No! No! No!” the Chinese official said, waving his arms across the doorway. The President of the United States was barging uninvited into a closed meeting with the Premier of China—and there was no way to stop him.
When you’re a senior official representing the United States abroad, let alone the President or Secretary of State, every movement is carefully planned and every door opens on cue. You get used to being whisked through busy city centers in motorcades, bypassing customs and security at the airport, and never having to wait for an elevator. But sometimes protocol breaks down and diplomacy gets messy. That’s when you have to improvise. This was one of those times.
President Obama and I were looking for Premier Wen Jiabao in the middle of a large international conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark. In December 2009, that charming city was cold, dark, and uncharacteristically tense. We knew that the only way to achieve a meaningful agreement on climate change was for leaders of the nations emitting the most greenhouse gases to sit down together and hammer out a compromise—especially the United States and China. The choices and trade-offs confronting us would be difficult. New clean energy technologies and greater efficiencies might allow us to cut emissions while creating jobs and exciting new industries, and even help emerging economies leapfrog the dirtiest phases of industrial development. But there was no getting around the fact that combating climate change was going to be a hard political sell at a time when the world was already reeling from a global financial crisis. All economies ran primarily on fossil fuels. Changing that would require bold leadership and international cooperation.
But the Chinese were avoiding us. Worse, we learned that Wen had called a “secret” meeting with the Indians, Brazilians, and South Africans to stop, or at least dilute, the kind of agreement the United States was seeking. When we couldn’t find any of the leaders of those countries, we knew something was amiss and sent out members of our team to canvass the conference center. Eventually they discovered the meeting’s location.
After exchanging looks of “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” the President and I set off through the long hallways of the sprawling Nordic convention center, with a train of experts and advisors scrambling to keep up. Later we’d joke about this impromptu “footcade,” a motorcade without the motors, but at the time I was focused on the diplomatic challenge waiting at the end of our march. So off we went, charging up a flight of stairs and encountering surprised Chinese officials, who tried to divert us by sending us in the opposite direction. We were undeterred. Newsweek later described us as “a diplomatic version of Starsky and Hutch.”
When we arrived outside the meeting room, there was a jumble of arguing aides and nervous security agents. Robert Gibbs, the White House Press Secretary, got tangled up with a Chinese guard. In the commotion the President slipped through the door and yelled, “Mr. Premier!” really loudly, which got everyone’s attention. The Chinese guards put their arms up against the door again, but I ducked under and made it through.
In a makeshift conference room whose glass walls had been covered by drapes for privacy against prying eyes, we found Wen wedged around a long table with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and South African President Jacob Zuma. Jaws dropped when they saw us.
“Are you ready?” said President Obama, flashing a big grin. Now the real negotiations could begin.
It was a moment that was at least a year in the making. In our 2008 campaigns both Senator Obama and I highlighted climate change as an urgent challenge for our country and the world, and we offered plans to curb emissions, improve energy efficiency, and develop clean energy technologies. We tried to level with the American people about the hard choices to come while avoiding the old false choice between the economy and the environment.
The problems posed by global warming were evident, despite the deniers. There was a mountain of overwhelming scientific data about the damaging effects of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases. Thirteen of the top fourteen warmest years on record have all come since 2000. Extreme weather events, including fires, heat waves, and droughts are measurably on the rise. If this continues, it will cause additional challenges, displacing millions of people, sparking competition over scarce resources such as fresh water, and destabilizing fragile states.
Once in office, President Obama and I agreed that climate change represented both a significant national security threat and a major test of American leadership. We knew that the United Nations would hold a major climate conference at the end of our first year in office and that it would be an opportunity to galvanize broad international action. So we began laying the groundwork.
This was part of a bigger story about how our foreign policy had to change. During the Cold War, Secretaries of State could focus nearly exclusively on traditional issues of war and peace, such as nuclear arms control. In the 21st century we’ve also had to pay attention to the emerging global challenges that affect everyone in our interdependent world: pandemic diseases, financial contagion, international terrorism, transnational criminal networks, human and wildlife trafficking—and, of course, climate change.
