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And in a move that should be shocking but isn’t, one of those who will rotate through the tryouts for that coveted spot will be Maria Bartiromo, whose Trump sycophancy during the campaign may well have been unparalleled

At the same time, Sean Hannity, who likes to blast Biden as “cognitively struggling,” and Tucker Carlson, who tries to sow doubt about the prevalence of White supremacy, have become even more outlandish as they try to gin up anti-Biden rage within their audiences.

How to get the Fox News monster under control? I do not believe the government should have any role in regulating what can and can’t be said on the air, although I often hear that proposed. That would be a cure worse than the disease

No, the only answer is to speak the language that the bigwigs at Fox will understand: Ratings. Advertising dollars. Profit.

Corporations that advertise on Fox News should walk away, and citizens who care about the truth should demand that they do so

The Post reported last week that the 147 Republican lawmakers who opposed certification of the presidential election have lost the support of many of their largest corporate backers. General Electric, AT&T, Comcast, Honeywell, PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG and Verizon all said they would suspend donations to members of Congress who voted against certifying Joe Biden as president.

This shows, at the very least, that there is a growing understanding that lying to the public matters, that it’s harmful

Simply being in touch throughout the government’s planning was good for BlackRock, potentially burnishing its image over the longer run, Mr. Birdthistle said. BlackRock would have benefited through “tons of information, tons of secondary financial benefits,” he said.

Mr. Fink’s firm is a huge player across many stock and debt markets, and its advisory arm helped to execute some of the Fed’s crisis response during the 2008 financial meltdown. That market insight and experience got him a front-row seat at a pivotal moment, one that may have put him in a position to influence a rescue with huge ramifications for households, businesses and the entire U.S. economy.

They’re about as close to a government arm as you can be, without being the Federal Reserve,” said William Birdthistle, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law and the author of a book on funds.

On March 24, 2020, the New York Fed announced that it had again hired BlackRock’s advisory arm, which operates separately from the company’s asset-management business but which Mr. Fink oversees, this time to carry out the Fed’s purchases of commercial mortgage-backed securities and corporate bonds.

The company makes a profit by managing money for clients in an array of funds, generally charging a preset fee. It earns more when assets under its management grow. In the early days of the coronavirus crisis, as people converted financial holdings into cash, parts of its asset base were contracting and its business outlook hinged on what happened in certain markets.

Mr. Mnuchin held 60 recorded calls over the frantic Saturday and Sunday leading up to the Fed’s unveiling on Monday, March 23, of a policy package that included its first-ever program to buy corporate bonds, which were becoming nearly impossible to sell as investors sprinted to convert their holdings to cash. Mr. Mnuchin spoke to Mr. Fink five times that weekend, more than anyone other than the Fed chair, whom he spoke with nine times. Mr. Fink joined Mr. Mnuchin, Mr. Powell and Larry Kudlow, who was the White House National Economic Council director, for a brief call at 7:25 the evening before the Fed’s big announcement, based on Mr. Mnuchin’s calendars.

BlackRock’s connections to Washington are not new. It was a critical player in the 2008 crisis response, when the New York Fed retained the firm’s advisory arm to manage the mortgage assets of the insurance giant American International Group and Bear Stearns.

Several former BlackRock employees have been named to top roles in President Biden’s administration, including Brian Deese, who heads the White House National Economic Council, and Wally Adeyemo, who was Mr. Fink’s chief of staff and is now the No. 2 official at the Treasury.

The firm has grown rapidly: Its assets under management swelled from $1.3 trillion in early 2009 to $7.4 trillion in 2019.

As it expanded, it has stepped up its lobbying. In 2004, BlackRock Inc. registered two lobbyists and spent less than $200,000 on its efforts. By 2019 it had 20 lobbyists and spent nearly $2.5 million, though that declined slightly last year, based on OpenSecrets data. Campaign contributions tied to the firm also jumped, touching $1.7 million in 2020 (80 percent to Democrats, 20 percent to Republicans) from next to nothing as recently as 2004.

People could still pull their money from E.T.F.s, which both the industry and several outside academics have heralded as a sign of their resiliency. But investors would have had to take a financial hit to do so, relative to the quoted value of the underlying bonds. That could have bruised the product’s reputation in the eyes of some retail savers.

The Fed’s programs helped to turn that around. The central bank supported the corporate bond market on March 23, 2020, by pledging to buy both already issued debt and new bonds. The program for existing bonds promised to also buy E.T.F.s, because they are a quick way to get access to a wide swath of the market. The bond market and fund recovery was nearly instant.

“We hired BlackRock for their expertise in these markets,” Mr. Powell has since said in defense of the rapid move. “It was done very quickly due to the urgency and need for their expertise.”

So it is that mobile phone bills in the US are on average $100 a month, twice that of France and Germany, with the same story in broadband

Profits per passenger airline mile in the US are twice those in Europe.

US healthcare is impossibly expensive, with drug companies fixing prices twice as high or even higher than those in Europe; health spending is 18% of GDP.

Google, Amazon and Facebook have been allowed to become supermonopolies, buying up smaller challengers with no obstruction.

Because prices stay high, wages buy less, so workers’ lifestyles, unless they borrow, get squeezed in real terms while those at the top get paid ever more with impunity. Inequality escalates to unsupportable levels. Even life expectancy is now falling across the US

why has this happened now? Philippon has a deadly answer. A US political campaign costs 50 times more than one in Europe in terms of money spent for every vote cast. But this doesn’t just distort the political process. It is the chief cause of the US economic crisis.

Corporations want a return on their money, and the payback is protection from any kind of regulation, investigation or anti-monopoly policy that might strike at their ever-growing market power

this is systemic; how both at federal and state level ever higher campaign donations are correlated with ever fewer actions against monopoly, price fixing and bad corporate behaviour.

In Europe, the reverse is true. It is much harder for companies to buy friendly regulators. The EU’s competition authorities are much more genuinely politically independent than those in the US

As a result, it is Europe, albeit with one or two laggards such as Italy, that is bit by bit developing more competitive markets, more innovation and more challenge to incumbents while at the same time sustaining education and social spending so important to ordinary people’s lives

The EU’s regulations are better thought out, so in industry after industry it is becoming the global standard setter. Its corporate governance structures are better.

to complete the picture, Christine Lagarde, the incoming president of the European Central Bank, in the most important pronouncement of the year, said the environment would be at the heart of European monetary policy. In other words, the ECB is to underwrite a multitrillion-euro green revolution. In short – bet on Europe not the US.

Those with power inside institutions love splashy progressive gestures—solemn, monochrome social media posts deploring racism; appointing their first woman to the board; firing low-level employees who attract online fury—because they help preserve their power. Those at the top—who are disproportionately white, male, wealthy and highly educated—are not being asked to give up anything themselves.

It is strange that “cancel culture” has become a project of the left, which spent the 20th century fighting against capricious firings of “troublesome” employees. A lack of due process does not become a moral good just because you sometimes agree with its targets

We all, I hope, want to see sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination decrease.

Activists regularly challenge criticisms of “cancel culture” by saying: “Come on, we’re just some people with Twitter accounts, up against governments and corporate behemoths.”

In the United States, diversity training is worth $8 billion a year, according to Iris Bohnet, a public-policy professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. And yet, after studying programs in both the U.S. and post-conflict countries such as Rwanda, she concluded, “sadly enough, I did not find a single study that found that diversity training in fact leads to more diversity.

the training programs are typically no more scientifically grounded than previous management-course favorites, such as Myers-Briggs personality classifications

“Implicit-bias tests” are controversial, and the claim that they can predict real-world behavior, never mind reduce bias, is shaky. A large-scale analysis of research in the sector found that “changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior.”

Diversity training offers the minimum possible disruption to your power structures: Don’t change the board; just get your existing employees to sit through a seminar.

we should be aware of the economic incentives here, particularly given the speed of social media, which can send a video viral, and see onlookers demand a response, before the basic facts have been established.

But when you look at the economic incentives, almost always, the capitalist imperative is to yield to activist pressure. Just a bit. Enough to get them off your back

Real institutional change is hard; like politics, it is the “slow boring of hard boards.” Persuading a company to toss someone overboard for PR points risks a victory that is no victory at all. The pitchforks go down, but the corporate culture remains the same. The survivors sigh in relief. The institution goes on.

If you care about progressive causes, then woke capitalism is not your friend. It is actively impeding the cause, siphoning off energy, and deluding us into thinking that change is happening faster and deeper than it really is

When people talk about the “excesses of the left”—a phenomenon that blights the electoral prospects of progressive parties by alienating swing voters—in many cases they’re talking about the jumpy overreactions of corporations that aren’t left-wing at all.

Remember the iron law of woke institutions: For those looking to preserve their power, it makes sense to do the minimum amount of social radicalism necessary to survive … and no economic radicalism at all. The latter is where activists need to apply their pressure.

Also, the Biden plan—or some version of it—is likely to advance in Congress only if Democrats keep a majority in the House and take control of the Senate

they only want to repeal parts of the law and that they would focus those changes on corporations and households making more than $400,000.

For corporations, he would raise the tax rate to 28% from 21%, impose a new minimum tax and raise taxes on foreign income. For individuals, he would raise the top rate to 39.6% from 37%, create new limits on deductions and impose the 12.4% Social Security payroll tax on wages above $400,000. High-income owners of pass-through businesses that don’t pay the corporate tax would lose a break they got in 2017.

The middle 20% of households would get a tax cut worth 1% of after-tax income, or an average of $620.

But there are two main ways in which middle-income families could pay more. One is through Mr. Biden’s proposed reinstatement of the individual mandate to buy health insurance. The campaign, citing Trump administration language, describes that as a fee, not a tax. The payments are required by the tax code, and the Supreme Court has ruled that the penalty for failing to purchase health insurance is a tax.

So anyone owning stocks could be affected and eventually, companies may raise wages less than they otherwise would.

He would temporarily expand the child tax credit to $3,000 from $2,000 and add another $600 for children under age 6

Denver-based oil and gas company K P Kauffman allegedly violated air pollution laws, emitting volatile organic compounds that form smog in the Denver-Julesburg Basin, an area that wasn’t meeting smog standards. The company settled and agreed to pay $1m in eight installments over four years, but it has not been required to pay its second installment because of the freeze. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Chris Saeger, director of strategic initiatives at Accountable.US, said: “This is exactly the time to make sure support is flowing to the federal, state and local governments that need a hand with responding to the coronavirus crisis and with the environmental problems that these special interests have caused.”

The companies will not be required to pay penalties before 1 June, although they have the option to do so and at least two companies told the Guardian they made payments despite the extension. The EPA would not respond to inquiries about its policy and or say which companies paid penalties.

One company, Virginia power provider Dominion Energy, settled and agreed to pay $1.4m for allegedly releasing 27.5m gallons of water from a coal ash impoundment that seeped into groundwater along the shore of the James River. Coal ash contains dangerous pollutants, including mercury, cadmium and arsenic, which can cause widespread environmental damage. The company said it plans to pay the settlement penalty once it is finalized.

Another alleged violator, one of the world’s largest steel companies, ArcelorMittal, decided to pay the $5m penalty it agreed to for air quality issues at steel plants in East Chicago, Indiana; Burns Harbor, Indiana; and Cleveland, Ohio, according to a spokesman.

