Fork 1 Bush41 1989
see losing earth
**Fork 1**1989 Bush 41:
HW Bush runs as the environmental president (after Hansen testimony, on the stump boasted of the "White House Effect" beating the greenhouse effect) and building on US leadership on Montreal Protocol. Then his Chief of Staff John Sununugets spooked by a Margaret Mead talk that alludes to global environmental cooperation and engineers a policy 180, sabotaging climate talks. He uses Cato's hack scientist Pat Michaelsfor corroboration.
11 25 netflix the wh effect
sununu out, but bad effects k? RECRUIT HACKS? LINDZEN? MICHAELS? // CATO?
overpromise in campaign, underpromise in office/ policy. meaning?
b41 pushed to rio JEJ promo in theatres; paraiah at rio
reporter asked about US pressure, our guy says we never do --> ha
bromley
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rich losing earth?
Sununu was more interested in those who rejected the emerging climate science, including a number of researchers who have continued to battle against consensus science today. Some of them, includingPat Michaels of the Cato Institute,continue to have influence in the Trump administration and have encouraged the rollback of climate protections
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https://time.com/6169294/climate-change-politicized-in-1990s/ eugene linden
Because the markets are where the money is, politicians followed. Nothing illustrates this more vividly than the dizzying evolution of George H.W. Bush starting in 1988. Aware of the upsurge in interest in environment during that year, Bush vowed to be the environmental president. On Aug. 31, 1988 in a campaign speech, he said, “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the ‘greenhouse effect’ are forgetting about the ‘White House effect’. In my first year in office, I will convene a global conference on the environment at the White House. It will include the Soviets, the Chinese… The agenda will be clear. We will talk about global warming.”
Bush actually did convene a conference once president, but sometime between his campaign speech and the conference in April, the “lobbyist effect” came into play. The Chinese were not invited, and the briefing papers for cabinet members warned them not to use the phrases “global warming” or “greenhouse effect.” This is akin to convening a conference on pandemics and forbidding your aides from mentioning COVID-19.
The battle to contain global warming was lost in the 1990s. The mixed messages coming from the U.S. on global warming undercut efforts to convince China and other emerging nations to eschew coal and “leapfrog” fossil fuels in powering their industrialization. China leapfrogged the U.S., but it was in greenhouse gas emissions and not in the adoption of renewables. A study of 2019 emissions by The Rhodium Group found that China accounted for 27% of total emissions that year, two and a half times more than the U.S., and equivalent to more than the combined emissions of the 27 nations in the European Union and the 38 nations in the OECD.
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NH raDIO
Annie Ropeik: And in fact, when Bush came to office, the table was set for them to do something big. Less than a year after Bush’s inauguration, world leaders planned a meeting — the first-ever international talks on a binding treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The talks would be held in Noordwijk, in the Netherlands. This would be the ideal place for Bush to hold true to his promises of being an environmental president - to lead the world in addressing climate change.
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Sam Evans-Brown: But immediately it became clear that John H did not see global warming as being like acid rain. And this teed up an internal battle within the Bush administration.
Rafe Pomerance: and this became an issue inside the Bush Whitehouse and agencies... some people very enthusiastic about moving forward… others like Governor Sununu, Chief of Staff, was not.
Rafe Pomerance: And what happened was, during the crucial week when they were going to make a decision. Hansen again shows up.
Annie Ropeik: James Hansen is that NASA scientist, the one whose models of the greenhouse effect first got Congress’ attention back in the early 80s. He had continued coming before lawmakers, including now-famous bombshell testimony in 1988 when he declared that global warming was already being observed. Now, he was testifying again.
Sam Evans-Brown: But this time, John H. Sununu intervened.
Rafe Pomerance: And Hansen’s testimony was altered by the Bush administration. And later, as I have learned, Sununu claims he altered the testimony, and diminished its conclusions.
Annie Ropeik: The new text said that climate change might be attributable to “natural processes,” which Hansen did not believe. This was leaked to the press, and was splashed all over the front page of the New York Times. The Bush White House wound up with egg all over their faces.
Rafe Pomerance: The Hansen alteration had a big political impact on the deliberations inside the Bush White house.…
Sam Evans-Brown: Rafe says when you look back at newspapers of the time, you see editorial writers throwing Bush's own words back at him. The self-proclaimed environmental president had promised his administration would tackle climate change. Instead, they'd been caught doing just the opposite — secretly trying to downplay the problem.
