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. 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.I . . . 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.