Another Tragically Beautiful Day

An interview with Ross Gelbspan - part two

interview by David Ross

Pulitzer Prizewinner Ross Gelbspan is the author of one of the most popular books on climate change, The Heat Is On: The High Stakes Battle Over Earth's Threatened Climate. His website, www.heatisonline.org, was recently rated the best climate-related site by the Pacific Institute. The following interview has been transcribed from a radio interview which was conducted by David Ross.

Dave Ross: What are the politics of climate change? We hear little about it in the corporate media. Our government doesn't appear to be doing anything about it, so how come nothing's being done about it?

Ross Gelbspan: What's really striking--and this is really important to understand--is that nothing is being done about it in the United States, but in other countries they're extremely aware of it. The science is unambiguous. Humanity needs to cut its emissions by at least 70 percent to allow the climate to stabilize.

So, in Europe for example, Holland has just finished a plan to cut her emissions by 80 percent in 4 years. The Germans have committed to cutting emissions by 50 percent in 50 years. The British are talking about cuts of 60 percent in 50 years.

It's only in the U.S where nothing is being done and the issue is not being discussed simply because of the lock that the oil and coal industry have on our Congress and especially on the Bush Administration, but even before that, during the Clinton Administration, nothing was done.

The oil and coal industry is one of the most powerful lobbies in the world.

One of the things that they have done is to finance a very effective campaign of disinformation to keep everybody confused about the issue.

Every time there's a new scientific finding or a new story about climate change, the public relations people from the fossil fuel industry are on the telephone with the newspaper reporters, telling them, "Oh, there are many sides to this story." What got me into this is when I learned that the coal industry was paying several scientists under the table to say that climate change wasn't happening. A poor reporter who's doing his story on deadline has no way of knowing that there's this kind of corruption going on.

Basically, the Bush Administration policies are really being called by ExxonMobil right now, which is probably the most intransigent of the oil companies, and also by the coal industry, because if you stop and think about it, 70 percent reductions means the end of the coal industry.

There's no way we can continue to burn coal, and it means a total transformation of the oil companies who have to become renewable energy companies.

They're fighting for their survival.

That yielded a very specific pattern, which is graphically different than the pattern of natural warming. It's greenhouse warming, very specifically.

Let me give you one other experiment that's really simple. As the temperature has been rising, the nighttime low and the wintertime low temperatures have been going up twice as fast as the daytime high and summertime high temperatures. The reason for that is the greenhouse gasses are trapping in the nighttime and wintertime warmth that would naturally radiate back into space. In other words, if it were natural warming, the high and low temperatures would sort of rise and fall in parallel, but that's not happening.

I'll give you one other experiment. There are a number of researchers who reconstructed the global climate for the last 1000 years. They went back a couple of hundred years using instruments, tree rings, coral, ice cores and various ways they can tell what the temperatures have been. They found that from the year 1000 until about 1865, the planet was actually cooling very slightly, and all of a sudden, after 1865, the temperature begins to skyrocket. It goes up faster than it has in 10,000 years, and that change corresponds exactly with humanity's beginning to industrialize using fossil fuels--the industrial revolution. There really is no question among scientists working on global warming as to what is causing it--we are.

That leads into the caller's second question, which I think is the important question: What should we be doing about it and what are the costs involved? Clearly the costs of inaction are not bearable. This isn't me saying it.

This is the insurance industry saying it. The biggest insurer in Britain last year said that, unchecked, climate change could bankrupt the global economy by 2065. The biggest insurance company in the world, a German company called Munich Re Insurance, has said that in the next couple of decades, the cost of these climate impacts will cost us all about $300 billion dollars a year. That's the cost of not doing it.

The cost of meeting the Kyoto targets is minimal. The problem is, the Kyoto targets are very low. They call on countries to cut emissions by 6-7 percent while the science says we have to cut them by 70 percent. So, Kyoto wouldn't be expensive. We could do it mostly through efficiencies, mostly just by cleaning up a lot of waste in our energy systems, but that wouldn't get us very far.

We really need to cut our emissions by 70 percent. What that implies is a rapid global transition to wind energy, hydrogen fuels, solar panels and so forth. Then you get into the question of what the cost of those are, and to think about that question, you have to realize that this is not just a United States' problem, this is a global problem. Even if we in the United States, Europe and Japan cut our emissions dramatically, we would still be still be overwhelmed by the carbon dioxide coming from India, China, Nigeria and so forth.

If the world wants to survive with a coherent civilization, it has to make the kind of investment in a new energy economy that will be global.

What that will do is create so many jobs, especially in poor countries, that it will turn impoverished countries into robust trading partners. It will expand the amount of wealth in the entire global economy. In fact, we would end up with a much more wealthier and peaceful world by doing it.

We would definitely have to take the $20 billion dollars in subsidies that the federal government spends on coal and oil and put them into renewable energy, and let the oil companies use that money to retrain and retool their workers so they become aggressive developers of fuel cells, wind farms, solar panels and so forth.

I think there are ways for this to happen that could really increase living standards, purchasing power and everything else, especially in developing countries, but I think you need to see this as a project of at least several decades. If you look at it that way, I think it would probably be the most profitable investment we could make in our collective future.

Same caller: It's just not true that there's agreement among scientists on global warming. Sure we need to transition to renewable energy sources and we will do that. It's just a question of how we do that and the rate at which we do that. I would like to refer listeners to a book called, Skeptical Environmentalists.

What the gentleman said about how we do this is really what the question is, but in terms of his not accepting the science, I can tell you two things categorically. One, the head of the IPCC has said, definitively, there is no dispute among scientists working on this issue about the larger trends of what's happening to the planet. There are a lot of disputes about second level scientific issues, but there's no dispute about the larger trend toward human-induced global warming.

The other thing that I would like to point out, as I said, countries like Holland, Britain and Germany are preparing to make huge cuts, and really change their whole energy systems, and I doubt these countries would make these commitments if they had any real doubts about the validity of the science.

Dave Ross: What can we do individually or collectively to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions and thereby slow down or stop global warming?

I really think this is more of a political question, than a lifestyle question. First of all, I'm not advocating that we all sit in the dark and ride bicycles. We're use to a certain amount of energy, and I think we need that kind of energy to have a productive society, and a productive economy.

Even if all of us turned off all the lights, all the time, and only drove when we had to, that would not solve the problem.

I think what really needs to happen is political action to empower governments to change energy subsidies, and to regulate the oil companies into this transition. I've talked to several oil company presidents, and they say, "We can do this. We can become renewable energy companies, but we have to be regulated by the government so we do it all together without losing any competitive standing within the industry." I would think that political action, such as asking your candidates about it, asking your press about it, is really the best way to go.

I'd like to make one other point. There are some real serious splits within the oil industry already. British Petroleum, which believes very strongly in global warming, is the world's biggest seller of solar systems. Shell Oil has just put a billion dollars into a new renewable energy company. So there are huge oil companies that know that this is happening and know it has to happen, and they're sort of having an internal industry war against companies like ExxonMobil that are trying to burn the last drop of oil they can get there hands on. I think there are opportunities for political action knowing that these different interests lie in different directions. I think that knowledge can also be used.