‘The Bali News- Climate War’ "We Haven't Done a Damned Thing"

‘The Climate War’ "We Haven't Done a Damned Thing"
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Books of The Times: Books About Climate Change by Eric Pooley and Heidi Cullen (August 3, 2010)

It was the rainy season in Bali but the rains had not come. December is summertime on the island, one of the 17,000 volcanic pearls that make up the vast Indonesian archipelago, and normally that means very hot and wet. But like so many places in the world, Bali was living through some weird weather in 2007.

The heat had arrived on schedule but the twelve inches of rainfall that soak the island in an average December were not to be found, so the humidity gathered and grew, a pregnant, vaporous shroud that cloaked the long line of people waiting to get through the metal detectors and into Nusantara Hall, in the luxury beach resort of Nusa Dua, on the evening of December 13.

Eleven thousand people — diplomats, civil servants, lobbyists, activists and journalists from nearly 190 countries — had come to Nusa Dua to begin negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. The "Bali Roadmap" was supposed to lead to a new treaty by December 2009, when many of those same people would reconvene in Copenhagen. But the talks had run into an American roadblock.

The administration of George W. Bush was doing everything it could to obstruct progress. With just a year left in office, Bush was running out the clock.

For the first week of the conference the mood in Bali had been as giddy as a little boy who has eaten too much candy. The sugar rush was fueled by news from America: a Senate committee had passed the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, the first serious federal attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To people who didn't understand the gridlocked ways of Washington, it sounded as if the U.S., after a decade of denial and delay, was finally ready to take action.

In the second week, the sugar high ended with a familiar crash. The leaders of the U.S. delegation arrived in Nusa Dua and the world remembered who was running things in Washington. President Bush had only recently conceded that man-made climate change was real, and his delegation, led by Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, was doing an enthusiastic job of making sure nothing got done in Bali.

After James Connaughton, chief of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, tried to claim the mantle of leadership — "The U.S. will lead, but leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow" — protesters staked out the convention center hallways and fell into line behind him whenever he appeared, following, following, following in a shame-on-you conga line. And on the conference's final day, delegates from most of the 190 nations booed Dobriansky loud and long — a sustained global jeer that won American acquiescence on a small point and let everyone sign the Bali Roadmap, such as it was, and go home.

For now, that dramatic moment was days away and the fate of the talks were very much in doubt. Europe and many developing countries wanted the Roadmap's preamble to make a nonbinding reference to the painful scientific conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions needed to be reduced 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 if the world was to avoid the worst impacts. This target was far beyond anything the U.S. and its allies — Canada, Japan and Russia — were willing to contemplate, so they made sure that no such nod at reality was made. At one point, the Russians proposed a sentence about the "the dangerous implications of climate change," and the Americans moved to strike the phrase. The Russians dutifully praised this American "improvement."

In response, European officials threatened to boycott the next round of talks in a Bush climate sideshow called the Major Economies Meeting. Ivo de Boer, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Committee on Climate Change, which ran the global climate process, said he feared Bali was heading for failure. Delegates debated whether it was worth blowing up the process to call attention to American obstruction. It was the only way, they argued, to make the world see what the U.S. was really up to in Bali. Now, in Nusantara Hall, another American was going to try to defuse those arguments and get the talks back on track.

Al Gore stepped onto the low stage and waited for the ovation to subside. Gore had flown in from Oslo, where he had accepted the Nobel Peace Prize three days earlier; he was profoundly jet-lagged and a bit nervous, because he was about to do something that, as a patriotic American and former high officeholder, he was reluctant to do: Stand on foreign soil and rip into his own country.

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When Gore landed in Bali the day before, leaving the airport in the bustling commercial district of Tuban for the ride to Nusa Dua on the southeastern coast, he was running on caffeine, adrenaline, and the rush of global acclaim. His acceptance of the Nobel Prize — along with Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the 2,500 experts from 130 countries whose job it was to assess the risk from human-caused global warming — capped an extraordinary two-year period in which the U.S. finally began to catch up with the rest of the industrialized world in its comprehension of the climate threat. Though the American public remained confused and divided (Democrats and independents mostly understood that the planet was warming and humans were to blame; many Republicans still did not), what had started as an elite issue — identified as a crisis by a few hundred scientists and taken up as a cause by a few thousand activists — showed signs of becoming a truly popular concern.

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