BP was accused of emitting too much particle pollution, which is linked to asthma and heart attacks. The justice department’s assistant attorney general Brian Benczkowski represented BP in the past. BP employees have given $85,000 to Trump campaign groups.

as the production of food and material goods centralized and rapidly expanded, commerce reached a scale that the country’s existing stores were ill-equipped to handle, according to the historian Susan Strasser, the author of Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. Manufacturers needed ways to distribute their newly enormous outputs and educate the public on the wonder of all their novel options. Americans, in short, had to be taught how to shop.

In 2019, one in five American workers was employed in retail, food service, or hospitality; even more are now engaged in service work of some kind.

This dynamic is exacerbated by the fact that the United States has more service workers than ever before, doing more types of labor, spread thin across the economy

Retailers won over this growing middle class by convincing its members that they were separate from—and opposed to—industrial workers and their distrust of corporate power,

With these goals in mind, Leach writes, customer service was born. For retailers’ tactics to be successful, consumers—or guests, as department stores of the era took to calling them—needed to feel appreciated and rewarded

From 1870 to 1910, the number of service workers in the United States quintupled. It’s from this morass that “The customer is always right” emerged as the essential precept of American consumerism—service workers weren’t there just to ring up orders

they were there to fuss and fawn, to bolster egos, to reassure wavering buyers, to make dreams come true.

they were also quite intentionally building something far grander: class consciousness. Leach writes that the introduction of shopping was fundamental to forming middle-class identity at a particularly crucial moment, as the technological advances of the Gilded Age helped create the American office worker as we now know it.

Customers might not have been able to afford a household staff to do their bidding like the era’s truly wealthy, but corporate stores offered them a little taste of what that would be like. The middle class began to see itself as the small-time beneficiaries of industrialization’s barons.

For many of these workers, the difficulty of finding non-service employment enables companies to pay low wages and keep their prices artificially low, which consumers generally like as long as they don’t have to think about what makes it possible. In theory, these conditions are supposed to encourage better performance on the part of the worker; in practice, they also encourage cruelty on the part of the consumer.

Previously confined to a few lavish European-owned hotels in America, tipping “aristocratized consumption,

Tipping ratcheted up the level of control that members of the middle class could exercise over the service workers beneath them: Consumers could deny payment—effectively, deny workers their wages—for anything less than complete submission.

In the 150 years that American consumerism has existed, it has metastasized into almost every way that Americans construct their identities. Today’s brands insert themselves into current events, align themselves with causes, associate patronage of their businesses with virtue and discernment and success.

Most Americans now expect corporations to take a stand on contentious social and political issues; in return, corporations have even co-opted some of the language of actual politics, encouraging consumers to “vote with their dollars” for the companies that market themselves on the values closest to their own.

For Americans in a socially isolating culture, living under an all but broken political system, the consumer realm is the place where many people can most consistently feel as though they are asserting their agency.

Being corrected by a salesperson, forgotten by a bartender, or brushed off by a flight attendant isn’t just an annoyance—for many people, it is an existential threat to their self-understanding.

“The notion that at the restaurant, you’re better than the waiters, it becomes part of the restaurant experience,” and also part of how some patrons understand their place in the world. Compounding this sense of superiority is the fact that so many service workers are from historically marginalized groups—the workforce is disproportionately nonwhite and female.

Because consumer identities are constructed by external forces, Strasser said, they are uniquely vulnerable, and the people who hold them are uniquely insecure

If your self-perception is predicated on how you spend your money, then you have to keep spending it, especially if your overall class status has become precarious, as it has for millions of middle-class people in the past few decades

Although underpaid, poorly treated service workers certainly exist around the world, American expectations on their behavior are particularly extreme and widespread, according to Nancy Wong, a consumer psychologist and the chair of the consumer-science department at the University of Wisconsin. “Business is at fault here,” Wong told me. “This whole industry has profited from exploitation of a class of workers that clearly should not be sustainable.”

Department-store magnates alleviated these concerns by linking department stores to the public good. Retailers started inserting themselves into these communities as much as possible, Leach writes, turning their enormous stores into domains of urban civic life. They hosted free concerts and theatrical performances, offered free child care, displayed fine art, and housed restaurants, tearooms, Turkish baths, medical and dental services, banks, and post offices. They made splashy contributions to local charities and put on holiday parades and fireworks shows. This created the impression that patronizing their stores wouldn’t just be a practical transaction or an individual pleasure, but an act of benevolence toward the orderly society those stores supported.

Modern businesses have invented novel ways to exacerbate conflicts between their customers and their workers.

A big problem at airlines and hotels in particular, Wong said, is what’s called the “customer relationship management” model. CRM programs, the first and most famous of which are frequent-flyer miles, are fabulously profitable; awarding points or miles or bucks encourages people not only to increase the size and frequency of their purchases, but also to confine their spending to one airline or hotel chain or big-box store.

Higher-spending customers access varying levels of luxury and prestige, often in full view of everyone else. Exposure to these consumer inequalities has been found to spark antisocial behavior in those who don’t get to enjoy their perks, the classic example of which is air rage

Workers must do what the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart, identified as “emotional labor.”

Workers must stifle their natural emotional reactions to, in the case of those in the service industry, placate members of the consumer class. These workers are alienated from their own emotional well-being, which can have far-reaching psychological consequences—over the years, research has associated this kind of work with elevated levels of stress hormones, burnout, depression, and increased alcohol consumption.

If the world had adopted the proposal widely endorsed at the end of the ’80s — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.

Action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead. It didn’t.

There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without understanding why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance.

The first suggestion to Rafe Pomerance that humankind was destroying the conditions necessary for its own survival came on Page 66 of the government publication EPA-600/7-78-019. It was a technical report about coal

‘This Is the Whole Banana’ Spring 1979

here was an urgent problem that demanded their attention, MacDonald believed, because human civilization faced an existential crisis. In “How to Wreck the Environment,” a 1968 essay published while he was a science adviser to Lyndon Johnson, MacDonald predicted a near future in which “nuclear weapons were effectively banned and the weapons of mass destruction were those of environmental catastrophe.” One of the most potentially devastating such weapons, he believed, was the gas that we exhaled with every breath: carbon dioxide. By vastly increasing carbon emissions, the world’s most advanced militaries could alter weather patterns and wreak famine, drought and economic collapse.

the Jasons. They were like one of those teams of superheroes with complementary powers that join forces in times of galactic crisis. They had been brought together by federal agencies, including the C.I.A, to devise scientific solutions to national-security problems: how to detect an incoming missile; how to predict fallout from a nuclear bomb; how to develop unconventional weapons, like plague-infested rats.

Agle pointed to an article about a prominent geophysicist named Gordon MacDonald, who was conducting a study on climate change with the Jasons, the mysterious coterie of elite scientists to which he belonged

During the spring of 1977 and the summer of 1978, the Jasons met to determine what would happen once the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled from pre-Industrial Revolution levels. It was an arbitrary milestone, the doubling, but a useful one, as its inevitability was not in question; the threshold would most likely be breached by 2035.

The Jasons’ report to the Department of Energy, “The Long-Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate,” was written in an understated tone that only enhanced its nightmarish findings: Global temperatures would increase by an average of two to three degrees Celsius; Dust Bowl conditions would “threaten large areas of North America, Asia and Africa”; access to drinking water and agricultural production would fall, triggering mass migration on an unprecedented scale. “Perhaps the most ominous feature,” however, was the effect of a changing climate on the poles. Even a minimal warming “could lead to rapid melting” of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet contained enough water to raise the level of the oceans 16 feet.

MacDonald explained that he first studied the carbon-dioxide issue when he was about Pomerance’s age — in 1961, when he served as an adviser to John F. Kennedy. Pomerance pieced together that MacDonald, in his youth, had been something of a prodigy: In his 20s, he advised Dwight D. Eisenhower on space exploration; at 32, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences; at 40, he was appointed to the inaugural Council on Environmental Quality, where he advised Richard Nixon on the environmental dangers of burning coal. He monitored the carbon-dioxide problem the whole time, with increasing alarm.

They were surprised to learn how few senior officials were familiar with the Jasons’ findings, let alone understood the ramifications of global warming. At last, having worked their way up the federal hierarchy, the two went to see the president’s top scientist, Frank Press.

Thus began the Gordon and Rafe carbon-dioxide roadshow. Beginning in the spring of 1979, Pomerance arranged informal briefings with the E.P.A., the National Security Council, The New York Times, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Energy Department, which, Pomerance learned, had established an Office of Carbon Dioxide Effects two years earlier at MacDonald’s urging

. Out of respect for MacDonald, Press had summoned to their meeting what seemed to be the entire senior staff of the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy — the officials consulted on every critical matter of energy and national security. What Pomerance had expected to be yet another casual briefing assumed the character of a high-level national-security meeting.

MacDonald would begin his presentation by going back more than a century to John Tyndall — an Irish physicist who was an early champion of Charles Darwin’s work and died after being accidentally poisoned by his wife. In 1859, Tyndall found that carbon dioxide absorbed heat and that variations in the composition of the atmosphere could create changes in climate. These findings inspired Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist and future Nobel laureate, to deduce in 1896 that the combustion of coal and petroleum could raise global temperatures. This warming would become noticeable in a few centuries, Arrhenius calculated, or sooner if consumption of fossil fuels continued to increase.

Four decades later, a British steam engineer named Guy Stewart Callendar discovered that, at the weather stations he observed, the previous five years were the hottest in recorded history. Humankind, he wrote in a paper, had become “able to speed up the processes of Nature.” That was in 1939.

MacDonald’s history concluded with Roger Revelle, perhaps the most distinguished of the priestly caste of government scientists who, since the Manhattan Project, advised every president on major policy; he had been a close colleague of MacDonald and Press since they served together under Kennedy. In a 1957 paper written with Hans Suess, Revelle concluded that “human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.” Revelle helped the Weather Bureau establish a continuous measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide at a site perched near the summit of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii, 11,500 feet above the sea — a rare pristine natural laboratory on a planet blanketed by fossil-fuel emissions.

After nearly a decade of observation, Revelle had shared his concerns with Lyndon Johnson, who included them in a special message to Congress two weeks after his inauguration. Johnson explained that his generation had “altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale” through the burning of fossil fuels, and his administration commissioned a study of the subject by his Science Advisory Committee. Revelle was its chairman, and its 1965 executive report on carbon dioxide warned of the rapid melting of Antarctica, rising seas, increased acidity of fresh waters — changes that would require no less than a coordinated global effort to forestall.Yet emissions continued to rise, and at this rate, MacDonald warned, they could see a snowless New England, the swamping of major coastal cities, as much as a 40 percent decline in national wheat production, the forced migration of about one-quarter of the world’s population. Not within centuries — within their own lifetimes.

On May 22, Press wrote a letter to the president of the National Academy of Sciences requesting a full assessment of the carbon-dioxide issue. Jule Charney, the father of modern meteorology, would gather the nation’s top oceanographers, atmospheric scientists and climate modelers to judge whether MacDonald’s alarm was justified — whether the world was, in fact, headed to cataclysm.

If Charney’s group confirmed that the world was careering toward an existential crisis, the president would be forced to act.

Hansen turned from the moon to Venus. Why, he tried to determine, was its surface so hot? In 1967, a Soviet satellite beamed back the answer: The planet’s atmosphere was mainly carbon dioxide. Though once it may have had habitable temperatures, it was believed to have succumbed to a runaway greenhouse effect: As the sun grew brighter, Venus’s ocean began to evaporate, thickening the atmosphere, which forced yet greater evaporation — a self-perpetuating cycle that finally boiled off the ocean entirely and heated the planet’s surface to more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit

At the other extreme, Mars’s thin atmosphere had insufficient carbon dioxide to trap much heat at all, leaving it about 900 degrees colder. Earth lay in the middle, its Goldilocks greenhouse effect just strong enough to support life.

