Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
THE EMISSARY
Sheila Watt-Cloutier
Sheila Watt-Cloutier's people, who have lived in the Arctic for thousands of years, recognized the threat posed by global warming long before science confirmed their observations. When robins and barn owls began showing up in the North's frozen reaches, the Inuit had no name for them.
As chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference -- an alliance of 155,000 indigenous people -- Watt-Cloutier serves as an international emissary. This fall, the ICC is filing a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that accuses the United States of violating the rights of the Inuit by refusing to curb its climate-heating pollution. "Sheila is putting a human face on the problem of global warming," says Donald Goldberg of the Center for International Environmental Law.
Watt-Cloutier has only to look out of her living-room window in the Canadian town of Iqaluit to see the effects of global warming: Sea ice is melting and permafrost is thawing. "What you do in the United States is connected to people falling through the ice in the Arctic," she says. "What happens to the planet happens first up here. We are the early warning for the rest of the world."
A grandmother at 51, Watt-Cloutier spent the first 10 years of her life traveling by dog sled. Today she hopes the human-rights petition will show the rest of the world that the Inuit aren't simply helpless victims who can't make it in the modern world. "I don't think we're meant to be eliminated by globalization," she says. "We're meant to be the beacon, so that the rest of the world can understand what it's doing to itself."
THE PRIME MINISTER
Tony Blair
Eighteen months after the September 11 attacks, British Prime Minister Tony Blair stepped on a podium in London and identified the biggest long-term threat confronting the world. "There will be no genuine security," Blair declared, "if the planet is ravaged." He went on to equate global warming with weapons of mass destruction, a position later elaborated by his chief science advisor, Sir David King: "Climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today -- more serious even than the threat of terrorism."
Blair's international reputation was damaged when he supported President Bush's invasion of Iraq -- but he has tried to use his political capital to push the White House to wage war on global warming. Blair made climate change one of his top two priorities at the G8 summit last summer, and he warns that only "timely action" will avert a threat "so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power that it alters radically human existence." Britain's own record debunks Bush's insistence that curbing climate change would hurt the economy: Since 1990, Britain has reduced its greenhouse-gas emissions by 14 percent, while its economy has grown by 40 percent.
Blair, 52, is no newcomer to the fight. After a briefing by his science advis0rs in 2001, he ordered a detailed investigation into the impact of climate change. The conclusion: Global warming will become irreversible unless the world slashes CO2 emissions by 60 percent within 50 years.
In a stroke of diplomatic genius, Blair pledged to achieve such reductions in Britain by 2050 -- making him the first world leader to propose concrete targets beyond the time frame outlined in the Kyoto Protocol. Spurred by his example, France, Germany and Sweden followed suit. "If there is one political leader who has most vigorously championed the issue of climate change, it is Tony Blair," says Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme.
An Oxford grad who played in a rock band as a student, Blair is an avid nature buff who has hiked the Pyrenees and an obsessive scholar who has been known to read the Koran on vacation. His urgency over global warming sharpened considerably in 2003, after a record heat wave in Europe left 30,000 people dead. In recent years, he has ordered his government to purchase a fleet of hybrid cars and make its buildings more energy-efficient.
So far, the Bush administration has ignored his calls for action. But Blair remains determined to force the United States to take responsibility for its contribution to global warming. "The blunt reality," he says, "is that unless America comes back into some form of international consensus, it is very hard to make progress."
THE ROAD WARRIOR
Hiroshi Okuda
Hiroshi Okuda, the chairman of Toyota, envisioned the need for a hybrid car long before history demanded it. In the 1990s, at a time when oil prices were hitting rock bottom and America's SUV market was exploding, Okuda greenlighted the engine technology that would usher in an era of fuel-efficient -- and eventually zero-emission -- cars.
Today there are more than 350,000 Priuses on the road worldwide, and other automakers are racing to catch up with the 350 patents Toyota holds on gas-electric hybrids. "When it comes to perfecting the killer app of hybrid technology," says Ashok Gupta, director of the air and energy program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, "Okuda is the Bill Gates of the auto world."
Six feet tall and a black belt in judo, Okuda likes to break the rules. To encourage youthful innovation, he promotes younger employees to managerial roles. He has dismissed American carmakers as "stupid." And in June, to help Japan meet its climate targets under the Kyoto Protocol, he sauntered down a Tokyo catwalk in a lightweight suit, sans tie, his shirt collar unbuttoned down to midchest. It was a fashion statement almost as scandalous as an emperor with no clothes: Formal business attire is to Japanese executives as shitkickers are to Texas oilmen. But Okuda, an outspoken climate crusader at age 72, was promoting Japan's emerging "cool biz" movement, modeling lighter suits that could alleviate the need for air conditioning in office buildings.
