A Conversation - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

A Conversation

Nancy L. Rosenblum & Rafe Pomerance

“The fate of Greenland is the fate of Miami.”

R afe Pomerance has been called “the original climate change warrior.” He

was profiled in Nathaniel Rich’s 2018 New York Times Magazine article and
subsequent book, Losing Earth. At the moment when much of the science
was known but there was no awareness in political circles, Pomerance was cru-
cial in shaping recognition by government officials, policy-makers, and the public
that climate change is a crisis. In two conversations, on May 10 and August 5, 2019,
we talk about his path into climate work; the sequence of his experiences as an ad-
vocate, strategist, organizer, and negotiator; his work with Arctic 21 and ReThink
Energy Florida; his political assessment of the point to which we have come; Und
his experience as a “witnessing professional.”

NANCY L. ROSENBLUM: Until fall of 2019 you were chairman of Arctic 21, a net-
work of organizations communicating “the unraveling of the Arctic as a result of
climate change” to policy-makers and the public. Let’s start here: why did you
choose that organization?

RAFE POMERANCE: Our one-liner is, “The fate of Greenland is the fate of Miami.”
The fate of Greenland is the fate of many coastal cities because melting from con-
tinuous warming could ultimately lead to twenty feet of sea level rise. We’re not
going to see all that in the short term, but we’re already seeing a significant amount.
Greenland, the Arctic high-latitude glaciers, Antarctica, and thermal expansion of
the oceans are the major contributors to sea level rise, and your (Rosenblum’s)
house in North Truro (Cape Cod) is experiencing that, partly due to Greenland. Also
the interest of the United States is bound up with the fate of Greenland.

A question frames our work in Arctic 21: what is the future state of the Arctic?
Or, what is the Arctic we must have to sustain the global climate system? Diese
are different versions of the same question, and governments have to answer the
question, or should. Governments have to figure out what is required if we’re go-
ing to have any chance of achieving climate sustainability. Remember when the
earth is 2 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times, which is coming up on

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us, the Arctic will be about 5 degrees Celsius warmer: that’s two-and-a-half times
the earth’s global average. The question, wieder, is what do scenarios of the future
look like? And how are governments going to decide where we end up? Weil
one way or another, they must decide.

NR: Where does the U.S. government stand today on the Arctic?

RP: This is an interesting week to talk about that (Mai 10, 2019) because it was
one of the worst weeks ever for the U.S. government with regard to the Arctic.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went, as he should, to a biannual meeting of the
foreign ministers of the eight Arctic countries (Kanada, Denmark, Finland, Ice-
Land, Norwegen, Russland, Schweden, und die Vereinigten Staaten). They got together to ap-
prove a declaration about what they’ve done, what they’re going to do, what their
focus should be. The United States negotiated and then refused to accept a draft
declaration that included attention to climate change as an element of the Coun-
cil’s program.

The only statement Pompeo made related to climate was that as we lose sea ice,
ship channels are opening up. He didn’t talk about the other aspects of sea ice, oder
any other aspect of the Arctic that is falling apart. He wouldn’t acknowledge cli-
mate change, and he blocked agreement on the declaration because the United
States wouldn’t accept any reference to warming–a reference other governments
had to have in their declaration of purpose.

Pompeo instead made speeches attacking China and Russia as military and eco-
nomic competitors. This performance was arrogant and inappropriate. To talk
about competition is one thing, but to do it at the Arctic Council, which is a multi-
lateral organization focused on the environment that has deliberately kept broad-
er political issues at bay is another. He missed the point. The point is that the un-
raveling of the Arctic is a threat to U.S. national interests.

NR: You made the striking statement: “The fate of Greenland is the fate of Mi-
ami.” What led you to that realization? This statement is one of many examples
of you speaking eloquently as a witness.

RP: There are two parts to the answer. One is the scientific part: Greenland is the
largest sources of sea level rise today. The second part is political: Florida is the po-
tential epicenter of climate politics. Florida is the most important purple state, A
competitive swing state that could go either Republican or Democratic in presiden-
tial elections. It is existentially threatened by sea level rise. So if you can make the
connection between the Arctic and Florida, you can make a powerful case for action.

NR: You’ve drawn the connection between your involvement with Arctic 21 Und
ReThink Energy Florida, and we will come back to that. Erste, let’s trace your path

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesA Conversation

into climate work. It’s of interest because your personal story and your involve-
ment in climate politics proceeded together. You were a young environmentalist
–how did you first become interested in the environment?

RP: That’s a good question. I grew up in Cos Cob, Connecticut, on a property pur-
chased by my grandfather. I walked in the woods all the time, which included a
lake where I skated and played hockey. My mother was heavily involved in the nu-
clear test ban and nonproliferation treaties, so there was that influence. Mein Vater
was an architect, a planner; there was that influence, zu. My sister was involved
in local conservation. My brother was a mountaineer. My aunt was a conservation
writer. She had a home in Martha’s Vineyard and wrote a couple of fine books on
coastal issues.