We want to learn more about Earth’s climate, Jim told Anniek — and how humanity can influence it. He would use giant new supercomputers to map the planet’s atmosphere. They would create Mirror Worlds: parallel realities that mimicked our own. These digital simulacra, technically called “general circulation models,” combined the mathematical formulas that governed the behavior of the sea, land and sky into a single computer model. Unlike the real world, they could be sped forward to reveal the future.

The government officials, many of them scientists themselves, tried to suppress their awe of the legends in their presence: Henry Stommel, the world’s leading oceanographer; his protégé, Carl Wunsch, a Jason; the Manhattan Project alumnus Cecil Leith; the Harvard planetary physicist Richard Goody. These were the men who, in the last three decades, had discovered foundational principles underlying the relationships among sun, atmosphere, land and ocean — which is to say, the climate.

When, at Charney’s request, Hansen programmed his model to consider a future of doubled carbon dioxide, it predicted a temperature increase of four degrees Celsius. That was twice as much warming as the prediction made by the most prominent climate modeler, Syukuro Manabe, whose government lab at Princeton was the first to model the greenhouse effect. The difference between the two predictions — between warming of two degrees Celsius and four degrees Celsius — was the difference between damaged coral reefs and no reefs whatsoever, between thinning forests and forests enveloped by desert, between catastrophe and chaos.

The discrepancy between the models, Arakawa concluded, came down to ice and snow. The whiteness of the world’s snowfields reflected light; if snow melted in a warmer climate, less radiation would escape the atmosphere, leading to even greater warming. Shortly before dawn, Arakawa concluded that Manabe had given too little weight to the influence of melting sea ice, while Hansen had overemphasized it. The best estimate lay in between. Which meant that the Jasons’ calculation was too optimistic. When carbon dioxide doubled in 2035 or thereabouts, global temperatures would increase between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, with the most likely outcome a warming of three degrees.

within the highest levels of the federal government, the scientific community and the oil-and-gas industry — within the commonwealth of people who had begun to concern themselves with the future habitability of the planet — the Charney report would come to have the authority of settled fact. It was the summation of all the predictions that had come before, and it would withstand the scrutiny of the decades that followed it. Charney’s group had considered everything known about ocean, sun, sea, air and fossil fuels and had distilled it to a single number: three. When the doubling threshold was broached, as appeared inevitable, the world would warm three degrees Celsius

The last time the world was three degrees warmer was during the Pliocene, three million years ago, when beech trees grew in Antarctica, the seas were 80 feet higher and horses galloped across the Canadian coast of the Arctic Ocean.

After the publication of the Charney report, Exxon decided to create its own dedicated carbon-dioxide research program, with an annual budget of $600,000. Only Exxon was asking a slightly different question than Jule Charney. Exxon didn’t concern itself primarily with how much the world would warm. It wanted to know how much of the warming Exxon could be blamed for.

“It behooves us to start a very aggressive defensive program,” Shaw wrote in a memo to a manager, “because there is a good probability that legislation affecting our business will be passed.”

Shaw turned to Wallace Broecker, a Columbia University oceanographer who was the second author of Roger Revelle’s 1965 carbon-dioxide report for Lyndon Johnson. In 1977, in a presentation at the American Geophysical Union, Broecker predicted that fossil fuels would have to be restricted, whether by taxation or fiat. More recently, he had testified before Congress, calling carbon dioxide “the No.1 long-term environmental problem.” If presidents and senators trusted Broecker to tell them the bad news, he was good enough for Exxon.

The company had been studying the carbon-dioxide problem for decades, since before it changed its name to Exxon. In 1957, scientists from Humble Oil published a study tracking “the enormous quantity of carbon dioxide” contributed to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution “from the combustion of fossil fuels.” Even then, the observation that burning fossil fuels had increased the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was well understood and accepted by Humble’s scientists.

The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s largest trade association, asked the same question in 1958 through its air-pollution study group and replicated the findings made by Humble Oil. So did another A.P.I. study conducted by the Stanford Research Institute a decade later, in 1968, which concluded that the burning of fossil fuels would bring “significant temperature changes” by the year 2000 and ultimately “serious worldwide environmental changes,” including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap and rising seas.

The ritual repeated itself every few years. Industry scientists, at the behest of their corporate bosses, reviewed the problem and found good reasons for alarm and better excuses to do nothing. Why should they act when almost nobody within the United States government — nor, for that matter, within the environmental movement — seemed worried?

Why take on an intractable problem that would not be detected until this generation of employees was safely retired? Worse, the solutions seemed more punitive than the problem itself. Historically, energy use had correlated to economic growth — the more fossil fuels we burned, the better our lives became. Why mess with that?

That June, Jimmy Carter signed the Energy Security Act of 1980, which directed the National Academy of Sciences to start a multiyear, comprehensive study, to be called “Changing Climate,” that would analyze social and economic effects of climate change. More urgent, the National Commission on Air Quality, at the request of Congress, invited two dozen experts, including Henry Shaw himself, to a meeting in Florida to propose climate policy.

On April 3, 1980, Senator Paul Tsongas, a Massachusetts Democrat, held the first congressional hearing on carbon-dioxide buildup in the atmosphere. Gordon MacDonald testified that the United States should “take the initiative” and develop, through the United Nations, a way to coordinate every nation’s energy policies to address the problem.

During the expansion of the Clean Air Act, he pushed for the creation of the National Commission on Air Quality, charged with ensuring that the goals of the act were being met. One such goal was a stable global climate. The Charney report had made clear that goal was not being met, and now the commission wanted to hear proposals for legislation. It was a profound responsibility, and the two dozen experts invited to the Pink Palace — policy gurus, deep thinkers, an industry scientist and an environmental activist — had only three days to achieve it, but the utopian setting made everything seem possible

We have less time than we realize, said an M.I.T. nuclear engineer named David Rose, who studied how civilizations responded to large technological crises. “People leave their problems until the 11th hour, the 59th minute,” he said. “And then: ‘Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?’ ” — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The attendees seemed to share a sincere interest in finding solutions. They agreed that some kind of international treaty would ultimately be needed to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide at a safe level. But nobody could agree on what that level was.

William Elliott, a NOAA scientist, introduced some hard facts: If the United States stopped burning carbon that year, it would delay the arrival of the doubling threshold by only five years. If Western nations somehow managed to stabilize emissions, it would forestall the inevitable by only eight years. The only way to avoid the worst was to stop burning coal. Yet China, the Soviet Union and the United States, by far the world’s three largest coal producers, were frantically accelerating extraction.

“Do we have a problem?” asked Anthony Scoville, a congressional science consultant. “We do, but it is not the atmospheric problem. It is the political problem.” He doubted that any scientific report, no matter how ominous its predictions, would persuade politicians to act.

The talk of ending oil production stirred for the first time the gentleman from Exxon. “I think there is a transition period,” Henry Shaw said. “We are not going to stop burning fossil fuels and start looking toward solar or nuclear fusion and so on. We are going to have a very orderly transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.”

What if the problem was that they were thinking of it as a problem? “What I am saying,” Scoville continued, “is that in a sense we are making a transition not only in energy but the economy as a whole.” Even if the coal and oil industries collapsed, renewable technologies like solar energy would take their place. Jimmy Carter was planning to invest $80 billion in synthetic fuel. “My God,” Scoville said, “with $80 billion, you could have a photovoltaics industry going that would obviate the need for synfuels forever!”

nobody could agree what to do. John Perry, a meteorologist who had worked as a staff member on the Charney report, suggested that American energy policy merely “take into account” the risks of global warming, though he acknowledged that a nonbinding measure might seem “intolerably stodgy.” “It is so weak,” Pomerance said, the air seeping out of him, “as to not get us anywhere.”

Scoville pointed out that the United States was responsible for the largest share of global carbon emissions. But not for long. “If we’re going to exercise leadership,” he said, “the opportunity is now.

One way to lead, he proposed, would be to classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act and regulate it as such. This was received by the room like a belch. By Scoville’s logic, every sigh was an act of pollution. Did the science really support such an extreme measure? The Charney report did exactly that, Pomerance said.

Slade, the director of the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program, considered the lag a saving grace. If changes did not occur for a decade or more, he said, those in the room couldn’t be blamed for failing to prevent them. So what was the problem?

“Call it whatever.” Besides, Pomerance added, they didn’t have to ban coal tomorrow. A pair of modest steps could be taken immediately to show the world that the United States was serious: the implementation of a carbon tax and increased investment in renewable energy. Then the United States could organize an international summit meeting to address climate change

these two dozen experts, who agreed on the major points and had made a commitment to Congress, could not draft a single paragraph. Hours passed in a hell of fruitless negotiation, self-defeating proposals and impulsive speechifying. Pomerance and Scoville pushed to include a statement calling for the United States to “sharply accelerate international dialogue,” but they were sunk by objections and caveats.

They never got to policy proposals. They never got to the second paragraph. The final statement was signed by only the moderator, who phrased it more weakly than the declaration calling for the workshop in the first place. “The guide I would suggest,” Jorling wrote, “is whether we know enough not to recommend changes in existing policy.”

Pomerance had seen enough. A consensus-based strategy would not work — could not work — without American leadership. And the United States wouldn’t act unless a strong leader persuaded it to do so — someone who would speak with authority about the science, demand action from those in power and risk everything in pursuit of justice.

The meeting ended Friday morning. On Tuesday, four days later, Ronald Reagan was elected president.

‘Otherwise, They’ll Gurgle’ November 1980-September 1981

In the midst of this carnage, the Council on Environmental Quality submitted a report to the White House warning that fossil fuels could “permanently and disastrously” alter Earth’s atmosphere, leading to “a warming of the Earth, possibly with very serious effects.” Reagan did not act on the council’s advice. Instead, his administration considered eliminating the council.

After the election, Reagan considered plans to close the Energy Department, increase coal production on federal land and deregulate surface coal mining. Once in office, he appointed James Watt, the president of a legal firm that fought to open public lands to mining and drilling, to run the Interior Department. “We’re deliriously happy,” the president of the National Coal Association was reported to have said. Reagan preserved the E.P.A. but named as its administrator Anne Gorsuch, an anti-regulation zealot who proceeded to cut the agency’s staff and budget by about a quarter

Reagan “has declared open war on solar energy,” the director of the nation’s lead solar-energy research agency said, after he was asked to resign). Reagan appeared determined to reverse the environmental achievements of Jimmy Carter, before undoing those of Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy and, if he could get away with it, Theodore Roosevelt.

When Reagan considered closing the Council on Environmental Quality, its acting chairman, Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, wrote to the vice president and the White House chief of staff begging them to reconsider; in a major speech the same week, “A Conservative’s Program for the Environment,” Baldwin argued that it was “time for today’s conservatives explicitly to embrace environmentalism.” Environmental protection was not only good sense. It was good business. What could be more conservative than an efficient use of resources that led to fewer federal subsidies?

Meanwhile the Charney report continued to vibrate at the periphery of public consciousness. Its conclusions were confirmed by major studies from the Aspen Institute, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Every month or so, nationally syndicated articles appeared summoning apocalypse: “Another Warning on ‘Greenhouse Effect,’ ” “Global Warming Trend ‘Beyond Human Experience,’ ” “Warming Trend Could ‘Pit Nation Against Nation.’

