The fuse of the carbon bomb began to smolder sometime around the year 1800, when industrialized cities started burning coal to heat homes and power primitive engines. In 1850, about 198 million tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere.
Carbon is a curiously durable element. It can float in the sky for thousands of years without breaking down. Carbon has another important characteristic—it is translucent. That means that it blocks sunlight, just slightly, like a veil of smoke. This translucence is vitally important to life on Earth. A thin layer of compounds like carbon dioxide and water vapor in the atmosphere act like a shield, retaining some of the sun’s warmth on the surface of the planet.
The mechanics of how this works are simple and well understood. About two-thirds of the sun’s heat hits the Earth, but then bounces off into space. The remaining third of the heat is kept on Earth because the thin layer of translucent elements trap it there. For about the past 400 thousand years, carbon levels in the atmosphere bounced around in a very narrow band, between roughly 200 and 400 parts per million. This period of relative climate stability coincided with the rise of agriculture and the development of civilization.
The fuse of the carbon bomb was truly lit in 1859, when Edwin Drake hit his gusher of an oil well in Pennsylvania and began the age of oil in America. When a barrel of crude oil was burned, it released about 317 kilograms of invisible carbon dioxide into the air. In 1890, 1.3 billion tons of carbon were released into the sky. Some of it went back into the trees, some of it went into the oceans, but some of it stayed in the atmosphere.
In 1930, 3.86 billion tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere. In 1970, 14.53 billion tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere. It was joined by other industrial gases that wafted up from factories, refineries, feedlots, and fertilizer plants, gases like methane and nitrous oxide that were also invisible and seemingly harmless. Some of these gases blocked far more light than carbon, on the order of 30 to 50 times more. As more of these gases were released into the atmosphere, more heat would be trapped. This is incontrovertible.
In the 1950s, a chemist and oceanographer named Charles David Keeling installed an air monitor on top of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. Its measurements showed that carbon was accumulating in the atmosphere. In 1959, carbon composed 316 parts per million in the atmosphere. In 1970, it composed 325 parts per million. In 1990, it was 354 parts per million. Concurrent with this discovery, scientists tested air samples that were trapped in tiny bubbles in the glaciers of Antarctica.
This proved that during the early millennia of human existence, carbon levels remained in the narrow band between roughly 200 and 300 parts per million. Now that carbon levels exceeded that threshold, it raised troubling questions: What would the world’s climate be like at 360 parts per million? Or at 380? Or at 400? There was no certain answer.
In 1988, a group of scientists working with the United Nations formed a consortium called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which set out to synthesize the research on global climate change occurring around the world. Initially, the IPCC was very cautious and even seemed to downplay the potential risks from higher carbon concentrations. The panel said that more study was needed, and that no rash actions should be taken that might dampen the prosperity that came from burning fossil fuels.
Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and other firms spent millions of dollars to support the idea that there was an “alternative” view about climate change between 1991 and 2009.Each ensuing IPCC report, however, became more certain than the last. Carbon concentrations were increasing, which inevitably trapped more heat in the atmosphere. Humans were responsible for the increase. The future implications were unpredictable, but could be severe. The world could expect more dramatic rainfall events and bigger storms in part because warmer air held more moisture. Areas that were parched would become drier. Weather data showed that the world was already getting warmer, as would be predicted when greenhouse gases increased.
While the scientific community was in agreement on these facts, the American public was in doubt. This wasn’t accidental. As early as 1991, Charles Koch and other executives in the fossil fuel industry helped foster skepticism about the evidence of climate change. When George H. W. Bush announced that he would support a treaty to limit carbon emissions, the Cato Institute held a seminar in Washington called “Global Environmental Crises: Science or Politics?”
The seminar featured scientists who questioned the prevailing view that humankind’s carbon emissions caused the Earth to warm, including Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, Charles Koch’s alma mater. A brochure for the seminar featured a large-print quote from Lindzen in which he said: “The notion that global warming is a fact and will be catastrophic is drilled into people to the point where it seems surprising that anyone would question it, and yet, underlying it is very little evidence at all.”
The seminar was not a fringe event. Lindzen and other speakers at the conference were invited to join White House staffers in the Roosevelt Room while they were in town for the conference, according to an internal White House memo from Nancy G. Maynard, who worked for the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Maynard’s boss forwarded the invitation to Bush’s chief of staff, John H. Sununu, under the subject line “Alternative Perspectives on Global Warming.”
Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and other firms spent millions of dollars to support the idea that there was an “alternative” view about climate change between 1991 and 2009. These groups had a distinct advantage in the debate. It took many decades for firm scientific consensus to take shape. Scientists are, by nature, cautious and self-doubting. They were hesitant to push the narrative further than the data would support.
And the mechanisms of climate change were impossibly complex and hard to quantify. It was difficult to estimate, for example, just how much carbon the world’s oceans might be able to absorb over time, or exactly how many degrees the earth might warm over a hundred years if the atmospheric levels of carbon reached 400 parts per million. Even as the global scientific community slowly cohered around the understanding that human activity caused climate change, this cottage industry thrived—a cottage industry built to highlight all the points of uncertainty in the scientific debate.
ExxonMobil eventually abandoned this strategy, but Koch Industries persevered. In 2014, Koch Industries’ top lobbyist, Philip Ellender, said that the evidence was in doubt. “I’m not a, you know, climatologist or whatever,” Ellender said. “Over the past, I think, hundred years, the earth is warmer. Over the past roughly eighteen, it’s cooler . . . Whether or not the increases and fluctuations are anthropologic or not is still a question.”
