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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Meet the 28 leaders -- scientists, politicians, activists, celebrities and inventors -- who are fighting to stave off planetwide catastrophe.
Nov 4, 2005 | Global warming is a planetary emergency everywhere but in the White House. While the Bush administration fiddles, the rest of the world burns with concern about the earth's rising temperature. With our industries billowing a relentless stream of gases into the atmosphere, trapping heat, we're decimating our natural ecosystems, exacting an incalculable toll on our planet and future health.
The climate warriors and heroes honored here embody the environment's best defense. They are scientists, ministers, students, politicians, activists, lawyers, celebrities, inventors, and world leaders. As Al Gore says in his accompanying essay, they share little in common. "But each of them recognized the threat that climate change poses to the planet -- and responded by taking immediate action to stop it," Gore writes.
The range of their actions is remarkable. A college dropout tours the country in a bus that runs on vegetable oil, educating young people about fuel efficiency. The CEO of General Electric, one of the world's biggest polluters, argues for a federal policy to reduce global warming. An emissary from the Inuit in the Arctic accuses the United States of violating the rights of her people by refusing to curb its climate-heating pollution.
"Their stories should inspire and encourage us," Gore writes, "to see with our hearts, as well as our heads, the unprecedented response that is now called for."
THE DROPOUT
Billy Parish
There are lots of ways to fight global warming: drive less, send e-mails to Congress, buy more efficient light bulbs. Billy Parish dropped out of Yale.
Parish, a junior from New York, became convinced that climate change poses a serious threat to human survival. So he quit school and became the coordinator of Energy Action, mobilizing more than a thousand student groups to lower climate-warming pollution. Working on a laptop and sleeping on couches from San Francisco to North Dakota, Parish has galvanized students across the country to take action on global warming.
In July he led a three-day fast at the White House to call attention to the estimated 150,000 deaths caused each year by climate change. He dispatched a bus that runs on biodiesel and vegetable oil to tour summer music festivals and promote fuel efficiency, culminating in a two-day forum in Detroit. And he has persuaded more than 120 universities to sign the Campus Climate Challenge, vowing to lower their emissions of greenhouse gases.
Parish first became concerned about the environment in high school, when he spent a semester tending an organic farm in rural Vermont. The 23-year-old is soft-spoken in a way that commands respect: He's sincere without sounding self-righteous. "Billy had the courage to leave Yale to go get something done on the climate issue when it is most needed -- now," says James Gustave Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. "His efforts to mobilize young people are exactly what is needed."
For Parish, who once dreamed of being a doctor, dropping out of college seems like a small price to pay to halt global warming. "More and more young people are beginning to realize that climate change will significantly impact their future," he says. "We need to do everything that we can -- fight as hard as we can. Right now it doesn't feel like there's time for me to be in school."
THE AVENGER
Al Gore
When history derailed the presidency of Al Gore, it may have increased his power to save the planet. Freed from the restraints of elected office, the former vice president is now widely regarded as America's most persuasive and passionate spokesman on global warming. "Rescuing the environment from climate collapse was a -- if not the -- defining issue of my political career," says Gore, 57. "And you can be damn sure I'm not giving up on it now."
No public figure has a deeper working knowledge of the climate crisis. Gore studied the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions at Harvard and held the Senate's first hearing on the science of climate change. In 1988, when he ran for president at the age of 40, his "primary motivation was to push the global-warming issue." Four years later, he wrote "Earth in the Balance," the bestselling book on global warming. Not long after that, Bill Clinton, who calls Gore "one of the greatest political and scientific intellects of our time," asked him to be his running mate.
As vice president, Gore was a chief architect of the Kyoto Protocol, the historic accord on reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. But the Senate refused to ratify the treaty, calling the evidence "inconclusive." Now that the scientific consensus is irrefutable,
Gore considers it "damned immoral" that the White House and Congress continue to block action on global warming. "This is an emergency of historic proportions," he says. "We are in a race against time. There is a brave and hearty band of about 2 percent of Washington officials who are working on this, but 98 percent are in denial."
These days, Gore devotes much of his energy to pressuring Washington to act. Since 2001, he has traveled the world giving a riveting presentation titled "Global Warming: A Planetary Emergency," a lecture and multimedia display that lays out the causes and consequences of what Gore calls "the collision between civilization and the earth." And last year, he co-founded an investment firm that supports climate-change initiatives and sustainable development.