For all his showmanship, Okuda is dead serious when it comes to the fight against global warming. "People and countries simply will no longer allow autos to damage their living environments or the earth's ecosystems," says Okuda, who has worked at Toyota for 50 years. The Prius "embodies this spirit," he adds, contributing to the company's "growth in the moral dimension."
Okuda, a serious reader who ranges from political memoirs to Goethe, selected the name "Prius" because it means "to go before" in Latin -- signifying "a forerunner to the 21st century and to the era when automobile technologies become highly diverse." Hybrid technology is already setting the stage for the future: Building on the system used in the Prius, Toyota has developed a prototype, the FCHV, that runs on hydrogen fuel cells.
THE ICE HUNTER
Dr. Lonnie Thompson
Lonnie Thompson has spent more time above 18,000 feet than any other person on earth. Trekking to the Himalayas and Andes and beyond, he has risked blood clots and temporary blindness in the name of a single pursuit: preserving tens of thousands of years of weather history coded deep in the planet's fast-vanishing glaciers. "No scientist has taken bigger risks to track ancient weather patterns and help us understand the anomaly of current climate trends," says Al Gore.
Thompson stores his prehistoric glacial samples at Ohio State University in vaults kept at subarctic temperatures and studies the dust particles and air trapped within the ice. From this atmospheric evidence, he has reconstructed a meticulous calendar of temperatures dating back 750,000 years. The upshot: "It proves that the warming trends of today are vastly more dramatic than what we've seen over 5,000 years," Thompson says.
Growing up on a small farm in West Virginia, Thompson studied geology so he could work in the coal industry. But he got sidetracked in grad school, when he examined the first ice core ever extracted by American scientists. "You could have knocked me over with a feather the day I discovered, firsthand, that glaciers contain a frozen history of the earth," he recalls. Now, in his work at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State, Thompson possesses a will to survive on par with Lance Armstrong's, defying frostbite and hurricane-force winds. Photographs he has taken provide disturbing views of the world's melting glaciers -- including the ice cap on Mount Kilimanjaro, which is expected to disappear entirely by 2015.
Thompson dismisses skeptics who contend that the current warming trend is due to a natural cycle. "Name one who has ever really studied climate or collected data," he says. "I bet you can't." Glaciers, he adds, "have no political agenda. They don't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican. Science is about what is, not what we believe or hope. And it shows that global warming is wiping out invaluable geological archives right before our eyes."
THE HARDBALLER
Dr. Ralph Cicerone
In 2001, after 2,000 international scientists issued a landmark report concluding that climate change is a man-made problem, the White House flatly rejected the resounding global consensus, demanding "information based on science." Casting suspicion on the work of foreign scientists, President Bush called for a report by America's elite scientific institution, the National Academy of Sciences -- referring the issue to an NAS panel that included leading skeptics intent on refuting the conclusive evidence of global warming.
But Bush didn't count on Ralph Cicerone. An atmospheric chemist who has spent decades computing pollution levels around the world, Cicerone put up a formidable fight against the skeptics -- and won. The NAS published a corroboration of the international report, broadcasting the message that scientists will not serve as apologists for the president. "It took incredible courage," says Stephen Schneider, a climate expert at Stanford University. "Ralph's team refused to buckle under pressure from the administration." Faced with the panel's strong conclusions, Bush had no choice but to publicly admit to the overwhelming evidence that humanity is causing climate change, even as his administration fails to address it.
Before opting for a career in science, Cicerone played varsity baseball at MIT and was offered a job as a radio announcer for the San Diego Padres. Having spent decades collecting greenhouse-gas samples from sources as varied as tailpipes, rice paddies and cow pastures, Cicerone has proved to be a remarkably savvy political operative. He opposed Bush's ouster of Robert Watson from a U.N. panel on climate change, claiming it would "greatly reduce the emphasis on science." And in June, when Rep. Joe Barton of Texas demanded an investigation to discredit three scientists whose data confirmed global warming, Cicerone denounced the move as "intimidating" and demanded that it be halted.
To Cicerone, 62, the politics of global warming seem simpler than the science. "I can't emphasize enough how complicated the climate system is," he says. "So to see all the evidence that has come together recently is staggering. And despite all the political polarization around the issue of climate change, there is more serious interest in it than I have ever seen. That revs me up."
