Читать книгу Dinosaur Dreaming - Gail Collins-Ranadive - Страница 8

“We’re the first generation to feel the impact of climate change, and the last generation that can do something about it.”

—Gov. Jay Inslee

How did the human species get itself into this existential mess? Sadly, my own generation has been complicit in creating the predicament.

I confess I was so completely oblivious to the problem that I can’t even recall seeing the big green Brontosaurus on display at the New York World’s Fair back in 1964. Did I even visit the oil company pavilion that featured their signature mascot and showcased nine life-size replicas of dinosaurs as a ploy for promoting their gasoline?

Frankly, dinosaurs probably wouldn’t have grabbed my attention or remained in my memory; those huge beasts were something my brothers were into and comprised the biggest words in their vocabularies. As for my sisters and me, we simply wouldn’t have been impressed with putting a dinosaur anywhere, let alone in a gas tank, a marketing claim based on the false premise that the world’s oil reserves were laid down when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Yet even back when I was a teen there was scientific evidence suggesting the dangers of burning gasoline, wherever it came from. In fact, research on the effect of CO2 on the climate had begun as early as 1824, when the atmospheric greenhouse effect was first discovered. According to the information found in ice cores, for 800,000 years after the age of the dinosaurs atmospheric CO2 ranged between 180 and 290 parts per million. When earth’s atmosphere reached the right levels of gases needed to support the ecosystem upon which life as we know it depends, mammals evolved to eventually include us.

But slowly, insidiously, as we humans embraced burning fossilized sunlight as a source of energy for warmth, transportation, and growing and preparing food, we didn’t realize that this blessing came with a curse.

When the industrial age began in 1750, CO2 parts per million were stable at the 280 PPM level. By 1824, they were steadily rising, and by 1860 the effects were actually quantifiable. In 1896 it became clear that coal burning could lead to global warming, and by 1938 it was found to already be starting. Research advanced rapidly after 1940, and in 1957 the public was first alerted that fossil fuel burning was “a grandiose scientific experiment” being carried out upon climate.

But by then, a fossil fuel burning car had become part of the American family, my own included. What a blessing our blue and white station wagon turned out to be—my father didn’t have to ride two buses to get to work, my mother no longer had to phone in her weekly grocery order, then wait for its delivery, then send back what wasn’t right. We didn’t have to call on a relative to drive us to the hospital for our latest childhood ailment. And we could take Sunday drives out into the country, as well as spend my father’s vacation week making day trips to the beach or the wild animal farm or the amusement park. Life was good!

My partner Milt remembers back when his grandfather plowed the family farm with a team of horses, and then when he shifted to the “horse-power” of a tractor that ran on gasoline after WWII.

By the time of the 1964 World’s Fair, atmospheric CO2 was pushing 315 ppm. Did we know? Should I care? By 1971, when I was driving a mid-size station wagon so that my own two small daughters could sleep in the back on long trips, Exxon oil company’s own scientists had confirmed the emerging consensus that fossil fuel emissions could pose risks for society, and began “exploring the extent of the risks.”

Meanwhile, I think our burnt orange and white station wagon averaged 8 mpg, but gas was inexpensive and not an issue. Then in 1973 the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) disrupted oil supplies in response to an Israeli war backed by American weapons. The resulting gasoline shortage had us waiting in long lines for $3 worth of gas at a time, odd-number license plates on odd days, even numbered ones on even days. A fifty-five mile an hour speed limit was imposed to further conserve gas. The U.S. economy went into a recession. and the American public began to pay attention to oil.

In July 1977, a senior scientist in Exxon’s Research & Engineering division warned company executives of the danger of atmospheric carbon dioxide increases from the burning of fossil fuels, and reported that there was general scientific agreement at that time that the burning of fossil fuels was the most likely manner in which mankind was influencing global climate change. CO2 levels had reached 339 parts per million.