Another element was that my parents were political. They were members of the
Democratic Party and were donors. They went to events and occasionally they’d
take me along. So I learned something about politics, and of course I was in col-
lege during the Vietnam War. I became part of the antiwar movement, which was
another education in politics.

NR: These influences came from home. What about your professional path? Was
Friends of the Earth, where you became president, your first job after college?

RP: NEIN. When I got out of school, I was a VISTA volunteer in Virginia learning how
to be a community organizer. I did welfare rights organizing. We were organizing
poor people to claim what was rightfully theirs under local welfare regulations.
There was funding that should have been flowing to low-income communities but
wasn’t. So we tried to simplify access and to make welfare departments enforce
the law. I learned organizing skills doing that.

NR: How did you move from that to Friends of the Earth?

RP: Well, I moved to Washington, because I wanted to lobby for the National Wel-
fare Rights Organization.

NR: Let’s just pause on this. I’ve never heard anyone say they set out to become a
lobbyist.

RP: I was interested in how government worked and in trying to influence things.
It’s hard to recall exactly, but lobbyist has become such a pejorative term. I want-
ed to get into the action. I went from welfare rights to a group called the Urban
Environment Conference (UEC), which was a coalition of labor, Umwelt,
and poor people’s organizations. (I met my wife Lenore doing this work; we were
codirectors of the UEC.) The group was set up by Phil Hart, the former senator
from Michigan. The United Auto Workers was very green at the time, and Hart’s
staff helped organize the coalition of unions, poor people’s organizations like Na-

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149 (4) Fall 2020Nancy L. Rosenblum & Rafe Pomerance

tional Welfare Rights and the National Tenants Organization, and environmen-
tal groups like the Wilderness Society. It was a coalition trying to find common
Boden.

One area of common ground was air pollution. We spun off a really effective coa-
lition called the National Clean Air Coalition that operated from the early 1970s to
the early 1990s. It contributed enormously to the environmental success of Con-
gress’s amendments to the Clean Air Act of 1970. We might not have had a Clean
Air Act with integrity without that coalition.

NR: Another contributor to this volume, Patrick Kinney, also entered climate
work through his study of air pollution.

RP: That was my path, Ja, but at this point I was not yet into climate work. Mein
transition was sudden. After the Clean Air Act amendments of 1977 were added, ICH
did research with the Friends of the Earth on acid rain. I ran across an EPA report
on the environmental impact of coal in which there was a reference to the poten-
tial that coal use could warm the planet. I was shocked. I said to myself, “This can’t
happen!” I stood up, walked out of my office, showed the report to a colleague,
Betsy Agle, and said something like: “This must be the whole banana.”

A few days later, Betsy brought an article into the office from what I think was
the Rocky Mountain News. It was a story about geophysicist Gordon MacDonald’s
speech on the effects of increased carbon dioxide. Gordon had just completed a
turn chairing a committee with JASON, the elite independent advisory group of
geophysicists that consulted on science and technology for the U.S. government.
Gordon was special in that he understood the bridge between science and policy.
He understood the need to engage policy-makers. He had served in a policy capac-
ity in the Nixon administration as one of the first members of the Council on En-
vironmental Quality. Right away I called him up and asked if I could come to see
him. I went with two colleagues to his office at the MITRE Corporation. We spent
two hours together. He explained the whole thing to us.

NR: MacDonald was a mentor to you. What did you learn from him in a personal
Weg?

RP: Gordon was a fascinating person with a great sense of humor, very smart po-
litically as well as scientifically. He loved to eat at French restaurants; we had a
special place we’d go to regularly for lunch. He was always very patient with me,
explaining the different pieces of the climate problem. I think what he saw in me
was somebody who could be helpful, and he was willing to take the time to lay it
all out. I became interested in the problem and he was the credible source. He was
necessary to everything I did at that time.

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesA Conversation

NR: MacDonald was crucial to your entry into climate politics, Dann. What was
the first step?

RP: I said to him, “Okay, if I set up briefings, will you do them?” And Gordon
was all for it. He had no problem spending time talking to policy-makers, wohingegen
some scientists have no experience with policy.

NR: So you had to set up the venues for him?

RP: You put your finger on what was a critical point: there was nobody out there
systematically connecting science to policy. Despite all the years of scientists pub-
lishing this report, that report, here and there, there was no systematic effort to
make climate a public issue.

