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A few years later, Henry Ford’s grandson, Henry Ford II, acknowledged that “the law requiring greater fuel efficiency in motor vehicle usage has moved us faster toward conservation goals than competitive, free-market forces would have done.” Still he pleaded for Washington to “give up” on pushing for tighter post-1985 fuel-efficiency standards.

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The combination of the number of delegations, the overall size of the crowd, and the sharp disagreement on the basic questions—all these led to a chaotic conference that was, as the days went by, becoming more and more frustrating for all involved. It was possible that there would be no agreement at all.

Barack Obama flew in early one morning toward the end of the conference, with the intention of leaving later in the day. Shortly after his arrival, he was told by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “Copenhagen was the worst meeting I’ve been to since eighth-grade student council.”

After sitting in a confusing meeting with a group of leaders, Obama turned to his own staff and said he wanted, urgently, to see Premier Wen Jiabao of China. Unfortunately, he was told, the premier was on his way to the airport. But then, no: word came back that Wen was still somewhere in the conference center. Obama and his aides started off at a fast pace to find him. Time was short, for Obama himself was scheduled to leave in a couple of hours, hoping to beat a blizzard that was bearing down on Washington.

At the end of a long corridor, Obama came upon a surprised security guard outside the conference room that was the office of the Chinese delegation. Despite the guard’s panicked efforts, Obama brushed right passed him and burst into the room. Not only was Wen there but, to Obama’s surprise, he found that so were the other members of what was now known as the BASIC group—President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, President Jacob Zuma of South Africa, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India—huddling to find a common position. For their part, they were no less taken aback by the sudden, unexpected appearance of the president of the United States. But they were hardly going to turn Obama away. He took a seat next to Lula and across from Wen. Wen, overcoming his surprise, passed over to Obama the draft they were working on. The president read it quickly and said it was good. But, he said, he had a “couple of points” to add.

Thereupon followed a drafting session with Obama more or less in the role of scribe. At one point the chief Chinese climate negotiator wanted to strenuously disagree with Obama, but Wen instructed that this interjection not be translated.

Finally, after much give-and-take, some of it heated, they came to an agreement. There would be no treaty and no legally binding targets. Instead developed and developing countries would adopt parallel nonbinding pledges to reduce their emissions. That would be accompanied by a parallel understanding that the “mitigation actions” undertaken by developing countries be “subject to international measurement, reporting and verification.” The agreement also crystallized the prime objective of preventing temperatures from rising more than 2°C (3.6°F). The BASIC leaders tossed it to Obama to secure approval from European leaders, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the UK. The Europeans did so, but only reluctantly, as they wanted something much stronger. Obama then took off, beating the snowstorm back to Washington.

And:

Over drinks before dinner, Piebalgs was asked—in light of the EU’s aggressive 2020 efficiency targets—about the relative popularity of renewables versus efficiency. “Renewables are more popular,” he said. “Renewables are supply side. They provide new energy. Efficiency is something that pays back over the years. Energy efficiency involves a lot of nitty-gritty, a lot of incentives and a lot of regulations.

“And there’s no red ribbon to cut.” Conservation—energy efficiency—may be so obvious as a solution to cost and environmental issues. But there is no photo op, no opening ceremony where government officials and company executives can cut a ribbon, smile broadly into the camera, and inaugurate a grand new facility. He shook his head as he considered one of the most powerful of the life lessons he had learned from his deep immersion in global politics.

“It’s very important to be able to cut a red ribbon.”

And:

The spread of air-conditioning changed the course of global economic development and made possible the expansion of the world economy. Lee Kuan Yew, the founder and former prime minister of modern Singapore, once described air-conditioning as “the most important invention of the twentieth century,” because, he explained, it enabled the people of the tropics to become productive. Singapore’s minister of the environment was a little more explicit, saying that, without air-conditioning, “instead of working in high-tech factories” Singapore’s workers “would probably be sitting under coconut trees."

And:

“Mottainai is the spirit in which we have approached things over a thousand years because we never really had anything in abundance,” Kawaguchi continued. “So we’ve had to be wise about resources. I was taught at home, every child was taught at home, that you don’t leave a grain of rice on your plate. That’s mottainai. Too precious to waste.”