Movement on the domestic front began quickly in 2009, as the new Obama Administration started working with Congress on ambitious “cap-and-trade” legislation that would create a market for pricing, buying, and selling carbon emissions, while also taking direct action through federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and passing legislation that provided incentives to generate more solar and wind power. There was a lot of excitement when a bill passed the House of Representatives in June with the leadership of Congressmen Henry Waxman from California and Ed Markey from Massachusetts, but it quickly got bogged down in the Senate.
Internationally, we had tough going. From the start I knew it would take creative and persistent diplomacy to build a network of global partners willing to tackle climate change together. Building this kind of coalition, especially when the policy choices involved are so difficult, is much harder than herding cats. The first step was embracing the international negotiations process called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which allowed all participating nations to discuss this shared challenge at a single venue. The goal was to gather everyone in Copenhagen in December 2009 and try to strike a deal between the developed and developing countries.
I needed an experienced negotiator with expertise in climate and energy issues to lead this effort, so I asked Todd Stern to become Special Envoy for Climate Change. I knew Todd from his work in the 1990s as a negotiator on the Kyoto Accord, which Vice President Al Gore championed and Bill signed but the Senate never ratified. Beneath a calm demeanor, Todd is a passionate and dogged diplomat. During the years of the Bush Administration he worked diligently on climate and energy issues at the Center for American Progress. Now he would have to use all his skill to cajole reluctant nations to come to the negotiating table and compromise. I wanted to give him as much of a running start as possible, so I brought him with me on my first trip to Asia. If we didn’t convince China, Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia to adopt better climate policies, it would be nearly impossible to reach a credible international agreement.
In Beijing, Todd and I visited the high-tech gas-fired Taiyanggong Thermal Power Plant, which emits half the carbon dioxide of a coal-powered plant and uses a third of the water. After getting a look at the state-of-the-art turbines manufactured by General Electric, I spoke to a Chinese audience about the economic opportunities that come from addressing the challenges of climate change. Their government had begun making huge investments in clean energy, especially in solar and wind, but was refusing to commit to any binding international agreements on emissions. Todd spent many hours then and later trying to convince them to change their minds.
Our early focus on China was no accident. Thanks to its tremendous economic growth over the past decade, China was quickly becoming the world’s largest overall emitter of greenhouse gases. (Chinese officials were always quick to point out that their country’s per capita emission rate still lagged far behind that of the industrialized West, particularly the United States. Although on that score, too, they are rapidly catching up.) China was also the largest and most influential of a new group of regional and global powers, including Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey, and South Africa, who were gaining international clout more for their expanding economies than their military might. Their cooperation would be essential for any comprehensive agreement on climate change.
Each in its own way, these countries were grappling with the implications of their growing weight and influence. For example, China had moved hundreds of millions of people out of poverty since Deng Xiaoping opened it to the world in 1978, but in 2009, 100 million people still lived on less than a dollar per day. The Communist Party’s commitment to raising incomes and decreasing poverty relied on increasing industrial output. That posed a stark choice: Could China afford to tackle climate change while so many millions were still so poor? Could it follow a different development path, relying on more efficient and renewable energy, that would still decrease poverty? China was not the only nation struggling with this question. When you govern a country that has deep inequalities and poverty, it’s understandable to believe you can’t afford to restrain your growth just because 19th- and 20th-century industrial powers polluted their way to prosperity. If India could improve the lives of millions of its citizens by accelerating industrial growth, how could it afford to choose a different path? The answers given by these countries as to whether they would be part of combating climate change, even though they hadn’t caused it, would determine the success or failure of our diplomacy.
With this in mind, Todd and I went together to India in the summer of 2009. After proudly showing us around one of the greenest buildings near Delhi and offering me a flowered garland, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh surprised us during our public speeches by throwing down a rhetorical gauntlet. Taking steps to address climate change should be the responsibility of wealthy countries like the United States, he declared, not emerging powers like India that had more pressing domestic challenges to worry about. In our private conversation, Ramesh reiterated that India’s per capita emissions were below that of developed countries, and he argued that there was no legitimate basis for international pressure being put on India in the run-up to Copenhagen.
