Bank of England governor tells Lloyd’s insurers that ‘challenges currently posed by climate change pale in significance compared with what might come’
Mark Carney said: ‘Once climate change becomes a defining issue for
financial stability, it may already be too late.’ He proposes that firms
‘would disclose not only what they are emitting today, but how they
plan their transition to the net-zero world of the future’.
Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, has warned that climate change will lead to financial crises and falling living standards unless the world’s leading countries do more to ensure that their companies come clean about their current and future carbon emissions.
In a speech to the insurance market Lloyd’s of London on Tuesday, Carney said insurers were heavily exposed to climate change risks and that time was running out to deal with global warming.
The governor said that proposals would probably be put to the G20 meeting in Turkey in November urging the world’s leading developed and developing countries to bring in tougher corporate disclosure standards so that investors could better judge climate change risks.
“The challenges currently posed by climate change pale in significance compared with what might come,” Carney said. “The far-sighted amongst you are anticipating broader global impacts on property, migration and political stability, as well as food and water security. So why isn’t more being done to address it?”
Carney added that there was a growing evidence of humans’ role in climate change, noting that since the 1980s the number of registered weather-related loss events had tripled. Inflation-adjusted losses for the insurance industry had increased five fold to $50bn (£33bn) a year. France will host the latest global attempt to combat climate change at a summit in December, and Carney added to the pressure for action by pointing to the threats to “financial resilience and longer-term prosperity. While there is still time to act, the window of opportunity is finite and shrinking”.
The governor, who is chairman of the Financial Stability Board, the international body set up by the G20 in 2009 to monitor risks to the financial system, said losses would be higher than expected if recent weather events proved to be the new normal.
A man by the Qiantang river after Typhoon Dujuan hit China. Claims for flood damage could affect financial stability. Photograph:
Imaginechina/Rex Shutterstock
“Climate change is the tragedy of the horizon. We don’t need an army of actuaries to tell us that the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors – imposing a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix.
“The horizon for monetary policy extends out to two to three years. For financial stability it is a bit longer, but typically only to the outer boundaries of the credit cycle – about a decade. In other words, once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.”
Carney said there were three ways in which climate change could affect financial stability: physical risks, such as claims from floods and storms; liability risks that could arise if those suffering climate change losses sought compensation from those they held responsible; and transition risks caused by the revaluation of assets caused by the adjustment to a lower-carbon economy.
The governor said that global action to tackle climate change could have a profound impact on companies if their business models were challenged by the move away from fossil fuels.
“Take, for example, the International Panel on Climate Change’s estimate of a carbon budget that would likely limit global temperature rises to 2 degrees [centigrade] above pre-industrial levels.
“That budget amounts to between a fifth and a third of the world’s proven reserves of oil, gas and coal. If that estimate is even approximately correct it would render the vast majority of reserves “stranded” – oil, gas and coal that will be literally unusable without expensive carbon-capture technology, which itself alters fossil fuel economics.
“The exposure of UK investors, including insurance companies, to these shifts is potentially huge.”
Carney said that, following a meeting in London last week, the FSB was “considering recommending to the G20 summit that more be done to develop consistent, comparable, reliable and clear disclosure around the carbon intensity of different assets”.
One proposal, he added, was the creation of an industry-led group, a climate disclosure taskforce, to design and deliver a voluntary standard for disclosure by those companies that produce or emit carbon.
“Companies would disclose not only what they are emitting today, but how they plan their transition to the net-zero world of the future. The G20 – whose member states account for around 85% of global emissions – has a unique ability to make this possible.”
Fairfax Video
RAW VIDEO: Bank of England governor Mark Carney warns "climate change
threatens financial resilience and longer term prosperity."
New research has found that sharks play an important
role in preventing climate change, warning that overfishing and culling
sharks is resulting in more carbon being released from the seafloor.
A
paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change has found that the
culling and fishing of sharks and other large fish is leading to an
overabundance of their prey, such as turtles, stingrays and crabs.
Larger numbers of these marine creatures means that vegetation which stores carbon is being eaten in greater quantities.
"Sharks,
believe it or not, are helping to prevent climate change," said Dr
Peter Macreadie, an Australian Research Council Fellow from Deakin
University and one of the paper's authors.
Several years ago researchers found that carbon is stored in blue carbon ecosystems in the marine environment.
"They
are the seagrasses, the salt marshes, the mangroves and they're among
the most powerful carbon sinks in the world," Dr Macreadie said.
"So
they will capture and store carbon at a rate 40 times faster than
tropical rainforests like the Amazon and they'll store that carbon in
the ground for millennial time scales."
He said as predators were culled and overfished, other marine life consumed more and more vegetation.
"Turtles,
crabs, certain types of worms, stingrays — these animals that are
overabundant to do with loss of predators used to keep their numbers in
check," Dr Macreadie said.
The researchers used Cape Cod in Massachusetts as an example of where this process had been observed.
"There
had been overfishing in the region, so a lot of the big fish had been
removed and then what we saw was an increase — a remarkable increase, a
huge increase — in the number of crabs that bury and borrow down in the
system, in the salt marsh which sequestered all this carbon," Dr
Macreadie said.
"And we'd found that in an area there, the crabs
had become so abundant that they had pretty much destroyed the salt
marsh, and it was a small area, it was only 1.5 square kilometres, but
it liberated 250,000 tonnes of carbon that had been stored in the
ground."
Release of ancient carbon would have 'catastrophic' effect
He
said with the culling of huge numbers of sharks and other top ocean
predators, researchers had discovered many other examples of this
occurring.
"There's been some 90 per cent loss of the oceans' top
predators and so we've learnt this link between sharks and other top
predators and the cascading effects they will have down to other animals
in those ecosystems that are eating themselves out of house and home.
"They're
eating the blue carbon ecosystems that have sequestered so much carbon
and this is causing release of ancient carbon as a consequence."
Dr Macreadie said it would have a catastrophic effect on the environment.
"We've only just scratched the surface here," he said.
"These
blue carbon ecosystems are so critical for sequestering carbon and they
support these important food webs, and when these food webs are
disrupted it's a bit like playing a game of Jenga — you pull out a few
pins and the whole thing falls apart.
"If we just lost 1 per cent
of the oceans' blue carbon ecosystems, it would be equivalent to
releasing 460 million tonnes of carbon annually, which is about the
equivalent of about 97 million cars.
"It's about equivalent to Australia's annual greenhouse gas emissions.
"So
I think it's time to take a good look at the way in which nature helps
mitigate climate change for us and trying to do everything we can to let
that natural process operate in full force, and if sharks are a part of
that, if predators and a part of that we need to take that into
consideration."
With 1.4 million households with solar PV installed, rooftop solar has been one of Australia’s renewable energy success stories – a fact that is celebrated in a new report by the Energy Supply Association of Australia.
The report, titled Renewable Energy in Australia – How do we really compare?, notes that while Australia is ranked sixth in the world for total solar per capita, it is number one when it comes to solar on rooftops.
And the ESSA fact sheet has plenty of nice graphics to illustrate this achievement.
“More than one in seven households now have solar PV systems mounted on their roofs, which is a 15 per cent penetration rate,” the report says.
And it shows that South Australia and Queensland are leading the charge, with an average of 25 per cent and 24 per cent of households with solar on their roofs, and some suburbs in Adelaide and Brisbane – like Virginia and Chandler – boasting more than 50 per cent household PV penetration.
“We have double the penetration rates of the next best country, Belgium, and more than three times the level in Germany, which is considered a leader in solar generation,” says ESAA chief Matthew Warren.
The report also shows that South Australia and Tasmania have some of the highest per capita wind generation in the world, alongside leading US states like Iowa and Texas.
The message from this analysis, argues Warren, is that Australia “has not been a laggard” on renewable generation.
“This analysis clearly (shows) that we are have made progress in terms of sourcing energy from wind and solar and this can be expected to continue,” he says.
It’s an interesting message, coming from ESAA, which has in the past lobbied to have Australia’s Renewable Energy Target reduced and, more specifically, for the removal of upfront payments under the small-scale technology component of the RET – a measure aimed squarely at slowing rooftop solar uptake.
It seems to suggest that Australia is tracking just fine in its shift to renewable energy, as it tackles the dual task of emissions reduction and the modernisation of its grid. But surely the ESAA is not arguing that Australia has done enough.
The chart below, which is included on ESAA’s fact sheet, tells another story: That Australia is also among the world’s leading consumers of coal power generation. Anyone else confused?
As of last year, China and the US were first and third on the list of Australia’s trading partners. Australian trade with China was worth $152.53 billion - a total that has grown by 12.2% on average over the last 5 years. Australia’s trade with the US was worth $60.43 billion as of 2014, having grown 4% on average over the last 5 years.
In March this year, China raised a number of concerns regarding Australia’s Intended Nationally Determined Commitment (INDC) for greenhouse gas emissions in the lead up to the Paris Climate Summit in December. In particular, they queried whether replacing the planned Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and the Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI) with the Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) will yield the reductions that were likely under those two. The US also queried whether the ERF will primarily replace the ETS or whether other Policies and Measures will be considered.
I discussed a number of issues regarding the ERF (the Flagship of the Australian Government Direct Action plan) and the first Auction in April this year in an earlier blog. The second Auction will be held on 4 and 5 November, which is approximately three and a half weeks prior to the Paris Summit. It is possible that news of the second Auction results will spread as widely and quickly as for the first, including to representatives of other nations attending the Summit. The representatives may be keen to quiz the Australian party on the results, particularly if the results are questioned as extensively in social media as the results of the first Auction were. This will be very interesting to watch indeed.
In the time since the first Auction, it is fair to say that a lot has transpired politically in an international and domestic context that highlights and brings into focus Australia’s stance on emissions reductions. In an international context, China and the US have progressed a deal on emissions reductions reached last November with discussions earlier this month, as a result of which many cities including Atlanta, Houston, New York, Beijing, Guangzhou and Zhenjiang have pledged new actions. A number of other nations have announced their INDCs in the lead up to Paris.