This sense of mottainai has underpinned Japan’s approach to energy efficiency, which was codified in the Energy Conservation Law of 1979. The law was expanded in 1998 with the introduction of the Top Runner program. It takes the most efficient appliance or motorcar in a particular class—the “top runner”—and then sets a requirement that all appliances and cars must, within a certain number of years, exceed the efficiency of the top runner. This creates a permanent race to keep upping the ante on efficiency. The results are striking: the average efficiency of videocassette recorders increased 74 percent between 1997 and 2003. Even television sets improved by 26 percent between 1997 and 2003. Further amendments to the law mandate improvements by factories and buildings, and require them to adopt efficiency plans.

And:

By the 1970s Brazil was importing 85 percent of its oil, and its economy was booming. But the 1973 oil crisis abruptly ended what was being called the Brazilian Economic Miracle. Petroleum prices quadrupled, delivering a devastating shock to the economy. The military government responded with what it described as a “wartime economy” to meet the nation’s energy crisis. Brazil, according to the universal consensus, had absolutely no prospects for petroleum. The only energy option was sugar. As part of the “war effort”—and at the strong urging of distraught sugar growers—the government established the national Pro-Alcohol program. It was backed by the slogan “Let’s unite, make alcohol.” As an extra incentive, fuel stations, previously closed on weekends, were granted the right to stay open on Saturdays and Sundays in order to sell ethanol—but not gasoline. Ethanol consumption increased dramatically. Initially ethanol was added to gasoline. But by 1980, in response to the government’s insistence, the Brazilian subsidiaries of the major car companies agreed to manufacture vehicles that ran exclusively on ethanol. In turn, the government made a crucial pledge, both to the companies and consumers, that there would be sufficient ethanol. It was an absolute guarantee. The actual production costs of ethanol in 1980 were three times that of gasoline, but that was hidden from consumers by huge subsidies that were paid for by a tax on gasoline.

By 1985, 95 percent of all new cars sold in Brazil ran exclusively on “alcohol.”

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As it was, the Framework Convention on Climate Change—the agreement that came out of Rio—was remarkable. Not because of its targets, for it had none save the “aim” to reduce emissions in 2000 to 1990 levels, but because it existed at all. Four years earlier, climate change had not even been on the political agenda in the United States, nor on that of many other countries. Yet in less than half a decade, what heretofore had been an obscure scientific preoccupation had been turned into something that the international community had gone on record promulgating as an urgent and fundamental challenge to humanity and to the planet’s well-being.

The road to Rio was actually quite long; it had begun more than two centuries earlier, in the Swiss Alps. But what had started as an obsession by a handful of researchers with the past, with glaciers and the mysteries of the Ice Age, was now set to become a dominating energy issue for the future.

And:

On November 15, 1990, George H. W. Bush signed the Clean Air Amendments into law. Title IV established an emissions trading system to reduce acid rain. It was a great victory for something that had been considered beyond-the-pale just a year earlier. Shrinking the caps over time, that is, reducing the total number of allowances or permits year by year, would have the effect of making the permits scarcer and thus more expensive, increasing the incentive to reduce emissions. Many called this system allowance trading. Others, more optimistically, called it the “Grand Policy Experiment.”

After a slow start, the buying and selling of allowances became standard practice among utilities. The results in the years since have been very impressive. Emissions trading delivered much larger reductions, at much lower costs, and much more speedily, than what would have been anticipated with a regulatory system. By 2008, emissions had fallen from the 1980 level by almost 60 percent. As a bonus, the rapid reduction in emissions meant less lung disease and thus significant savings on health care.

The impact on thinking about how to solve environmental problems was enormous. “We are unaware of any other U.S. environmental program that has achieved this much,” concluded a group of MIT researchers, “and we find it impossible to believe that any feasible alternative command-and-control program could have done nearly as well.” Coase’s theorem worked; markets were vindicated. Within a decade, a market-based approach to pollution had gone from immorality and heresy to almost accepted wisdom. The experience would decisively shape the policy responses in the ensuing debate over how to deal with climate change. Overall, the evidence on SO2 was so powerful that it was invoked again and again in the struggles over climate change policy.