Pomerance read on the front page of The New York Times on Aug. 22, 1981, about a forthcoming paper in Science by a team of seven NASA scientists. They had found that the world had already warmed in the past century. Temperatures hadn’t increased beyond the range of historical averages, but the scientists predicted that the warming signal would emerge from the noise of routine weather fluctuations much sooner than previously expected. Most unusual of all, the paper ended with a policy recommendation: In the coming decades, the authors wrote, humankind should develop alternative sources of energy and use fossil fuels only “as necessary.” The lead author was James Hansen.

Pomerance listened and watched. He understood Hansen’s basic findings well enough: Earth had been warming since 1880, and the warming would reach “almost unprecedented magnitude” in the next century, leading to the familiar suite of terrors, including the flooding of a 10th of New Jersey and a quarter of Louisiana and Florida. But Pomerance was excited to find that Hansen could translate the complexities of atmospheric science into plain English.

7. ‘We’re All Going to Be the Victims’ March 1982

Gore had learned about climate change a dozen years earlier as an undergraduate at Harvard, when he took a class taught by Roger Revelle. Humankind was on the brink of radically transforming the global atmosphere, Revelle explained, drawing Keeling’s rising zigzag on the blackboard, and risked bringing about the collapse of civilization. Gore was stunned: Why wasn’t anyone talking about this?

Most in Congress considered the science committee a legislative backwater, if they considered it at all; this made Gore’s subcommittee, which had no legislative authority, an afterthought to an afterthought. That, Gore vowed, would change. Environmental and health stories had all the elements of narrative drama: villains, victims and heroes. In a hearing, you could summon all three, with the chairman serving as narrator, chorus and moral authority. He told his staff director that he wanted to hold a hearing every week.

The Revelle hearing went as Grumbly had predicted. The urgency of the issue was lost on Gore’s older colleagues, who drifted in and out while the witnesses testified. There were few people left by the time the Brookings Institution economist Lester Lave warned that humankind’s profligate exploitation of fossil fuels posed an existential test to human nature. “Carbon dioxide stands as a symbol now of our willingness to confront the future,” he said. “It will be a sad day when we decide that we just don’t have the time or thoughtfulness to address those issues.”

That night, the news programs featured the resolution of the baseball strike, the ongoing budgetary debate and the national surplus of butter.

There emerged, despite the general comity, a partisan divide. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans demanded action. “Today I have a sense of déjà vu,” said Robert Walker, a Republican from Pennsylvania. In each of the last five years, he said, “we have been told and told and told that there is a problem with the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We all accept that fact, and we realize that the potential consequences are certainly major in their impact on mankind.” Yet they had failed to propose a single law. “Now is the time,” he said. “The research is clear. It is up to us now to summon the political will.”

Hansen flew to Washington to testify on March 25, 1982, performing before a gallery even more thinly populated than at Gore’s first hearing on the greenhouse effect. Gore began by attacking the Reagan administration for cutting funding for carbon-dioxide research despite the “broad consensus in the scientific community that the greenhouse effect is a reality.” William Carney, a Republican from New York, bemoaned the burning of fossil fuels and argued passionately that science should serve as the basis for legislative policy

the experts invited by Gore agreed with the Republicans: The science was certain enough. Melvin Calvin, a Berkeley chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the carbon cycle, said that it was useless to wait for stronger evidence of warming. “You cannot do a thing about it when the signals are so big that they come out of the noise,” he said. “You have to look for early warning signs.”

Hansen’s job was to share the warning signs, to translate the data into plain English. He explained a few discoveries that his team had made — not with computer models but in libraries. By analyzing records from hundreds of weather stations, he found that the surface temperature of the planet had already increased four-tenths of a degree Celsius in the previous century. Data from several hundred tide-gauge stations showed that the oceans had risen four inches since the 1880s

It occurred to Hansen that this was the only political question that mattered: How long until the worst began? It was not a question on which geophysicists expended much effort; the difference between five years and 50 years in the future was meaningless in geologic time. Politicians were capable of thinking only in terms of electoral time: six years, four years, two years. But when it came to the carbon problem, the two time schemes were converging.

“Within 10 or 20 years,” Hansen said, “we will see climate changes which are clearly larger than the natural variability.” James Scheuer wanted to make sure he understood this correctly. No one else had predicted that the signal would emerge that quickly. “If it were one or two degrees per century,” he said, “that would be within the range of human adaptability. But we are pushing beyond the range of human adaptability.” “Yes,” Hansen said.

How soon, Scheuer asked, would they have to change the national model of energy production? Hansen hesitated — it wasn’t a scientific question. But he couldn’t help himself. He had been irritated, during the hearing, by all the ludicrous talk about the possibility of growing more trees to offset emissions. False hopes were worse than no hope at all: They undermined the prospect of developing real solutions. “That time is very soon,” Hansen said finally. “My opinion is that it is past,” Calvin said, but he was not heard because he spoke from his seat. He was told to speak into the microphone. “It is already later,” Calvin said, “than you think.”

From Gore’s perspective, the hearing was an unequivocal success. That night Dan Rather devoted three minutes of “CBS Evening News” to the greenhouse effect. A correspondent explained that temperatures had increased over the previous century, great sheets of pack ice in Antarctica were rapidly melting, the seas were rising; Calvin said that “the trend is all in the direction of an impending catastrophe”; and Gore mocked Reagan for his shortsightedness. Later, Gore could take credit for protecting the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program, which in the end was largely preserved.

8. ‘The Direction of an Impending Catastrophe’ 1982

Following Henry Shaw’s recommendation to establish credibility ahead of any future legislative battles, Exxon had begun to spend conspicuously on global-warming research. It donated tens of thousands of dollars to some of the most prominent research efforts, including one at Woods Hole led by the ecologist George Woodwell, who had been calling for major climate policy as early as the mid-1970s, and an international effort coordinated by the United Nations. Now Shaw offered to fund the October 1982 symposium on climate change at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty campus.

David boasted that Exxon would usher in a new global energy system to save the planet from the ravages of climate change. He went so far as to argue that capitalism’s blind faith in the wisdom of the free market was “less than satisfying” when it came to the greenhouse effect. Ethical considerations were necessary, too. He pledged that Exxon would revise its corporate strategy to account for climate change, even if it were not “fashionable” to do so. As Exxon had already made heavy investments in nuclear and solar technology, he was “generally upbeat” that Exxon would “invent” a future of renewable energy.

Hansen had reason to feel upbeat himself. If the world’s largest oil-and-gas company supported a new national energy model, the White House would not stand in its way. The Reagan administration was hostile to change from within its ranks. But it couldn’t be hostile to Exxon.

The carbon-dioxide issue was beginning to receive major national attention — Hansen’s own findings had become front-page news, after all. What started as a scientific story was turning into a political story.

The political realm was itself a kind of Mirror World, a parallel reality that crudely mimicked our own. It shared many of our most fundamental laws, like the laws of gravity and inertia and publicity. And if you applied enough pressure, the Mirror World of politics could be sped forward to reveal a new future. Hansen was beginning to understand that too.

1. ‘Caution, Not Panic’ 1983-1984

in the fall of 1983, the climate issue entered an especially long, dark winter. And all because of a single report that had done nothing to change the state of climate science but transformed the state of climate politics.

After the publication of the Charney report in 1979, Jimmy Carter had directed the National Academy of Sciences to prepare a comprehensive, $1 million analysis of the carbon-dioxide problem: a Warren Commission for the greenhouse effect. A team of scientist-dignitaries — among them Revelle, the Princeton modeler Syukuro Manabe and the Harvard political economist Thomas Schelling, one of the intellectual architects of Cold War game theory — would review the literature, evaluate the consequences of global warming for the world order and propose remedies

Then Reagan won the White House.

the incipient report served as the Reagan administration’s answer to every question on the subject. There could be no climate policy, Fred Koomanoff and his associates said, until the academy ruled. In the Mirror World of the Reagan administration, the warming problem hadn’t been abandoned at all. A careful, comprehensive solution was being devised. Everyone just had to wait for the academy’s elders to explain what it was.

The committee’s chairman, William Nierenberg — a Jason, presidential adviser and director of Scripps, the nation’s pre-eminent oceanographic institution — argued that action had to be taken immediately, before all the details could be known with certainty, or else it would be too late.

Better to bet on American ingenuity to save the day. Major interventions in national energy policy, taken immediately, might end up being more expensive, and less effective, than actions taken decades in the future, after more was understood about the economic and social consequences of a warmer planet. Yes, the climate would change, mostly for the worst, but future generations would be better equipped to change with it.

Government officials who knew Nierenberg were not surprised by his conclusions: He was an optimist by training and experience, a devout believer in the doctrine of American exceptionalism, one of the elite class of scientists who had helped the nation win a global war, invent the most deadly weapon conceivable and create the booming aerospace and computer industries. America had solved every existential problem it had confronted over the previous generation; it would not be daunted by an excess of carbon dioxide. Nierenberg had also served on Reagan’s transition team. Nobody believed that he had been directly influenced by his political connections, but his views — optimistic about the saving graces of market forces, pessimistic about the value of government regulation — reflected all the ardor of his party.

That’s what Nierenberg wrote in “Changing Climate.” But it’s not what he said in the press interviews that followed. He argued the opposite: There was no urgent need for action. The public should not entertain the most “extreme negative speculations” about climate change (despite the fact that many of those speculations appeared in his report). Though “Changing Climate” urged an accelerated transition to renewable fuels, noting that it would take thousands of years for the atmosphere to recover from the damage of the last century, Nierenberg recommended “caution, not panic.” Better to wait and see

The damage of “Changing Climate” was squared by the amount of attention it received. Nierenberg’s speech in the Great Hall, being one-500th the length of the actual assessment, received 500 times the press coverage. As The Wall Street Journal put it, in a line echoed by trade journals across the nation: “A panel of top scientists has some advice for people worried about the much-publicized warming of the Earth’s climate: You can cope.”

On “CBS Evening News,” Dan Rather said the academy had given “a cold shoulder” to a grim, 200-page E.P.A. assessment published earlier that week (titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?”; the E.P.A.’s answer, reduced to a word, was no). The Washington Post described the two reports, taken together, as “clarion calls to inaction.

George Keyworth II, Reagan’s science adviser. Keyworth used Nierenberg’s optimism as reason to discount the E.P.A.’s “unwarranted and unnecessarily alarmist” report and warned against taking any “near-term corrective action” on global warming. Just in case it wasn’t clear, Keyworth added, “there are no actions recommended other than continued research.”

Edward David Jr., two years removed from boasting of Exxon’s commitment to transforming global energy policy, told Science that the corporation had reconsidered. “Exxon has reverted to being mainly a supplier of conventional hydrocarbon fuels — petroleum products, natural gas and steam coal,” David said. The American Petroleum Institute canceled its own carbon-dioxide research program, too.

Exxon soon revised its position on climate-change research. In a presentation at an industry conference, Henry Shaw cited “Changing Climate” as evidence that “the general consensus is that society has sufficient time to technologically adapt to a CO₂ greenhouse effect.” If the academy had concluded that regulations were not a serious option, why should Exxon protest

2. ‘You Scientists Win’ 1985

3. The Size of The Human Imagination Spring-Summer 1986

Curtis Moore’s proposal: Use ozone to revive climate. The ozone hole had a solution — an international treaty, already in negotiation. Why not hitch the milk wagon to the bullet train? Pomerance was skeptical. The problems were related, sure: Without a reduction in CFC emissions, you didn’t have a chance of averting cataclysmic global warming. But it had been difficult enough to explain the carbon issue to politicians and journalists; why complicate the sales pitch? Then again, he didn’t see what choice he had. The Republicans controlled the Senate, and Moore was his connection to the Senate’s environmental committee.