I was out of the country by then, accompanying my U.S. Army officer husband on a tour of duty with NATO in Germany. While we were stationed in Europe, I worked on a degree in Peace Studies, trying to create options to wars that put my friends and neighbors into harm’s way. Geopolitically, we were caught up in the Cold War between two nuclear super powers. But while I was attending a seminar at the U.S. Army Russia Institute in Garmisch, Germany and listening to civilian and military experts coolly discuss Mutually Assured Destruction, I had no idea that another potential Armageddon was already unfolding.

A 1979 paper presented to President Carter signed by four distinguished scientists warned that the time for implementing policies was passing; global warming would probably be conspicuous within 20 years, and enlightened policies managing fossil fuels could delay or avoid the changes. At that point the CO2 in the atmosphere had increased to 339 ppm. Yet instead of dealing with this reality by finding and focusing on renewable non-carbon-emitting energy, the newly formed Department of Energy began promoting a massive program of synthetic fuels to be made from coal, tar sands, and oil shale. Because these synthetic fuels would produce more climate-altering gases than most other energy technologies, the government promptly produced a memo to downplay the growing climate concerns.

Returning state-side with a diesel-fueled vehicle we named Eliot for Pete’s dragon in a favorite children’s story, I was oblivious that public awareness of the greenhouse effect of burning fossil fuels was increasing, or that conservative reaction was gearing up to deny any environmental concerns that could lead to governmental regulations and threaten profits.

By the 1981 Presidency of Ronald Reagan, global warming had become a political issue. To implement spending cuts on climate-related environmental research and to stop funding for CO2 monitoring, Reagan appointed an Energy Secretary who claimed that there was no real global warming problem. By then CO2 parts per million were topping 340 and global temperatures had risen a half a degree.

Congressman Al Gore, who had once studied under a leading climate scientist, joined others in arranging for congressional hearings from 1981 onwards. These hearings gained enough public attention and concern to reduce the funding cuts for atmospheric research…for the time being.

But a polarized political debate developed. As the research became more solid, contrarians began claiming that increases in CO2 should be encouraged and not suppressed, because CO2 is good for plants. In 1983 an Environmental Protection Agency report said global warming was “not a theoretical problem but a threat whose effects will be felt within a few years,” with potentially “catastrophic” consequences. When the Reagan administration reacted by calling the report alarmist, the dispute got wide news coverage. CO2 emissions were 340 ppm.

I was tooling around D.C. in my diesel dragon that sounded like a tank, smelled like a tank, and drove like a tank. The changing climate was not on my radar screen. Nor, apparently, was I paying attention to the summer droughts and heat waves in full swing when NASA scientist James Hansen testified in a Congressional hearing on June 23, 1988. He stated with high confidence that long term warming was underway, with severe warming probable within the next fifty years, likely causing storms and floods. CO2 emissions had reached 351 ppm.

It’s not that I was politically absent and abstinent. In fact, utilizing my new M.A. in Peace Studies in the 1980s, I was part of a grassroots campaign to establish a federally funded institute for peace. I rode to the Senate committee hearings as far as the Pentagon with my husband’s carpool, encouraged by my military neighbors to open up non-violent options to the wars they had to fight. Ironically, when the bill finally passed Congress, it was attached to the military budget and signed by Reagan. And I had learned a valuable lesson about how our government really works, in contrast to what I’d been taught in high school civics class.

But if there was increased media attention on the scientific community’s broad consensus that the climate was warming, that human activity was the likely primary cause, and that there would be significant consequences if the warming trend were not curbed, I must have missed it. Apparently, these facts did encourage some discussion about and interest in passing new laws concerning environmental regulations that were simultaneously and vigorously opposed by the fossil fuel industry.

From 1989 onwards, with CO2 ppm pushing well into the 350s and global temperatures inching towards one full degree of warming, the fossil fuel industry funded organizations “to spread doubt among the public in a strategy already developed by the tobacco industry.”

In fact, some of the tobacco industry’s “scientists” became vocal against the prevailing climate science findings, and, supported by and in support of conservative interests, became politically involved; instead of publishing their opinions in peer-reviewed science journals, they spoke directly to the public through their articles, books, and the press.