Annie Ropeik: It put the White House on the defensive. And for a moment in the roiling internal debate within the administration, it seemed like John H. Sununu had lost. Just before the historic, first-ever climate negotiations in the Netherlands began, he wrote a telegram to State Department’s negotiators, reversing his previous position and telling them to work towards a “full international consensus.”
Sam Evans-Brown: Here again is Nathaniel Rich, the author of Losing Earth.
Nathaniel Rich: And then then the strangest detail of all is that there’s a series of talks on the eve of the trip in November, at a Tony hotel in DC in front of international — or — investors in the American Stock Exchange. Sununu — although he’s not there to speak about climate change necessarily, he’s just there in his capacity as powerful person within the Bush administration to talk about the economy — spends most of his talk on Noordwijk and on this idea of a treaty. And in fact comes out fairly forcefully — it’s a very strange thing to read — in favor of a global agreement. And he’s challenged at one point by an investor in the audience who says, “well isn’t this going to have some major economic costs? And he says, “yeah there’ll be some up front costs, but it’s nothing compared to the back end costs if we don’t do anything.”
Annie Ropeik: And yet, despite all of this — despite having lost face by altering Hansen’s testimony and having been pressured into supporting a global greenhouse gas treaty — somewhere between that speech to investors and the final negotiation in Noordwijk, Sununu flipped again.
Sam Evans-Brown: It meant Americans began the talks with a hard-line stance.
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Nathaniel Rich: We won’t sign anything that's binding in terms of emissions reductions, and we won't take part in anything that won’t consider the economic implications in the short-term basically. And that’s the end of the dream of a global binding treaty essentially. That’s the closest we’ve ever come since.
Annie Ropeik: This set the template for all climate talks that followed, every subsequent attempt at a binding greenhouse gas reduction treaty has failed. Even the much lauded Paris agreement, which the US also backed out of, was completely non-binding…
Sam Evans-Brown: This is where we get this great quote, which I think is theSwedish environment minister walking out of the room, and saying “your government is fucking this up.”
Nathaniel Rich: Yeah, right. And they did.
Annie Ropeik: If that binding treaty had been signed in 1990 — and if global community had lived up to it — there could have been fifteen percent less carbon in the atmosphere when the effort to scale back emissions began. There would have been a thirty year head start on developing solutions and driving down their cost.
Sam Evans-Brown: In short, the problem would have been a lot easier to solve. ...
White House Chief of Staff under President George H.W. Bush from January 21, 1989 until 1991. Sununu stepped down amidst allegations he had used taxpayer-funded flights for personal flights. Sununu has been described as the “bad cop” to Bush's “good cop”
So we were just talking about the oil industry's role in obstructing movement forward on stopping climate change. Politicians played a strong role in this, too. One of the centerpieces of your book is the NASA scientist James Hansen testifying before Congress about carbon emissions, climate change and what we're in store for if we don't move forward. And his testimony - you can say it was suppressed. You could say it was censored. I don't know what word you want to use. But the H.W. Bush administration tried to stop him from saying what he planned on saying. Tell us who tried to do it and how.
RICH: Yeah, this is something that had not been known. And one of the things I most wanted to figure out was that after Hansen testifies in 1988 - of course, and he's been testifying all decade - but in '88 he gets this huge amount of attention - and in 1989, he's due to go back. And this is right as negotiations are really getting started on a global treaty. And John Sununu is fighting this.
And his testimony comes back not only with deletions but also with absurd, new language, essentially to the effect that no regulatory policy should be introduced if it at all forces the U.S. to suffer economically - of course, nothing a scientist would say in any context. And he's outraged, understandably. And he takes this testimony to Al Gore, who's then a senator and leading the hearing. And Gore calls The New York Times. And they run a huge story about it. And it becomes a major scandal. And in fact, it generates more support for climate policy than Hansen could have done by himself.
And it had been unknown, you know, who was responsible for that? At the time, the White House claimed it was some bureaucrat five levels down from the top. I asked John Sununu if he knew anything about it. And he said, yeah, I did (laughter). I was responsible for it - that he told Richard Darman, the head of the OMB at the time, to censor it. He didn't think that Hansen's claims had merit. And he tried to stop it.
GROSS: How much of a scientist was John Sununu?
RICH: He considered himself a scientist. He considered himself...