And:

What seemed to be the attitude of the Bush administration was captured at a ceremony at the State Department in May 2001, when Secretary of State Colin Powell swore in Paula Dobriansky as Undersecretary of State. Going through her list of responsibilities, he came to climate change. At that point, he paused, and with a small, almost embarrassed grin, laughed, and jokingly put his hand over his mouth as if he had said something slightly naughty.

And:

On April 2, 2007, the Supreme Court delivered its opinion in what has been called “the most important environmental ruling of all times.” In a split 5–4 decision, the Court declared that Massachusetts had standing to bring the suit because of the costly storms and the loss of coastal shore that would result from climate change and that the “risk of harm” to Massachusetts was “both actual and imminent.”

And in the heart of its opinion, the Court said that CO2—even though it was produced not only by burning hydrocarbons but by breathing animals—was indeed a pollutant that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health and welfare.” And just to be sure not to leave any doubt as to how it felt, the majority added that the EPA’s current stance of nonregulation was “arbitrary” and “capricious” and “not in accordance with the law.”

The consequences were enormous; for it meant that if the U.S. Congress did not legislate regulation of carbon, the EPA had the authority—and requirement—to wield its regulatory machinery to achieve the same end by making an “endangerment finding.” Two out of three of the branches of the federal government were now determined that the government should move quickly to control CO2.

More (#4) from The Quest:

in 1978, in Washington, D.C., Rafe Pomerance, president of the environmental group Friends of the Earth, was reading an environmental study when one sentence caught his eye: increasing coal use could warm the earth. “This can’t be true,” Pomerance thought. He started researching the subject, and he soon caught up with a scientist named Gordon MacDonald, who had been a member of Richard Nixon’s Council on Environmental Quality. After a two-hour discussion with MacDonald, Pomerance said, “If I set up briefings around town, will you do them?” MacDonald agreed, and they started making the rounds in Washington, D.C.

The president of the National Academy of Sciences, impressed by the briefing, set up a special task force under Jule Charney. Charney had moved from Princeton to MIT where, arguably, he had become America’s most prominent meteorologist. Issuing its report in 1979, the Charney Committee declared that the risk was very real. A few other influential studies came to similar conclusions, including one by the JASON committee, a panel of leading physicists and other scientists that advised the Department of Defense and other government agencies. It concluded that there was “incontrovertible evidence that the atmosphere is indeed changing and that we ourselves contribute to that change.” The scientists added that the ocean, “the great and ponderous flywheel of the global climate system,” was likely to slow observable climate change. The “JASONs,” as they were sometimes called, said that “a wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late.”

The campaign “around town” led to highly attended Senate hearings in April 1980. The star of the hearing was Keeling’s Curve. After looking at a map presented by one witness that showed the East Coast of the United States inundated by rising sea waters, the committee chair, Senator Paul Tsongas from Massachusetts, commented with rising irony: “It means good-bye Miami, Corpus Christi . . . good-bye Boston, good-bye New Orleans, good-bye Charleston. . . . On the bright side, it means we can enjoy boating at the foot of the Capitol and fishing on the South Lawn.”

And:

In late August 1990, as the deadline for preparation of the report for the U.N. General Assembly approached, scientists and policymakers met in the northern Swedish town of Sundsvall. A week of acrimonious negotiations ensued, with enormous frustrating arguments even about individual words. What, for instance, did “safe” really mean? By Friday afternoon there was still no agreement. And without agreement they could not go to the United Nations General Assembly with concrete recommendations.

Then came the epic crisis that threatened to scuttle the entire IPCC process: At 6:00 p.m. the U.N. translators walked off the job. They had come to the end of their working day and they were not going to work overtime. This was nonnegotiable. Those were their work rules. But without translators the delegates could not communicate among themselves, the meeting could not go on, there would be no report to the General Assembly and no resolution on climate change. But then the French chairman of the session, who had insisted on speaking French all week, made a huge concession. He agreed to switch to English, in which, it turned out, he was exceedingly fluent.