Last Friday (US time) Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a nationwide cap and trade emissions program as part of efforts to tackle climate change. Cap and trade programs cap the total emissions and sources including power stations and factories purchase and sell credits. In terms of the US, although plans for a nationwide cap and trade program were defeated in 2009, California and other north-eastern states have implemented emissions trading schemes.
Domestically, the Government has changed leadership resulting in the installation of Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister. Last week, in response to the announcement of China’s cap and trade program, Environment Minister Greg Hunt announced that the Government will stay the course regarding the ERF which is reported to be “the best, most effective scheme in the world”.
Given that China and the US (amongst others) have raised concerns with Australia’s commitment for Paris and have signed agreements to peak and reduce emissions respectively, I would be very surprised if they (and other nations attending the Paris Summit) would be prepared to give Australia until 2017/18 to consider further emissions reductions. I think it more likely that the US and China lead the charge in maintaining pressure on Australia to do more in the global challenge that is climate change.
Given the recent announcements by the Australian Government with respect to the state of the domestic economy and the discussions as to the exact nature of the problem, I struggle to fathom why they believe they can maintain one particular strategy and direction with respect to emissions reduction when an increasing number of countries are going in another.
If trade with China and the US continues on their current respective trajectories, by 2017, the combined figure is at approximately $233.7 billion (at a minimum) - $170.84 billion from China and $62.85 billion from the US. I don’t know if many Australians would be prepared to allow their Government to gamble such a figure on any matter - least of all emissions reduction specifically but climate change more generally, especially given the global nature of today’s economy. This is effectively what they are doing by continuing to ignore the rising tide of emissions trading.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has announced pledged to adopt a national
emissions trading scheme from 2017. EPA/MICHAEL REYNOLDS/AAP
China has confirmed that it will launch its national emissions trading scheme.
In a joint US-China climate statement, issued as part of President Xi Jinping’s state visit to the United States, China confirmed that its new trading sytem will cover “key industry sectors such as iron and steel, power generation, chemicals, building materials, paper-making, and nonferrous metals”.
Below, our experts react to the development. John Mathews, Professor of Strategic Management, Macquarie Graduate School of Management, Macquarie University
Xi Jinping is scoring a propaganda coup by announcing China’s intention to introduce a national cap-and-trade scheme in 2017, while he is a guest of Obama at the White House. It will not be lost on observers that China will be introducing the very kind of scheme that failed to get through the US Congress, passing the House but being defeated in the Senate.
How interesting that China the communist country is introducing the kind of market-based emissions trading scheme that the United States was unable to launch.
There are two further points to make. The first is that China is introducing its national scheme after trying out various options as local and city-level experimental schemes over the past couple of years. In 2012, pilot programs were initiated in seven provinces, and have been closely monitored since. Here China is teaching the world a lesson in how to introduce reform: first try it out at a small scale in a variety of forms, and then scale up the most successful.
Second, China is not relying on these market-led cap-and-trade initiatives alone. It is also reducing coal consumption in its power sector through direct state intervention, and has been actively promoting solar photovoltaic and wind power through state-guided targeted investment, national planning, and local promotion programs. So the new scheme will take its place as an initiative that helps to solidify China’s trajectory towards greening its energy systems – after direct state action has done the heavy lifting.
Anita Talberg, PhD candidate, Australian-German Climate and Energy College, University of Melbourne
China’s greenhouse gas emissions represent a quarter of the global total. For this reason alone, any tangible progress on Chinese climate action is encouraging. However, what is more promising is what a Chinese emissions trading scheme could mean for the world.
To date we have only seen pockets of emissions trading across the globe; most notably the EU has had a scheme since 2004 and a Californian system has been operating since 2013. Despite concerted efforts, there has been very little headway in linking regional emissions trading schemes. This is because carbon credits would become fungible.
So if one market crashes, so do the connected markets. The entire system is only as strong as the safeguards in the weakest market. The environmental effectiveness of the entire system is only as credible as the monitoring and verification in the least stringent scheme.
The EU and the rest of the world will be looking closely at the integrity and robustness of the Chinese market’s design. If China gets it right, and can elicit enough buy-in, it could represent a turning point for climate change.
Peter Christoff, Associate Professor, School of Geography at University of Melbourne
The announced introduction of China’s national emissions trading scheme in 2017 places irresistible pressure on Malcolm Turnbull to revisit the issue of an Australian ETS.
When China joins the European Union (the world’s third biggest aggregate emitter) and a number of other major emitting countries and states using cap-and-trade schemes to help cut emissions, some 40% of total global emissions will be covered by carbon markets.
Tellingly, Chinese President Xi Jinping made his announcement at a joint White House Press Conference with President Obama. Together they emphasised how the world’s two largest emitters are now collaborating closely to tackle global warming. Pressure is building within the US to create a national integrated scheme on the foundations of its regional efforts, and other major emitters, like Brazil and Russia, are contemplating similar measures.
Australia’s Direct Action Plan cannot easily be linked to this growing global carbon market. Its underfunded “reverse auction” process cannot acquire sufficient emissions to meet even Australia’s 2020 target. Its “safeguard mechanism” is unlikely to require major Australian emitters to reduce their emissions significantly. Australia is now transparently out of step with global trends and, relying only on current measures, incapable of meeting the tougher mitigation targets which will be required of it in the near future.
David Hodgkinson, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Western Australia
The Chinese government’s announcement of a 2017 national ETS is not surprising. Since 2011 China has been piloting seven trading schemes in cities including Beijing and Shanghai, albeit with varying success, and has been planning for and had foreshadowed a national scheme.
The announcement also builds on last year’s US-China bilateral agreement, which included a pledge from China (for the first time) that its emissions would peak no later than 2030 – although no mention was made of the level at which they would peak.
What is surprising is the speed with which the divide between developed and developing states enshrined in both the UNFCCC and its Kyoto Protocol has now crumbled. Both developed and developing countries in Paris in December will now state their climate pledges, or “intended nationally determined contributions”, including China. These contributions won’t be negotiated by all the parties – that approach has long gone. And the legal character of these contributions is uncertain. But China’s announcement on Friday certainly works in favour of a more robust agreement.
The climate change problem can’t be addressed without China, the world’s largest emitter (or indeed India, the third largest). China now joins the other 75 countries (and the European Union) with frameworks for limiting emissions, and the 47 countries (plus the EU) that have carbon pricing.
William Borucki donated Shaw Award prize money for pioneering planet finding to the Union of Concerned Scientists for its climate change efforts
William Borucki has had an amazing scientific career. One of his first jobs was at NASA Ames Research Center, where he worked on the Apollo moon missions, including helping to develop the heat shield for the space shuttle. After the successful moon landings, Borucki shifted to NASA’s Theoretical Studies Branch in the 1970s, where he developed models of the Earth’s atmosphere to predict the effects of nitric oxides and chlorofluoromethanes on the ozone layer. Both were determined to contribute to the problem of ozone depletion and the hole in the ozone layer.
In the 1980s, Borucki began advocating the development of a space mission that could detect Earth-size planets. He published a paper in 1984 showing that a photometer 1,000 times more precise than any in existence could detect Earth-size planets. Undeterred by rejections of four proposals in the 1990s for a planet-finding mission, Borucki was ultimately appointed Principal Investigator in 2001 for NASA’s new Keppler Mission to discover these planets. During its four years of its operation, the Keppler Mission discovered over 4,600 planetary candidates, confirmed more than 1,000 as planets, and made numerous contributions to stellar astrophysics.
For his work in conceiving and leading the Keppler Mission, Borucki was awarded the Shaw Prize in astronomy. He decided to donate a portion of the award to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to support the organization’s work in addressing climate change, explaining,
I’ve spent a large portion of my career searching for other worlds. What we’ve found has underscored how important it is to protect this one. While we can detect other worlds, we cannot go to them. Our future is here on Earth and we must do much more to ensure that our planet’s climate remains hospitable. The UCS has a reputation for actively and successfully advocating mitigation of the climate change problem. Their arguments are based on scientifically valid arguments and on comprehensive climate data and model results.
I asked Dr. Borucki about his perceptions of the threats posed by human-caused climate change, and his thoughts on the steps we’ve taken so far to address them.
I consider the threat to be severe. Substantial changes are already occurring to the environment that effect many people; especially those who are impoverished. In the 1980s, the Climatic Impact Assessment Program warned that if changes weren’t made very soon, it would be difficult to reverse the changes. Clearly, they were correct. I am very hopeful because the leaders of many countries (and some religious leaders) now recognize the problem as an imminent threat and are meeting to develop a consensus as to the most practical methods of mitigating it.
Searching for Earth-like planets has made Dr. Borucki appreciate our own and the need to preserve it, as he told the Huffington Post,
The Earth is a very special place. Unless we have the wisdom and technology to protect our biosphere, it could become like many other dead worlds ... It wouldn’t take a lot of change to make the planet uninhabitable for ourselves.
Borucki remains optimistic that humans will still solve the problem of climate change before the consequences become too severe.
Once mankind understands the threat, I think they will get together ultimately and conquer that threat. But they have to recognize it and really be dedicated to accomplishing the task, because the tasks are just enormous.
The best thing to come out of a summit between China and the U.S. is a renewed commitment to fight global warming
Chinese President Xi Jinping listens as President
Barack Obama speaks during an official state arrival ceremony for the
Chinese president at the White House in Washington on Sept. 25, 2015.
China—the world’s largest polluter—has sought to portray itself as a leader in the global fight against climate change in recent years. The country has expedited the development of renewable energy power plants, experimented with cap-and-trade programs and last year committed to curb its growing carbon dioxide emissions in coming decades.
But despite these initiatives many lawmakers in the United States and policy makers around the world have viewed China’s environmental programs with skepticism—more promise than performance. China’s landmark announcement Friday of a national cap-and-trade program and other policies to reduce carbon emissions should ameliorate some of those concerns, experts said, even while the country faces roadblocks to implementation.
