The Big Fix

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Were one so inclined, one could look at all these events-candidates vying to out-green each other, Al Sharpton sitting down with Pat Robertson, slumping SUV sales, the G8 agreement-and conclude that the elements are finally in place for real change. Unfortunately, much the same thing could have been said -- and was said -- at several points in the past, and each time the optimists were, sadly, shown to be overly optimistic. In the fall of 1997, Bill Clinton sent then vice president Gore to Japan to salvage negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol, which seemed on the verge of collapse. When negotiators succeeded in hammering out an agreement, the New York Times declared that the effort "could lead to an environmental undertaking on a historic scale." The following year, with the treaty facing near-certain defeat in the Senate, the Clinton administration gave up on even trying to get it ratified.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush said that he, like Gore, was very concerned about global warming. Bush called climate change "an issue that we need to take very seriously" and promised to enact federal limits on carbon emissions. Six months after he was elected, Bush announced that he was withdrawing from ongoing negotiations over Kyoto and said he had changed his mind about limiting CO₂. (In spite of U.S. opposition, the treaty went into effect in 2005; the United States is now the only western industrialized nation that has refused to abide by its terms.) Just about the only action the Bush White House has taken on global warming has been to get in the way of jurisdictions, such as California, that are trying to make progress on their own. (The G8 pledge that the administration agreed to is so vague that it may never have any real impact, and it's certainly not going to change anything by the time a new president is sworn in.)

As the 2000 campaign showed, it's one thing to talk about fighting climate change and a very different thing actually to do so. McCain and Obama say they are in favor of strict limits on greenhouse gases, yet both have supported legislation whose goals are directly at odds with cutting emissions.

Obama, for instance, has voted repeatedly in favor of incentives for corn ethanol, which many scientists say is no better for the atmosphere than oil, and may even be worse. Just last year, he cosponsored a bill to promote turning coal into oil-about the worst possible move the country could make. (He has since "clarified" his position on this issue, saying that he would support "coal-to-liquids" technology only if the process emits 20 percent less carbon over its life cycle than conventional fuels do over theirs.)

For his part, McCain opposes ethanol subsidies but supports lifting the ban on offshore oil drilling, a policy that makes no sense whatsoever if the goal is reducing oil consumption. Recently McCain has been downplaying his support for global warming legislation, while touting offshore drilling as the answer to the country's energy ailments. "We need to drill here and we need to drill now," he told reporters in Pennsylvania in August.

Both candidates are clearly aware that to curb global warming, the cost of carbon-based fuels needs to be raised-that's the basic purpose of a cap-and-trade program. But both are obviously also feeling a great deal of political pressure to lower (or seriously pretend to lower) gasoline prices. A recent Web-only ad put out by the McCain campaign attacks Obama for opposing a federal gasoline-tax holiday (another totally misguided idea), calling him the "Dr. No" of energy.

Meanwhile, any truly comprehensive plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions will require not just presidential but congressional action, and it's not at all clear, even with a new administration, that the votes on Capitol Hill will be there. In June, the Lieberman-Warner bill failed even to reach the Senate floor because its supporters could muster only 48 of the 60 votes needed to end a filibuster. Many proponents of the bill pointed out that six senators who said they would have favored it, including McCain, Obama, and Hillary Clinton, were absent. Left unmentioned was the fact that 9 of the 48 senators who voted to cut off debate subsequently wrote a letter to the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, saying that had the bill reached the floor, they wouldn't have backed it.

Next year the new president will send a negotiating team to Copenhagen for the 15th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, commonly referred to as COP 15. The Copenhagen meeting is supposed to yield an international climate treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which lapses in 2012. Without strong U.S. leadership, it's difficult to imagine how such an agreement can be forged, and without a new agreement, it's hard to imagine how we will be able to avoid dangerous climate change. The stakes, in other words, couldn't be higher.

"The next administration has really got its work cut out for it," David Orr, the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College, told me recently. "It will have no margin for error." Orr is one of the founders of the Presidential Climate Action Project, which has put together a nonpartisan "first 100 days" agenda on climate change for whoever wins the November election. "It's got to move more quickly, insightfully, creatively than probably any government has ever had to move in recorded history," Orr continued. "I think Gore has it right: this is a global emergency. You get it right in very quick order or there's going to be hell to pay."

This past June, James Hansen returned to Capitol Hill to mark the 20th anniversary of his original testimony. Speaking to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence, he offered a stark analysis. "Now, as then, frank assessment of scientific data yields conclusions that are shocking to the body politic," he said. "Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99 percent. The difference is that now we have used up all slack in the schedule."