For Gore, who grew up on a cattle farm in Tennessee and keeps a picture of environmental pioneer Rachel Carson on his desk, global warming is as much a moral issue as a scientific one. But despite the urgency of the issue, he remains at heart more an optimist than a doomsayer. "If Americans act immediately, we can innovate our way out of this problem," Gore says. "We must use our political institutions, our democracy, our free speech, our reasoning capacity, our citizenship, our hearts and reason with one another, see the reality of this problem, and act as Americans."
THE PAUL REVERE
Dr. James Hansen
On June 23, 1988, as the temperature in the nation's capital climbed to a record 101 degrees, James Hansen sat before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and offered a blunt warning about the threat of global warming. "The greenhouse effect has been detected," he testified, "and it is changing our climate now."
That early alarm earned Hansen a reputation as the "Paul Revere of climatology." His testimony drew on extensive scientific data he had gathered as head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA -- but that didn't stop the energy industry from attacking him. When Hansen testified again, the first Bush administration inserted a disclaimer into his remarks, portraying his findings as "not reliable."
Hansen, a mild-mannered Iowan, blew the whistle on the White House tampering -- and quietly collected more evidence of global warming. In April, he reported that readings gathered by thousands of robotic sensors from deep in the earth's oceans show that the planet is "trapping" enough heat to raise average global temperatures by one degree in the next century. "He's a good example of what a citizen-scientist can do," says NASA colleague Ronald Miller. "His work is scientifically rigorous, but he also advises voters on how to deal with global warming."
Hansen, the son of a tenant farmer, is a die-hard Yankees fan who uses baseball statistics to help explain global warming. He made his name as one of the world's leading experts on Venus before switching planets in 1976. What alarms him most, he says, is how the current Bush administration is suppressing evidence of climate change. "In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now," Hansen says. "Delay of another decade, I argue, is a colossal risk."
THE MESSENGER
Dr. Robert Watson
It's not easy getting international scientists to agree about anything. Meteorologists look at the world differently than geologists, and developing countries have different agendas than industrial nations.
But Robert Watson, an American born in England, practically invented the process of getting the world's scientists to work together. In the 1980s, he persuaded researchers to combine their efforts to study damage to the ozone layer. And as chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he brought the same skills to bear on global warming. In 2001, the panel issued a landmark study endorsed by 120 nations. Its simple but devastating conclusion: Human beings have already caused the planet to heat up significantly, and it is likely to get worse. The study found that the earth's temperature will likely rise as much as 10 degrees by 2100, and that sea levels will rise as much as 35 inches.
The Bush administration responded by killing the messenger. After the study appeared, ExxonMobil sent a memo to the White House lobbying for Watson to be removed from the United Nations panel. A few months later, Watson was unceremoniously replaced with a less outspoken representative. "The Bush administration axed him because they saw him as too effective," says Michael Oppenheimer, a geosciences professor at Princeton University. "The world is poorer for not having Bob in this kind of role."
Not that the ouster silenced him. As chief scientist for the World Bank, Watson is on the road almost half of every year, working with developing nations to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions and to raise awareness about climate-related threats posed by widespread disease and flooding. "There could be a lot of lives lost and people being displaced," says Watson, 56. And despite being a target of the Bush administration, he notes that Democrats in Congress have also refused to impose mandatory targets to curb greenhouse gases. "What if tomorrow morning President Bush decided he wanted to move to targets -- would Congress approve it?" he asks. "The answer is most certainly no."
THE ELDER STATESMAN
Raúl Estrada Oyuela
In 1997, Argentine diplomat Raúl Estrada Oyuela presided during a two-week conference in Japan, where thousands of international delegates were meeting to hammer out the first global treaty on climate change. On the final night, after three days of nonstop negotiations, the delegates were close to an agreement. But at the last minute, U.S. representatives refused to sign, insisting that the treaty include a provision allowing countries to buy and sell "emissions credits" from one another, essentially trading the right to pollute. Tempers among the exhausted delegates grew short -- until Estrada, a portly and distinguished statesman known for his love of good food, stepped in and eased the tension with rapturous descriptions of his wife's home cooking. At the 11th hour, he accepted the American provision, sealing the deal on a unanimous agreement he named the Kyoto Protocol.
"Estrada is a grandmaster of diplomacy and the godfather of Kyoto," says David Sandalow, an assistant secretary of state under Bill Clinton, who helped negotiate the agreement. "It wouldn't have happened without his leadership, excellent judgment and good humor."
Eight years later, the landmark agreement has become the centerpiece of international law. In February, 131 countries -- including Canada, Japan and every member of the European Union -- began implementing the treaty, which requires nations to limit heat-trapping gases by 2012. But Kyoto failed to receive a single vote when it was brought before the U.S. Senate in 1997, and the Bush administration has refused to implement it, insisting that it would have "wrecked our economy."
