The Cheney Curse reaches Belém
"Our current trajectory will heat Earth by 3-5°C this century. "
On Monday this week the 30th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 30), the 20th meeting of the COP serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 20), and the seventh meeting of the COP serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA 7), as well as the 63rd sessions of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA 63) and the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI 63) convened in Belém Brazil.
Brazil says it wants to focus on “implementation”, rather than words in windowless negotiating rooms. And in some respects, climate action is – in some regions and some sectors – flourishing in ways that were scarcely imagined possible even a decade ago. Renewables, led by solar and wind, accounted for more than 90% of new power capacity added worldwide last year, with solar now the cheapest electricity in history. Global clean-energy investment is expected to reach $2.2tn this year, which would be about twice fossil-fuel spending. Last year, one in five of new cars sold around the world was electric, and there are now more jobs in clean energy than in fossil fuels.
That sort of real-world action is what makes a difference to people – it gets climate action out from the negotiating rooms, and the corporate boardrooms, and into living rooms
— Fiona Harvey, The Guardian
Unless you like to read science journals for fun, climate scientist James Hansen’s mind-numbing pre-COP briefing in Helsinki last month will do for you about the same as it did at the January 2001 task force Dick Cheney assembled in the White House to set the climate policy of the incoming G.W. Bush presidency—put you to sleep. Hansen’s chalk talks are dense to the point of incomprehensibility.
That is sad, because if you had enough Ovaltine labels to get Captain Midnight’s Code-O-Matic or spent 50 cents for Winky-Dink’s sticky-static TV screen overlay, you would likely find his predictions as shocking and urgent today as they were 40 years ago.
Dick Cheney, as Vice President under George W. Bush, convened a National Energy Policy Development Group just two months after the US Supreme Court subverted the legitimate election of Al Gore and handed the presidency to George W. Bush. Hansen’s briefing to the White House group took place shortly after Bush announced the U.S. would withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol (brokered by Al Gore 3 years earlier
Our current trajectory will heat Earth by 3-5°C this century.
Hansen addressed a captive audience of the Veep and a room full of cabinet secretaries who were made to attend in person, not through delegates. They and their underlings had already held scores of meetings with energy industry representatives and lobbyist quacks—but this 2001 meeting allowed the rare input of a genuine climate scientist. Cheney wanted the charade to appear fair and balanced.
I berate Hansen for his hamfisted speaking style, but honestly, the table was rigged against him before he arrived. Science never stood a chance.
In a fairy tale or Hollywood script, this could have been a turning point, like Gore’s rescue of the failing Kyoto summit in 1997. Instead, Hansen was no Al Gore. He was not Carl Sagan. He was not even a Stephen Schneider, Katherine Hayhoe or Michael Mann. As a public speaker, he was a sleeping potion. He repeated that last month with his latest powerpoint in Helsinki. Towards the end of the talk, he tried to translate arcane climate calculus into plain English, but by then it was too late—Elvis had left the building.
SIDEBAR: The Kyoto Protocol was adopted at COP 3 in Japan at the end of 1997. The protocol required overdeveloped countries to reduce their collective emissions of six GHGs (CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, HFCs, perfluorocarbons, and sulphur hexafluoride) by at least 5% below their 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. Countries had different requirements within this collective mandate, ranging from limiting an increase to 10% for Iceland (which had already reduced its emissions by increasing reliance on geothermal and hydroelectric power) to 8% reductions for the European Union (EU) and most of the countries in Eastern Europe. The overall reduction target was not very ambitious and that limited the protocol’s impact from the start.
The Cheney Report, finalized in May 2001, recommended expanding domestic energy supply—fossil fuels—and rolling back environmental regulations; your standard Republican plan. Recognizing that the US had already hit peak oil some years earlier, Cheney’s strategy was two-fold. First, he would accelerate fracking to boost “unconventional” fossil supplies, making the company he headed another fortune. Call that “Drain America First.” Second, he would find some pretext to persuade Bush to seize new supplies in other countries, such as Iraq or Venezuela.
One can speculate that it was in the interest of the royal family of Saudi Arabia, with whom both Bush and Cheney were intimate, to assist in providing a reason for invading Iraq, as described by the investigative reporter Michael Ruppert in his book, Crossing the Rubicon. That false flag operation came off splendidly on September 11, 2001. Ruppert was later found dead in his home in Northern California of an apparent suicide. Venezuela was placed into ready reserve status, its governance sabotaged, its economy destroyed, secured for the eventual day when its vast oil reserves would supplant the dwindling dregs in Iraq.
Hansen’s talk, then and now, described how the climate of Earth that has sustained life for billions of years is the product of incoming sunlight energy minus the heat lost to space. Hansen likes to express this in Watts per Square Meter (W/m2). The ocean, covering most of the planet’s surface, receives and stores sunlight as heat during the day and radiates it back to space at night. Sea surface temperature provides a very good gauge of how much heat is retained and how much is lost. Since the advent of the industrial era, Earth has been storing more solar radiation than it emits into space.