The discussions and debates now continued in English, and progress was laboriously made. But the chief Russian delegate sat silent, angrily scowling, wreathed in cigarette smoke. Without his assent, there would be no final report, and he gave no sign of coming on board.

Finally one of the scientists from the American delegation who happened to speak Russian approached the scientist. He made a stunning discovery. The Russian did not speak English, and he was certainly not going to sign on to something he did not understand. The American scientist turned himself into a translator, and the Russian finally agreed to the document. Thus consensus was wrought. The IPCC was rescued—just in time.

More (#3) from The Quest:

After World War II, the Navy enlisted Revelle to help understand the oceanographic effects of those tests. Revelle’s assignment was to devise techniques to measure the waves and water pressure from the explosions. This would enable him to track radioactive diffusion through ocean currents. In the course of this work, Revelle’s team discovered “sharp, sudden” variations in water temperatures at different depths. This was the startling insight—the ocean worked differently from what they had thought. In Revelle’s words, the ocean was “a deck of cards.” Revelle concluded that “the ocean is stratified with a lid of warm water on the cold, and the mixing between them is limited.” That constrained the ability of the ocean to accept CO2. It was this period, in the mid-1950s, that Revelle, collaborating with a colleague, Hans Suess, wrote an article that captured this insight and would turn out to be a landmark in climate thinking.

The title made clear what the article was all about: “Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase in Atmospheric CO2 During the Past Decades.” Their paper invoked both Arrhenius and Callendar. Yet the article itself reflected ambiguity. Part of it suggested that the oceans would absorb most of the carbon, just as Revelle’s Ph.D. had argued, meaning that there would be no global warming triggered by carbon. Yet another paragraph suggested the opposite; that, while the ocean would absorb CO2, much of that was only on a temporary basis, owing to the chemistry of sea water, and the lack of interchange between warmer and cooler levels, and that the CO2 would seep back into the atmosphere. In other words, on a net basis, the ocean absorbed much less CO2 than expected. If not in the ocean, there was only one place for the carbon to go, and that was back into the atmosphere. That meant that atmospheric concentration of CO2 was destined, inevitably, to rise. The latter assertion was a late addition by Revelle, literally typed on a different kind of paper and then taped onto the original manuscript.

Before sending off the article, Revelle appended a further last-minute thought: The buildup of CO2 “may become significant during future decades if industrial fuel combustion continues to rise exponentially,” he wrote. “Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.” This last sentence would reverberate down through the years in ways that Revelle could not have imagined. Indeed, it would go on to achieve prophetic status—“quoted more than any other statement in the history of global warming.”

Yet it was less a warning and more like a reflection. For Revelle was not worried. Like Svante Arrhenius who had tried 60 years earlier to quantify the effect of CO2 on the atmosphere, Revelle did not foresee that increased concentrations would be dangerous. Rather, it was a very interesting scientific question.

And:

nothing had so forcefully underlined the strategic importance of better comprehension of the weather than D-Day, the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. The “Longest Day,” as it was called, had been preceded by the “longest hours”—hours and hours of soul-wrenching stress, uncertainty, and fear in the headquarters along the southern coast of England, as indecisive hourly briefings followed indecisive hourly briefings, with the “go/no go” decision held hostage to a single factor: the weather.

“The weather in this country is practically unpredictable,” the commander in chief Dwight Eisenhower had complained while anxiously waiting for the next briefing. The forecasts were for very bad weather. How could 175,000 men be put at risk in such dreadful circumstances? At best, the reliability of the weather forecasts went out no more than two days; the stormy weather over the English Channel reduced the reliability to 12 hours. So uncertain was the weather that at the last moment the invasion scheduled for June 5 was postponed, and ships that had already set sail were called back just in time before the Germans could detect them.

Finally, on the morning of June 5, the chief meteorologist said, “I’ll give you some good news.” The forecasts indicated that a brief break of sorts in the weather was at hand. Eisenhower sat silently for 30 or 40 seconds, in his mind balancing success against failure and the risk of making a bad decision. Finally, he stood up and gave the order, “Okay, let’s go.” With that was launched into the barely marginal weather of June 6, 1944, the greatest armada in the history of the world. Fortunately, the German weather forecasters did not see the break and assured the German commander, Erwin Rommel, that he did not have to worry about an invasion.