Pomerance met with Senator John Chafee, a Republican from Rhode Island, and helped persuade him to hold a double-barreled hearing on the twin problems of ozone and carbon dioxide on June 10 and 11, 1986

F.Sherwood Rowland, Robert Watson, a NASA scientist, and Richard Benedick, the administration’s lead representative in international ozone negotiations, would discuss ozone; James Hansen, Al Gore, the ecologist George Woodwell and Carl Wunsch, a veteran of the Charney group, would testify about climate change.

As Pomerance had hoped, fear about the ozone layer ensured a bounty of press coverage for the climate-change testimony. But as he had feared, it caused many people to conflate the two crises. One was Peter Jennings, who aired the video on ABC’s “World News Tonight,” warning that the ozone hole “could lead to flooding all over the world, also to drought and to famine.”

The confusion helped: For the first time since the “Changing Climate” report, global-warming headlines appeared by the dozen. William Nierenberg’s “caution, not panic” line was inverted. It was all panic without a hint of caution: “A Dire Forecast for ‘Greenhouse’ Earth” (the front page of The Washington Post); “Scientists Predict Catastrophes in Growing Global Heat Wave” (Chicago Tribune); “Swifter Warming of Globe Foreseen” (The New York Times).

After three years of backsliding and silence, Pomerance was exhilarated to see interest in the issue spike overnight. Not only that: A solution materialized, and a moral argument was passionately articulated — by Rhode Island’s Republican senator no less. “Ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect can no longer be treated solely as important scientific questions,” Chafee said. “They must be seen as critical problems facing the nations of the world, and they are problems that demand solutions.”

The old canard about the need for more research was roundly mocked — by Woodwell, by a W.R.I. colleague named Andrew Maguire, by Senator George Mitchell, a Democrat from Maine. “Scientists are never 100 percent certain,” the Princeton historian Theodore Rabb testified. “That notion of total certainty is something too elusive ever to be sought.” As Pomerance had been saying since 1979, it was past time to act. Only now the argument was so broadly accepted that nobody dared object.

The ozone hole, Pomerance realized, had moved the public because, though it was no more visible than global warming, people could be made to see it. They could watch it grow on video. Its metaphors were emotionally wrought: Instead of summoning a glass building that sheltered plants from chilly weather (“Everything seems to flourish in there”), the hole evoked a violent rending of the firmament, inviting deathly radiation. Americans felt that their lives were in danger. An abstract, atmospheric problem had been reduced to the size of the human imagination. It had been made just small enough, and just large enough, to break through.

Four years after “Changing Climate,” two years after a hole had torn open the firmament and a month after the United States and more than three dozen other nations signed a treaty to limit use of CFCs, the climate-change corps was ready to celebrate. It had become conventional wisdom that climate change would follow ozone’s trajectory. Reagan’s E.P.A. administrator, Lee M. Thomas, said as much the day he signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer (the successor to the Vienna Convention), telling reporters that global warming was likely to be the subject of a future international agreement

Congress had already begun to consider policy — in 1987 alone, there were eight days of climate hearings, in three committees, across both chambers of Congress; Senator Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat, had introduced legislation to establish a national climate-change strategy. And so it was that Jim Hansen found himself on Oct. 27 in the not especially distinguished ballroom of the Quality Inn on New Jersey Avenue, a block from the Capitol, at “Preparing for Climate Change,” which was technically a conference but felt more like a wedding.

John Topping was an old-line Rockefeller Republican, a Commerce Department lawyer under Nixon and an E.P.A. official under Reagan. He first heard about the climate problem in the halls of the E.P.A. in 1982 and sought out Hansen, who gave him a personal tutorial. Topping was amazed to discover that out of the E.P.A.’s 13,000-person staff, only seven people, by his count, were assigned to work on climate, though he figured it was more important to the long-term security of the nation than every other environmental issue combined.

Glancing around the room, Jim Hansen could chart, like an arborist counting rings on a stump, the growth of the climate issue over the decade. Veterans like Gordon MacDonald, George Woodwell and the environmental biologist Stephen Schneider stood at the center of things. Former and current staff members from the congressional science committees (Tom Grumbly, Curtis Moore, Anthony Scoville) made introductions to the congressmen they advised. Hansen’s owlish nemesis Fred Koomanoff was present, as were his counterparts from the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Rafe Pomerance’s cranium could be seen above the crowd, but unusually he was surrounded by colleagues from other environmental organizations that until now had shown little interest in a diffuse problem with no proven fund-raising record. The party’s most conspicuous newcomers, however, the outermost ring, were the oil-and-gas executives.

That evening, as a storm spat and coughed outside, Rafe Pomerance gave one of his exhortative speeches urging cooperation among the various factions, and John Chafee and Roger Revelle received awards; introductions were made and business cards earnestly exchanged. Not even a presentation by Hansen of his research could sour the mood. The next night, on Oct. 28, at a high-spirited dinner party in Topping’s townhouse on Capitol Hill, the oil-and-gas men joked with the environmentalists, the trade-group representatives chatted up the regulators and the academics got merrily drunk. Mikhail Budyko, the don of the Soviet climatologists, settled into an extended conversation about global warming with Topping’s 10-year-old son. It all seemed like the start of a grand bargain, a uniting of factions — a solution.

Hansen was accustomed to the bureaucratic nuisances that attended testifying before Congress; before a hearing, he had to send his formal statement to NASA headquarters, which forwarded it to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for approval. “Major greenhouse climate changes are a certainty,” he had written. “By the 2010s [in every scenario], essentially the entire globe has very substantial warming.”

By all appearances, plans for major policy continued to advance rapidly. After the Johnston hearing, Timothy Wirth, a freshman Democratic senator from Colorado on the energy committee, began to plan a comprehensive package of climate-change legislation — a New Deal for global warming. Wirth asked a legislative assistant, David Harwood, to consult with experts on the issue, beginning with Rafe Pomerance, in the hope of converting the science of climate change into a new national energy policy.

In March 1988, Wirth joined 41 other senators, nearly half of them Republicans, to demand that Reagan call for an international treaty modeled after the ozone agreement. Because the United States and the Soviet Union were the world’s two largest contributors of carbon emissions, responsible for about one-third of the world total, they should lead the negotiations. Reagan agreed. In May, he signed a joint statement with Mikhail Gorbachev that included a pledge to cooperate on global warming.

Al Gore himself had, for the moment, withdrawn his political claim to the issue. In 1987, at the age of 39, Gore announced that he was running for president, in part to bring attention to global warming, but he stopped emphasizing it after the subject failed to captivate New Hampshire primary voters.

5. ‘You Will See Things That You Shall Believe’ Summer 1988

It was the hottest and driest summer in history. Everywhere you looked, something was bursting into flames. Two million acres in Alaska incinerated, and dozens of major fires scored the West. Yellowstone National Park lost nearly one million acres. Smoke was visible from Chicago, 1,600 miles away.

In Nebraska, suffering its worst drought since the Dust Bowl, there were days when every weather station registered temperatures above 100 degrees. The director of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment warned that the drought might be the dawning of a climatic change that within a half century could turn the state into a desert.

On June 22 in Washington, where it hit 100 degrees, Rafe Pomerance received a call from Jim Hansen, who was scheduled to testify the following morning at a Senate hearing called by Timothy Wirth. “I hope we have good media coverage tomorrow,” Hansen said.

Hansen had just received the most recent global temperature data. Just over halfway into the year, 1988 was setting records. Already it had nearly clinched the hottest year in history. Ahead of schedule, the signal was emerging from the noise. “I’m going to make a pretty strong statement,” Hansen said.

Hansen returned to his testimony. He wrote: “The global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.” He wrote: “1988 so far is so much warmer than 1987, that barring a remarkable and improbable cooling, 1988 will be the warmest year on record.” He wrote: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

“We have only one planet,” Senator Bennett Johnston intoned. “If we screw it up, we have no place to go.” Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, called for the United Nations Environment Program to begin preparing a global remedy to the carbon-dioxide problem. Senator Dale Bumpers, a Democrat of Arkansas, previewed Hansen’s testimony, saying that it “ought to be cause for headlines in every newspaper in America tomorrow morning.” The coverage, Bumpers emphasized, was a necessary precursor to policy. “Nobody wants to take on any of the industries that produce the things that we throw up into the atmosphere,” he said. “But what you have are all these competing interests pitted against our very survival.”

Hansen, wiping his brow, spoke without affect, his eyes rarely rising from his notes. The warming trend could be detected “with 99 percent confidence,” he said. “It is changing our climate now.” But he saved his strongest comment for after the hearing, when he was encircled in the hallway by reporters. “It is time to stop waffling so much,” he said, “and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

The press followed Bumpers’s advice. Hansen’s testimony prompted headlines in dozens of newspapers across the country, including The New York Times, which announced, across the top of its front page: “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.”

Rafe Pomerance called his allies on Capitol Hill, the young staff members who advised politicians, organized hearings, wrote legislation. We need to finalize a number, he told them, a specific target, in order to move the issue — to turn all this publicity into policy. The Montreal Protocol had called for a 50 percent reduction in CFC emissions by 1998. What was the right target for carbon emissions? It wasn’t enough to exhort nations to do better. That kind of talk might sound noble, but it didn’t change investments or laws. They needed a hard goal — something ambitious but reasonable. And they needed it soon: Just four days after Hansen’s star turn, politicians from 46 nations and more than 300 scientists would convene in Toronto at the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, an event described by Philip Shabecoff of The New York Times as “Woodstock for climate change.”

Pomerance had a proposal: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2000. Ambitious, Harwood said. In all his work planning climate policy, he had seen no assurance that such a steep drop in emissions was possible. Then again, 2000 was more than a decade off, so it allowed for some flexibility.

Mintzer pointed out that a 20 percent reduction was consistent with the academic literature on energy efficiency. Various studies over the years had shown that you could improve efficiency in most energy systems by roughly 20 percent if you adopted best practices.

Of course, with any target, you had to take into account the fact that the developing world would inevitably consume much larger quantities of fossil fuels by 2000. But those gains could be offset by a wider propagation of the renewable technologies already at hand — solar, wind, geothermal. It was not a rigorous scientific analysis, Mintzer granted, but 20 percent sounded plausible. We wouldn’t need to solve cold fusion or ask Congress to repeal the law of gravity. We could manage it with the knowledge and technology we already had.

Besides, Pomerance said, 20 by 2000 sounds good.

The conference’s final statement, signed by all 400 scientists and politicians in attendance, repeated the demand with a slight variation: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2005. Just like that, Pomerance’s best guess became global diplomatic policy.

Hansen, emerging from Anniek’s successful cancer surgery, took it upon himself to start a one-man public information campaign. He gave news conferences and was quoted in seemingly every article about the issue; he even appeared on television with homemade props. Like an entrant at an elementary-school science fair, he made “loaded dice” out of sections of cardboard and colored paper to illustrate the increased likelihood of hotter weather in a warmer climate. Public awareness of the greenhouse effect reached a new high of 68 percent

global warming became a major subject of the presidential campaign. While Michael Dukakis proposed tax incentives to encourage domestic oil production and boasted that coal could satisfy the nation’s energy needs for the next three centuries, George Bush took advantage. “I am an environmentalist,” he declared on the shore of Lake Erie, the first stop on a five-state environmental tour that would take him to Boston Harbor, Dukakis’s home turf. “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect,” he said, “are forgetting about the White House effect.”

His running mate emphasized the ticket’s commitment to the issue at the vice-presidential debate. “The greenhouse effect is an important environmental issue,” Dan Quayle said. “We need to get on with it. And in a George Bush administration, you can bet that we will.”