The fact that at that moment, through my work with Gordon MacDonald, Es
might be possible to put climate on the agenda is critical, because it actually need-
ed to have been on the agenda decades earlier. In 1965, oceanographer Roger Rev-
elle and others had produced a report for Lyndon Johnson on carbon dioxide and
global warming, yet it did not become a central issue. Remember, I worked on
the Clean Air Act for seven years and had never heard about global warming. You
might think that I had the wrong education; I was not a scientist. But not so. NEIN-
body brought it up–nobody in the administration, nobody on Capitol Hill, none
of the expert witnesses–I never remember hearing about it.

NR: This is another time when you realized something important that no one talk-
ed about and no one was taking on. So you assigned yourself this task. I see that
you had respect for your own mind–enough to take stands–even at a young age.
You realized that you did not know enough to be an authority, but you thought you
could do something. What enabled you to confidently recognize the importance
of climate change and plunge into action?

RP: It wasn’t as though I hadn’t had a lot of experience on Capitol Hill. I had spent
the last seven years or so working on the Clean Air Act and other issues, so I knew
something about the process, something about the issues. A lobbyist is somebody
who tries in the best sense to convince other people of the merits of their position
through argument and political pressure. What I did with Gordon, essentially, is en-
gage in a process of dialogue with important people. That was not a problem for me:
the issue was so compelling, and Gordon was so articulate and credible, that taking
that step was easy. I had an authority behind me. Without that, I could not have suc-
cessfully gone around convincing people that climate demanded attention.

NR: In Losing Earth, Rich reports that the decade from 1979 Zu 1989 was the mo-
ment when a massive effort at securing domestic and global commitments to con-
trol emissions seemed inevitable. Did you feel that way at the time?

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149 (4) Fall 2020Nancy L. Rosenblum & Rafe Pomerance

RP: NEIN. I don’t think so. There was the possibility of getting started, obwohl. Wir
saw our goal as getting targets and timetables into national policy and interna-
tional agreements. We worked toward getting governments to commit to hitting
certain emission targets over certain timescales. That would have been the begin-
ning of a major step toward a solution. We still don’t have that commitment in the
Vereinigte Staaten.

NR: At the time, you did not see the decade as a pivotal moment, but you did see
the need for political action. You pushed for clear targets for reducing greenhouse
gas emissions. As a witness, you had a good tactical sense for political steps and
even dramatics.

RP: That’s my job. The important step was taken at a 1988 international confer-
ence in Toronto, “Our Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security.”
It came after the congressional hearing that Colorado Senator Tim Wirth chaired,
the same hearing at which Jim Hansen declared that the global temperature re-
cord was outside natural variability. The conference occurred within a month of
Hansen’s testimony, during that very hot summer with forest fires burning, and I
decided somebody had to start talking about making carbon dioxide reductions.
I actually made a decision. Nobody was talking about it, somebody had to talk
about it, so I decided I’ll talk about it. That’s actually what happened. I had a close
working relationship with Tim Wirth’s staff and proposed that they consider put-
ting a target for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in a speech he was giving
in Toronto, and Wirth, who was a great leader, did. That was a big “first” by a ma-
jor politician. The conference embraced the target; they decided it was doable. ICH
think it was a 20 percent reduction by 2005.

Whether that was the right number, the point is, it was directional. It had the
good effect of starting that debate and helping to trigger momentum on emission
reductions.

NR: I am getting a picture of how you built your own body of knowledge and sense
of possible solutions. You’re doing this as you go along. In retrospect, Dann, War
1979 Zu 1989 a crucial decade?

RP: In that decade, a couple of things happened. The issue emerged from the sci-
entific realm and entered into the policy arena. In the twelve years from 1979 Zu
1991, we went from nowhere to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change. The Senate gave its advice and consent to the Framework
Convention: ninety-two to zero. The weakness in the treaty was that there were
no hard commitments to reduce emissions.

NR: Was the failure to proceed an institutional failure or a failure of individuals to
comprehend the problem and to act?

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesA Conversation

RP: Beide. Remember, this issue was new to the United States, and we’re talking
about the gigantic task of replacing the fossil fuel based energy system with clean
Energie! It’s the largest task ever considered by governments. So to think that
everybody is going to jump to it, including all the special interests, is mistak-
In. Few people understood the problem, except for some of the big companies
like Exxon. They knew a lot. In that decade, they knew how formidable the chal-
lenge was and how much risk there was for the planet, but they soon switched
to a strategy of denial and misrepresentation. Others have studied this history
carefully.

In any case, at that point I was not pinpointing fossil fuel companies as the ene-
Mein. I was focused on the Bush administration. As we approached the finalization
of international negotiations, some combination of companies and key people in
the administration got together and argued against targets. And some negotiators
who wanted a treaty were also dissuaded because they thought the effort would
fail if targets were included. All this prevented the United States from doing any-
thing really meaningful. If John Sununu, who was an MIT-trained engineer and
President George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff, had understood climate science, Er
might have taken the opposite position from the one he took, which was skepti-
cism and obstruction.

