The Committee on Global Warming was formed in 2007, one of Nancy Pelosi’s first official acts after she became the Speaker of the House. Creating a select committee sounds mundane, but it was actually a radical act of rebellion, at least in congressional terms. To understand why, it’s important to understand the structure of Congress.
It’s common to think of the US House of Representatives as a single organization with 435 members who propose laws and then vote on them. In fact, the House is a collection of smaller governing bodies, each with its own authority, called committees. There’s a committee to write tax law and another to write environmental law, for example. Each committee has a chairperson, who acts as the committee’s CEO. Bills in the House are written by committees, then passed by a vote of the committee members. This structure gives tremendous power to committee chairs, and it explains why any bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions never had a chance of passing.
The committee that oversaw climate change was the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which in 2007 was led by the Michigan Democrat John Dingell Jr. Dingell had been chair of the committee, or the ranking Democrat on the committee, since 1981, and he wasn’t friendly to any bills that might limit carbon emissions. Dingell wasn’t just close to the Detroit automakers in his home state, he was the Detroit automakers, owning more than $500,000 worth of stock in the auto industry.
Rather than push Dingell to pass a climate change bill, Pelosi just went around him and created the new House Committee on Global Warming and Climate Change out of thin air and stowed it in the basement of the Longworth Building. Dingell was less than enthusiastic. “These kinds of committees are as useful and relevant as feathers on a fish,” he told a reporter. So Pelosi put the Massachusetts congressman Ed Markey in charge of her new subcommittee. Markey was a passionate advocate for environmental regulation, and from the very beginning, Markey seemed dedicated to getting real results. He hired in the most talented staffers he could find and he immediately set to work to break down the barriers that had prevented climate change regulation for years.
Ed Markey built a team that resembled one of those motley groups of experts who are drawn together to pull off a bank heist. There was Jon Phillips, an expert in renewable-energy legislation. There was Joel Beauvais, a well-paid attorney and Clean Air Act expert who took a horrific pay cut to help the committee write its carbon control bill. There was Ana Unruh Cohen, a onetime congressional staffer who later studied climate change policy for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. There was Michael Goo, a congressional staffer who seemed to know everyone in the House. And there was Jeff Sharp, a onetime lobbyist and campaign worker who specialized in communications. Everyone on the team knew that they were overworked and underpaid. But they felt like they were part of something big. Lots of people came to Washington to change the world. This committee was on the precipice of actually doing it.
Almost immediately, the Committee on Global Warming started to agitate and provoke virtually everyone in Congress. The committee didn’t have the authority to pass bills, but it had the authority to hold hearings, which it began to do at a militant pace. Phillips spent a great deal of his time booking hearing rooms and bringing in experts to testify. Sharp, the communications guy, helped calibrate the hearings to generate as much media attention as possible. Along with experts and politicians, the committee began inviting celebrities to testify. Phillips met the actor Rob Lowe and ushered him around the Capitol before Lowe testified at a hearing on electric cars.
“We were always looking for celebrities. We’re always looking for, like, tearful stories,” Phillips recalled. “We’re always looking for ways to connect emotionally with people to raise the profile of the issue. It’s as much a communications apparatus as it is a fact-finding mission.”
Jonathan Phillips and his teammates weren’t driven by the hunger for attention. They were driven by a cause. They truly believed that the future existence of human life on Earth was hanging in the balance. To understand their dedication to this cause, it is useful to consider the story that the committee was trying to communicate through its marathon series of hearings.
This was a story of an unprecedented geological event that was initiated by humankind. It could be described as the detonation of a gigantic carbon bomb. The essence of this story would become a contested battlefield in itself, with groups like Koch Industries spending millions of dollars to sow doubt about the basic facts of the matter and the broader meaning of those facts.
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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 four hundred 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 thirty to fifty 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.