But it was a stubborn fact that it would be impossible to stop the rise in global temperatures if these rapidly developing countries insisted on playing by the old rules and pumping massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Even if the United States somehow reduced our emissions all the way to zero tomorrow, total global levels still would be nowhere near where they need to be if China, India, and others failed to contain their own emissions. What’s more, the same poor people the Indian Minister was concerned about helping would be the ones most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change. So in my response to his comments I said that the United States would do its part to develop clean technologies that would drive economic growth and fight poverty while also reducing emissions. But, I emphasized, it was crucial for the whole world to embrace this as a shared mission and responsibility. This was a debate that would continue in the following months, shape the negotiating positions when countries gathered for the UN’s climate conference in Denmark that December, and provoke the secret meeting the President and I crashed.
Copenhagen is a picturesque city, full of cobblestoned streets and parks. But when I arrived in the dead of winter in the middle of a swirling snowstorm just past 3 A.M. on December 17, 2009, it was bitterly cold and the negotiations had gone into deep freeze. In just two days the conference would end, and it seemed as if this opportunity for action would slip through the world’s fingers.
On one side of the debate were the emerging powers, or as I began to think of them, the “emerging emitters,” considering their quickly growing share of total carbon dioxide output. Most of them were seeking to avoid a binding agreement that would limit their growth. On another side were the Europeans, still hoping to extend the Kyoto Accord that had placed big burdens on rich nations but essentially had given large developing countries like China and India a free pass. Many poor and small countries, especially the island nations, were desperate for an agreement that would help them stave off or at least mitigate the climate changes they were already experiencing.
The United States was pushing for what we considered a realistic achievable outcome: a diplomatic agreement agreed to by leaders (rather than a legal treaty ratified by Parliaments and enforceable by courts), which would commit every major nation, developed and developing alike, to take substantive steps to curb carbon emissions and report transparently on their progress—neither of which had ever happened before. We didn’t expect every country to take the same steps or even cut emissions by an equal amount, but we were seeking an agreement requiring every country to assume some responsibility to reduce emissions.
One of my first meetings in Copenhagen was with the Alliance of Small Island States. It is estimated that global sea levels rose by 6.7 inches over the course of the 20th century. As Arctic ice continues to melt, sea levels will continue to rise at an increasing rate and threaten the very existence of some of these small countries. In 2012, when I visited the Cook Islands for a meeting of the Pacific Island Forum, leaders there told me that climate change was the single greatest threat facing their nations.
Islands and low-lying nations are on the front lines of this struggle, but the rest of us are not far behind. About 40 percent of all humankind lives within sixty miles of a coast. Sprawling cities near coastal deltas, including those of the Mississippi, Nile, Ganges, and Mekong rivers, are at particular risk. We have to project forward and think about what will happen as climate change continues and sea levels keep rising. What will happen to those billions of people if their homes and cities become unlivable? Where will they go? Who will provide assistance?
Imagine the violence that could follow in the wake of more severe droughts and extreme food and water shortages in fragile states, or the effects on global commerce as farms and infrastructure are destroyed in floods and storms. What will be the impact on global trade and stability as the gap between rich and poor countries widens further? When I met in Copenhagen with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who emerged as a spokesperson for some of the countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change and least able to manage them, he told me that the world was expecting a lot from us, and that this was a moment for American leadership.
Despite all the high hopes leading up to this conference, and perhaps to a degree because of them, things went badly from the start. Interests collided, nerves frayed, and compromise appeared out of reach. We needed to change the dynamic somehow. Early in the morning on December 17, I called a press conference. Our team at the conference hall found a large room with stadium-style seating, and when I arrived there were hundreds of journalists from all over the world packed in and eager for any bit of news that might herald a break in the deadlock. I told the crowd that the United States was prepared to lead a collective effort by developed countries to mobilize $100 billion annually by 2020 from a combination of public and private sources to help the poorest and most vulnerable nations mitigate the damage from climate change—if we could also reach a broad agreement on limiting emissions.
