game of a high-minded approach to public policy formulation by deigning to recognize the malign influence of Big Oil, Big Coal, and Big Nuke and all their money boosting the campaign coffers of our policymakers, spreading disinformation about what the science has been telling us for thirty years, and fighting tooth and nail in the courts and in the bureaucracies to preserve their rent-collecting positions of advantage?
And I would be remiss if I didn’t call the authors on their cavalier embrace of nuclear power as a “carbon-free” alternative. I have recently renewed my assault on the folly of nuclear power with a three-part, about 15-point rundown on why this is so not the way to go. I invite the authors to read my analyses or, better yet, get Amory Lovins on the phone and ask for his insight. Steven Chu is a very good man, no doubt, but if Lovins were our Secretary of Energy, we’d be out of the woods on climate change by the end of the second Obama administration.
One other point: The book conflates the UK’s Climatic Research Unit with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in mentioning all the brouhaha over the science last winter. The IPCC is an essentially ad hoc UN group that gathers the work of independent researchers and examines that data and analysis over the course of several years, then issues a series of reports. What happened at the CRU had precisely nothing to do with the work of the IPCC. In any event, the authors appear to hold the scientists at the CRU and their colleagues to an unrealistic standard. Have both of these worthy gentlemen never expressed frustration in an email at the shenanigans, perceived or otherwise, of political or philosophical opponents?
Beyond that, they decline to recognize the role that the media has played for over twenty years in elevating the feeble arguments of Denialists to the status of valid debate points against the resoundingly irrefutable science that has been gathered, peer-reviewed and carefully marshaled before the public and policymakers. In Our Choice, Al Gore quotes world-class climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer: “What they’ve done is try to take scientific understanding and put it on the same level with political opinion. After all, if scientific understanding is the same as political opinion, then everybody’s opinion is equally valid. There are no facts. And if there are no facts, there is no extra validity to acting on environmental problems than not acting.”
Still, this is an important contribution to the literature, and I sincerely hope that folks, particularly on The Hill, pick it up and read it. The authors quote the Koran quite appropriately: “…greater indeed than the creation of man is the creation of the heavens and the earth.” They urge us to get into high gear, or fast forward, to save this extraordinary creation.
Let Strobe Talbott describe what he means in the title for you.