This kind of talk roused the oil-and-gas men. “A lot of people on the Hill see the greenhouse effect as the issue of the 1990s,” a gas lobbyist told Oil & Gas Journal. Before a meeting of oil executives shortly after the “environmentalist” candidate won the election, Representative Dick Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, warned, “It’s going to be very difficult to fend off some kind of gasoline tax.” The coal industry, which had the most to lose from restrictions on carbon emissions, had moved beyond denial to resignation. A spokesman for the National Coal Association acknowledged that the greenhouse effect was no longer “an emerging issue. It is here already, and we’ll be hearing more and more about it.”

By the end of the year, 32 climate bills had been introduced in Congress, led by Wirth’s omnibus National Energy Policy Act of 1988. Co-sponsored by 13 Democrats and five Republicans, it established as a national goal an “International Global Agreement on the Atmosphere by 1992,” ordered the Energy Department to submit to Congress a plan to reduce energy use by at least 2 percent a year through 2005 and directed the Congressional Budget Office to calculate the feasibility of a carbon tax. A lawyer for the Senate energy committee told an industry journal that lawmakers were “frightened” by the issue and predicted that Congress would eventually pass significant legislation after Bush took office

The other great powers refused to wait. The German Parliament created a special commission on climate change, which concluded that action had to be taken immediately, “irrespective of any need for further research,” and that the Toronto goal was inadequate; it recommended a 30 percent reduction of carbon emissions

Margaret Thatcher, who had studied chemistry at Oxford, warned in a speech to the Royal Society that global warming could “greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope” and that “the health of the economy and the health of our environment are totally dependent upon each other.”

The prime ministers of Canada and Norway called for a binding international treaty on the atmosphere; Sweden’s Parliament went further, announcing a national strategy to stabilize emissions at the 1988 level and eventually imposing a carbon tax

the United Nations unanimously endorsed the establishment, by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of scientists and policymakers, to conduct scientific assessments and develop global climate policy.

One of the I.P.C.C.’s first sessions to plan an international treaty was hosted by the State Department, 10 days after Bush’s inauguration. James Baker chose the occasion to make his first speech as secretary of state. “We can probably not afford to wait until all of the uncertainties about global climate change have been resolved,” he said. “Time will not make the problem go away.”

: On April 14, 1989, a bipartisan group of 24 senators, led by the majority leader, George Mitchell, requested that Bush cut emissions in the United States even before the I.P.C.C.’s working group made its recommendation. “We cannot afford the long lead times associated with a comprehensive global agreement,” the senators wrote. Bush had promised to combat the greenhouse effect with the White House effect. The self-proclaimed environmentalist was now seated in the Oval Office. It was time.

8. ‘You Never Beat The White House’ April 1989

After Jim Baker gave his boisterous address to the I.P.C.C. working group at the State Department, he received a visit from John Sununu, Bush’s chief of staff. Leave the science to the scientists, Sununu told Baker. Stay clear of this greenhouse-effect nonsense. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Baker, who had served as Reagan’s chief of staff, didn’t speak about the subject again.

despite his reputation as a political wolf, he still thought of himself as a scientist — an “old engineer,” as he was fond of putting it, having earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. decades earlier. He lacked the reflexive deference that so many of his political generation reserved for the class of elite government scientists.

Since World War II, he believed, conspiratorial forces had used the imprimatur of scientific knowledge to advance an “anti-growth” doctrine. He reserved particular disdain for Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” which prophesied that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death if the world took no step to curb population growth; the Club of Rome, an organization of European scientists, heads of state and economists, which similarly warned that the world would run out of natural resources; and as recently as the mid-’70s, the hypothesis advanced by some of the nation’s most celebrated scientists — including Carl Sagan, Stephen Schneider and Ichtiaque Rasool — that a new ice age was dawning, thanks to the proliferation of man-made aerosols. All were theories of questionable scientific merit, portending vast, authoritarian remedies to halt economic progress.

When Mead talked about “far-reaching” decisions and “long-term consequences,” Sununu heard the marching of jackboots.

Sununu had suspected that the greenhouse effect belonged to this nefarious cabal since 1975, when the anthropologist Margaret Mead convened a symposium on the subject at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

While Sununu and Darman reviewed Hansen’s statements, the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly, took a new proposal to the White House. The next meeting of the I.P.C.C.’s working group was scheduled for Geneva the following month, in May; it was the perfect occasion, Reilly argued, to take a stronger stand on climate change. Bush should demand a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions.

Sununu wouldn’t budge. He ordered the American delegates not to make any commitment in Geneva. Very soon after that, someone leaked the exchange to the press.

A deputy of Jim Baker pulled Reilly aside. He said he had a message from Baker, who had observed Reilly’s infighting with Sununu. “In the long run,” the deputy warned Reilly, “you never beat the White House.”

9. ‘A Form of Science Fraud’ May 1989

The cameras followed Hansen and Gore into the marbled hallway. Hansen insisted that he wanted to focus on the science. Gore focused on the politics. “I think they’re scared of the truth,” he said. “They’re scared that Hansen and the other scientists are right and that some dramatic policy changes are going to be needed, and they don’t want to face up to it.”

The censorship did more to publicize Hansen’s testimony and the dangers of global warming than anything he could have possibly said. At the White House briefing later that morning, Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater admitted that Hansen’s statement had been changed. He blamed an official “five levels down from the top” and promised that there would be no retaliation. Hansen, he added, was “an outstanding and distinguished scientist” and was “doing a great job.”

10. The White House Effect Fall 1989

The Los Angeles Times called the censorship “an outrageous assault.” The Chicago Tribune said it was the beginning of “a cold war on global warming,” and The New York Times warned that the White House’s “heavy-handed intervention sends the signal that Washington wants to go slow on addressing the greenhouse problem.”

Darman went to see Sununu. He didn’t like being accused of censoring scientists. They needed to issue some kind of response. Sununu called Reilly to ask if he had any ideas. We could start, Reilly said, by recommitting to a global climate treaty. The United States was the only Western nation on record as opposing negotiations.

Sununu sent a telegram to Geneva endorsing a plan “to develop full international consensus on necessary steps to prepare for a formal treaty-negotiating process. The scope and importance of this issue are so great that it is essential for the U.S. to exercise leadership.”

Sununu seethed at any mention of the subject. He had taken it upon himself to study more deeply the greenhouse effect; he would have a rudimentary, one-dimensional general circulation model installed on his personal desktop computer. He decided that the models promoted by Jim Hansen were a lot of bunk. They were horribly imprecise in scale and underestimated the ocean’s ability to mitigate warming. Sununu complained about Hansen to D. Allan Bromley, a nuclear physicist from Yale who, at Sununu’s recommendation, was named Bush’s science adviser. Hansen’s findings were “technical poppycock” that didn’t begin to justify such wild-eyed pronouncements that “the greenhouse effect is here” or that the 1988 heat waves could be attributed to global warming, let alone serve as the basis for national economic policy.

When a junior staff member in the Energy Department, in a meeting at the White House with Sununu and Reilly, mentioned an initiative to reduce fossil-fuel use, Sununu interrupted her. “Why in the world would you need to reduce fossil-fuel use?” he asked. “Because of climate change,” the young woman replied. “I don’t want anyone in this administration without a scientific background using ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ ever again,” he said. “If you don’t have a technical basis for policy, don’t run around making decisions on the basis of newspaper headlines.” After the meeting, Reilly caught up to the staff member in the hallway. She was shaken. Don’t take it personally, Reilly told her. Sununu might have been looking at you, but that was directed at me.

Reilly, for his part, didn’t entirely blame Sununu for Bush’s indecision on the prospect of a climate treaty. The president had never taken a vigorous interest in global warming and was mainly briefed about it by nonscientists. Bush had brought up the subject on the campaign trail, in his speech about the White House effect, after leafing through a briefing booklet for a new issue that might generate some positive press. When Reilly tried in person to persuade him to take action, Bush deferred to Sununu and Baker. Why don’t the three of you work it out, he said. Let me know when you decide

Relations between Sununu and Reilly became openly adversarial. Reilly, Sununu thought, was a creature of the environmental lobby. He was trying to impress his friends at the E.P.A. without having a basic grasp of the science himself.

Pomerance had the sinking feeling that the momentum of the previous year was beginning to flag. The censoring of Hansen’s testimony and the inexplicably strident opposition from John Sununu were ominous signs. So were the findings of a report Pomerance had commissioned, published in September by the World Resources Institute, tracking global greenhouse-gas emissions. The United States was the largest contributor by far, producing nearly a quarter of the world’s carbon emissions, and its contribution was growing faster than that of every other country. Bush’s indecision, or perhaps inattention, had already managed to delay the negotiation of a global climate treaty until 1990 at the earliest, perhaps even 1991. By then, Pomerance worried, it would be too late.

Pomerance tried to be more diplomatic. “The president made a commitment to the American people to deal with global warming,” he told The Washington Post, “and he hasn’t followed it up.” He didn’t want to sound defeated. “There are some good building blocks here,” Pomerance said, and he meant it. The Montreal Protocol on CFCs wasn’t perfect at first, either — it had huge loopholes and weak restrictions. Once in place, however, the restrictions could be tightened. Perhaps the same could happen with climate change. Perhaps. Pomerance was not one for pessimism. As William Reilly told reporters, dutifully defending the official position forced upon him, it was the first time that the United States had formally endorsed the concept of an emissions limit. Pomerance wanted to believe that this was progress.

All week in Noordwijk, Becker couldn’t stop talking about what he had seen in Zeeland. After a flood in 1953, when the sea swallowed much of the region, killing more than 2,000 people, the Dutch began to build the Delta Works, a vast concrete-and-steel fortress of movable barriers, dams and sluice gates — a masterpiece of human engineering. The whole system could be locked into place within 90 minutes, defending the land against storm surge. It reduced the country’s exposure to the sea by 700 kilometers, Becker explained. The United States coastline was about 153,000 kilometers long. How long, he asked, was the entire terrestrial coastline? Because the whole world was going to need this. In Zeeland, he said, he had seen the future.

Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif., has a habit of asking new graduate students to name the largest fundamental breakthrough in climate physics since 1979. It’s a trick question. There has been no breakthrough. As with any mature scientific discipline, there is only refinement. The computer models grow more precise; the regional analyses sharpen; estimates solidify into observational data. Where there have been inaccuracies, they have tended to be in the direction of understatement.

More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since the final day of the Noordwijk conference, Nov. 7, 1989, than in the entire history of civilization preceding it

Despite every action taken since the Charney report — the billions of dollars invested in research, the nonbinding treaties, the investments in renewable energy — the only number that counts, the total quantity of global greenhouse gas emitted per year, has continued its inexorable rise.

When it comes to our own nation, which has failed to make any binding commitments whatsoever, the dominant narrative for the last quarter century has concerned the efforts of the fossil-fuel industries to suppress science, confuse public knowledge and bribe politicians.

The mustache-twirling depravity of these campaigns has left the impression that the oil-and-gas industry always operated thus; while the Exxon scientists and American Petroleum Institute clerics of the ’70s and ’80s were hardly good Samaritans, they did not start multimillion-dollar disinformation campaigns, pay scientists to distort the truth or try to brainwash children in elementary schools, as their successors would.