The idea began with the Europeans, particularly British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who had proposed a similar deal in the summer. Prior to my arrival in Copenhagen, Todd and Deputy National Security Advisor Mike Froman recommended that I have it in my back pocket in case we needed to jump-start negotiations. By offering a concrete commitment, I hoped to breathe new life into the talks, put pressure on China and the other “emerging emitters” to respond, and win support from developing countries who would welcome this new assistance. The journalists and delegates started buzzing immediately, and many were thrilled. The Danish Prime Minister captured the changing mood when he said, “There’s a feeling among negotiators that now we have to go into business, and now we have to be flexible, and now we have to try as hard as we can to make real compromises.”
But the good feelings didn’t last long. The fundamentals of the impasse remained firmly in place. That night, with President Obama not yet in Copenhagen, I joined other world leaders for a contentious debate that stretched late into the night in a small and overheated room. The Chinese weren’t giving an inch; neither were the Indians and Brazilians. Some of the Europeans were letting the perfect be the enemy of the good—and the possible. We emerged, frustrated and tired, sometime around 2:00 in the morning, still without an agreement. Exhausted Presidents and Prime Ministers rushed for the exit, only to find a traffic jam of motorcades and security vehicles. So we stood there in what amounted to the world’s most unusual taxi line. Patience began to wear thin. Here we all were, hungry and sleepy, with nothing to show for our efforts. No previous climate conference had included so many leaders at the highest level, and yet we were no closer to reaching an agreement. Finally President Sarkozy of France could take no more. He rolled his eyes and with a look of extreme exasperation, he declared, in English, “I want to die!” We all knew what he meant.
What a difference a day makes. Sitting next to President Obama in the small leaders’ meeting he and I had just forced our way into, I hoped that we might finally be getting somewhere. I looked across the table at Wen Jiabao, then at the leaders of India, Brazil, and South Africa. They represented about 40 percent of the world’s population, and their place at this table symbolized a profound shift in global influence. Countries that just a few decades before had been marginal players in international affairs were now making crucial decisions.
Watching the body language of these leaders, I was glad that President Obama had decided to come to Denmark. He had originally been scheduled to land in Copenhagen on Friday morning, the final day of negotiations. We had hoped to have a deal ready for his arrival, but the deadlocked negotiations made that impossible. Back at the White House his advisors grew nervous. Given how stuck the talks were, was it even worth the President’s time to make the trip? This was another case when I thought we had to “get caught trying.” I called the President and assured him that his personal intervention might provide the push we needed to break the impasse. He agreed, and Air Force One soon touched down in freezing Copenhagen.
Now here we were, making a last-ditch effort. Among the sticking points was this: If nations agreed to cut their emissions, how would those commitments be monitored and enforced? The Chinese, always allergic to outside scrutiny, were resisting any robust reporting requirements or verification mechanisms. The Indians, however, were more amenable. The country’s soft-spoken Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, was gently pushing back against the Chinese objections. President Jacob Zuma of South Africa, who had been one of our most strident critics in earlier meetings, was also more constructive and conciliatory.
We could feel the momentum in the room shifting, and we weren’t the only ones. In a surprising display, one of the other members of the Chinese delegation, a talented diplomat with whom we generally had very cordial relations, started loudly scolding the far more senior Premier. He was quite agitated by the prospect that a deal might actually be at hand. Wen, embarrassed, instructed his interpreter not to translate the outburst. Trying to get the meeting back on track, President Obama, in his cool and calm way, asked Wen what the other Chinese official said. The Premier looked at us and said, “It is not important.”
In the end, after lots of cajoling, debating, and compromising, the leaders in that room fashioned a deal that, while far from perfect, saved the summit from failure and put us on the road to future progress. For the first time all major economies, developed and developing alike, agreed to make national commitments to curb carbon emissions through 2020 and report transparently on their mitigation efforts. The world began moving away from the division between developed and developing countries that had defined the Kyoto agreement. This was a foundation to build on.