To my mind, he represents a type of very smart but ill-informed scientist or en-
gineer who thinks he knows better than all the scientists who actually study the
Problem. He got it wrong, and that had consequences.

There’s more to the story. James Baker, who was a powerful secretary of state,
could have been a counter to Sununu, but he dropped out of the conversation. Er
just said, “Well I have a conflict of interest, so I am not going to deal with this
anymore.” He recused himself from any involvement in the development of cli-
mate policy because, he claimed, of his work with the oil industry. Baker could
have been a formidable advocate. In 1989, a letter was delivered to him from eight
members of the Foreign Relations Committee: four Democrats and four Republi-
cans, if I remember correctly. After that, Baker made an important speech, vielleicht
his first remarks on the subject, advocating what he called a “no regrets strategy”:
that it was prudent to take certain actions immediately, and that we could not af-
ford to wait until all the uncertainties were resolved. He recommended measures
like energy efficiency and planting trees. Einerseits, his recommendations
did not push for a firm commitment to spend government money on the problem.
Andererseits, it acknowledged the issue. No denialist would have ever said
Das. And then he recused himself.

NR: How did you feel about his withdrawal?

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149 (4) Fall 2020Nancy L. Rosenblum & Rafe Pomerance

RP: James Baker’s recusal–why he did it, its impact–is a good issue for historians
to study. The whole episode underscores my understanding that within the struc-
tural aspects of history, people make a difference. Structures change because of
Menschen. It’s interesting to note that Baker is now part of an organization, the Cli-
mate Leadership Council, publicly advocating for a carbon tax.

NR: Let’s bring your story forward to the present. Nathaniel Rich observed that
all of the conversations taking place in the 1970s are still taking place. Yet there are
also new conversations. What changes strike you as crucial?

RP: There has been a total transformation in the media coverage of the issue and
a huge change in public attitudes. Then there is what appears to be an important
awakening of young people; it’s not that they weren’t awake earlier, but now they
are more organized, more vocal. That’s very important because this is a multi-
generational issue. Their voice is critical and deserves a place at the center of climate
action because it’s their lives and their children’s lives that are at stake–including
my children, grandchildren, and my grandchildren’s children. So that’s another
Schicht. One more thing: we are at a crucial moment in partisan terms because the
Republican Party as a whole is an obstacle to progress. Generally speaking, Die
UNS. Congress is the problem in the world, and within it, the Republican Party is
the problem.

NR: Say more about these developments from your special vantage point. The me-
dia has clearly taken climate change up, and you’ve been working on that through-
out your career.

RP: I am trying to think what actually led to this transformation in the media.
Many people in different organizations have been working on the media aspects
der Krise. Every environmental group has its communications staff, and the sci-
entific community publishes reports all the time, but finally now the press appre-
ciates that this issue is upon us. I think that Rich’s article “Losing Earth” had an
impact because The New York Times Magazine decided to devote the entire issue to
the history of how we got to this point. The publication was a signal of the reali-
ty and urgency of climate change. It came forty years after the big report of 1979,
the Charney Report of the Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate,
which had accurately assessed the effect of carbon dioxide on global warming.

NR: Is public awareness also spurred by the fact that we’re experiencing the im-
pact of climate change? Forty years ago, it seemed hypothetical and far off. Heute
we see its effects, and our catalog of disasters is growing rapidly.

RP: I think so. The impact is undeniable. The climate system has begun to respond
to what the scientists call “forcing.” The term indicates the amount of additional
warming resulting from increases in the concentration of greenhouse gases. Der

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesA Conversation

oceans are warming. The atmosphere is warming. We’re losing glaciers. We’re
losing sea ice. More than half of the world’s coral reefs, including large portions
of the Great Barrier Reef, are dead from bleaching caused by the heating of the
ocean. An early biological signal came from the warming of the ocean, which we
started to pick up in the 1980s. Jim Hansen’s 1988 congressional testimony was
another moment of awareness: the surface temperature record had exceeded nat-
ural variability. That was a signal. It goes on and on as more and more signals are
picked up, making the whole case more convincing.

NR: We now have organizations and advocacy groups, we have mass movements
with marches and protests, even civil disobedience. What’s your sense of the sig-
nificance of this organizing activity?

RP: I think it’s important. It’s a way to project the opinions of a large number
of citizens into the policy-making process. Take the Natural Resources Defense
Council or Sierra Club or Union of Concerned Scientists: they all have represen-
tation in Congress, and they have members back in the states who pressure their
congressional representatives. So they’re a critical element in trying to achieve re-
Ergebnisse. Trotzdem, they’re like everybody else: they don’t know (Meiner Meinung nach, none of
us do) what is the right political judgment at the right moment. They can make
mistakes.