Last year’s joint announcement from the U.S. and China set big goals on the part of both countries to eventually reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. promised to reduce carbon emissions by 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025, and Chinese officials said the country’s carbon dioxide emissions would reach peak levels by 2030.
This week’s announcement, both from the U.S. and China, follows up on that target, providing a plan to reach it. A cap-and-trade program would set a national limit in China on carbon emissions in the heavy-polluting industries of power generation, iron and steel, chemicals, and building materials and require companies to buy credits to pollute. Another program will prioritize the use renewable energy on the grid. (Right now, while China produces a great deal of renewable energy, problems with the grid means much of it goes unused.) The country will also improve appliance and vehicle efficiency standards.
“It’s really walking the talk to the commitment last year,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “China has really been working over the last year to put flesh on the bones.”
China benefits internationally from taking on climate change—especially at a time when the country is coming under pressure for alleged cyberespionage and territorial expansion—but experts say the most logical reason to trust the commitment China may be because of internal issues the country faces. Most of the country’s energy currently comes from coal. In the past, coal plants in China have been cheap and easy to build, but the fossil fuel source has led to crippling pollution and a dramatic public health problem. Air pollution in China causes 1.6 million premature deaths every year, or 4,400 per day, research has shown. At the same time, the country is the world’s largest importer of foreign oil, leaving it dependent on shifting oil prices and the messy geopolitics of the Middle East. Renewable energy provides the logical alternative, experts say.
“Their cities are choking, to put it bluntly,” said John Creyts, managing director at the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank. “They need a development pathway that allows them to grow without choking their people and requiring them to be depend on external economies for the resources they need.”
In fact, China has already matched commitment with action. In 2014, for instance, the country invested $90 billion in clean energy, compared to $52 billion in the U.S., according to a U.S. government report.
Still, experts say implementing some of the policies in China will face uphill battles given the many overlapping jurisdictions and different reporting standards throughout the sprawling country. In their announcement Friday, China and the U.S. said they would develop a program to ensure transparency, but the details remain unclear.
Many in the U.S. and around the world have expressed skepticism about investing in efforts to fight climate change, arguing that costly efforts would lead to a free rider problem of sorts. They say under national plans to curb climate change, the U.S. would invest in expensive efforts to cut carbon emissions while other countries—primarily big developing nations like China and India—would reap the benefit without doing anything to slow their own emissions.
The argument has played out in public as recently as last week, when Republican presidential contenders suggested that government regulations to address climate change would leave the country at a competitive disadvantage.
“We are not going to destroy our economy,” said Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a GOP presidential candidate. “America is not a planet. And we are not even the largest carbon producer anymore, China is. And they’re drilling a hole and digging anywhere in the world that they can get a hold of.”
Meyer says this week’s announcement undercuts this opposition, leaving the U.S. to show how it will meet its commitment to cut emissions.
“This is yet another indication of momentum and seriousness,” Meyer said. “The job’s not done yet.”
Labor questions Turnbull's conviction: Labor is accusing Malcolm Turnbull of
compromising on core beliefs including climate change, marriage equality
and water reform. (Courtesy of ABC News 24).
It used to be politically hard work for an Australian government to sell the case for policy action on climate change when the world's two great emitters were opting out of the game.
Now that China's President Xi Jinping has arrived in Washington with an emissions trading plan, policy inaction has become the harder sell.
Quixotic campaigns against wind farms and other acts of enviro-economic sabotage are now politically untenable, if they weren't already.
President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House in Washington on Thursday ahead of crucial talks. Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta
And the global headwinds on climate policy that helped destroy the Rudd and Gillard governments, and bring Abbott to power, have turned into a tailwind for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Mr Xi's national cap-and-trade emissions reduction scheme, which he will reportedly announced on Friday Washington time, will not be without problems.
Details will be hard to come by, and anyone who watched the development of other complex markets in China will rightly wonder whether it can be done.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Photo: Andrew Meares
Efficient emissions trading schemes require a degree of trust, transparency and regulatory autonomy which simply does not currently exist in China.
China's scheme will risk being rorted and possibly paralysed amid the contradictions of Chinese market-Leninism, if recent travails in the markets for shares, futures, bonds and currencies are anything to go by.
But Mr Xi's new emissions trading plan is symbolic of changes already made as much as a promise of things to come.
Climate change has become the centre of US-China cooperation under Mr Xi and Mr Obama, at a time of otherwise darkening relations.
Both leaders have relied on tough administrative edicts to meet energy-intensity and emissions commitments, in combination with underlying economic structural change. Together, they have altered what had been a catastrophically steep global emissions trajectory.
Emissions growth in China has been slowing for several years and may have even peaked. In the US, emissions have been declining since 2007.
The old Australian excuse of waiting for the world's two great emitters is no longer viable.
The world's most powerful leaders are giving Mr Turnbull a chance of working with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Environment Minister Greg Hunt to restore Australia's constructive role in the global fight against global warming, without upsetting the delicate chemistry of the Coalition party room.
Action in this area would have the important side-benefit of re-opening a productive channel of cooperation with China, at a time of rising regional tension.
The modest commitment to the Paris climate change conference later this year will become a floor for Australia's ambitions, rather than a ceiling.
In short, the geo-political climate is changing rapidly in Mr Turnbull's favour.
Malcolm Turnbull is now defending the policy he criticised, but his
truths about climate change won’t go away and this stop-gap scheme will
come badly unstuck
Malcolm Turnbull at the memorial dedicated to war correspondents at the
Australian War Memorial this week. Photograph: Lukas Coch/EPA
You asked for this Malcolm, standing in the wind outside the war memorial this week. You said journalists had “to hold up the truth to power”. But in the case of your climate policy you’ve made our job easy. You’ve said so much on the subject that for the most part we can hold up your own truth to yourself.
This mirror reflecting back your own past verities could become a bit of a theme in your prime
ministership, with all that you’ve said and all the things that now constrain you. Or maybe it won’t – it’s still too early to say.
But since you’ve asked for them, here are some of your own truths about climate change.
Lately you’ve claimed the $2.5bn emissions reduction fund (ERF) – part of the Direct Action climate policy you once ridiculed but have now inherited – has been “very successful” and that “all of the advice we have suggests that the government’s policies will achieve the reductions ... that we’re taking to the Paris conference of the parties.”
On Friday (as China – yes, China – announced a start date for its national emissions trading scheme) your environment minister Greg Hunt went so far as to say ours is the “best and most efficient scheme in the world”.
But we all know that’s not true. Not as it stands. And we know you know it because you’ve stuck a pin in its problems yourself.
First – trying to meet deeper emissions long-term reductions by buying them with the ERF is going to become too expensive.
The scheme might meet the 2020 target (a 5% cut of 2000 levels by 2020) but if it does it will be in large part because we vastly overestimated what our emissions would be – the job is now less than a third of what we expected.
But to get to our next target (a cut of between 26% and 28% by 2030) it will cost a bomb. As you told Lateline in 2011 “if you want to ... cut carbon emissions ... in a very substantial way to the levels that the scientists are telling us we need to do by mid-century to avoid dangerous climate change, then a direct action policy where ... industry was able to freely pollute, if you like, and the government was just spending more and more taxpayers’ money to offset it, that would become a very expensive charge on the budget in the years ahead.” Pretty much every expert agrees with what you thought back then.
Second, it’s very hard to know whether the ERF is actually buying emission reductions or just paying people to do things they would have done anyway.
Direct Action’s first “reverse auction” spent $660m to reduce Australia’s expected greenhouse emissions by 47m tonnes, which you and Greg Hunt now claim was a stunning success.
On close examination that’s questionable.
It spent $300m to make sure farmers around Cobar and Bourke who had already promised not to clear trees on their land, continued to keep that promise. Most of them had been getting money under the former government’s carbon farming scheme. Perhaps they would have started clearing again had they lost the government income stream but almost no one thinks they ever intended to clear all the land they were permitted to clear, and for which they are receiving payments to leave alone.
Another $200m went to ensure that garbage dumps, mines and livestock operations that were already capturing the potent greenhouse gas methane kept on doing what they were already doing. Most of those projects had been around for a long time, had already recouped their capital costs, were generating an income and would have continued even without additional government funding.
Back into 2010, you were also already onto this obvious pitfall.
“Arguments of considerable ferocity will arise as to whether a new piece of equipment would have
been bought anyway with the risk that the government ends up funnelling billions of dollars to companies to subsidise their profits without achieving any real additional cuts to emissions,” you told parliament, with remarkable prescience.
As you knew, usually when governments pay for these kinds of projects the lucky grant-winners have to try to demonstrate that the money is essential for them to do some greenhouse-gas reducing thing in addition to what they would have done anyway.
But in the case of these projects the Direct Action legislation let them off. It assumed “additionality’ and did not require it to be proven – in the interests of “investment certainty”. We avoided the ferocious arguments you predicted but we have no idea whether all our money went on buying new emission reductions or not.
Is that really “stunning”, or as you said before “a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a grand scale?” We’re pretty sure we know what you would have concluded.
Third, there’s the other element of your policy that could possibly reduce emissions – the “safeguards” mechanism – the bit that sets “baselines” for big industrial emitters. Except the current draft rules explicitly state that it’s not even trying to reduce emissions, it just aims to make sure they don’t go up and undo all the emission reductions the ERF is buying.
And expert analysis, for example by Reputex, suggests it will fail even in that astonishingly modest aim, and instead allow the country’s biggest emitters to increase their greenhouse pollution.
You actually have a chance to change this – consultation on the draft rules closed last Monday, and independent senator Nick Xenophon is saying if they aren’t given at least some “teeth” he’ll disallow them in the Senate – a threat that may not have concerned your predecessor but he’s thinking might just give you pause.
Tougher baselines would start to create a baseline and credit emissions trading scheme. Will you do it? Is that what Hunt has planned after the review you’ll be holding in 2017? If it is you’ll have to give up on the line that you’ve found a way to reduce emissions without any impact on consumer prices.