The trend is not our friend. Many scientists have examined this data and predicted average temperatures over the coming decades. The predictions should terrify anyone not lulled into a somnambulistic state by legacy media, new media, or the retasked tobacco lobby.
A “4-Degree Conference” was held at Oxford University ahead of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen (COP15) in December 2009. It brought together scientists, policymakers, and civil society delegates to assess the consequences of exceeding 4°C of warming. Our current trajectory—call it the Cheney Curse—will heat Earth by 3 to 5°C this century, but 7 to 10°C could already be baked in the cake for future centuries. What does that actually mean?
The 2009 4-Degree Conference predicted sea level rise, food and water security, vulnerable populations, migration, epidemics, wildfires, ecosystem and wildlife impacts, and regional devastation of Amazonia, Australia, and Bangladesh. All that has started to come true, ahead of time. Another 4-degree conference, held September 8-10, 2025 at the University of East Anglia, asked whether anyone is paying attention. Apparently not. None of the 2030 targets set by the Paris Agreement is remotely close to being met. The COP30 pledges being discussed in Belém this week won’t get there either. Collectively, they are less than 12% of the required amount. The consequences will be severe.
Brazil ranks in the top 10 global oil and gas exporters, and is prospecting for new fields, some of them offshore from the Amazon. The country’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has strongly defended the rights of poor countries to carry on exploiting their resources, arguing it is the rich countries that have benefited from them for two centuries, and caused the climate crisis, who must stop.
— Fiona Harvey
At 2°C
More extreme flooding, storms, and heatwaves.
Sea level rise hazards ports, roads, and wastewater systems.
Droughts threaten water supplies for Phoenix, San Diego, Mexico City, Chennai, Madrid, Istanbul, Cape Town, Sao Paolo, Baghdad, and Nairobi.
Agriculture, tourism, and insurance industries suffer massive losses.
Supply chains are disrupted by weather.
Coral reefs collapse, wrecking many of the world’s fisheries.
Warming surface waters deplete the food supply for seabirds and other marine animals.
Mass extinctions of land animals.
Regional political and social instability takes root.
At 3°C
Critical infrastructure such as roads, bridges and railways fail.
Urban environments face blistering heat with underwhelming cooling capacity.
In some regions, outdoor work is no longer physically possible.
Loss of critical pollinators.
Crop failures and livestock losses.
Heat stress, insects, and infectious diseases augur health emergencies.
There are significant GDP losses, straining public resources.
Mass migrations involve one billion people.
At 4°C
Recovery costs become unsustainable.
Southern Spain resembles the Sahara. The Sand Hills return to Nebraska.
Manhattan abandons the Battery. London raises its seawall. Miami Beach vanishes.
Some island nations vanish.
Some tropical and subtropical regions become uninhabitable.
Water scarcity creates power demand for desalination.
Food systems move indoors. Animal agriculture implodes.
Mass extinctions of insects, plants and birds.
Migrations exceed 3 billion people.
Organized government becomes a tenuous proposition in much of the world.
At 5°C
Near-total system failures with widespread displacement.
Sea level rise moves miles inland. More island nations vanish.
Mass extinctions of reptiles.
Power, transport, and communications collapse.
Political and social instability is global.
These events will occur within the lifetimes of many people alive now.
Some greenhouse gases, such as methane or sulphur hexafluoride, linger only weeks to decades in the atmosphere. Others, such as carbon dioxide and water vapor, last for centuries. Hansen says a third of the heating and weather weirding effect of past emissions will be experienced between now and 2050. A second third will reveal its impact over centuries. The final third will only play out over the course of millennia. If all that legacy greenhouse pollution could be miraculously scrubbed by the end of this century—more than three trillon tons CO2 equivalent (and growing by 50 billion tons per year)—there is no guarantee that the latent effects on climate would quickly reverse. Some estimates place the time needed to restore equilibrium at six thousand years.
—Pamela Chasek, Earth Negotiations Bulletin
It is difficult to pinpoint triggers, thresholds or tipping points because they are so outside the human experience. Events predicted to only occur above 2 degrees a decade ago have already occurred at less than 1.5. Each degree beyond 1°C dramatically increases the risks and scale of damage across infrastructure, human safety, well-being, and economies. That much we know. What we don’t know are all the unknown unknowns.
Many say that COPs are a waste of time or worse. To me, it is important to be talking. What is the alternative you propose?
Thanks for reading The Great Change! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to cease the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). I appreciate your support.
And speaking of resettling refugees, did you know? A study by Poland’s National Development Bank found that the influx of Ukrainians added between 0.5% and 2.5% to GDP growth and paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.
Could you help me get my blog posted every week? All Patreon donations and Blogger, Substack and Medium subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions can be made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! Donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.
#RestorationGeneration.
When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
 |
Comments