NR: What kind of mistakes?

RP: Well, you can overreach. I was part of an effort to design a BTU tax (British
thermal unit of heat) that Bill Clinton and Al Gore had proposed very early on. Wenn
you tax energy based on BTUs, you get something that works a lot like a carbon tax,
without calling it that. The BTU tax passed the House of Representatives but went
down in the Senate. The Democrats took a thrashing in the next congressional
election, in part because of this issue. The Republicans just made hay, accusing the
Democrats of wanting to raise energy prices. They did the same thing with Pres-
ident Obama and the Waxman-Markey Bill to promote a clean energy economy.
Anything that is a direct form of energy pricing has to be done on a bipartisan ba-
Schwester, otherwise the Republicans will try to eat the Democrats’ lunch.

Maybe it’s just not possible anymore. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is
going after the Green New Deal. Warum? Because he thinks it too is politically dam-
aging for Democrats. The plan makes a host of claims about what it is going to
do, from guaranteeing jobs for all to narrowing the racial wage gap to retirement
security. There has been a pretty big debate within the climate community about
whether the Green New Deal is going to help or hurt.

NR: What do you think?

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RP: I tend to think it helps because it seemed to have a galvanizing effect on the
öffentlich, with the youth, and on Capitol Hill. It seemed to dramatically increase at-
tention and motivation. We’ll see. The Green New Deal may or may not help in
terms of the electoral map. In Florida, Zum Beispiel, which is a pivotal place, Die
case is better argued from the standpoint of the effect of sea level rise on the state.

NR: That brings us back to Florida. You are involved with ReThink Energy Flori-
da, raising awareness of the impact of sea level rise in that very vulnerable state.
You see Florida as the linchpin for addressing climate change in the United States.
Warum?

RP: Ja, in a way it is the linchpin. In my more grandiose moments, I’d make a pre-
diction that sea level rise will decide the 2020 election. It’s not going to decide the
election based on its impact in North Truro, Massachusetts, but it could in Miami,
Tampa, and Jacksonville. The key is that Florida is the most important electoral
state in the country. If Florida moves green, so to speak, just a little bit, President
Trump could lose Florida and lose the election. He has to win Florida. The theo-
ry that I’ve been operating on for a number of years is that if Florida–which fac-
es existential issues from sea level rise and the increasing power of hurricanes–
wakes up, it will shift politics because the Republicans will have to take action.

NR: For some time now, Florida has been engaging in local climate adaptation
Maßnahmen. Can this be done without acknowledging climate change?

RP: Former Florida Governor, now Senator, Rick Scott, refused to acknowledge
Es. Nor did he assist in local adaptation measures. But leading counties acknowl-
edged the climate change problem, particularly in southeast Florida: Palm Beach,
Broward, Miami, Dade, and Monroe. They formed the Southeast Florida Com-
pact, and the movement toward multicounty organizations has been spreading in
the state. The three largest newspapers in South Florida–Miami Herald, The Palm
Beach Post, and Orlando Sentinel–and WLRN, the PBS station, have formed a col-
laborative and, with about two dozen smaller local newspapers and public radio
stations, publish a joint editorial page on the web called The Invading Sea. Warum?
Because when they started, they declared that sea level rise is the most important
issue facing Florida in the twenty-first century.

Now some members of Florida’s congressional delegation and Governor Ron De-
Santis have pulled back from Scott’s intransigence. DeSantis did an about-face
when he took office. He has said climate change is real, and that’s huge (obwohl
we will see if he goes ahead with state-level efforts). He’s appointed someone to
be in charge of adaptation and resilience planning. He’s appointed a good science
adviser. My colleagues there are pleased with the shift because they’re not fighting
against denialism as they did with Scott. Gleichzeitig, there is growing skepti-

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cism that DeSantis will deliver. Trotzdem, once you’ve acknowledged the issue, you’ve
taken a big step.

NR: Some people think climate adaptation diverts attention from the vital busi-
ness of mitigation. Another view is that when adaptation measures are going on
right around you at home, and your street is being elevated to accommodate flood-
ing, it raises awareness of the need for mitigation. Do you think it works that way?

RP: Well, I think you’re not going to stop people from working on adaptation.
They’ve got to cope with what’s coming at them. Doing so will lower the costs and
impacts of climate change. The problem with adaptation in the long run is, what
are you adapting to? What climate system are you adapting to? One or two de-
grees warmer or five degrees warmer? Du weisst, there may be no point in adapt-
ing to a climate that’s five degrees warmer. If you live near a coastline, you’re go-
ing to have to move; even two degrees of warming will probably mean you’re go-
ing to have to move. The climate is now transient, it’s changing all the time. Dort
is no equilibrium state anymore. So what is it you’re adapting to?