It was James Hansen’s testimony before Congress in 1988 that, for the first time since the “Changing Climate” report, made oil-and-gas executives begin to consider the issue’s potential to hurt their profits. Exxon, as ever, led the field. Six weeks after Hansen’s testimony, Exxon’s manager of science and strategy development, Duane LeVine, prepared an internal strategy paper urging the company to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions.” This shortly became the default position of the entire sector. LeVine, it so happened, served as chairman of the global petroleum industry’s Working Group on Global Climate Change, created the same year, which adopted Exxon’s position as its own

The American Petroleum Institute, after holding a series of internal briefings on the subject in the fall and winter of 1988, including one for the chief executives of the dozen or so largest oil companies, took a similar, if slightly more diplomatic, line. It set aside money for carbon-dioxide policy — about $100,000, a fraction of the millions it was spending on the health effects of benzene, but enough to establish a lobbying organization called, in an admirable flourish of newspeak, the Global Climate Coalition.

The G.C.C. was conceived as a reactive body, to share news of any proposed regulations, but on a whim, it added a press campaign, to be coordinated mainly by the A.P.I. It gave briefings to politicians known to be friendly to the industry and approached scientists who professed skepticism about global warming. The A.P.I.’s payment for an original op-ed was $2,000.

It was joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 14 other trade associations, including those representing the coal, electric-grid and automobile industries

In October 1989, scientists allied with the G.C.C. began to be quoted in national publications, giving an issue that lacked controversy a convenient fulcrum. “Many respected scientists say the available evidence doesn’t warrant the doomsday warnings,” was the caveat that began to appear in articles on climate change.

The following year, when President Bill Clinton proposed an energy tax in the hope of meeting the goals of the Rio treaty, the A.P.I. invested $1.8 million in a G.C.C. disinformation campaign. Senate Democrats from oil-and-coal states joined Republicans to defeat the tax proposal, which later contributed to the Republicans’ rout of Democrats in the midterm congressional elections in 1994 — the first time the Republican Party had won control of both houses in 40 years

The G.C.C. spent $13 million on a single ad campaign intended to weaken support for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which committed its parties to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 5 percent relative to 1990 levels. The Senate, which would have had to ratify the agreement, took a pre-emptive vote declaring its opposition; the resolution passed 95-0. There has never been another serious effort to negotiate a binding global climate treaty.

. This has made the corporation an especially vulnerable target for the wave of compensatory litigation that began in earnest in the last three years and may last a generation. Tort lawsuits have become possible only in recent years, as scientists have begun more precisely to attribute regional effects to global emission levels. This is one subfield of climate science that has advanced significantly sin

Pomerance had not been among the 400 delegates invited to Noordwijk. But together with three young activists — Daniel Becker of the Sierra Club, Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists and Stewart Boyle from Friends of the Earth — he had formed his own impromptu delegation. Their constituency, they liked to say, was the climate itself. Their mission was to pressure the delegates to include in the final conference statement, which would be used as the basis for a global treaty, the target proposed in Toronto: a 20 percent reduction of greenhouse-gas combustion by 2005. It was the only measure that mattered, the amount of emissions reductions, and the Toronto number was the strongest global target yet proposed.

The delegations would review the progress made by the I.P.C.C. and decide whether to endorse a framework for a global treaty. There was a general sense among the delegates that they would, at minimum, agree to the target proposed by the host, the Dutch environmental minister, more modest than the Toronto number: a freezing of greenhouse-gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2000. Some believed that if the meeting was a success, it would encourage the I.P.C.C. to accelerate its negotiations and reach a decision about a treaty sooner. But at the very least, the world’s environmental ministers should sign a statement endorsing a hard, binding target of emissions reductions. The mood among the delegates was electric, nearly giddy — after more than a decade of fruitless international meetings, they could finally sign an agreement that meant something.

11. ‘The Skunks at The Garden Party’ November 1989

It was nearly freezing — Nov. 6, 1989, on the coast of the North Sea in the Dutch resort town of Noordwijk

Losing Earth: The Decade WeAlmost Stopped Climate Change We knew everything we needed to know, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves. A tragedy in two acts. By Nathaniel RichPhotographs and Videos by George Steinmetz AUG. 1, 2018

“The general American public should not have to make up the balance as corporations avoid paying billions in U.S. taxes,” Senator McCain said.

As Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, testified, there is a whole range of tactics Apple has chosen not to use.

“Apple’s basic structure and planning described in the memorandum appears to be appropriate corporate tax planning in today’s environment

If you look at taxes as Senator McCain seems to do, one person finding a way around taxes means the rest of us have to pay more. After all, the government must raise enough money to meet its obligations. But that is not the way a lot of Republicans look at it now. They have denounced taxes for so long that some of them seem to view those who manage to legally avoid paying taxes as heroes. Some of them also seem to think that the government they help to run is evil and that depriving it of revenue is therefore a good thing.

In theory, under the current law, American multinationals will pay American taxes on all profits — less whatever foreign taxes they paid — when they bring the profits home. That is known as “deferred” taxation. But they try to avoid doing that, and hope they can persuade the government to let them pay a minimal tax on such repatriated profits, rather than the full rate.

Multinational corporations have been campaigning for a “territorial” tax system, in which the United States would tax only profits generated in this country. Doing that without finding a way to close down the loopholes that allow companies to move taxes around would simply ratify the current situation, with the difference that companies would no longer face the possibility of paying American taxes when they brought the money home.

closing those loopholes may be impossible under the current system. Companies can have one subsidiary pay any price they want to another subsidiary, so long as it is reasonably close to what an arm’s-length negotiation would produce. The I.R.S. is overmatched when it tries to challenge such pricing, particularly because there are often no comparable deals

To get anything done, Congress will have to agree that Senator McCain’s way of looking at taxes is correct, and accept that giving a tax break to one person or company must mean forcing others to pay more than they otherwise would.

For decades, the United States has led the way as the world’s markets for manufacturing, labor and capital have become increasingly interconnected and interdependent. This has benefited poorer nations around the world — most prominently China — as well as large multinational corporations with the reach and balance sheets to compete globally. It has also contributed to a surge in the incomes of well-educated professionals with globally competitive skills.

our leaders in business and government have offered up a consensus view that chief among the gains from open trade is a small financial benefit — reflected mostly in lower prices for a host of imported goods — spread in a thin layer over an enormous number of people, which in the aggregate offsets the narrowly focused devastation wreaked on discrete industries, workers and communities.

today’s practical lesson is much simpler: The deal on offer to the U.S. working and middle classes from globalization is in tatters. We have ignored at our peril the dislocations and the uneven distribution of the benefits.

We need a new agenda promising fairness and growth in equal measure.

The business community’s agenda for accelerating economic growth is straightforward. It includes making our corporate tax system simpler and more globally competitive; subjecting regulations to rigorous cost-benefit criteria; reforming our immigration laws to admit more highly educated and skilled workers, particularly in the technology and engineering fields; and adopting more free-trade agreements, most notably the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, to stimulate global flows of goods and services. Corporate leaders (and many economists) are convinced that this is the clear path to accelerated growth and job formation.

in order to create the social circumstances necessary to make this commercial agenda at all politically feasible, the business community must find a way to support — and especially be willing to pay for — an array of policies designed to foster economic fairness that are traditionally opposed by the business lobby.

This list is long but would include increasing the minimum wage, expanding the earned-income tax credit and reforming unemployment programs; investing in early-childhood education, vocational training, prison-to-work assistance, apprenticeships and college affordability; financing a large-scale infrastructure building program; implementing robust transition assistance for workers dislocated by foreign competition and technological change; and ensuring health-care and retirement income for aging citizens in need.

The cost of all of this would be, of course, high. But the price of inaction is certainly far more dear. One of the best ways to finance it all might be a national sales levy along the lines of a progressive value-added tax

To restore credibility to the business community’s agenda, we must work to set in motion the policies necessary to stimulate growing incomes and rising equality. In actuality, growth and fairness agendas are compatible and mutually reinforcing because a stronger middle class — and healthier consumer — would be as good for business as it is for society.

As a religious organization, the LDS Church enjoys several tax advantages. Like other churches, it is often exempt from paying taxes on the real estate properties it leases out, even to commercial entities, says tax lawyer David Miller, who is not Mormon. The church also doesn’t pay taxes on donated funds and holdings.

Under U.S. law, churches can legally turn around and sell donated stock without paying capital-gains taxes, a clear advantage for both donor and receiver.

According to U.S. law, religions have no obligation to open their books to the public, and the LDS Church officially stopped reporting any finances in the early 1960s. In 1997 an investigation by Time used cross-religious comparisons and internal information to estimate the church’s total value at $30 billion. The magazine also produced an estimate that $5 billion worth of tithing flows into the church annually, and that it owned at least $6 billion in stocks and bonds.

a recent investigation by Reuters in collaboration with sociology professor Cragun estimates that the LDS Church is likely worth $40 billion today and collects up to $8 billion in tithing each year.

Several high-ranking church insiders told him that the church’s finances are so compartmentalized that no single person, not even the president, knows the entirety of its holdings

it’s important to start at the very top: The Mormon Church is owned and run by what is called the Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This entity is a “corporation sole,” which is an obscure legal body owned entirely by one person. In the case of the Mormon Church, that person is Monson, the prophet.

McMullin says the Mormon Church has “two or three or four for-profit entities under the Presiding Bishopric,” and names DMC, AgReserves, and Suburban Land Reserve. He says DMC has about “2,000 to 3,000 employees.” He also confirms Hoover’s estimate that DMC has annual revenue of roughly $1.2 billion

The Mormon belief in the spiritual value of financial success goes back to 1830, when the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith, announced to his followers that God had told him the following: “Verily I say unto you, that all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal.” In other words, historian Quinn translates, “whether it’s investing in a merchandising store, or tannery, or a lumber mill, or a hotel, or a bank—all of which occurred under Joseph Smith’s leadership—according to that 1830 revelation, it’s all spiritual.”

In its early days, the church’s entrepreneurial rigor was fueled by necessity. Mormons, who clashed with neighbors and government authorities over practices such as polygamy, often had to fend for themselves. The group also espoused separatist financial goals of “erecting and maintaining an improved economic system for its members,” according to historian Leonard J. Arrington, who points out that 88 of Smith’s 112 revelations deal directly or indirectly with economic matters.

When Mormons arrived in Utah in 1847 it was a barren territory, still under Mexican jurisdiction. To settle the land, Arrington writes, over a 15-year period in the late 1800s, “Mormons constructed 200 miles of territorial railroad, a $300,000 woolen mill, a large cotton factory, a wholesale-retail concern with sales of $6,000,000 a year, more than 150 local general stores, and at least 500 local cooperative manufacturing and service enterprises.”

oday, Temple Square is filled with statues glorifying the industry of those pioneers. The state emblem is a beehive, in honor of diligent work, and the term “deseret,” used in the titles of many Latter-day enterprises, derived from the Book of Mormon, means “honeybee.”

Until the 1990s, wards—the Mormon equivalent of parishes—kept some donated member money locally to distribute for aid and activities as they saw fit. Today all money is wired directly to Salt Lake City. McMullin insists that not one penny of tithing goes to the church’s for-profit endeavors, but it’s impossible for church members to know for sure. Although the Mormon Doctrine and Covenants says “all things shall be done by common consent in the church,” members are not provided with any financial accounting.

the Mormon Church donates only about 0.7 percent of its annual income to charity; the United Methodist Church gives about 29 percent.

“Though the church’s monetary donations are significant, much of the ‘value’ of our service is not monetary, but in the hundreds of thousands of hours of service and the talent and expertise given by church members to help others around the world.”

