If the press really wanted to bring home the reality of climate change
to viewers and readers, it would begin by making the connection
between the warming atmosphere and the marked increase in extreme
weather events—the floods, droughts, and severe storms that comprise
an increasingly larger proportion of news budgets. Asked about the fail-
ure of the news outlets to make this connection, a ranking editor at one
network replied, “We did include a line like that once. But we were inun-
dated by calls from the oil lobby warning our top executives that it is sci-
entifically inaccurate to link any one particular storm with global warm-
ing.” The editor concluded, “Basically, our executives were intimidated by
the fossil fuel lobby.”
And resistance to the solution is staggering. We need to begin to
move toward a global energy transition within this decade and we need
to pursue it with the urgency of the Manhattan Project, in which the
United States developed the atomic bomb in less than three years.
On one point the science is unambiguous: To allow the climate to
restabilize requires worldwide reductions of carbon emissions of 70 per-
cent.
The politics are almost as unambiguous. When 160 nations met in
Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 to forge a climate treaty, not one government
took issue with the science. Since then Holland has finished a plan to
cut emissions by 80 percent in 40 years. In February 2003, British
Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that the United Kingdom would
cut its carbon emissions by 60 percent in 50 years. Germany has com-
mitted to reductions of 50 percent in 50 years. Even China, whose
economy grew 36 percent during a 5-year period up to 2000, cut its
emissions by 17 percent during the same period. In other words, the
confusion around the climate issue stops at the boundaries of the
United States.
The view of the world’s business leaders is moving on the same tra-
jectory. A vote by executives of the world’s largest corporations, finance
ministers, and heads of state who attended the World Economic Forum
in Davos, Switzerland, in 2000 was remarkable. When conference
organizers polled participants on which of five different trends were
most troubling, the participants overrode the choices and declared cli-
mate change to be by far the most threatening issue facing humanity.
Introduction 5