That’s what the President and I told our European friends when we met to debrief them. Crammed into another small room, Brown, Sarkozy, Angela Merkel of Germany, Fredrik Reinfeldt of Sweden, Lars Rasmussen of Denmark, and José Manuel Barroso of the European Commission listened carefully to President Obama. They wanted a legal treaty out of Copenhagen and didn’t like our compromise. However, they reluctantly agreed to support it since there was no viable alternative. The Europeans were right that we didn’t achieve everything we wanted at Copenhagen. But that’s the nature of compromise.
In the months that followed, dozens of nations, including all the major developing countries, did in fact submit proposed plans for limiting emissions. And they are, as best as we can tell, acting to implement those plans. We built on this foundation in follow-on conferences over the next four years in Cancun, Durban, and Doha, all leading to another gathering in Paris in 2015 with the hope of achieving an even stronger agreement applicable to all.
After Copenhagen, I began looking for ways to keep making progress, even if political opposition in Congress and disagreements with China and others on the world stage made it difficult to achieve the kind of sweeping reforms we needed to combat climate change. As a girl in Illinois, I played my share of softball, and one of the lessons that stuck with me was that if you try to hit only home runs, you’ll end up popping out more often than not. But if you also go for singles and doubles, even walks, they can add up to something even bigger.
That was the idea behind the Climate and Clean Air Coalition I announced in February 2012, with the purpose of reducing what’s called “super pollutants.” More than 30 percent of global warming is attributed to these particles, including methane, black carbon, and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are produced by animal waste, urban landfills, air conditioning units, burning fields, cooking fires, and oil and gas production, among other things. The pollutants are also highly damaging to people’s respiratory health. The good news is that these greenhouse gases disperse in the atmosphere more quickly than carbon dioxide, so an aggressive effort to reduce them can slow the rate of climate change more quickly. According to one study, “A sharp reduction in emissions of shorter-lived pollutants beginning in 2015 could offset warming temperatures by up to 50 percent by 2050.”
Doing that would buy the world precious time to develop new technologies and the political will to deal with the tougher carbon problems. I started talking to like-minded governments, especially the Scandinavians, about what we could do. We decided to form a public-private partnership consisting of governments, businesses, scientists, and foundations. I held an event at the State Department with the Environmental Ministers from Bangladesh, Canada, Mexico, and Sweden, the Ambassador from Ghana, and the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, to launch the Climate and Clean Air Coalition. In 2014, there are thirty-seven country partners and forty-four nonstate partners, and the Coalition is making important strides toward reducing methane emissions from oil and gas production and black carbon from diesel fumes and other sources. Addressing waste management in cities from Nigeria to Malaysia, reducing black carbon from brick production in places like Colombia and Mexico, and curtailing methane emissions in Bangladesh and Ghana may fly under the radar, but steps like these are making a difference in the global effort to address climate change.
One of my partners in this effort was Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. He invited me to visit Norway and see firsthand the effects of climate change on shrinking Arctic glaciers. I arrived in the picturesque Norwegian city of Tromsø, which sits north of the Arctic Circle, in June 2012. In the summer the temperatures there climbed into the 40s and daylight lingered nearly all night. Jonas and I boarded the Arctic Research Vessel Helmer Hanssen for a trip up a fjord to get a closer look at the melting ice. The air was so clean and crisp, I could hardly believe it. The mountains, still mostly snow-covered, seemed to jut up right out of the icy water. Jonas pointed to the receding glaciers with concern. Summer thaws were now leaving parts of the Arctic Ocean ice-free for weeks at a time. In fact, glaciers were retreating almost everywhere around the world, including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, and Rockies and in Alaska and Africa.
Alaska is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the United States, and erosion, melting permafrost, and rising waters are already forcing some communities along the coast to relocate further inland.