THE LITIGATOR
John Adams
If the planet has a lawyer, it's John Adams. In 2003, when the Bush administration failed to curb auto emissions as mandated by the Clean Air Act, Adams unleashed his team of attorneys at the Natural Resources Defense Council to file a landmark lawsuit against the government. He also sued the nation's five largest power companies for spewing the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming, and he will soon be going to court to stop automakers from blocking a new clean-car law in California.
All told, the organization currently has more than 200 lawsuits pending against polluters. "NRDC represents the gold standard," says Eric Schaeffer, former head of law enforcement at the Environmental Protection Agency. "Their attorneys rival the sharpest minds in the EPA and are defending public health right now in a way that officials under the Bush regime can't."
At 72, Adams is a white-haired, button-down attorney who comes across as mild-mannered and unflappable. But he can display a mean bark in the courtroom, as well as an impeccable command of the facts. A crackerjack strategist who co-founded NRDC in 1970, he promptly made a name for the organization by playing a key role in writing the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.
NRDC now boasts more than a million members, an annual budget of $60 million and a more powerful climate arm than any other environmental group. In his 35 years of shaping NRDC's legal tactics, Adams says, he has never seen a more worthy target than the Bush administration: "Their denial is stupefying. Here we have an administration that invaded Iraq on sparse and even bogus evidence, and yet they claim to be unconvinced by the overwhelming data on climate change -- despite a bigger scientific consensus than most any we've ever seen in history."
Adams grew up in New York's Catskills and still owns a farm there, often wheeling guests around on an ancient Cub Cadet tractor. But he is not afraid to draw the ire of his allies: NRDC has taken flak from fellow environmentalists for siding with the Bush administration and fossil-fuel producers on the benefits of "clean coal," a new technology that filters out climate-warming pollutants so they can be "sequestered" underground. "We're not going to solve the climate problem unless we get industry to join us in the fight," Adams insists.
Coal accounts for more than half of U.S. electricity production, and Adams believes that a complete shift to renewable energy will simply take too long to protect the climate. "The bottom line," he says, "is that America has to start significantly reducing greenhouse gases even before we phase out fossil fuels."
THE PRODUCER
Laurie David
No one has done more to get global warming off the science page and on to the front page than Laurie David. A trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, David is putting together a comedy special on climate change that will air Nov. 20, featuring celebrities such as Tom Hanks, Steve Martin and Robin Williams. She is producing an HBO report on global warming called "Too Hot Not to Handle," which she promises will be "the least wonky documentary anybody has ever seen on this issue." And she has organized a "virtual march" on Washington, signing up Walter Cronkite, Sen. John McCain, Leonardo DiCaprio and 140,000 other Americans to demand immediate action on global warming.
"She can get any studio head on the telephone within a few minutes, and virtually any Hollywood celebrity," says Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "She's opened up new corridors of power to the environmental movement."
David is working those corridors to "permeate pop culture" with environment-friendly images. Her husband, Larry David, the creator of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," drives a Toyota Prius hybrid -- both on the show and in real life. And thanks to her efforts, hybrids also make prominent appearances on "24" and "Alias" -- cause-related product placement designed to make the fight against global warming look cool.
David, 47, used to berate Hummer drivers at red lights for their lousy fuel economy, but she gave up the lectures at the insistence of her preteen daughters. These days, her urgency is most apparent in the virtual march, which will be featured this fall on "The Young and the Restless" and "The Bold and the Beautiful." Rather than burn fossil fuels to get millions to Washington, David is signing people up online for a cross-country look at climate change's devastation. "You don't have to go to Alaska to see that global warming is real and now," David says. "You can see it in Louisiana and Florida, in New Jersey and Arizona. We have to shift the debate on this issue this year."
Her husband likes the online protest for a different reason. "The virtual march is a perfect opportunity for the lazy man to do something good without having to expend any effort," he says. "This thing was made for me."
THE LAWMAKERS
John McCain and Joe Lieberman
For a politician, Sen. John McCain doesn't sound optimistic about staving off global warming. "We're making great progress," he says, "but I'm not convinced that we are going to devise solutions in time to prevent serious damage to the environment."
Not that McCain isn't doing his part. At a time when some Republicans in Congress dismiss global warming as a "hoax" perpetrated by environmentalists, McCain and Sen. Joe Lieberman have forged a bipartisan counterassault to tackle the crisis. The Climate Stewardship Act, which they introduced in 2003, is the only bill that seeks to force American industry to reduce its total emission of greenhouse gases. Under the measure -- modeled on the market-based program that successfully reduced acid rain in the 1990s -- businesses that exceed a federal cap on emissions would be permitted to buy pollution "credits" from companies that cut their output of CO2. "It's an ingenious solution in which polluters are paying pioneers to innovate," Lieberman says.