In private, Koch Industries officials were even more dismissive of the science around climate change. One former senior Koch Industries executive, a trained scientist who only made business decisions after first analyzing reams of data, explained that he believed global warming was a hoax invented by liberal politicians who sought to use the fiction as a way to unite the populace against an invented enemy.
After the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991, this executive explained, American elites needed a new, all-encompassing enemy with which to frighten the masses, and so they invented one with global warming. All the data on atmospheric carbon levels and rising temperatures were part of this conspiracy, the executive said.
This is what lent the sense of desperation to Phillips and his team, as they conducted their series of hearings on climate change. Phillips and his colleagues were painfully aware of the data underpinning climate change. They spent their days reading the scientific research about global climate change, and they felt like they had a window into a terrible truth that most people needed to see. This was the reason behind the parade of hearings and the celebrity appearances that they held on Capitol Hill. Their desperation derived from the fact that no one seemed to be listening.
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When Markey’s committee realized that hearings alone weren’t changing the political dynamic, they took a more provocative step. They wrote a bill of their own. The Select Committee couldn’t pass the bill or even introduce it for a vote. But the team knew that the mere existence of a bill would make the issue all the harder to ignore.
The shape of the bill reflected the politics of the time. There were many ways that the government could stanch greenhouse gas emissions. Congress could tax carbon emissions, incentivizing companies to use lower-carbon sources of energy. Or Congress could regulate carbon like a pollutant, setting strict limits on its release.
Rather than take these straightforward approaches, the committee settled on a complicated, far-reaching regulatory structure that embodied the internal paradoxes of the neoliberal philosophy that dominated policy making from the Clinton administration onward. The bill sought to dramatically expand the reach of government, while harnessing the power of private markets. In this case, the approach was called cap and trade.
There was surprisingly little dissent within the committee against this approach. “Very early on, people got the sense that this is going to be a cap-and-trade bill,” Phillips recalled. “The think tanks in town and everyone in the talking head community—no one was talking about a carbon tax. Everyone was talking about cap and trade as being the vehicle. At that time, there was sort of this consensus that it was the moderate, most economically efficient way of dealing with pollution.”
Phillips said it was also attractive because it had the advantage of enjoying bipartisan support. “It was a Republican idea,” he said.
The cap-and-trade policy was made famous under President George H. W. Bush, who used it as a way to combat acid rain. The concept was simple. The government capped the total amount of a certain pollutant that could be released. But then it gave companies a license to release that pollution. A company could pollute as much as it desired, but it paid the price to do so by purchasing pollution “credits.” If a company cut the amount of pollution it released, it could earn credits for doing so and turn around and sell them.
This created a “market” for pollution. Polluters paid to pollute, companies earned money by cutting pollution. All the while, government determined how much total pollution was allowed by setting the cap. The government could turn the screws and push the caps downward, making a stronger and stronger incentive to cut emissions.
Cap-and-trade gained support after Bush imposed it on power plants that released sulfur dioxide, which created acid rain. By 2008, emissions were 60 percent lower than they had been in 1980. More importantly, the cuts were made at much lower costs than people had predicted. The cap and trade system on sulfur dioxide was imposed in 1990.
When Ed Markey’s committee realized that hearings alone weren’t changing the political dynamic, they took a more provocative step. They wrote a bill of their own.With their bill, the Markey committee aimed to create the largest cap-and-trade system in history. The limit on greenhouse emissions affected virtually every corner of the modern economy, from automobiles, to power plants, to factories. The policy mechanisms to do so, laid out in the bill’s thousand pages, were almost impossibly complex.
Ed Markey unveiled the bill in May of 2008, giving it the consumer-friendly name of “iCAP.” After Obama became president, Nancy Pelosi became emboldened. She helped initiate a coup in the Energy and Commerce Committee. A usually perfunctory vote on the chairmanship went against Dingell. He was replaced by the California liberal Henry Waxman, who vowed to pass a law to control carbon emissions. Ed Markey and his committee, after years of agitating from their basement office, were now in a position to do more than agitate. They were in a position to govern. They had opened a pathway to push their bill through Waxman’s committee.
The iCAP bill was put on the legislative operating table in 2009 and opened back up. It would become known as the Waxman-Markey bill, an ambitious cap-and-trade system that quickly became a centerpiece of Obama’s legislative agenda. The bill had been in the works for years and had been the subject of hundreds of hours of congressional hearings.
In the early days of the Obama era, even more hearings were held. The select committee worked even harder as it drafted new language and met with members of Congress and lobbyists from the energy companies and environmental groups.
The long days of grinding work in the basement office were thrilling, in a way, for Phillips. He had the sense that he was a part of history. And he wasn’t the only one. At night, Phillips and his friends went out to drink at cheap bars. They must have felt something like the young staffers back in the 1930s, when the mighty legislative pillars of the New Deal were being put into place. They were laying the governing framework of
They were part of the strongest governing coalition in years, or perhaps decades. An acquaintance of Phillips’s, a young speechwriter named Dylan Loewe, wrote a book during that time entitled Permanently Blue: How Democrats Can End the Republican Party and Rule the Next Generation. Galley copies were passed around Washington.
People read Loewe’s prediction that the Democratic Party was in a position to hold the White House and Congress for the next quarter century, and this prediction seemed entirely believable. The Republicans had been reduced to a factional minority with no clear path back to power. The Democratic Party had the force of history at its back, pushing it forward. future generations.
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Excerpted from Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America by Christopher Leonard. Copyright