The LDS Church’s legions of missionaries and volunteers don’t merely spread the Mormon message around the world; they’re also vital to the church’s businesses. According to McMullin, DMC alone employs 1,400 “people who are volunteering their time and their services—some are part-time and some are volunteer.” Many of these members being asked to serve full- or part-time are retirees.

Even if the corporatization of our society is so complete that it is objectively impossible to avoid giving money to entities that are at that very moment working to undermine our political freedoms, every religious and ethically-minded institution should be urging those under its influence to be aware and resist wherever possible.

In sum, you should absolutely be supporting corporations that put human values ahead of profit, and doing your best to keep your dollars away from ones that exploit workers and try to obstruct democracy, whether directly by stripping workers of their rights or indirectly by supporting the exclusionary social fantasies of religious reactionaries.

The economics community just hasn't spent much time over the past couple of decades focusing on the effect that machine intelligence is likely to have on the labor marke

The Digital Revolution is different because computers can perform cognitive tasks too, and that means machines will eventually be able to run themselves. When that happens, they won't just put individuals out of work temporarily. Entire classes of workers will be out of work permanently. In other words, the Luddites weren't wrong. They were just 200 years too early

while it's easy to believe that some jobs can never be done by machines—do the elderly really want to be tended by robots?—that may not be true.

Robotic pets are growing so popular that Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who studies the way we interact with technology, is uneasy about it: "The idea of some kind of artificial companionship," she says, "is already becoming the new normal."

robots will take over more and more jobs. And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us.

Economist Paul Krugman recently remarked that our long-standing belief in skills and education as the keys to financial success may well be outdated. In a blog post titled "Rise of the Robots," he reviewed some recent economic data and predicted that we're entering an era where the prime cause of income inequality will be something else entirely: capital vs. labor.

We're already seeing them, and not just because of the crash of 2008. They started showing up in the statistics more than a decade ago. For a while, though, they were masked by the dot-com and housing bubbles, so when the financial crisis hit, years' worth of decline was compressed into 24 months. The trend lines dropped off the cliff.

In the economics literature, the increase in the share of income going to capital owners is known as capital-biased technological change

The question we want to answer is simple: If CBTC is already happening—not a lot, but just a little bit—what trends would we expect to see? What are the signs of a computer-driven economy?

if automation were displacing labor, we'd expect to see a steady decline in the share of the population that's employed.

Second, we'd expect to see fewer job openings than in the past.

Third, as more people compete for fewer jobs, we'd expect to see middle-class incomes flatten in a race to the bottom.

There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.

Fifth, as a result of all this, we'd expect to see labor's share of national income decline and capital's share rise.

Fourth, with consumption stagnant, we'd expect to see corporations stockpile more cash and, fearing weaker sales, invest less in new products and new factories

The next step might be passenger vehicles on fixed routes, like airport shuttles. Then long-haul trucks. Then buses and taxis. There are 2.5 million workers who drive trucks, buses, and taxis for a living, and there's a good chance that, one by one, all of them will be displaced

in another sense, we should be very alarmed. It's one thing to suggest that robots are going to cause mass unemployment starting in 2030 or so. We'd have some time to come to grips with that. But the evidence suggests that—slowly, haltingly—it's happening already, and we're simply not prepared for it.

the first jobs to go will be middle-skill jobs. Despite impressive advances, robots still don't have the dexterity to perform many common kinds of manual labor that are simple for humans—digging ditches, changing bedpans. Nor are they any good at jobs that require a lot of cognitive skill—teaching classes, writing magazine articles

in the middle you have jobs that are both fairly routine and require no manual dexterity. So that may be where the hollowing out starts: with desk jobs in places like accounting or customer support.

In fact, there's even a digital sports writer. It's true that a human being wrote this story—ask my mother if you're not sure—but in a decade or two I might be out of a job too

Doctors should probably be worried as well. Remember Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing computer? It's now being fed millions of pages of medical information so that it can help physicians do a better job of diagnosing diseases. In another decade, there's a good chance that Watson will be able to do this without any human help at all.

Take driverless cars.

Most likely, owners of capital would strongly resist higher taxes, as they always have, while workers would be unhappy with their enforced idleness. Still, the ancient Romans managed to get used to it—with slave labor playing the role of robots—and we might have to, as well.

There will be no place to go but the unemployment lin

we'll need to let go of some familiar convictions. Left-leaning observers may continue to think that stagnating incomes can be improved with better education and equality of opportunity. Conservatives will continue to insist that people without jobs are lazy bums who shouldn't be coddled. They'll both be wrong.

Corporate executives should worry too. For a while, everything will seem great for them: Falling labor costs will produce heftier profits and bigger bonuses. But then it will all come crashing down. After all, robots might be able to produce goods and services, but they can't consume them

we'll probably have only a few options open to us. The simplest, because it's relatively familiar, is to tax capital at high rates and use the money to support displaced workers. In other words, as The Economist's Ryan Avent puts it, "redistribution, and a lot of it."

would we be happy in a society that offers real work to a dwindling few and bread and circuses for the rest?

The modern economy is complex, and most of these trends have multiple causes.

 economist Noah Smith suggests that we might have to fundamentally change the way we think about how we share economic growth. Right now, he points out, everyone is born with an endowment of labor by virtue of having a body and a brain that can be traded for income. But what to do when that endowment is worth a fraction of what it is today? Smith's suggestion: "Why not also an endowment of capital? What if, when each citizen turns 18, the government bought him or her a diversified portfolio of equity?"

In simple terms, if owners of capital are capturing an increasing fraction of national income, then that capital needs to be shared more widely if we want to maintain a middle-class society.

it's time to start thinking about our automated future in earnest. The history of mass economic displacement isn't encouraging—fascists in the '20s, Nazis in the '30s—and recent high levels of unemployment in Greece and Italy have already produced rioting in the streets and larger followings for right-wing populist parties. And that's after only a few years of misery.

When the robot revolution finally starts to happen, it's going to happen fast, and it's going to turn our world upside down. It's easy to joke about our future robot overlords—R2-D2 or the Terminator?—but the challenge that machine intelligence presents really isn't science fiction anymore. Like Lake Michigan with an inch of water in it, it's happening around us right now even if it's hard to see

A robotic paradise of leisure and contemplation eventually awaits us, but we have a long and dimly lit tunnel to navigate before we get there.

Thatcher said something else that's particularly interesting in this discussion. She said there's no such thing as society. There are only individuals and families. And so what we begin to see is the emergence of a kind of ethic, a survival of the fittest ethic that legitimates the most incredible forms of cruelty, that seems to suggest that freedom in this discourse of getting rid of society, getting rid of the social-- that discourse is really only about self-interest, that possessive individualism is now the only virtue that matters. So freedom, which is essential to any notion of democracy, now becomes nothing more than a matter of pursuing your own self interests

I want to echo something that FDR once said, When he said that, you know, you not only have to have personal freedoms and political freedoms, the right to vote the right to speak, you have to have social freedom. You have to have the freedom from want, the freedom from poverty, the freedom from-- that comes with a lack of health care.

How do you get a discourse governing the country that seems to suggest that anything public, public health, public transportation, public values, you know, public engagement is a pathology?

Individualize the social, which means that all problems, if they exist, rest on the shoulders of individuals.

that the government-- the larger social order, the society has no responsibility whatsoever so that-- you often hear this, I mean, if there--I mean, if you have an economic crisis caused by the hedge fund crooks, you know and millions of people are put out of work and they're all lining up for unemployment, what do we hear in the national media? We hear that maybe they don't know how to fill out unemployment forms, maybe it's about character.

I think that what we haven't seen before is an attack on the social contract, Bill, that is so overwhelming, so dangerous in the way in which its being deconstructed and being disassembled that you now have as a classic example, you have a whole generation of young people who are now seen as disposable.

young people can't turn anywhere without in some way being told that the only obligation of citizenship is to shop, is to be a consumer. You can't walk on a college campus today and walk into the student union and not see everybody represented there from the local banks to Disneyland to local shops, all selling things.

Where are the public spaces for young people other learn a discourse that's not commodified, to be able to think about non-commodifiable values like trust, justice, honesty, integrity, caring for others, compassion. Those things, they're just simply absent, they're not part of those public spheres because those spheres have been commodified.

Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.” Why that metaphor, zombie politics? HENRY GIROUX: Because it's a politics that's informed by the machinery of social and civil death.

It's a death machine. It's a death machine because in my estimation it does everything it can to kill any vestige of a robust democracy. It turns people into zombies, people who basically are so caught up with surviving that they have no-- they become like the walking dead, you know, they lose their sense of agency-

This casino capitalism as we talk about it, right, one of the things that it does that hasn't been done before, it doesn't just believe it can control the economy. It believes that it can govern all of social life. That's different. That means it has to have its tentacles into every aspect of everyday life. Everything from the way schools are run to the way prisons are outsourced to the way the financial services are run to the way in which people have access to health care, it's an all-encompassing, it seems to me, political, cultural, educational apparatus.

as the social state is crippled, as the social state is in some way robbed, hollowed out and robbed of its potential and its capacities, what takes its place? The punishing state takes its place. You get this notion of incarceration, this, what we call the governing through crime complex where governance now has been ceded to corporations who largely are basically about benefiting the rich, the ultra-rich, the big corporations and allowing the state to exercise its power in enormously destructive and limited ways.

we kill the imagination by suggesting that the only kind of rationality that matters, the only kind of learning that matters is utterly instrumental, pragmatist. So what we do is we collapse education into training, and we end up suggesting that not knowing much is somehow a virtue. And I'll and I think what's so disturbing about this is not only do you see it in the popular culture with the lowest common denominator now drives that culture, but you also see it coming from politicians who actually say things that suggest something about the policies they'd like to implement.

Rick Santorum is not-- is kind of a, you know, an obvious figure. But when he stands up in front of a body of Republicans and he says, the last thing we need in the Republican party are intellectuals. And I think it's kind of a template for the sort of idiocy that increasingly now dominates our culture.

I think intellectuals are-- there are two ways we can describe intellectuals. In the most general sense, we can say, "Intellectuals are people who take pride in ideas. They work with ideas." I mean, they believe that ideas matter. They believe that there's no such thing as common sense, good sense or bad sense, but reflective sense.

how we learn what we learn and what we do with the knowledge that we have is not just for ourselves. It's for the way in which we can expand and deepen the very processes of democracy in general, and address those problems and anti-democratic forces that work against it.

I think the real issue here is, you know, what would it mean to begin to do at least two things?

one is to develop cultural apparatuses that can offer a new vocabulary for people, where questions of freedom and justice and the problems that we're facing can be analyzed in ways that reach mass audiences in accessible language. We have to build a formative culture

Secondly, we've got to overcome the fractured nature of these movements. I mean the thing that plagues me about progressives in the left and liberals is they are all sort of ensconced in these fragmented movements

here's the contradiction I hear in what you're saying. That if you write about a turning toward despair and cynicism in politics. Can you get movements out of despair and cynicism? Can you get people who will take on the system when they have been told that the system is so powerful and so overwhelming that they've lost their, as you call it, moral and political agency?

to be different than it is now, rather than romanticizing hope and turning it into something Disney-like, right, it really has to involve the hard work of A) recognizing the structures of domination that we have to face, B) organizing collectively and somehow to change those, and C) believing it can be done, that it's worth the struggle.

I refuse to become complicitous. I refuse to say--I refuse to be alive and to watch institutions being handed over to right wing zealots. I refuse to be alive and watch the planet be destroyed. I mean, when you mentioned-- you talk about the collective imagination, you know, I mean that imagination emerges when people find strength in collective organizations, when they find strength in each other.