Fourth, if we are going to reduce emissions we have to change the way we generate electricity. Yes, we have a renewable energy target, but the general policy uncertainty means even the political truce on that issue has not restarted investment. The biggest increase since the abolition of the carbon price has been the dirtiest brown coal fired power.
And we know you know this too.
“The transition from a high emission economy to a low emission one cannot be achieved without major changes to the way we generate and use energy,” you said. “Given that the cheapest fuels are generally the dirtiest, in the absence of a clear carbon price signal, new capacity is likely to be coal rather than gas, rather than renewables.”
Yes, your predecessor was forced into a deal on the renewable energy target, but the ongoing uncertainty means retailers still aren’t building the large-scale renewable developments that are required. You are going to have to give them a sign.
We understand you had to make some concessions to become prime minister. You have promised to work within the current scheme, which Hunt always hoped would morph into a baseline and credit trading scheme over time. And yes, you need time to consult and make decisions, to add or amend or change. To take your own side with you. But your own truths won’t go away and as it stands this stop-gap policy will come badly unstuck.
Climate campaigners applaud pope’s bridging of environmental issues with moral obligation as way to force Republican party leaders to reconsider position
Pope Francis calls on the US – and Congress – to lead the charge in efforts to combat climate change.
It just took one utterance from Pope Francis – “earth” – to rouse cheers from the climate campaigners who had gathered on the Mall to watch the pope’s historic speech to Congress.
The pope’s visit to what remains a fortress of climate denial among the Republican party leadership greatly boosted hopes among campaigners of elevating climate change from a narrow, partisan issue to a matter of broad public concern.
As Francis appeared on the large screen, several thousand campaigners – some carrying quotes from his encyclical on the environment on large banners trimmed in Vatican yellow, a contingent of animal rights activists dressed as nuns – whooped and cheered.
“We’re excited about the pope being here, especially his saying that climate change is not a partisan issue, and that we have a moral obligation to act,” said Ashley Aguirre, 20, and a student at Virginia Commonwealth University, who had travelled from Richmond for the rally.
Although there was only a very brief mention of the environment in his speech to Congress – he avoided a direct clash with Republican party leaders by diving into climate change deeply in his visit to the White House on Wednesday – the pope still managed to emphasise two clear points. He re-affirmed that human activity was driving climate change, and that political leaders needed to act.
“I am convinced that we can make a difference and I have no doubt that the United States – and this Congress – have an important role to play,” the pope said. “Now is the time for creative actions and strategies aimed at implementing “a culture of care”.
Francis’s intervention has produced some new alliances in the climate camp, with faith groups now coming together with civil rights campaigners and traditional environmental supporters.
His appearance in Congress came a day after his endorsement of Barack Obama’s clean power plant plan – arguably one of the biggest targets of Republicans in both houses as well as on the presidential campaign trail.
More than half of Republicans in Congress deny the existence of climate change, or oppose government regulations to cut carbon pollution.
Environmental campaigners had been thrilled at the prospect of the pope reprising his powerful message for climate action from the encyclical in front of Republican Catholics, such as house speaker John Boehner.
The musician Moby, one of the performers at the climate rally, called it “Pope-enfreude”. “Basically,
Pope's climate push is 'raving nonsense' without population control, says top US scientist Read more
it’s watching crazy rightwing anti-environmental Republicans who have always hidden behind religion actually be held accountable,” he told The Guardian. “To have people like [Republican presidential candidates] Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio watch the head of their church come out as an outspoken environmentalist – it’s just satisfying to me watching them squirm.”
Jairo Diaz, an artist who had come from Fort Lauderdale with a canvas of Christ, said he hoped the pope’s presence in the US – just after his encyclical and before the Paris climate negotiations – could help advance prospects of climate action. “It’s a blessing that the pope is here at this moment in this country,” he said.
Even the very mention of the words climate change are awkward for Republicans, who have typically aligned with the Catholic church on social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, and now find themselves out of step with the pope.
By the time of Francis’s speech to Congress, campaigners dared to believe there was already a pope effect taking hold.
“Just by being here, he is forcing the discussion on climate change,” said Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth. “With the pope coming out strong and really leaning into climate change, this is about trying to further shift the US discussion particularly in the Republican party, and get more conservatives talking about climate change.”
The Bureau of Meteorology has defended the accuracy of its climate records after documents released under freedom-of-information laws showed the Abbott government considered investigating its estimates on global warming.
The agency said that while it welcomed scrutiny of its scientific work "the bureau has always confidently maintained that it has not altered climate records to exaggerate estimates of global warming".
The comments come after documents released to the ABC showed former prime minister Tony Abbott's department discussed investigating the bureau's climate data following claims in The Australian newspaper last year that the bureau was "wilfully ignoring evidence that contradicts its own propaganda".
A weather bureau source said forecasters were instructed to be "more
careful" when discussing climate change after Tony Abbott was elected. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
The inquiry, had it proceeded, would have been carried out by a taskforce in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet established to consider Australia's post-2020 emissions reduction targets.
One bureau source told Fairfax Media that forecasters were instructed to be "more careful" when discussing climate change after Mr Abbott was elected in 2013.
The source said the instructions were unofficial but passed down through government channels.
"It was common knowledge that the Liberal Party were not as convinced about climate change,
Illustration: Ron Tandberg
and they just asked us not to be too keen about all these records being broken all the time," the source said.
Seven of Australia's 10 warmest years on record occurred in the past 13 years.
The bureau has repeatedly rejected claims it has altered or exaggerated climate data.
A review published in July by a technical advisory forum set up to examine the bureau's data backed the accuracy of its records, but recommended some improvements in the clarity and presentation of its information.
The FOI documents show Environment Minister Greg Hunt argued against the government's targets taskforce investigating the bureau, noting that the technical forum was already conducting its review.
Mr Abbott in correspondence to Mr Hunt asked Senator Simon Birmingham, who had responsibility for the agency at the time, to "write to me on the outcome of the review of the temperature dataset".
A briefing that was sent to Mr Abbott noted the articles in The Australian but said the way the bureau managed its records was "transparent" and "recognised internationally as among the best in the world".
"It is a scientific approach that has been peer reviewed," the note says.
"Nevertheless, the public need confidence information on Australia's, and the world's, climate is reliable and based on the best available science."
The bureau's spokeswoman said "the bureau always welcomes scrutiny of its scientific work".
"Temperature records are influenced by a range of factors such as changes to site surrounds, measurement methods and the relocation of stations. Such changes introduce biases into the climate record that need to be adjusted for prior to analysis," she said.
"Adjusting for these biases, a process known as homogenisation, is carried out by meteorological authorities around the world as best practice to ensure that climate data is consistent through time."
Former prime minister Tony Abbott's own department discussed setting up an investigation into the Bureau of Meteorology amid media claims it was exaggerating estimates of global warming, Freedom of Information documents have revealed.
In August and September 2014, The Australian newspaper published reports questioning the Bureau of Meteorology's (BoM) methodology for analysing temperatures, reporting claims BoM was "wilfully ignoring evidence that contradicts its own propaganda".
Key points:
The Australian published reports suggesting BOM was "wilfully ignoring evidence"
Weeks after the articles were published, Mr Abbott's department canvassed taskforce investigation, FOI documents reveal
Environment Minister Greg Hunt argued against investigation
Review found no evidence BOM had been adjusting figures
With seven of Australia's 10 warmest years on record being in the last 13 years and warnings climate change will bring disastrous impacts for Australia, the accuracy and integrity of temperature information is crucial.
The BoM strongly rejected assertions it was altering climate records to exaggerate estimates of global warming.
Nevertheless, documents obtained by the ABC under Freedom of Information show just weeks after the articles were published, Mr Abbott's own department canvassed using a taskforce to carry out "due diligence" on the BoM's climate records.
Late last year, the Government set up a taskforce to provide advice on post 2020 emissions reduction targets ahead of the United Nations Paris climate change conference in December 2015.
The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet originally wanted the taskforce to also conduct "due diligence to ensure Australia's climate and emissions data are the best possible, including the Bureau of Meteorology's Australian temperature dataset". "The way the Bureau manages its climate records is recognised internationally as among the best in the world," the brief said.
"Nevertheless, the public need confidence information on Australia and the world's climate is reliable and based on the best available science."
Public trust in BOM paramount: Hunt
The pressure intensified when Mr Abbott's business advisory council chair Maurice Newman wrote an opinion piece in the paper, demanding a Government-funded audit and review of the Bureau.
The concerns centred on the Bureau's temperature homogenisation process — the method in which it adjusts temperatures for weather sites based on factors like trees casting shade or influencing wind or if the station is moved.
Both the Department of Environment and Environment Minister Greg Hunt argued against having the taskforce investigate the Bureau. One Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet bureaucrat described a Department of Environment official as being "on a campaign" to get the references to BoM removed from the taskforce's responsibilities.
Further documents appear to show Mr Hunt convinced senior cabinet members to remove any references of "due diligence" or "quality assurance".
In a letter to Mr Abbott written on November 18 last year, Mr Hunt highlighted the fact the "draft terms of reference refers to the taskforce doing due diligence on the Bureau of Meteorology's Australian temperature data set".
"In doing this, it is important to note that public trust in the Bureau's data and forecasts, particularly as they relate to bushfires and cyclones, is paramount," it said.
"Given the recent publicity about the Bureau's temperature data sets, Senator Birmingham and I established a strengthened governance oversight of the Bureau's ongoing work in this area."
Review group set up in response to articles
The strengthened governance of the Bureau that Mr Hunt referred to is the setting up a Technical Advisory Forum to review and provide advice on the Bureau's temperature data — a recommendation from an earlier review of the Bureau's processes.
"It is important to emphasise that this is primarily a matter of meteorology, statistics and data assurance," Mr Hunt wrote in his letter to Mr Abbott.
A 2011 review found the Bureau's data and analysis methods met world's best practice but recommended a group be set up to review progress on the development and operation of the temperature data.
