James Connaughton, lead White House environment official, in India last year. (Credit: U.S. State Department)Throughout the Bush presidency, there has been an aversion to addressing one question about global warming: How much is too much?
Nothing has changed, it appears, even though administration officials late Friday night endorsed (along with counterparts from 129 other countries) the troubling findings in the fourth in-depth assessment since 1990 of the causes and consequences of global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Despite the report’s added emphasis on a list of “reasons for concern” about the continuing growth of long-lived emissions that trap heat, senior White House officials said Friday and Saturday that it remained impossible to define a “dangerous” threshold in the concentration of greenhouse gases or resulting warming.
This has always been the response, despite President Bush’s repeated pledges to uphold commitments made by the United States when his father signed, and the country ratified, the first climate treaty, the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change. One provision of that treaty is that countries pledge to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases at a level avoiding “dangerous” interference with the climate system.
The United States is hardly alone in avoiding this “dangerous” question.
Just about the only nations that have tried to define such a limit are those in the European Union, which chose a temperature target a decade ago and have held firm ever since. Their goal is to avoid more than 3.6 degrees of warming beyond the preindustrial average for the planet. The average temperature of Earth, now 59 degrees, has already risen about 1.4 degrees since 1880.
(Some climate experts question the value, or practicability, of setting an upper temperature limit given the complexities of the climate system, which cannot be manipulated like a thermostat – not yet at least. But many experts, including most I.P.C.C. authors, now are pressing for deep, prompt cuts in emissions to at least slow the rate of warming.)
Why is it so persistently hard to figure out how much warming is too much, even after four I.P.C.C reports over 17 years, several joint statements calling for prompt emissions curbs by the world’s scientific academies, and a United States climate research program the administration often promotes as the world’s best (and best financed, at about $1.8 billion a year)?
I e-mailed a few questions to the White House about all of this early this morning. Below are responses that came in a telephone interview on Saturday with James L. Connaughton, Mr. Bush’s top environmental aide:
Q. In 2002, the president said: “I reaffirm America’s commitment to the United Nations Framework Convention and its central goal, to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate.” How does the Bush administration intend to live up to the president’s stated commitment, while refusing to define a dangerous level of warming?
A. Europe is the only region that has set a number… They have committed to that as a protective measure. I’m not aware of any other sort of country as a matter of policy that has been able to make that policy judgment.
In the absence of being able to make that policy call at this time on dangerous interference, what we’re doing as an interim measure is working bottom up to see how aggressive can we be in finding a pathway to low-carbon power generation from coal, because that accounts for more than 50 percent of emissions; how aggressive can we be in transitioning to a much greater diversity of fuel supply than petroleum, and vehicle technology, and that’s 20 percent of emissions; and then what can we do much more rapidly to halt deforestation, which is 20 percent of emissions.
We’re asking the question from the other end, which is what can we reasonably achieve on an aggressive timeline in the three areas that matter most while we sustain our work in complementary areas such as efficiency and renewables and expansion of nuclear.
Q. In committing to that, are you saying, essentially, that the current trajectory of emissions is dangerous, or unacceptable?
A. What the president has said is that the science has advanced and our understanding of the science has deepened, and it underscores the need for stronger action.
Q. In service of what? Why bother?
A. Why bother? Because you are working against an unquantifiable risk of a significant negative impact. You’re working to ensure against that…. The insurance analogy still holds in this sense. We have an unquantifiable long-term risk. Because of the advances of the science, our appreciation of the risk is stronger now, and therefore that warrants more investment in working to ensure against that.
Q. Someone told me there’s a funny cartoon floating out there somewhere, from the future, where it’s I.P.C.C. report number 485 and everyone’s living on life rafts or something. Is it time to look inward instead of waiting for the scientists to provide more clarity?
A. What’s going on now — finally, in my view — is a much more focused set of questions on what do the technology pathways actually look like and what do we need to do on the government side and the private sector side to get there.
There’s a bit of mythology in putting all of your eggs in the emissions-market basket. Because what we’ve learned in the last 10 years is some of these market-based mechanisms are very good at efficiently capturing emissions reductions at the margin but they are not advancing these infrastructure changes that are so expensive.
Basically you need both tools — the incentives and market-based instruments, but you’ve got to work much more aggressively on the government side with a technology push with the private sector…. Right now the United States and Japan account for most of the public technology R&D. When you think about it, Japan doesn’t use very much coal. And America is essentially the only one putting major resources into this fundamental question. The president’s real challenge is everyone else ought to be working on that too.
Q. Did you say last night that one thing you’ll be pushing for [at upcoming climate-treaty talks] in Bali is a component for doing a lot more on R&D?
A. We’d like to see sectoral activity under the U.N. focused on those three areas I identified for emissions mitigation — which are low-emissions fossil, lower-carbon roadway transportation and deforestation. Everyone agrees that’s 90 percent of the challenge and yet that receives about 10 percent of the conversation.
The conversation tends to focus on adaptation funds, which are useful, on technology funds, which are useful, and on global emissions trading. But if the countries having those discussions aren’t really putting the investment, the much less expensive investment, into advancing the technology there’s just a real disconnect.
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