This became a period when legitimate skepticism about basic aspects of climate science was no longer justified. Those spreading mistrust about this issue became “deniers.” As their arguments were increasingly refuted by the scientific community with new data, these deniers turned to political arguments, made personal attacks on the reputation of mainstream scientists, and promoted ideas of a global warming conspiracy.

With the 1989 fall of communism, the attention of conservative think tanks turned from the “red scare” to the “green scare,” which they saw as a threat to their goals of private property, free trade market economies, and global capitalism. Into the 1990s, conservative think tanks launched campaigns against increased regulations on environmental issues from acid rain to ozone depletion, second-hand smoke, and the dangers of DDT, using the argument “that the science was too uncertain to justify any government intervention.”

This strategy would continue for the next two decades, influencing public perception and discourse by shifting it from the science and data of climate change to a discussion of politics and the so-called controversy. For instance, an advertising campaign funded by the coal industry sought to reposition global warming as “theory” rather than “fact.”

Yet worldwide concern over global warming had prompted the creation of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that resulted in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed by all countries in 1985. The IPCC began as a small group of scientists mandated to assess scientific information relevant to human-induced climate change, its impact, and the options for adaptation and mitigation. It serves as an autonomous intergovernmental body in which scientists take part both as experts on the science and representatives of their governments, produce reports which have the firm backing of all the leading scientists researching the topic, and which then have to gain consensus agreement from every one of the participating governments before its reports are shared with the public. And because IPCC climate change assessments include input from scientists from all the world regions as well as policymakers representing all the world governments, endorsement of its findings are reliable, incontrovertible, and widely quoted.

At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, 154 nations signed U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change that called for governments to reduce atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases with the goal of “preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with Earth’s climate system.” But President George H. W. Bush became the loudest voice in the room calling for mandatory emissions cuts to be replaced by voluntary ones, and only signed once this revision was made.

He cited “scientific uncertainty” and economic risk, and declared “the American way of life is not up for negotiation.”

Meanwhile, the 1990s found me in seminary, where I celebrated my 50th birthday as a first-year student in 1994. After living in a nine-room, three-bathroom home, I’d moved into one small dorm room, with a community bathroom down the hall. I had no phone and no car, both by choice: I needed silence and solitude to discern what was next in my life.

At the end of the first year, I went home for the summer to end my thirty-year marriage and fully move out of the family home. After selling my relatively new luxury car because it felt obscene to keep it, I returned to Berkeley and made my way to the nearby Saturn dealership.

A spin-off of General Motors, this new company promised a different kind of buying experience, a commitment it more than lived up to—I was treated as an intelligent woman, capable of deciding what best fit my needs, wants, and budget. As an added bonus, I got to finance my first solely owned car and establish a credit history for my new single life.

I promptly named my new car Columba, short for columbine—Latin for dove—the wildflower that had become a metaphor for my new life. Columba was a pale plum color, and could get 28 mpg in the city, 37 on the highway. Meanwhile atmospheric CO2 had reached 360 ppm.

After the previous year’s walking as far as my legs and available time would let me, I now had access to hiking trails up in the Berkeley Hills, and Marin County and the Pacific Coast highway were barely an hour away. My car became my modern monastic cell as it carried me across the Northern Rockies to and from my chaplaincy training summer in Billings, Montana. After graduation, I drove clear across the country for my parish ministry internship in Massachusetts. I was finally back to where I’d started from as a child, and, wanting the chance to spend time with my family of origin as my parents aged, I took a part-time ministry position in a small church south of Boston. Columba was terrific in the traffic congestion while trying to get through the city to my ailing father’s bedside in the late 1990s, and then to conduct his funeral.

CO2 levels were steadily climbing towards 370 ppm and I was still oblivious of this growing problem that I was perpetuating! How could that possibly be? In 1998 the American Petroleum Institute wrote a proposal intended to recruit scientists to convince politicians, the media, and the public that climate science was too uncertain to be taken seriously. This proposal included a five million dollar multi-point strategy to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours upon Congress, the media, and other key audiences.” Their goal was to raise questions and undercut prevailing scientific wisdom.