The 2015 panel included eminent statisticians and members have told the ABC they were in no doubt that it was set up in response to the newspaper articles.
A draft letter from Mr Abbott addressed to Mr Hunt showed that Mr Abbott wanted personal updates on the panel's review.
"The credibility of Government agencies is important and must be ensured," the letter read.
The review confirmed the credibility of the Bureau of Meteorology in its report released in June 2015, which did not find any evidence that the BoM had been adjusting its figures to fit a pattern of global warming.
"There is a clear trend [of temperature] increase in both the raw and homogenised temperature data, and the temperature patterns exhibited in a variety of other datasets have a similar character," the report said.
However, it did recommend improving the clarity and accessibility of information and refining some of the Bureau's data handling and statistical methods.
An accompanying brief seen by Mr Abbott noted that "in recent articles in The Australian, the BoM was accused of altering its temperature data records to exaggerate estimates of global warming".
Rolling Stone - Jeff Goodell "I don't want to get paralyzed by the magnitude of this thing. I'm a big believer that imagination can solve problems," says the president
President Obama in Kotzebue, Alaska. Photograph by Mark Seliger
In Alaska, President Obama was in a very good mood. He visited the state in late summer to draw attention to the looming climate catastrophe the world faces, but with the exception of one big policy speech when he sounded as apocalyptic as any hemp-growing activist, he spent most of his three days up north beaming. "He's happy to be out of his cage," one aide joked. Others credited the buoyant U.S. economy or the fact that the president had just learned that he had secured enough votes to protect the hard-fought nuclear deal with Iran from being derailed by Senate Republicans.
Whatever the reason, you could see the cheerfulness in his face the moment he stepped out of his armored presidential limo at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, where the air was hazy with smoke from the wildfires that had burned millions of acres in Alaska.
The president was all smiles, shaking hands with local pols and then bounding up the stairs into Air Force One. No suit and tie, no sir — today, on what was the third and final day of his trip, he was dressed for adventure in black outdoor pants, a gray pullover and a black Carhartt jacket.
He was heading north to Kotzebue, a village about 30 miles above the Arctic Circle, which is suffering from a climate-disaster trifecta of melting permafrost, rising seas and bigger storm surges. As White House press releases and video blogs pointed out, this was a historic trip — not only would Obama be the first sitting president to ever visit the Arctic, but he would also be the first president to use a selfie stick to take videos of himself talking about the end of human civilization.
The president's upbeat mood was an odd and unexpected counterpoint to the seriousness and urgency of the message he was trying to deliver. "Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now," Obama said in his remarks to an international conference on the Arctic in Anchorage on the first day of his trip. In perhaps the starkest language he has ever used in public, Obama warned that unless more was done to reduce carbon pollution, "we will condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair: submerged countries, abandoned cities, fields no longer growing." His impatience was obvious: "We're not moving fast enough," he repeated four times in a 24-minute speech (an aide later told me this repetition was ad-libbed).
Obama's trip to Alaska marked the beginning of what may be the last big push of his presidency — to build momentum for a meaningful deal at the international climate talks in Paris later this year. "The president is entirely focused on this goal," one of his aides told me in Alaska. For Obama, who has secured his legacy on his two top priorities, health care and the economy, as well as on important issues like gay marriage and immigration, a breakthrough in Paris would be a sweet final victory before his presidency drowns in the noise of the 2016 election. "If you think about who has been in the forefront of pushing global climate action forward, nobody is in Obama's league," says John Podesta, a former special adviser to Obama who is now chairing Hil-lary Clinton's presidential campaign. (One recent visitor to the Oval Office recalled Obama saying, "I'm dragging the world behind me to Paris.")
Policywise, the president didn't have much to offer in Alaska. He restored the original Alaska Native name to the highest mountain in North America (Denali), accelerated the construction of a new U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker, doled out a few million bucks to help Alaska Native villages move to higher ground — largely symbolic gestures that didn't do much to help Alaskans deal with the fact that their state is melting like a popsicle on a summer sidewalk. In the end, the trip was mostly a calculated and well-crafted presidential publicity stunt. And it raised the question: If the American people see the president of the United States standing atop a melting glacier and telling them the world is in trouble, will they care?
"Part of the reason why I wanted to take this trip was to start making it a little more visceral and to highlight for people that this is not a distant problem that we can keep putting off," the president told me. "This is something that we have to tackle right now."
Obama could not have picked a better place to make his point than Alaska. Climatewise, it is the dark heart of the fossil-fuel beast. On one hand, temperatures in the state are rising twice as fast as the national average, and glaciers are retreating so quickly that even the pilot of my Delta flight into Anchorage told passengers to "look out the window at the glaciers on the left side of the aircraft — they won't be there for long!" The very week of Obama's visit, 35,000 walruses huddled on the beach in northern Alaska because the sea ice they used as resting spots while hunting had melted away; in the Gulf of Alaska, scientists were tracking the effects of a zone of anomalously warm water that stretches down to Baja California and which has been named, appropriately enough, "the blob." On the other hand, the state is almost entirely dependent on revenues from fossil-fuel production, which, thanks to the low price of oil and exhausted oil and gas wells on the North Slope, are in free fall — the state is grappling with a $3.7 billion budget shortage this year. Alaska Gov. Bill Walker had flown from Washington, D.C., to Anchorage with the president at the beginning of his trip; according to one of the president's aides, Walker asked the president to open more federal lands to oil and gas drilling to boost state revenues. "Alaska is a banana republic," says Bob Shavelson, executive director of Cook Inletkeeper, an environmental group in Alaska. "The state has to pump oil or die."
President Obama shooting his selfie video about the end of human civilization. Pete Souza/White House
When it comes to climate change, the rap on Obama has always been that he's better at talk than action. He campaigned in 2008 on a promise to cut carbon pollution and push cap-and-trade legislation through Congress, but his commitment lacked urgency. (During the 2008 campaign, he went out of his way to support "clean coal," which was the favorite buzzword of Big Coal and political shorthand for "Don't worry, Midwestern voters, I'm not really serious about this climate-change stuff.") The year he took office, he brokered a last-minute deal at the Copenhagen climate negotiations, but decided to make health care reform, not climate legislation, his top priority in the first term. With the economy faltering, he pushed through an $800 billion stimulus bill that jump-started the clean-tech revolution in America, financing investment in wind, solar and other forms of renewable energy. And he used the leverage he gained during the federal bailout of the auto industry to double fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles. But after the 2010 midterm elections, the president had to deal with a Republican Congress full of rabid climate deniers. Rather than confront them and use his bully pulpit to build political momentum for action on climate change, he essentially went dark on the issue for the rest of his first term.
That changed in the second term. "I think his 2013 inaugural address was a turning point," says the president's senior adviser Brian Deese. "He wrote it more or less himself, without policy people, and it really marks a change in his thinking." In that address, Obama makes the case for immediate action: "We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations."
And he made good on that. In June 2013, he unveiled a detailed 75-point Climate Action Plan, which essentially redirected the entire federal government to begin taking climate change seriously. With the help of Podesta, whom he brought in as a senior adviser in early 2014, Obama launched a series of executive actions that circumvented Congress but still allowed him to demonstrate that he was serious about cutting America's carbon pollution. Just as important, he cut a deal with China to reduce carbon pollution in both countries, which broke the logjam on international politics and removed one of the major talking points against taking stronger action on climate change ("China isn't doing anything, so why should we?"). Finally, earlier this year he introduced the Clean Power Plan, which will use the Environmental Protection Agency's regulatory authority to cut power-plant CO2 emissions by 32 percent by 2030.
President Obama at the Dillingham Airport. Pete Souza/White House
Nearly all of Obama's policies have focused on reducing demand for fossil fuels; when it comes to shutting down supply, he has been far less ambitious. He has expanded drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, allowed fracking for natural gas, sold coal leases in Wyoming at flea-market prices and still has not officially killed the controversial Keystone pipeline. This reflects a seemingly deliberate philosophy that reducing demand is a more effective way to wean our economy off fossil fuels than shutting off supplies — which, in a global market, will just be provided elsewhere. Just a month before the trip began, the Department of the Interior approved a permit to allow Shell to perform exploratory drilling this summer about 75 miles off the coast of Alaska in the Chukchi Sea. White House officials argued that approving the dril-ling was hardly a sign that the president was unserious about climate change and pointed out, accurately, that the lease had been sold years earlier by the Bush administration, that there are already some 30 exploratory wells drilled in the Arctic, that the Department of the Interior had only approved this one after pushing hard for new safety regulations and environmental protections, and that, even if all went well, Shell wouldn't begin pumping oil for at least a decade. Nevertheless, climate activists blasted the president for hypocrisy; Al Gore called Arctic drilling "insane."
For the flight up to Kotzebue, the Air Force left the president's 747 parked on the tarmac in Anchorage and switched to a smaller plane, a 757 (it was also dubbed Air Force One, which applies to any aircraft the president is flying in — his staff called it "mini-Air Force One"). Several members of Obama's senior staff were along, including Deese and Susan Rice, his national-security adviser.
Rice's presence on the trip was a reminder that a rapidly melting Arctic also has rapidly escalating national-security implications. As the ice vanishes, a whole new ocean is opening up — and one that contains 30 percent of the known natural-gas reserves and 13 percent of the oil.
Unlike Russia, the U.S. is poorly equipped to operate up there, with only two icebreakers (the Russians have 40). And the Russians aren't the only ones with eyes on the Arctic — as we were flying toward Kotzebue, five Chinese warships were cruising in international waters below. Coincidence or power play? And off to the east, the Canadian military had just wrapped up Operation Nanook, an annual large-scale military exercise, which, according to the Canadian government, was "to assert sovereignty over its northernmost regions."