A decade later, knowing better than anyone else the strategic importance of improved weather knowledge, Eisenhower, now president, gave the “let’s go” order for the International Geophysical Year.

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A power crisis that erupted in California in 2000 threw the state into disarray, created a vast economic and political firestorm, and shook the entire nation’s electric power system. The brownouts and economic mayhem that rolled over the Golden State would have been expected in a struggling developing nation, but not in the state that was home to Disneyland, and that had given birth to Silicon Valley, the very embodiment of technology and innovation. After all, California was, if an independent country, the seventh-largest economy in the world.

What unfolded in California graphically exposed the dangers of misdesigning a regulatory system. It was also a case study of how short-term politics can overwhelm the needs of sound policy.

According to popular lore, the crisis was manufactured and manipulated by cynical and wily out-of-state power traders, the worst being Enron, the Houston-based natural gas and energy company. Its traders and those of other companies were accused of creating and then exploiting the crisis with a host of complex strategies. Some traders certainly did blatantly, and even illegally, exploit the system and thus accentuated its flaws. Yet that skims over the fundamental cause of the crisis. For, by then, the system was already broken.

The California crisis resulted from three fundamental factors: The first was an unworkable form of partial deregulation that explicitly rejected the normal power-market stabilizers that could have helped avoid or at least blunt the crisis but instead built instability into the new system. The second was a sharp, adverse turn in supply and demand. The third was a political culture that wanted the benefits of increased electric power but without the costs.

And:

[California] was in an uproar; its economy, disrupted. In April 2001, after listening to Governor Davis threaten the utilities with expropriation, the management of PG&E, the state’s largest utility, serving Northern California, decided that it had no choice but to file for bankruptcy protection. San Diego Gas & Electric teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. The management of one of the state’s major utilities hurriedly put together an analysis of urban disruption to try to prepare for the distress and social breakdown—and potential mayhem—that could result if the blackouts really got out of hand. They foresaw the possibility of riots, looting, and rampant vandalism, and feared for the physical safety of California’s citizens.

But Governor Gray Davis was still dead set against the one thing that would have immediately ameliorated the situation — letting retail prices rise. Instead he had the state step in and negotiate, of all things, long-term contracts, as far out as twenty years. Here the state demonstrated a stunning lack of commercial acumen—buying at the top of the market, committing $40 billion for electricity that would probably be worth only $20 billion in the years to come. With this the state transferred the financial crisis of the utilities to its own books, transforming California’s projected budget surplus of $8 billion into a multibillion-dollar state deficit.

And:

a question troubled Saussure as he traipsed through the Swiss mountains. Why, he asked, did not all the earth’s heat escape into space at night? To try to find an answer, he built in the 1770s what became known as his “hot box”—sort of mini greenhouse. The sides and bottom were covered with darkened cork. The top was glass. As heat and light flowed into the box, it was trapped, and the temperature inside would rise. Perhaps, he mused, the atmosphere did the same thing as the glass. Perhaps the atmosphere was a lid over the earth’s surface, a giant greenhouse, letting the light in but retaining some of the heat, keeping the earth warm even when the sun had disappeared from the sky.

The French mathematician Joseph Fourier — a friend of Napoléon’s and a sometime governor of Egypt — was fascinated by the experiments of Saussure, whom he admiringly described as “the celebrated voyager.” Fourier, who devoted much research to heat flows, was convinced that Saussure was right. The atmosphere, Fourier thought, had to function as some sort of top or lid, retaining heat. Otherwise, the earth’s temperature at night would be well below freezing.

But how to prove it? In the 1820s Fourier set out to do the mathematics. But the work was daunting and extremely inexact, and his inability to work out the calculations left him deeply frustrated. “It is difficult to know up to what point the atmosphere influences the average temperature of the globe,” he lamented, for he could find “no regular mathematical theory” to explain it. With that, he figuratively threw up his hands, leaving the problem to others.