By the beginning of the 2000s, the efforts by climate change denial groups were recognized as an organized campaign. Taking a page from the tobacco campaign, these propagandists began receiving funding from oil companies. ExxonMobil led in corporate donations to these think tanks, and between 1998 and 2014 gave nearly 31 million dollars to groups that would deliberately spread climate misinformation.

The ideologically conservative Koch brothers, with their massive petrochemical business interests, donated more than $100 million from 1997 onward to 84 groups promulgating climate denial, all shielded from public scrutiny through financial vehicles known as Donors’ Trusts.

As the money flowed through this dubious network over the decades, its misinformation strategies passed like a baton to a shifting array of coalitions and initiatives that protected fossil fuel interests in the climate debate. Some groups produced reports that cast doubt on the accumulating evidence of manmade climate change, and others amplified the alternative findings. Think tanks in the network held conferences, sponsored panels, wrote op-eds and letters, and created an echo chamber loud enough to command equal time in the mainstream media.

In 2000, environmentally aware and climate savvy Vice President Al Gore ran for president. When the Supreme Court ruled on the contested election results and handed the presidency to oilman George W. Bush, I was in the middle of an interim ministry year in Las Vegas, Nevada.

With my little church back in New England barely able to pay me for part-time work, and aching to do full-time ministry, I had put my name into the interim ministry pool, a group of ministers who undergo special training to serve congregations “in transition” between ministers. But I was surprised and shocked to find myself “banished” to the desert, where brown replaced familiar, comforting green, and trees were scarce.

Because I stay grounded by bonding with my natural surroundings, I had to learn to see and appreciate the desert’s gifts. By mid-year I was smitten, so said yes to the religion reporter from the local paper that wanted to interview me about religion and environmental awareness. Apparently, she had struck out with other local congregations, but my faith tradition includes Emerson and the other Transcendentalists for whom nature is a primary scripture, so I had the theological backing for what the reporter was looking for.

When the article appeared, complete with photos shot during a worship service, the other half of it included an interview with Josh Abbey, representing the Jewish tradition. He stated that his infamous father would have written off Las Vegas long ago for its ecological transgressions. It was at that moment in time that I consciously moved from being a nature lover into becoming an environmental activist.

When a congregant connected with the Sierra Club asked me to do a workshop with the local members who were feeling totally defeated by what was happening in D.C. I said yes. Two months after George W. Bush was sworn in, he renounced the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty which extended the 1992 UN Framework on Climate Change that committed state parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Then, under Vice President Cheney, our national energy policy was rewritten behind closed doors to include the Halliburton loophole, thus exempting his old company from clean water regulations, and kick-starting the hydraulic fracturing frenzy to ensure access to the “bottom of the barrel” fossil fuels that would emit even more CO2, plus release methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas. With CO2 emissions climbing through 370s ppm, we were clearly going in the wrong direction!

By 2002, I’d begun to be concerned about my own carbon emissions. If I were going to do interims for my ministry career, I would be driving back and forth across the continent over the next several years. My sweet Saturn was fuel-efficient, but I had heard that the company was developing a hybrid vehicle that would run on battery as well as gasoline.

As I eagerly waited for this option, I did not know that its parent company, General Motors, had developed, produced, and leased electric vehicles (the EV1) between 1996 and 1999. It was the first mass-produced electric car in the modern era by a major automaker, and the only electric passenger car to be marketed under the GM brand name. The decision to mass-produce an electric car came on the heels of a mandate by the California Air Resources Board that required the sale of zero-emissions vehicles from the seven major automakers if they were to continue to sell their vehicles in California.