In 2005, I joined Senator McCain and two other Republican Senators, Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins, for a trip to Whitehorse, Canada, and Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost point of the United States. We met with scientists, local leaders, and First Nations elders to hear from them about the effects of climate change. Flying over the vast coniferous forests of the Yukon, I could see huge brown swaths of dead spruce trees, killed off by infestations of bark beetles that had moved north because of warmer temperatures, especially the milder winters. Those dead trees became kindling for forest fires that the Canadians told us were happening more frequently. We could see the smoke for ourselves as it billowed up from a nearby blaze.
Virtually everyone I spoke to on that trip had a personal wake-up call about what was happening. A tribal elder recounted how he had returned to a lake where he had fished as a boy only to find it dried up. I met lifelong participants in dogsled races who told me they no longer even needed to wear gloves. In Barrow the sea used to freeze all the way up to the North Pole beginning in November. Now, residents told us, they found slush instead of ice. At Kenai Fjords National Park, rangers showed us the measurements of the shrinking glaciers. It had gotten so bad that you couldn’t even see the ice from the visitors’ center built a few decades earlier to showcase the stunning view.
Seven years later, in Norway, I was seeing even more evidence of the steady march of climate change. I liked Jonas and admired his passion for protecting his country’s precious ecosystem. Unfortunately there was only so much Norway could do on its own. So he threw himself into the intense diplomacy needed to bring all the Arctic powers together. He and I discussed our shared efforts at the Arctic Council, the international organization responsible for setting out the rules for protecting the region. Tromsø is now home to its permanent headquarters. The Council includes all the key players: the United States, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden. I shared Jonas’s commitment to the Council, and in 2011 I became the first U.S. Secretary of State to attend one of its formal meetings, which was held in Nuuk, the remote capital of Greenland. One of my allies in pushing greater American involvement in the Arctic Council was the Republican Senator from Alaska Lisa Murkowski. She made the trip with Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and me. I signed the first legally binding international agreement among the eight Arctic states, putting in place plans for search-and-rescue missions for ships in distress. That was a start, hopefully paving the way for future cooperation on climate change, energy, and security.
The melting ice was opening up new opportunities for shipping and oil and gas exploration across the Arctic, setting off a scramble for resources and territorial rights. Some of the energy reserves could be enormous. Russian President Vladimir Putin had cast his eyes on the region and directed his military to return to a number of old Soviet bases in the Arctic. In 2007, a Russian submarine even deposited a Russian flag on the floor of the ocean near the North Pole. Russia’s moves raised the prospect of an arms race in the region and the “militarization” of Arctic relations. Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada, has said that to “defend national sovereignty” in the Arctic, his country needs “forces on the ground, ships in the sea and proper surveillance.” China, too, is eager to gain influence in the region. It’s hungry for energy and excited by the prospects of new shipping routes that could cut the travel time between ports in Shanghai and Hong Kong and markets in Europe by thousands of miles. China has launched several Arctic research expeditions, built its own research center in Norway, expanded investments in Nordic countries, signed a trade agreement with Iceland, and gained observer status at the Arctic Council.
Jonas and I discussed the need to prevent this latter-day gold rush from overwhelming the Arctic’s fragile ecosystem and accelerating climate change. Increased economic activity was inevitable and could be conducted responsibly, if we were careful. But more ships, more drilling, and more military forces in the region would only accelerate the environmental damage. Just imagine the impact of an oil spill in the Arctic like the one that hit the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. If we let the Arctic turn into the Wild West, the health of the planet and our own security would be at risk.
In the future, I hope that the Arctic Council is able to reach agreement on how to protect and use the Arctic. This challenge may not galvanize public opinion today, but it’s one of the most important long-term issues we face.
Despite a strong call to action from President Obama in his second inaugural address, a serious, comprehensive response to climate change remains stymied by entrenched political opposition at home. The recession may have helped cut our total emissions, but it also made it harder to mobilize the political will to drive more meaningful change. When the economy is hurting and people are looking for jobs, many other concerns fade into the background. And the old false choice between promoting the economy and protecting the environment surfaces once again. One exception has been the rapid transformation from coal to natural gas in the generation of electricity. Burning natural gas emits only about half the greenhouse gases that coal does, so long as methane is prevented from leaking from the gas wells, although its production carries other environmental risks. To take full advantage of our large resource of natural gas, states and the federal government will need to provide better regulations, more transparency, and rigorous enforcement.