And:

In 1938 an amateur meteorologist stood up to deliver a paper to the Royal Meteorological Society in London. Guy Stewart Callendar was not a professional scientist, but rather a steam engineer. The paper he was about to present would restate Arrhenius’s argument with new documentation. Callendar began by admitting that the CO2 theory had had a “chequered history.” But not for him. He was obsessed with carbon dioxide and its impact on climate; he spent all his spare time collecting and analyzing data on weather patterns and carbon emissions. Amateur though he was, he had more systematically and fully collected the data than anyone else. His work bore out Arrhenius. The results seemed to show that CO2 was indeed increasing in the atmosphere and that would lead to a change in the climate—more specifically, global warming. 13

While Callendar found this obsessively interesting, he, like Arrhenius, was hardly worried. He too thought this would make for a better, more pleasant world—“beneficial to mankind”—providing, among other things, a boon for agriculture. And there was a great bonus. “The return of the deadly glaciers should be delayed indefinitely.”

But Callendar was an amateur, and the professionals in attendance that night at the Royal Meteorological Society did not take him very seriously. After all, he was a steam engineer.

Yet what Callendar described — the role of CO2 in climate change — eventually became known as the Callendar Effect. “His claims rescued the idea of global warming from obscurity and thrust it into the marketplace of ideas,” wrote one historian. But it was only a temporary recovery. For over a number of years thereafter the idea was roundly dismissed. In 1951 a prominent climatologist observed that the CO2 theory of climate change “was never widely accepted and was abandoned.” No one seemed to take it very seriously.

More (#1) from The Quest:

...auto executives could now see a point on the horizon when China might actually overtake the United States as the world’s largest automobile market. It was inevitable, they said. It was just a matter of time. In 2004 General Motors predicted that it could happen as early as 2025. Some went further and said it could happen as early as 2020. Maybe even 2018. But, they would add, that would be a real stretch.

As things turned out, it happened much sooner — in 2009, amid the Great Recession. That year China, accelerating in the fast lane, not only overtook the United States but pulled into a clear lead.

And:

During World War II, in order to meet the energy needs of factories working two or three shifts a day to supply the war effort, the East Ohio Gas Company built an LNG storage facility in Cleveland. In October 1944 one of the tanks failed. Stored [liquefied natural gas] seeped into the sewer system and ignited, killing 129 people and creating a mile-long fireball. Subsequently, the causes of the accident were identified: poor ventilation, insufficient containment measures, and the improper use of a particular steel alloy that turned brittle at very low temperatures. The design and safety lessons would be seared into the minds of future developers.

And:

It was one thing to build an atomic bomb. It was quite another to harness a controlled chain reaction of fission to generate power. So much had to be invented and developed from scratch—the technology, the engineering, the know-how. It was Rickover who chose the pressurized light-water reactor as the propulsion system. He also imposed “an engineering and technical discipline unknown to industry or, except for his own organization, to government.”

To accomplish his goals, Rickover built a cadre of highly skilled and highly trained officers for the nuclear navy, who were constantly pushed to operate at peak standards of performance...

In Rickover’s tireless campaign to build a nuclear submarine and bulldoze through bureaucracy, he so alienated his superiors that he was twice passed over for promotion to admiral. It took congressional intervention to finally secure him the title.

Rickover’s methods worked. The development of the technology, the engineering , and construction for a nuclear submarine—all these were achieved in record time. The first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, was commissioned in 1954. The whole enterprise had been achieved in seven years—compared with the quarter century that others had predicted. In 1958, to great acclaim, the Nautilus accomplished a formidable, indeed unthinkable, feat—it sailed 1,400 miles under the North Pole and the polar ice cap. The journey was nonstop except for those times when the ship got temporarily stuck between the massive ice cap and the shallow sea bottom. When, on the ship’s return, the Nautilus’s captain was received at the White House, the abrasive Rickover, who was ultimately responsible for the very existence of the Nautilus, was pointedly excluded from the ceremony.

...By the time Rickover finally retired in 1986, 40 percent of the navy’s major combatant ships would be nuclear propelled.