Before we crossed into the Arctic, we touched down in Dillingham, a small town on Bristol Bay that is the heart of the salmon fishery in Alaska. The presidential motorcade headed straight for the beach, where a couple of Alaska Native women had caught silver salmon in a net, which made another nice visual tableaux for the president's social-media feed and gave him a chance to talk briefly about the importance of salmon in Alaska's economy. (However, he managed to avoid addressing the Pebble mine, a massive and controversial gold and copper mine that is seeking permits in Alaska courts and that, if built, would destroy the headwaters of the salmon fishery.) The funniest moment of the entire trip occurred when the president, who was wearing orange rubber gloves, held up a two-foot-long silver salmon that a fisherwoman had given him. The salmon, apparently a male and still very much alive, ejaculated on his shoes. Obama laughed, and the fisherwoman said something privately to him. The president laughed again and repeated her remark loud enough for everyone to hear: "She says he's happy to see me."
The view from Air Force One of Kivalina Island. Pete Souza/White House
Next stop, Kotzebue. On the way, the president decided to circle over the island of Kivalina to have a look at it. Kivalina is the poster child for the havoc that climate change is wreaking on Alaska Native villages along the coast, where the thawing permafrost is destabilizing the soil, causing houses to collapse and allowing the rising sea to wash the island away. About 400 people live on Kivalina, and their way of life is doomed — relocating the village to higher ground on the mainland will cost an estimated $100 million, which, so far, neither the state nor the federal government has been willing to pay for. And Kivalina is just one of a dozen or so communities that are at immediate risk on the Alaska coast.
We touched down in Kotzebue (population 3,200) at about 5 p.m. The president was greeted on the tarmac by Reggie Joule, the mayor of the Northwest Arctic Borough, then we climbed into our assigned vehicles in the motorcade for the short drive to the high school. We rolled by flimsy weather-beaten houses with American flags hanging in the windows and broken dog sleds in the front yards. You could sense the hardship of life in a place where it gets down to 100 degrees below zero (including wind chill) in the long, dark winters and where the nearest road to civilization is 450 miles away. About 170 miles to the west, across the Bering Strait, is Russia.
The motorcade pulled up at Kotzebue High School, a large metal building draped with banners welcoming the president and snipers pacing on the roof. A thousand people crowded into the gym, draped with the blue and gold colors of the Kotzebue Huskies. Obama gave a relaxed speech about climate change and the wonders of the far north, clearly enjoying the fact that history would remember him as the first sitting president to visit the Arctic. He said he was envious that Warren Harding spent two weeks in Alaska during a trip in 1923, but then explained that he had to get back quickly because "I can't leave Congress alone that long."
When it was over, a White House aide guided me into a nearly empty classroom with a large round table in the center and two blue plastic chairs. Ice crystals made from blue construction paper hung from the ceiling, and a Secret Service officer kept watch by the door. Then the president walked in. We shook hands, exchanged a few words about the flight, then Obama sat down in one of the plastic chairs and said, "Let's do it." We talked for more than an hour — the cheerfulness that had animated many of his public remarks on this trip dissipated. He spoke in measured tones, but with a seriousness that suggested that he believed — not unjustifiably — that the fate of human civilization was in his hands. Only near the end, when I asked if he felt any sadness about what we are losing in the world as a result of our rapidly changing climate, did he show any emotion — he averted his eyes for a moment and looked away, as if the knowledge of what's coming in the next few decades was almost too much to bear. So let's start at the beginning. In 2008, on the day you received the nomination for president, you said, "I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children . . . this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." It's been seven years now. How do you feel about the progress you've made? Well, I'll leave it to others to give a report card on myself. I'll say that, collectively, we have made modest progress, but nowhere near what we need to do.
In the United States, we had an early defeat when we couldn't get congressional passage of a cap-and-trade bill. And we saw Republicans who, in some cases, had previously supported cap-and-trade suddenly run the other way. And so we had to find another way to skin the cat.
And we started with the clean-energy investments that we made early on through the Recovery Act, the work that was done in conjunction with the automakers — in part, frankly, because we were helping them out a lot during that phase — to double fuel-efficiency standards and to look at what we could do administratively in terms of regulatory standards that would create greater efficiency.
And Copenhagen, although it was a disorganized mess — and I still remember flying in that last day, and nothing was happening, and I literally had to rescue the entire enterprise by crashing a meeting of the BRIC countries [Brazil, Russia, India and China] and strong-arming them into coming up with at least a document that could build some consensus going into the future.
What we were able to do was to establish the basic principle that it wasn't going to be enough just for the advanced countries to act — that China, India, others, despite having much lower per-capita carbon footprints, given the sheer size of their populations and how rapidly they were developing, were going to have to put some skin in the game as well.
So where does that leave us now? We set a 17 percent target [for emissions reduction]; we are on track to meet that. We have doubled our production of clean energy — wind-energy production up threefold, solar up twentyfold. We've been able to grow the economy from the depths of the recession while emitting less carbon than we did. Our auto and truck regulations are on track. And the prospect of a real clean-energy economy is there on the horizon. It's achievable. And as I've said, we've been able to do that while creating millions of jobs and dropping the unemployment rate down. And none of the disasters that were predicted from our regulatory steps have taken place.
President Obama briefs foreign leaders at the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Pete Souza/White House
With the clean-power-plant rule, we are now doubling down. And I think it's fair to say that with the steps we've taken through the clean-power-plant rule to reduce carbon emissions from the single largest source by over 30 percent, we've been able to establish a very aggressive target of 26 to 28 percent carbon reduction. Probably as importantly, we've been able to lead by example in a way that allowed me to leverage China and President Xi to make their own commitments for the first time, to have a conversation with somebody like Prime Minister Modi of India or President Rousseff of Brazil, so that they put forward plans.
And I believe that when we get to Paris at the end of this year, we're now in a position for the first time to have all countries recognize their responsibilities to tackle the problem, and to have a meaningful set of targets as well as the financing required to help poor countries adapt. And if we're able to do that by the end of this year — and I'm cautiously optimistic — then we will at least have put together the framework, the architecture to move in concert over the next decade in a serious way.
But having said all that, the science keeps on telling us we're just not acting fast enough. My attitude, though, is that if we get the structure right, then we can turn the dials as there's additional public education, not just in the United States but across the world, and people feel a greater urgency about it and there's more political will to act. Here in Alaska, you talked in almost apocalyptic terms about the future we face if we don't cut carbon pollution quickly. But at the same time, you recently approved a new round of drilling in the Arctic here. How do you justify that decision? This has been an ongoing conversation that I've had with the environmental community. One of the things about being president is you're never starting from scratch, you've got all these legacies that you wrestle with. And obviously, the fossil-fuel economy is deeply entrenched in the structure of everybody's lives around the world. And so from the start, I've always talked about a transition that is not going to happen overnight.
And regardless of how urgent I think the science is, if I howl at the moon without being able to build a political consensus behind me, it's not going to get done. And in fact, we end up potentially marginalizing supporters or people who recognize there's a need to act but also have some real interests at stake.
Alaska, I think, is a fascinating example of that. We've been having conversations with Alaska Natives who are seeing their way of life impacted adversely because of climate change, but also have a real interest in generating jobs and economic development in depressed areas.
And so they'll talk to me about climate change and in the same breath say, "By the way, we really are looking to use our natural resources in a way that can spur on economic development." And that's just a microcosm of what's true across America and what's true around the world.
So my strategy has been to use every lever that we have available to move the clean-energy agenda forward faster, which then reduces the costs of transition for everybody — in fact, in many cases, saves people money and saves businesses money — so that we're reducing what is perceived as a contradiction between economic development and saving the planet.
And when it comes to our own fossil-fuel production, what I've said is there're some things we're just not going to do, not only because it's bad for the climate, but it's also bad for the environment or too risky — Bristol Bay, where we went to earlier today, being a prime example where we just took out the possibility of oil and gas drilling around the Aleutians in ways that would threaten Bristol Bay. Same thing up north.
But to say that, knowing there's still going to be some energy production taking place, let's find those areas that are going to be least likely to disturb precious ecosystems, and let's raise the standards — meaning making them more costly — but not shut them off completely, and that allows me then to have a conversation not with folks who are climate deniers, and not with folks who are adamant about their right to drill, explore and extract anywhere, anytime, but with those folks who are of two minds about the issue.
And I think that process is something that we have to take into account even when something is really important. Even when something threatens us all, we have to bring everybody along. We had the same discussion around something like fracking. The science tells us that if done properly, fracking risks can be minimized. And natural gas is a fossil fuel, but the reason we're not seeing coal-fired plants being built in the United States is not just because of the clean-power-plant rule — because we just put that in place. The reason is it wasn't economical because natural gas was so cheap. And we have to make those choices.
President Obama visits Kanakanak Beach. Pete Souza/White House
Nuclear energy — we approved a nuclear plant down South. And there are some environmentalists who don't like that either. But while acknowledging the risks that we saw in Fukushima, we also have to acknowledge that if we're going to solve climate change, energy is going to have to come from somewhere for a lot of these countries.
So there's always this balance. And I see this even in other issues. When I came into office, I was clear about wanting to end "don't ask, don't tell." A lot of people said, "Well, why not just end it right away?" And I took two years to build a consensus within the Pentagon so that by the time we actually ended it, it was something that had the support of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and that made it a lot easier to get done. The problem, of course, is that building consensus on climate change is different than other issues because you have physics to account for too, right? The warming of the planet is not waiting for consensus-building. I understand. But if we're going to get our arms around this problem, which I think we can, then we are going to have to take into account the fact that the average American right now, even if they've gotten past climate denial, is still much more concerned about gas prices, getting back and forth from work, than they are about the climate changing. And if we are not strategic about how we talk about the issue and work with all the various stakeholders on this issue, then what will happen is that this will be demagogued and we will find ourselves in a place where we actually have slower progress rather than faster progress.
So the science doesn't change. The urgency doesn't change. But part of my job is to figure out what's my fastest way to get from point A to point B — what's the best way for us to get to a point where we've got a clean-energy economy. And somebody who is not involved in politics may say, "Well, the shortest line between two points is just a straight line; let's just go straight to it." Well, unfortunately, in a democracy, I may have to zig and zag occasionally, and take into account very real concerns and interests.