NR: Do you see a constructive connection between adaptation and mitigation
Politik?

RP: Ja, because when you start trying to figure out what future you have to adapt
Zu, you are forced to consider reducing emissions. It’s an “oh my God” sort of
moment: if we follow X scenario or Y scenario, the differences in what we will
have to do are huge. There’s a logic to the dynamic interaction of adaptation and
mitigation because if you’re trying to plan for security or resiliency, you’ve got to
consider what emission scenario you are planning for.

NR: You’ve been involved in international negotiations, including a period as dep-
uty assistant secretary of state for environment and development and as a negoti-
ator for the Kyoto Protocol. What did you learn from your experience that negoti-
ators today need to know?

RP: I was very involved in the lead-up to Kyoto, and I learned a lot from that ex-
perience. It was extremely stressful for me because I had a personal connection to
the problem. I had personal feelings about it. Some of my colleagues were long-
term professional negotiators who weren’t as deeply into the science as I was.
They had more distance.

In some of those negotiating sessions, I remember saying to myself: we’re nego-
tiating the future of the planet and at the same time the future of the global econ-
omy. That’s what was going on, implizit, in the room. Those were the stakes.
You have to deal with the build-up of greenhouse gases that control the fate of
the earth, its climate system. Gleichzeitig, you have to substitute an entirely

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new energy system for powering the world economy. That’s the largest task ever
invented for government (though it may be second in importance to controlling
nuclear weapons: das ist, never using nuclear weapons).

I didn’t have any experience with multilateral negotiations when I started, so I
had to learn very quickly. I’ve concluded that we, Die Vereinigten Staaten, can no longer
go into a multilateral negotiation unless Congress has approved legislation that
would allow us to implement what we negotiate. How do you negotiate in good
faith when you can only hope that your government will pass legislation to imple-
ment the agreement? It was a terrible spot to be in. That’s even true for the Paris
Agreement, which has voluntary targets. So we have a problem negotiating any-
thing unless it’s clear that the political system supports it. If you were appointed
secretary of state or assistant secretary for the Bureau of Oceans and International
Environmental and Scientific Affairs, what are you going to do? You can’t come
up with a scheme to save the planet unless you have the authority back home, un-
less the Congress has told you “yes, we will do that.” That’s a huge lesson and a
challenge for U.S. negotiators.

The second lesson is how tough it is to come up with an agreed target of reduc-
tions because, Natürlich, every country is different. The Paris Agreement reflects
everything we learned from the Framework Convention in Rio in 1992 through all
the subsequent attempts to get an agreement. Paris is a voluntary accord based
on each country’s own judgment, and because the targets are self-imposed, es war
possible to get everybody in. Developing countries joined. China joined. Dann
you’re reliant–as you are in anything–on domestic political commitments to
achieve those numbers.

We’re still waiting for the United States to step up and understand that the fate
of our country lies in dealing with emissions. We still have no political consensus
on that. Some of us understand what’s required while others don’t, or just don’t
think it’s worth acting on.

NR: So the distributive question, the international justice question, is central to
negotiations and to getting an inclusive agreement.

RP: Im 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that
committed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and that was ratified by
the Senate, developing countries basically signed up to do nothing. It was the job
of twenty developed countries to act first. The same thing happened with the Kyo-
to Protocol, which acknowledged countries’ different capacities and responsibili-
ties for addressing global warming. That was a strike against the agreement, gegeben
UNS. Politik, and it was never submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent.
But President Obama was committed to an inclusive Paris Agreement, and his di-

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plomacy–especially with China’s President Xi–resulted in two hundred nations
signing on to voluntary targets for reducing emissions. Yet President Trump aban-
doned it despite the fact that it was all-inclusive and voluntary.

NR: Let’s talk a bit more about mitigation policy. What has influenced your
thinking?

RP: I talk to experts. On this issue, a lot of economists base their assessments on
the most efficient policy. I made my judgments, leaving aside the politics of any
particular measure for a moment, after many conversations with economists:
meistens, Robert Repetto at the World Resources Institute; Roger Dower, who came
to the World Resources Institute from the Congressional Budget Office; Dick
Morgenstern and Ray Kopp, who were at Resources for the Future; and Adele
Morris at Brookings. Generally, they were all carbon tax proponents.

Der beste, most efficient policy mechanism for reducing emissions is a carbon tax.
But the obstacles are significant. To get there, you need Republicans on board. You
have to take care of the distributional issues by using the revenues in a certain way.
You have to take care of the trade issues. You have to take care of those interests,
let’s say energy-producing regions, that could get hit. So you want to design a pol-
icy that acknowledges transitional costs and attends to the impact of the tax on
low-income communities. We’ve learned a lot about these questions of distrib-
utive justice over the years, and people are designing comprehensive packages of
policies to make the impact equitable.