These EV1s were made available via lease-only agreements to residents in selected western cities and could be serviced only at designated dealerships. Consumer reaction to the electric cars was so positive that GM grew worried that these cars wouldn’t prove profitable enough. After all, without gas motors there is little need for maintenance, or demand for gasoline. They rounded up the leased cars, refused to sell them to the lessees who wanted to purchase them outright, and crushed them.

Meanwhile, the car manufacturers litigated the CARB requirement for the wiggle room to make and sell super low emission vehicles and hybrids instead of going the all-electric route. When the EV1 program was discontinued in 2002, the oil companies, along with the oil-drenched executive branch of the federal government, had played a huge role.

By 2002 I was in my third interim ministry, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I’d spent my second interim year with a congregation in Vermont that was steeped in environmental awareness: I went there because I had so much to learn! But before that year barely started, 9/11 happened.

Our national response to the horror was to bomb Afghanistan; that it is an oil, gas, and coal-rich country was probably just coincidental in our determination to punish someone for our national tragedy. Yet the decision to bomb Iraq in the spring of 2003 was different. It was widely suspected that we were after their oil, and demonstrations were held worldwide, including in the community where I was living.

Months before that unpopular invasion, I had given up on waiting for Saturn to market its hybrid, suspecting but not knowing for sure that GM had opted for making the more profitable Hummer instead.

Wading through the grief of giving up my faithful companion, I traded Columba in for a Toyota Prius that wanted to be named Gaia. She was the soft aqua shade of earth and water and sky combined, and promised to get 50 mpg in town, somewhat less on the highway, with super-low CO2 emissions. The reverse of gas burning cars, the hybrid gets better mileage when constant braking at stoplights recharges its lithium battery. This takes some getting used to: whenever I stopped at a light, and the engine went silent, I worried it had shut down completely.

I’d checked out the Honda hybrid as well, but it didn’t have the super low emissions rating that Toyota’s did. The early Prius I owned still had the Corolla body, not the unique one seen on our roads today. I would have preferred buying American had there been any way to do so. Only U.S. dealerships whose mechanics had received special training in Japan were allowed to carry the Prius. I came to feel like a pioneer, as glitches worked themselves out—or not. But these annoyances were worth it to me to be doing the right thing. I was a minister, after all!

My commitment was unexpectedly confirmed at a stoplight in Santé Fe, New Mexico, as I headed back to Colorado after an annual interim ministers meeting. The driver of the pickup truck beside me rolled down his window and shouted, “What mileage do you get in that thing?” When I told him, he whistled, then declared, “I’m gonna get me one of those. Let them Arabs keep their damn oil!”

That we the people were catching on became hopeful during my next interim ministry, in Flagstaff, where it seemed that every other car was a Prius in this progressive college town in northern Arizona, just 70 miles from the south rim of the Grand Canyon. I agreed to stay on for a second year, part-time, so I could have sabbatical time up at the Canyon.

The second autumn I was there found me standing at the checkout counter at the nearby Albertson’s, leafing through the September 2004 issue of the National Geographic. Its title, “Global Warning, Bulletins from a Warmer World,” had caught my attention, and the inside note from the editor piqued my interest enough to buy the copy on the spot.

Essentially, he claimed that, after a decade as editor in chief, he had a good idea what articles would provoke a lot of angry letters, and even terminate memberships, yet he wouldn’t be able to look at himself in the mirror if he didn’t bring readers the “biggest story in geology today.”

Seventy-four pages of stunning photographs from across the planet showed rising sea levels, melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, increasing wildfires, lingering droughts, shrinking lakes, changing habitats and migration habits, bleaching coral reefs, invading exotic species, disappearing amphibians, eroding coastlines, and ice shelves collapsing. Then he challenged even those who don’t believe the Earth is getting warmer and that human behavior is a contributing factor to take a look at the hard truth as scientists were seeing it. CO2 levels had passed 380 ppm by then. Would the public finally wake up?