Although the Senate has twice rejected the measure, McCain and Lieberman have held repeated hearings on the issue, exposing the tactics of their opponents. In one of the most memorable sessions, McCain shot down fellow Republicans who were brandishing a statement signed by "experts" on climate science -- pointing out that Perry Mason and a Spice Girl were among the signatories.
The Bush administration also refuses to support a mandatory cap on climate-warming pollution, arguing for voluntary limits. Lieberman, 63, calls the president's do-nothing approach "monumental negligence," while McCain, 69, attacks it as "disgraceful." But the deadlock will continue, they say, as long as Congress and the White House remain under the influence of polluting industries. In 2004 alone, the energy industry contributed nearly $38 million to congressional candidates.
"We see governors and mayors across the nation taking action on climate change, and yet here in Washington, the special interests rule," McCain says. "But they won't rule forever."
THE TIDE TURNER
Dr. Robert Corell
Few scientists know as much about how global warming is changing the world as Robert Corell. As chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, Corell oversaw a five-year study by 300 scientists from 15 countries who studied the effects of climate change in the Arctic. The conclusion: Greenhouse gases are causing the planet to heat up faster than anyone realizes. "We're talking about the sea level rising at a rate of about a meter every hundred years or so," says Corell -- enough water to swallow a chunk of Florida and more than 40 percent of Bangladesh. Even if all climate-warming pollution ceased today, he adds, "the oceans would continue to warm, and the glaciers would continue to melt -- and those processes will take 1,500 years to stabilize."
The detailed findings -- laid out in a peer-reviewed, 1,200-page report published on Oct. 21 -- provide the most advanced evidence yet of global warming's stark reality. But a year before the study was finished, the Bush administration stalled its progress, shutting down talks designed to come up with specific policy recommendations. "The United States took umbrage to the process, even though they had voted to create it," says Corell, a senior fellow with the American Meteorological Society. "They said the science was not complete." After a series of tense meetings in Greenland, Iceland and Denmark, the administration finally yielded -- endorsing the recommendations at 3 a.m. on the very last day of negotiations.
Corell, 70, became interested in climate change while studying oceanography. His plain-spoken authority has been instrumental in settling the debate over global warming. "He talks about climate change in terms that regular people can understand," says Sen. John McCain. "A lot of people who used to be skeptical about global warming have been persuaded by the overwhelming scientific evidence presented by studies like the ACIA."
Corell remains optimistic that those who doubt the reality of global warming -- those he calls "the Bush recalcitrants" -- will come around as industry finds ways to profit from cleaner forms of energy. "By 2100, the power plants of today are going to look like the steel mills did in Pittsburgh in 1975," he says. "They will be derelict, because they're no longer useful." Corell has turned his attention to hydrogen and other forms of renewable energy, looking for a way to stem the coming tide. "My grandchildren are pretty damned important to me," he says. "I can't sit here saying, 'Take action,' when I didn't take part in the action time. I don't want to leave a legacy that I didn't do my damnedest to try to slow this down as fast as we could."
THE UP-AND-COMER
Zhao Hang
If China fulfills expectations in the coming decades by emerging as the world's dominant industrial power, its explosive growth could heat the planet to catastrophic levels. China has only 20 million cars on the road -- but at its current pace, that number will surpass 300 million by 2030. That's why Zhao Hang, director of the China Automotive and Technology Research Center, has fought so hard to implement what one U.S. analyst calls "the most important energy policy adopted by any country in the world in the last 30 years."
Working with advisors in California, Michigan and Japan, Zhao devised fuel-economy standards for China that are 20 percent tougher than those in the United States. He then steered the measure through the central government, where it was approved unanimously. The new standards, which went into effect this summer, will reduce climate-warming emissions in a country that is already home to 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities. They will also save more than 1 billion barrels of oil by 2030 and force automakers to clean up their act: By 2008, 90 percent of the SUVs currently built in America will no longer be legal for sale in China.
China has also implemented a landmark law requiring the country's utilities to produce 10 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. "China understands that climate change is a very big challenge in human history," says Zhao, 43, speaking in his native Mandarin. "It is a matter in our own interest to ensure that our growth is sustainable -- and to impose limits on our contribution to this problem."