I think we have to bail out some of the energy producing, fossil fuel producing re-
gions of the country. I recall a speech I gave in Charleston, West Virginia, maybe
twenty years ago. I started out by acknowledging the role that West Virginia had
played in building the country’s energy system. We have to acknowledge that. Wir
have to understand people’s vulnerabilities.

In my book, the fastest solution to the equity issue is low-cost clean energy. It has
to be cheap enough for developing countries to embrace solar or wind or nuclear
–whatever it might be that out-competes coal and natural gas. If you can lower
the cost of substitutes enough, emissions will drop faster. That’s where innova-
tion comes in and why investment in research and development is so important.

NR: What about the view that nuclear power is the best answer?

RP: Well, that’s probably hugely expensive, absent a carbon tax. With a tax, Die
economics would work themselves out, in theory. If you impose a carbon tax, Die
winner tends to be the low-cost option. So if coal and gas become much more ex-
pensive, nuclear becomes relatively cheaper. I would say that in that scenario, Wenn
nuclear is low-cost, then fine. In the context of the dire risks of the build-up of

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carbon dioxide, I’m not overly worried about nuclear power. We need all hands
on deck to avoid the worst. I wouldn’t take that option off the table unless there’s
good reason to do so, like safety or proliferation.

Do I have reservations? Determining whether nuclear power is “safe” is up to the
regulatory process. I’m no expert on nuclear power safety, or on disposal, oder weiter
the connection to nuclear proliferation. Those are all important problems. Der
question becomes, what can nuclear power contribute to addressing the climate
problem and is it worth the risk? If it’s too expensive compared with solar and
wind and even coal that has had the carbon pulled out, then why go there? But if
it isn’t too expensive then you have to evaluate it on these other grounds. I am not
a no on nuclear power.

NR: Often some energy source, nuclear, Zum Beispiel, is described as transitional.
Is that a helpful way of thinking?

RP: Some people say natural gas is a transitional fuel, but that’s getting less popu-
lar because methane leakage and gas still produce carbon dioxide. Geoengineer-
ing may be a transitional strategy, not forever. It’s essential that while society is
implementing geoengineering, it is also eliminating carbon as a source of emis-
sions and even pulling it out of the atmosphere. It may take a long time, but you
can envision a point at which the temperature of the earth is either rising so slowly
or is flat that you could stop. Jetzt, that could be a long time from now; it could be
a century. Transition is not short term.

NR: How did you get involved as an advocate of geoengineering research?

RP: I’ve spent some time supporting the establishment of a research program in
die USA. government. We don’t have a research program on solar radiation man-
agement–reflecting some amount of inbound sunlight back out into space–and
we need one. Even if we oppose geoengineering, we have to be able to point out its
problems and explain why opposition is warranted, if it is. We may need to inter-
vene in a planetary manner to cool the earth off in a hurry when no other tool is
verfügbar.

NR: All along, in discussing your evolution as a climate activist, we’ve been talking
about your emergence as a witnessing professional. Could you say more about
Das, both your view of yourself in that light, and your view of others around you?
You worked closely with scientists who moved from their community of expert
knowledge to public testimony and activism. What did you observe about others
who were reticent about speaking out, and about professional constraints?

RP: I think there was a period when scientists were the voice of urgency. Urgen-
cy was implicit in the science. Initially they were the appropriate people to speak

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to the issue, because they understood it and could lay out how it worked, what
the consequences were, and so on. Dann, in theory, policy-makers, diplomats,
and every one else would come to grips with it. In theory. Even if they are knowl-
edgeable about policy, scientists risk losing credibility if they start to weigh in on
policy because those discussions are always politicized. Sometimes it’s better for
ihnen, even if they have an opinion, to withhold it.

There is a form of appropriate caution and a form of political caution. Scientists
work in a world of peer reviewed literature, and there they exercise appropriate
caution. They want to get it right. Gleichzeitig, some scientists become very
active in policy areas where they don’t have the credibility they do as scientists,
and it’s arguably counterproductive. It’s a matter of doing it properly, arguing the
Fall, and recognizing the risks.

The risks are real. Take Florida under Governor Scott when the word went out:
“Thou shall not talk about or use the words climate change.” Eventually many sci-
entists in the state did speak out. In the Trump administration, people are keeping
their heads down. The administration hasn’t restrained experts at NOAA or NASA
from talking about climate science, but they have tried to silence the EPA. And
government has censored data that are used by the public; mindestens, this is a
failure of government’s responsibility to educate.

NR: Scientists enter the history of the global climate crisis because their work is
the basis for understanding where we are and where we are heading. You enter this
history by providing a bridge from science to politics and policy. As a political strat-
egist, you are not bound by the established norms of a licensed profession, wie zum Beispiel
law and medicine. Auch so, have you experienced constraints on witnessing?