I think one of the failures that we had in the cap-and-trade legislation that came up early in my first term was we were doing so many things at that time. People's minds were overwhelmingly focused on economic recovery and getting people back to work — and rightly so — that for a member of Congress who might care about climate change, but was seeing massive job loss, and comes from an industrial state where the [cost of] transition is going to be really high to go from dirty energy to clean energy — casting a vote like that just didn't seem to be a priority. And we hadn't built enough of the consensus that was required to get that done. Do you have any regrets about how you handled that cap-and-trade legislation in your first term? It passed the House, and many people think that with a little more muscle, you could have gotten it through the Senate. Look, I think that our democratic process is painfully slow — even when you've got Democratic majorities. And this is an issue that, although overwhelmingly Democrats are on the right side of, it's not easy for every Democrat, and it's not uniform. And when you've got a filibuster in the Senate, you've got challenges.
I think the biggest problem we had was folks like John McCain, who had come out in favor of a cap-and-trade system, getting caught up in a feverish opposition to anything I proposed and reversing themselves — which meant that getting the numbers that we needed was going to be too difficult. And we probably should have moved faster to a nonlegislative strategy, but I don't think that there was some magic recipe whereby we could have gotten cap-and-trade through the Senate without some Republican support. We needed 60 votes. That's the way the filibuster operates there.
This is similar to the discussions I have with progressives sometimes when they say, "Why didn't you have a trillion-dollar stimulus instead of an $800 billion stimulus?" And you try to explain, well, this was significantly larger than the New Deal; it was the largest stimulus ever, but I had to get the votes of a couple of Republicans in order to get it done. Or folks who want single-payer health care instead of Obamacare. We had political constraints.
Now, what this tells us, generally, is that those who, rightly, see this as the issue of our time have to take politics into account and have to be strategic in terms of how we frame the issues, and we have to make sure that we're bringing the public along with us. There's been good work done in terms of public education over the last several years. I think surveys show that the American people understand this is an urgent problem. But it isn't yet at the point where they consider it the most important problem, and it's not even close. Al Gore once told me that he thinks that everyone who cares deeply about climate change has had what he called an "oh, shit" moment when they realized what's at stake. What was your "oh, shit" moment? Well, I did grow up in Hawaii. And the way that you grow up in Hawaii is probably surprisingly similar to the way some folks grew up here in the Arctic Circle. There are traditions that are very close to the land — in Hawaii, the water — and you have an intimate awareness of how fragile ecosystems can be. There are coral reefs in Hawaii that, when I was growing up, were lush and full of fish, that now, if you go back, are not.
And so I don't think that there was a eureka moment. In my early speeches in 2007-2008, we were already talking about this and making it a prominent issue. What's happened during my presidency is each time I get a scientific report, I'm made aware that we have less time than we thought, that this is happening faster than we thought. And what that does for me is to say that we have to ring the alarm louder, faster. But, as I said, the good news is that the kind of complete skepticism you had around the science that you saw even two or three years ago, I think, has been so overwhelmed — that we kind of cleared out that underbrush.
The next argument that was being made — and a lot of Republicans have continued to make — is the notion that, well, even if it is a problem, there's no point in us doing something because China won't do something about it. And my trip to China and the joint announcement, I think, was critical in puncturing that notion.
Every so often, John Holdren, the head of my science advisory group, sends out the latest data, and I make sure that not only me but my entire senior staff read it. And the last few reports have gotten everybody feeling like we've got to get moving on this, and to see what kinds of tools we can use to really have an impact.
Obama with Chinese President Hu Jintao in 2009. Feng Li/Getty
So that brings us back to politics. Obviously one of the biggest sort of impediments to moving faster is the oil cartels — especially the Koch brothers. They're oil billionaires who are doing everything they can to slow the transition to clean energy. You recently singled out Charles Koch for fighting subsidies for clean energy, saying, "That's not the American way." What did you mean by that? Well, it wasn't just that they were trying to eliminate solar subsidies — that's the spin they put on it after I made those remarks down in Nevada — they are actually trying to influence state utilities to make it more expensive for homeowners to install solar panels. And my point was, that's not how the market works. And by the way, they're also happy to take continued massive subsidies that Congress has refused to eliminate, despite me calling for the elimination of those subsidies every single year.
Everybody is very selective when they start talking about free-market principles and innovation and entrepreneurship. And it seems as if — and I don't necessarily need to single out the Koch brothers, I think that this is true for a lot of folks in the traditional energy industries — they're fine with sweetheart deals and cushy subsidies for their mature, well-established industries, but somehow when it comes to developing clean energy, they're not simply opposing subsidies, they're actually actively trying to keep competitors out.
And what's been fascinating is the coalition that you're now seeing between the green movement and some members of the Tea Party in some states, saying, leave us alone. If we want to set up a solar panel or change how energy is distributed, and to reorganize the traditional power grid in a way that is more efficient, saves people money and is more environmentally sound, that's something that government should support. That's not something that government should be trying to impede. Let's talk about the Arctic. The Russian deputy prime minister recently called the Arctic "Russia's Mecca." And there's a lot of talk about Russian operations here, military buildup and a new Cold War brewing. How do you read Russia's intentions up here? So far, Russia has been a constructive partner in the Arctic Council and has participated with the other Arctic nations in ways that are consistent with the rule of law and a sensible approach to the changes that are taking place in the Arctic. Given that much more of their country and their economy is up north, it's not surprising that they see more opportunities and are more focused on a day-to-day basis on what's taking place here than Washington has been.
But part of the reason that I wanted to come here is that needs to change. The icebreaker announcement was just a concrete example of the need for policymakers, starting from the president on down, to be mindful that this area is changing and is changing faster than policymakers thought it was going to 10 years ago, or five years ago, or last year.
So we're going to have to have more resources up here. I think that we have to work with other countries, including Russia, to establish some clear rules of the road so we don't start seeing some of the same kinds of problems that we've been seeing in the South China Sea around maritime rules and borders and boundaries. I think that's achievable. Obviously we've got big differences with the Russians on other issues. But as we've seen in the discussions with Iran, there is the ability to compartmentalize some of these issues so that even as we have very fierce disagreements with Russia on Ukraine, there remain areas where we should be able to work constructively together.
One thing that I am concerned about is, as a major oil producer, Russia may not be as concerned about climate change as they need to be. And if we've got problems with public opinion in the United States, I think it's fair to say that those problems are bigger in a country like Russia. And so constantly engaging with them around the science and making it clear that there is an upside for them in navigation and commerce, but there are massive downsides for them as well — as we've witnessed in the biggest fires that they've seen in years recently — that is a conversation that we've got to have on an ongoing basis.
The Russian icebreaker Yamal. Nery Ynclan/NBC/Getty
You've talked increasingly about climate change as a national-security issue. How would you compare the challenges and the risk to America's security regarding climate change to, say, ISIS or, for that matter, Iran? Well, they're different. And as president and commander in chief, I don't have the luxury of selecting one issue versus the other. They're all major problems. What we know about climate change, though, is that with increasing drought, increasing floods, increasing erosion of coastlines, that's going to impact agriculture; it's going to increase scarcity in parts of the world; it is going to result in displacement of large numbers of people.
The people who live on the island [Kivalina] that we flew over today can move. It's painful for those residents, but it can be done. If the monsoon patterns in South Asia change, you can't move tens of millions of people without the possibilities of refugees, conflict. And the messier the world gets, the more national-security problems we have. In fact, there have been arguments that, for example, what's happening in Syria partly resulted from record drought that led huge numbers of folks off farms and the fields into the cities in Syria, and created a political climate that led to protests that Assad then responded to in the most vicious ways possible.
But that's the kind of national-security challenge that we're looking at with climate change. It will manifest itself in different ways, but what we know from human history is that when large populations are put under severe strain, then they react badly. And that can be expressed in terms of nationalism; it can be expressed in terms of war; it can be expressed in terms of xenophobia and nativism; it can be expressed in terms of terrorism. But the whole package is one that we should be wanting to avoid, if at all possible. The Paris climate talks that are coming up in December are a big focus of your attention right now, and may be the last best chance for the world to come together and actually do something to slow climate change. How will you define success in Paris? For us to be able to get the basic architecture in place with aggressive-enough targets from the major emitters that the smaller countries say, "This is serious" — that will be a success.
I'm less concerned about the precise number, because let's stipulate right now, whatever various country targets are, it's still going to fall short of what the science requires. So a percent here or a percent there coming from various countries is not going to be a deal-breaker. But making sure everybody is making serious efforts and that we are making a joint international commitment that is well-defined and can be measured will create the basis for us each year, then, to evaluate, "How are we doing?" and will allow us, five years from now, to say the science is new, we need to ratchet it up, and by the way, because of the research and development that we've put in, we can achieve more ambitious goals.
You think about when I started, we thought we were setting a really bold goal with our plans for solar-power production. And if you had told me in 2007-2008 that the costs for solar would have dropped as much as they have, even Steve Chu, my then-energy secretary, would have told you that's a little crazy. But it has. And I think just last year, costs were down 10 to 20 percent, depending on the region. So human ingenuity, when focused and targeted, can achieve amazing things.
And the key for Paris is just to make sure that everybody is locked in, saying, "We're going to do this." Once we get to that point, then we can turn the dials. But there will be a momentum that is built, and I'm confident that we will then be in a position to listen more carefully to the science — partly because people, I think, will be not as fearful of the consequences or as cynical about what can be achieved. Hope builds on itself. Success breeds success. When you talk about capitalism, that reminds me of the pope, who is speaking out about climate change and is trying to build momentum for the Paris talks. I really like the pope. Personally? Yes, he's a good man. And he's on the right side of a lot of stuff. In the encyclical, the pope talks about what he calls the "myth of progress." And he basically argues that greed and materialism are destroying the planet. How do you interpret that idea? Do you think that dealing with climate change is ultimately going to require rethinking the basic tenets of capitalism? If you look at human history, it is indisputable that market-based systems have produced more wealth than any other system in human history by a factor of — you choose the number. And that has been, net, a force for good.