At that exact moment in our country’s history, the billionaire oil-baron Koch brothers began building an assembly line to manufacture political change that included think tanks which produced papers, advocacy groups that pushed for policies, and PACs that donated money to candidates. By putting these all together, the Kochs were able to push back against doing anything about climate change on those three fronts all at once. “You get papers that look like they’re real scientific opinions doubting that climate change is real, you get advocacy groups saying we can’t afford to do anything about it, and you get candidates who are told if you want to get money from Koch donors you have to sign a pledge saying that, if elected, you will do nothing about climate change that requires spending any money on the problem.”

No wonder that when I went back east for my fifth interim ministry, this time in Charleston, South Carolina, hybrids were few and far between, and I could count them on one hand while driving route 95 for two days from the southeast to the northeast to visit my ailing mother.

In fact, the neighbor next door to my rented townhouse on the Ashley River drove a honking huge SUV, mainly because her tax advisor recommended it. As a real estate agent, she would get a tax advantage that would be foolish to refuse: her expensive sports utility vehicle could be depreciated more rapidly than anything under 6000 pounds. What was its gas mileage and carbon footprint? Why should/would she care?

Then Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans! Surely now people would pay attention to what was coming to pass as we wantonly dump CO2 into the atmosphere, warm the earth and alter the climate, thus creating such a superstorm surge. But the national media never once connected those dots during their massive coverage of the unfolding disaster in Louisiana.

Why not! What was going on here? Was there an unspoken conspiracy between news outlets and their fossil fuel industry and car company sponsors? How could that be happening in a nation built upon the foundations of reason, logic, and science?! After all, CO2 had just surpassed 380 ppm! Yet when astronaut Sheila Collins returned from space that fall, and felt compelled to report what she had been seeing over time—shrinking glaciers, expanding deserts, disappearing forests—no one paid attention. The major news story on that day was about the risk of driving while wearing flip-flops.

After a frustrating year being mired in obliviousness, I was off to Maine for a final interim ministry year. It was 2006, and An Inconvenient Truth was being made available to selected congregations through Interfaith Power and Light. I borrowed the video to show at our church and share with the Yarmouth community. In the graphic film he had created and produced, Al Gore re-emerged on the public scene to set out the science of climate change and discuss concerns around global warming. Even before he lost the 2000 presidential election, Gore had been internationally involved in trying to deal with the greatest challenge to ever face humanity. Now, he was about to be awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about manmade climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures needed to counteract such change.’

Also in 2007, a Newsweek cover story reported, “the denial machine is running at full throttle.” This well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks, and industry had “created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change.” CO2 emissions were nearing 390 parts per million.

In 2007, I finished up my interim ministry career and took a settled position, back in Las Vegas, where it had first begun. I desperately needed to stay put in one place, put down roots, buy a home of my own, and not move every summer. The desert spoke to me as no other place had, and so I settled there. By 2008, the Bush presidency ended and the Obama one began, and I felt we could take a deep breath. Surely now our government would see the light and do the right thing.

But in 2010, a Supreme Court decision removed caps on corporate and nonprofit political donations and opened the floodgates on campaign spending. Then billionaires such as the Kochs moved millions of dollars to support the rise of the Tea Party movement and ultra-conservative candidates who used climate denial as a bedrock of party orthodoxy.

Soon, few Republicans running for federal office would admit to accepting the reality of manmade climate change. CO2 was approaching 400 ppm.

By 2010, I was in a partnered relationship with a retired aerospace engineer who was as concerned and committed as I was about the fate of the warming world. And we would soon be driving a Chevy Volt, GM’s plug-in electric car, and powering it by solar panels on the roofs of our individual homes, mine in Vegas, his in Denver.

Ironically, the CEO of General Motors had admitted that the biggest mistake he ever made was killing the EV1 and failing to direct more resources to electrics and hybrids after having such an early lead on this technology. Was the Volt my Saturn revamped?!”

We named it Emerson, for the Transcendentalist writer and philosopher, because we saw it as being, like Ralph Waldo, quietly subversive on behalf of the planet. We called its GPS system Naggie Maggie after Margaret Fuller, a persistent stone in Emerson’s shoe.

We were about to become climate activists.