RP: I’ll give you an example. Geoengineering has been a topic that has been un-
mentionable for a long time because of the fear that talking about it would dis-
suade people from reducing emissions, or that the risks would be too great. Geo-
engineering is not a new subject. I remember the testimony in 1987 of Wallace
Broecker, one of the world’s top geophysicists. He said that we may have to fly
747s with sulfur into the stratosphere to block sunlight. His testimony went no-
Wo; no one took notice. When John Holdren, Barack Obama’s science adviser,
was asked by an AP reporter at the end of an interview, “Are you in favor of doing
geoengineering research?” Holdren responded, “Of course.” Well, that became
the lead of the story, and as I remember, the result was that Holdren was battered
dafür. Until the very end of the Obama administration, that was the risk of even
mentioning geoengineering.

So in most settings, introducing a discussion of geoengineering requires gump-
tion. Just recently I stood up at a National Academy of Sciences event, where a

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speaker was talking about how to prevent the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarc-
tica from melting, and I asked him why he didn’t mention geoengineering. It took
me years to stand up in public and ask that question because of fear of ridicule.
And still eyes roll. Often scientists don’t know anything about it, even though it’s
a relevant policy response. Political opinions about geoengineering tend to over-
ride the necessary policy and scientific debate.

I am an advocate for research. And the more time goes on, the more I can see that
the odds of an intervention go up. We are already deeply committed to a mas-
sive warming of the earth–it is baked in–and if you don’t cut the warming off,
somehow, while you’re getting emissions down, you lose the fight. A friend who
is a paleo climatologist sent me an email that read: “We’re on our way to the Plio-
cene.” The Pliocene was three million years ago, and the concentration of carbon
dioxide then was the same as it is today, but the temperature and sea level were
much higher. Given enough time, the planet will look like the Pliocene. Impacts
take a long time to happen after concentrations of carbon dioxide have changed.

When I have to do something tough, I wear a bracelet given to me by my grand-
daughter. I use that to remind myself that I have to be outspoken. Unless there’s
some strategic reason not to speak out, I don’t hold back, because this is about her.

NR: If an international agreement on targets for restricting carbon emissions
and sticking to it is hard, imagine overseeing and enforcing an agreement on
geoengineering.

RP: Everything is hard. That’s no different. What we’re dealing with here is an un-
precedented effect of humanity on the planet. There is nothing like it. Nothing at
this scale.

NR: My last question: We’ve all heard expressions of despair from climate sci-
Entisten, from biologists who study species that are becoming extinct, for exam-
Bitte, and many others who have been personally and professionally entrenched in
studying the effects of climate change. What gives you courage, and what gives
you hope?

RP: At this point, having courage is not a problem for me. I speak. I know what I
think. I know that every time I speak out, my own voice, my own words evolve in
responding to different issues. Shouldn’t I be totally depressed? Yet I’m not. Does
that have to do with the substance of the issue? Or in the end, perhaps it’s a matter
of personal disposition.

What gives me hope? The emergence of young people, if they get organized, Ist
really, really, really important. They have a legitimate stake in this, more so than
baby boomers like me. And the progress we’re making on some technologies gives

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me hope. The cost of solar and wind has come down. Also hopeful is the number
of people involved in the issue. When I started, nobody had heard of the problem.
Nobody was active. When I went around with Gordon MacDonald briefing peo-
ple at high levels in the Carter administration, they had never heard of climate
ändern. We started at zero. Well, look at us now. Everybody in the world knows
about climate change. So is that progress? Let’s hope.

Über die Autoren

Nancy L. Rosenblum, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2004, is Senator
Joseph Clark Research Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government and Professor
Emerita in the Government Department at Harvard University, where she served
as chairperson. She is coeditor of the Annual Review of Political Science and has been
a member of the advisory board of the SSRC “Anxieties of Democracy” program
seit 2013. She is the author and editor of eleven books, among them A Lot of People
Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy (with Russell Muirhead,
2019), Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America (2016), On the Side of the
Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship (2010), Membership and Morals: The Per-
sonal Uses of Pluralism in America (1998), and Thoreau: Political Writings (1996).

Rafe Pomerance has served as Chairman of Arctic 21, President of Friends of the
Earth, Senior Associate for Climate Change and Ozone Depletion Policy at the
World Resources Institute, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment
und Entwicklung, President of the Climate Policy Center (CPC), and Consultant to
ReThink Energy Florida. He was a Founder and Chairman of the Board of American
Rivers, as well as Chairman of the Board of both the League of Conservation Vot-
ers and the Potomac Conservancy. He currently serves as Senior Arctic Policy Fel-
low at the Woods Hole Research Center.

179

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149 (4) Fall 2020Nancy L. Rosenblum & Rafe Pomerance
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