In fact, as Estrada points out, Kyoto is proving to be an advantage: Germany, for example, has created 450,000 new jobs while cutting carbon emissions by nearly 20 percent. "We expected the United States leaders to comply," says Estrada, "because the protocol is economically forward-thinking." What's more, he adds, American companies can't escape the treaty: Any U.S. business that operates in a Kyoto-endorsing country must comply with the agreement's emissions restrictions at its overseas plants.
A father of eight and grandfather of 12, Estrada started out as a journalist before getting his law degree and serving in embassies from the United States to China. His global experience makes him confident that America will eventually join Kyoto. "I believe that international collaboration is the only way to solve this global problem," says Estrada, 68. "And I have faith that U.S. leaders will eventually agree to participate in this greater good."
THE POWER PLAYER
Paul Anderson
You wouldn't expect the cutthroat CEO of one of the country's largest utilities to propose a tax on his own pollution -- but that's exactly what Paul Anderson of Duke Energy is doing. Anderson wants to slow global warming by giving industry an incentive to go green -- levying a "carbon tax" on their emissions of climate-warming gases. Since Duke burns 17 million tons of coal each year, the tax would encourage the North Carolina power company to replace its aging generators with newer, cleaner facilities that run on wind or natural gas. "It gives you the flexibility to make intelligent investment choices," Anderson says.
Many of Anderson's colleagues in the energy industry consider the carbon tax "a high-cost proposal for something that we're not even sure is real." But Anderson has no doubt that global warming is real: He witnessed the damage himself in 1999, when he was CEO of what is now the world's largest mining company, in a chopper flying over one of his operations in New Guinea. "I saw that the glaciers had shrunk to practically nothing," he says. "It was a heck of a dramatic way of understanding that something is actually happening here."
In the normally staid utility industry, Anderson is something of a maverick -- an energy czar who has been invited to captain Greenpeace's ship, the Rainbow Warrior. The son of a nuclear-plant worker, he jokingly refers to himself as Bart Simpson. But Anderson, 60, doesn't kid around about global warming: The beauty of a carbon tax, he says, is that it's a "no regrets" policy: "If somebody tomorrow were to discover that global climate change isn't real, the carbon tax still would have resulted in higher-performance machinery, more conscientious executives and healthy debate in the industry. Better yet, it would have reduced our dependence on foreign oil. At the end of the day you'd say, Well, that wasn't a bad deal anyway."
THE HAWK
Jim Woolsey
Stern and officious, Jim Woolsey comes across like the hard-core hawk he is -- a former director of the CIA with access to high-level officials in the White House and the Pentagon. But going against the grain of old-school conservatism, he has become the loudest voice in a growing chorus of "cheap hawks" who want to wage the war on terror with plug-in cars and fuel made from manure. A member of the Defense Policy Board, Woolsey wants to defeat terrorism by freeing America from its dependency on foreign oil, rather than routing the enemy in costly wars. "America's energy demand is financing terror," Woolsey says. "We don't need pie-in-the-sky hydrogen scenarios that are 20 years out. We don't have that kind of time."
Among the techno-fixes Woolsey promotes: producing ethanol from prairie grass and corncobs, harvesting biodiesel from farm waste, and adding a battery to existing hybrid cars. "Plug-in hybrids could get up to 150 miles per gallon," he says. "And since electricity is comparatively cheap, you would get the functional equivalent of 50-cent-a-gallon gasoline."
Woolsey's primary goal is to bolster America's national security. But his energy-independence strategy would also curb global warming, create a market for clean-energy providers, strengthen the dollar, cut the deficit, and generate international goodwill. "It's not just win-win," he says. "It's win-win-win-win-win."
Woolsey, 64, is careful not to criticize his fellow conservatives, and the White House has begun to borrow his ideas about energy efficiency. "Conservatives dismiss renewable energy as kind of airy-fairy -- you know, real men dig and drill," says Reid Detchon, executive director of the Energy Future Coalition. "Woolsey has used his security-hawk clout to cut through that myth and pump up the profile of clean-tech solutions."
An Oklahoma native, Woolsey earned degrees from Stanford, Oxford and Yale. For a hawk, he can be a bit of a prankster; he sings backup in a rock band called the Goths and played the role of Homeland Security secretary in a war-game scenario prepared for Congress that envisioned terrorist attacks disrupting oil supplies. An avid kayaker who lives in a solar-powered house off Chesapeake Bay, he also confesses to being "a tree hugger" -- but he isn't worried about sharing an agenda with environmentalists. "It doesn't matter what the principal motivation is," he says. "It's just two different sets of reasons for wanting the same thing."