I wish we had achieved more to combat climate change during the first four years of the Obama Administration. Losing the Congress set us back a lot because the Republican majority, unlike conservative parties in other countries, has made denying climate change and opposing even economically beneficial responses to it a central part of its platform. But we can’t get discouraged by the size of the problem or the stubbornness of the opposition. We have to keep taking practical steps that actually work. In our meeting in Copenhagen, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia told me that the world was looking to the United States to lead the way on climate change. I believe this is both a responsibility we should accept and an opportunity we should seize. After all, we’re still the largest economy and the second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide. The more serious the effects of climate change, the more important it will be for us to lead. The crucial innovations that will help meet this challenge, whether new clean energy technologies, carbon sequestration techniques, or ways to increase our energy efficiency, are most likely to come from our scientists and laboratories. And changing the way we produce and conserve energy can make a large contribution to our economy.
Despite their hard-line stance in international settings, China’s leaders are taking important steps at home to invest in clean energy and begin addressing their environmental problems. Over the years we’ve seen growing grassroots pressure from the Chinese people on issues of pollution, air quality, and clean water. In January 2013, in Beijing and more than two dozen other cities in China the air quality from pollution grew so bad—twenty-five times greater in Beijing than any U.S. city would consider a safe level—that people referred to it as an “airpocalypse.” Our embassy in Beijing played an essential role in publicly providing information about pollution, including hourly updates via Twitter. The situation grew so dire that the Chinese leadership recognized pollution as a threat to the country’s stability and started to monitor it and publicly release their own numbers on air quality.
In June 2013, President Obama and President Xi signed an agreement to work together on eliminating some “super pollutants,” the hydrofluorocarbons that come largely from air conditioning units. This was the first agreement between the United States and China to do something specific on climate change. If these steps succeed, it may help to convince China that concerted global action on climate change is in its long-term interest. An understanding between the United States and China will be essential for a global agreement.
The next big international milestone will come in Paris in 2015, when the process that began in Copenhagen will hopefully culminate in a new legal agreement on emissions and mitigation that is applicable to every country in the world. Reaching that goal won’t be easy, as we’ve learned, but it does represent a real opportunity for progress.
America’s ability to lead in this setting hinges on what we ourselves are willing to do at home. No country will fall in line just because we tell them to. They want to see us taking significant steps of our own—and we should want the same thing. The failure to pass a comprehensive climate bill through the Senate in 2009 made our negotiating job at Copenhagen much harder. To succeed in Paris, we need to be able to show real results at home. President Obama’s June 2013 Climate Action Plan is an important step in the right direction, and despite Congressional gridlock, the President is moving forward with strong executive actions. Since 2008, we’ve nearly doubled production of clean renewable energy from wind, solar, and geothermal sources; improved fuel efficiency for vehicles; and for the first time begun measuring greenhouse gas emissions from our largest sources. In 2012, U.S. carbon emissions fell to the lowest level in twenty years. But there’s a lot more to do. Building a broad national consensus on the urgency of the climate threat and the imperative of a bold and comprehensive response will not be easy, but it is essential.
The most important voices to be heard on this issue are those of the many people whose lives and livelihoods are most at risk from climate change: tribal elders in Alaska watching their fishing holes dry up and the land below their villages erode away; the leaders of island nations trying to raise the alarm before their homes are submerged forever; military planners and intelligence analysts preparing for future conflicts and crises caused by climate change; and all those families, businesses, and communities who have been assaulted by extreme weather. At the conference in Copenhagen in 2009 the most compelling pleas for action came from the leaders of the small island nations, confronting the loss of their land to rising ocean levels. “If things go business as usual,” one said, “we will not live, we will die. Our country will not exist.”