In our own lives, you think about the changes in the standard of living that have taken place here in the United States. Then you think about hundreds of millions of people who have been lifted out of poverty in China or in India — and you can't scoff at that. If a child has enough food to eat, if they have medicine that prevents deadly diseases, if people have a roof over their heads and can afford to send their kids to school, that is part of justice and part of my ethics. And so I think a broadside against the entire market-based system would be a mistake.
What I do think is true is that mindless free-market ideologies that ignore the externalities that any capitalist system produces can cause massive problems. And it's the job of governments and societies to round the edges and to address big system failures. That, by the way, is not controversial among market economists. There are a whole bunch of concepts involved in that that you can open up in any standard economic textbook in the United States or anywhere else in the world. And pollution has always been the classic market failure, where externalities are not captured and the system doesn't deal with them, even though it's having an impact on everybody.
So our goal here has to be to say that climate change is a major market failure, just like smog in Los Angeles was back in the Sixties and Seventies, just like the problems with polluted waters were in the Cuyahoga River. And just as we were able to use the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act to clean up those waters and to clean up that air, just as we were able to solve the acid-rain problem and the growing problem with ozone with some smart regulations, we can do that with climate change.
The difference is that those previous pollution problems were more or less localized, and you weren't seeing the possibility of a global feedback loop that tips us over the edge. So there is a race against time here that we haven't seen before, but the nature of the problem is not that different.
And I think that the way we solve any big market failure is to have a broad-based conversation and to come to a collective agreement that this is something we're going to take into account in our day-to-day doing business. And when we do that, businesses will find ways to profit from it, jobs will be created. We're already seeing that when it comes to the solar industry. We're seeing that when it comes to the wind industry. And we're seeing that consumers are interested in saving money and using less electricity.
President Obama speaking to the press following a roundtable with Alaska Native leaders. Chuck Kennedy/White House
So I am optimistic about us being able to solve this problem. But it is going to require that our politics catches up with the facts. And right now, in this country, our politics is going through a particularly broken period — Congress has trouble passing a transportation bill, much less solving big problems like this. That's part of the reason why we're having to do so much action, administratively. And that's part of the reason why I took this trip.
Historically, politics catch up when the public cares deeply. And when people couldn't breathe in L.A., the state of California starts saying, "You've got to get catalytic converters." When the river catches fire in Cuyahoga, the people of Ohio and, eventually, the people nationally, say, "That's getting kind of out of hand."
You're the leader of the world's largest economy, as well as one of the world's biggest polluters. How do you handle this responsibility of avoiding a potential catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions that will affect all of humanity — and within your daughters' lifetimes? I think about it a lot. I think about Malia and Sasha a lot. I think about their children a lot.
One of the great things about being president is you travel a lot and you get to see the world's wonders from a vantage point that very few people get a chance to see. When we were out on the water yesterday, going around those fjords, and the sea otter was swimming on its back and feeding off its belly, and a porpoise jumps out of the water, and a whale sprays — I thought to myself, "I want to make sure my grandchildren see this."
We go back to Hawaii every year, and I intend to, hopefully, spend a lot of time there when I'm out of office. I want to make sure my kids, when they go snorkeling, are seeing the same things that I saw when I went snorkeling when I was five years old, or eight years old. I spent a big chunk of my life in Indonesia when I was young, and I want them to be able to have some of the same experiences, walking through a forest and suddenly seeing an ancient temple. And I don't want that gone.
And so it's probably less of a function of being president, more a function of age [laughs] when you start thinking about what you're leaving behind. One of the books I read during vacation was The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert. And it's a wonderful book, and it makes very clear that big, abrupt changes can happen; they're not outside the realm of possibility. They have happened before, they can happen again.
So all of this makes me feel that I have to tackle this every way that I can. But one of the things about being president is you're also mindful that, despite the office, you don't do things alone. So we've made big strides with the power-plant rule, but that's not enough. We've doubled fuel-efficiency standards, but that's not enough. We should triple our investment in energy R&D. I can't do that without Congress.
So that's why I continually go back to the notion that the American people have to feel the same urgency that I do. And it's understandable that they don't, because the science right now feels abstract to people. It will feel less abstract with each successive year. I suspect that the record wildfires that we're seeing, the fact that half of the West is in extreme or severe drought right now, is making people understand this better. If you talk to people in Washington state right now, I suspect, after having tragically lost three firefighters, and seeing vast parts of their state aflame, that they understand it better. If you go down to Florida, and neighborhoods that are now flooding every time the tide rises, they're understanding it better.
And part of what's happening is a recognition that it is going to be cheaper to take action than not. That's one of the hardest things in politics to convince people of: to make investments today that don't pay off until many years from now.
But what's now happening — and that's part of what I've been trying to highlight — is that the costs are starting to accrue right now. We're spending about a billion dollars a year on firefighting, and the fire season extends now about two and a half months longer than it did just a few decades ago. And that's money that could be spent on schools. That's money that could be spent on fixing roads. That's money that people could spend in their own households.
When you look at the changes people are having to make in California in their own lives, and farmers now suddenly realize we're going to have to entirely change how we think about irrigation, well, that's an investment that they're going to have to make.
So we're getting to the point now where we can start attaching dollars and cents to climate change in a way that might not have been true a decade ago – or at least the link might have not been as clear. And that's an opportunity.
You wish that the political system could process an issue like this just based on obscure data and science, but, unfortunately, our system doesn't process things that way. People have to see it and feel it and breathe it. And that makes things a little scarier, because it indicates that we're already losing a lot of time. But, potentially, it gives us the chance to build the kind of political consensus, not just in America but internationally, that's going to be necessary to solve this enormous problem.
But I want to end on an optimistic note. The technologies are there. We'll need more to close the gap entirely, but using what we know right now and what we have right now, we can make huge strides just in the next 20 years. And that 20 years, if we're investing enough in R&D, allows us then to make the next leap forward. And there's a way of doing it that will be compatible with growth, jobs, economic development.
I think it's important for us not to pretend that there are no difficult trade-offs at all. The transition will require some tough choices to be made. There are going to be localized impacts for folks who have more of a legacy system of dirty energy. We can accommodate helping those communities transition, but it requires us to feel like we're all in this together.
It's not enough for environmentalists who are distantly removed from an aging coal town in West Virginia to just say, "Stop it." And it's not enough to say to a state like Alaska, "Cut it out because we think your state is beautiful." We've got to be in there talking to folks about how do we solve some of the technical problems involved; how do we make sure that everybody is benefiting from this transition; and if there are costs involved in this transition, how do we all pull together to make sure that it's not just being borne by one group of people.
And that's true internationally as well. I can't have a conversation with the prime minister of India and ignore the fact that they still have hundreds of millions of people in poverty and not enough electricity. So if I'm going to get him to have an aggressive plan to keep emissions down, then I've got to be willing to pony up strategies for power that aren't polluting. And some of that may require technology transfers or help to modernize their systems to make them more efficient. When we were hiking at the glacier in Seward the other day, one of the rangers who works for the park said that more and more people are making pilgrimages to see the glacier before it vanishes. Some people even kiss it goodbye. And she said there's a sadness in a lot of the people who go there because they know the world is changing so quickly as a result of climate change. Do you ever feel sadness about what we, as human beings, for better or for worse, knowingly and unknowingly, are doing to the planet? There are some amazing, beautiful things in this world that aren't coming back. And that should give us all pause. But I don't wallow in sadness, because we've got too much work to do. The world is always changing, and there are going to be changes in our lifetime that I wish hadn't happened. There are also changes that have eradicated polio, and changes that have reduced infant mortality. And those we celebrate.
So there are some things that I've experienced and seen that I suspect my grandchildren won't, and that's a sad thing. But the world is full of wonders, and I figure that we still have time to save most of them. And our kids will probably discover some new ones.
President Obama collecting meltwater runoff from the ice of Exit Glacier. Pete Souza/White House
After the formal interview ended, the president and I walked along the sea wall across the street from the high school, which was built to hold back the rising waters of Kotzebue Bay (and which was, ironically, constructed in part with federal dollars from Obama's stimulus plan). The bay was gray and flat, and even though it was only early September, you could already feel winter approaching. The two biggest take-aways from my time with the president were these: First, he is laser-focused on the Paris climate talks and is playing a multidimensional chess game with other nations to build alliances and cut deals to reach a meaningful agreement later this year. Second, whatever deals he cuts, it won't be enough. On this trip, I witnessed all the trappings of presidential power — the jets, the helicopters, the Secret Service agents, the obsequiousness of local politicians. But given the scale of this problem, given the fact that what we need to do is nothing less than reinvent the infrastructure of modern life, even a president as committed and shrewd as Obama can only move us a few steps in the right direction. This is a long war, with everything at stake. "I do what I can do and as much as I can do," the president told me as we walked along Kotzebue Bay. "What I don't want to do is get paralyzed by the magnitude of the thing, and what I don't want is for people to get paralyzed thinking that somehow this is out of our control. And I'm a big believer that the human imagination can solve problems. We don't usually solve them as fast as we need to. It's sort of like two cheers for democracy. We try everything else, I think Churchill said, and when we've exhausted every other alternative, we finally do the right thing. Hopefully, the same will be true here."
We walked a few hundred yards, then Obama stopped to chat with 2011 Iditarod champion John Baker. The president scooped up a sled-dog puppy to hold and was given a baseball cap to take home. At about 8:30 p.m., we motorcaded back to the airport and the president bounded up the steps to Air Force One. A small group of Alaskans waved at him from behind a chain-link fence and shouted goodbyes. He had been in the Arctic for about four hours — but that was four hours more than any other president had done. As I took my seat on Air Force One, the president was already in his leather chair at the conference table on the plane, still wearing his Iditarod hat. He said to his staff, "Let's get to work."
