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For many patients and their families, hospital fees are already complicated, opaque and stressful. The Kingsburys show just how little control consumers have.

None of this has been clear to consumers—until this year. Hospitals and insurers have long set prices through confidential negotiations. Starting Jan. 1, hospitals were required to make their prices public under a Trump administration policy that sought to expose the sector’s pricing to greater market pressure.

Compliance with the rule has been spotty, but the available data show that prices vary widely among the plans that negotiate contracts with hospitals. While the data remains difficult for consumers to use, knowing the full range of rates could ultimately help patients negotiate their bills.

Healthcare economists note that prices in other sectors, such as airlines, can also vary for the same service, but hospitals’ steep prices mean the dollar difference between the highest and lowest rates can amount to tens of thousands of dollars. “The order of magnitude of healthcare costs is different,”

Even within an insurance plan, prices aren’t consistently low or high. A plan’s prices for one service can be among the lowest a hospital negotiates, but among the highest for another,

A person insured by Minnesota-based HealthPartners would have received the most favorable price for a hospital stay because of back problems, but the cost of an emergency room visit with the same insurance was among the highest, according to the Journal’s analysis of the data.

When insurance didn’t cover some treatments, the Journal found, Avera McKennan Hospital set its own prices that ranked among the highest anywhere in the U.S. in the Journal’s analysis.

The LifeShield price of about $780 amounted to a discount of 53% off the hospital’s charge. Ms. Kingsbury paid all of it because her plan’s benefits didn’t cover the rest of the bill. The insurance was exempt from some federal rules that protect healthcare consumers. LifeShield didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Ms. Kingsbury earned roughly $17,700 last year, tax records reviewed by the Journal show. Her husband, who is retired, received about $22,800 in yearly income from Social Security. They bought insurance in 2019 from LifeShield National Insurance Co.

The range of prices is the product of a complex interplay of multiple payers and hospitals, and a lack of competitive pressure to hold down costs, economists said. Rates have been determined by trade-offs at the bargaining table between hospitals and insurers—such as an offer of cheaper prices in return for more business—and by market power, with higher prices where hospitals dominate.

Hospitals and insurers ultimately bargain for prices to meet financial targets for revenue and profit, said David Dillon, a healthcare actuary with the consulting firm Lewis & Ellis Inc. “It is kind of as simple as both sides of the table have their revenue requirements,” he said.

“The market for healthcare just doesn’t look at all like the market for tomatoes because somebody else is literally negotiating and purchasing on your behalf,” Mr. Cooper said.

The cost for the scan under LifeShield was $1,497, almost half the price charged under Avera. However, Ms. Kingsbury’s plan at LifeShield was exempt from Affordable Care Act rules to prevent gaps in coverage. LifeShield didn’t cover this scan. So Avera charged Ms. Kingsbury the price it sets for patients not covered by insurance, at $8,451, one of the highest prices in the Journal’s analysis of publicly available rates nationwide.

“Healthcare is a service and it can be an expensive service, especially for a serious condition. That’s why health insurance exists,” said Avera spokeswoman Ms. Meyers. “It is important for consumers to understand what they are buying and the coverage it provides.”

The Journal compared Avera McKennan’s 2019 PET CT price for Ms. Kingsbury with the price Medicare would pay, as calculated by price-comparison startup Turquoise Health Co. The hospital’s cash price for Ms. Kingsbury in 2019 was 5.7 times the Medicare rate, according to the Journal’s analysis using newly public data collected by Turquoise. That’s one of the highest multiples of any of the more than 1,200 U.S. hospitals in the analysis.

Of the EU’s 27 countries, only 13 produce nuclear power. Some ban it. France and Germany, the two countries that dominate EU policymaking, find themselves directly opposed

France generates over 70% of its power from nuclear reactors

when it comes to nuclear power the two are firm pals. It is tempting to carve the EU into simple blocs,

How the EU is managing the decision reveals a lot about the club.

Franco-German engine sputtering on nuclear policy, unlikely alliances have formed. France and the likes of Poland and the Czech Republic are usually sparring partners.

Countries in eastern Europe see the French as protectionists who suck up to Russia

Nuclear policy is a reminder that fates in the EU are bound together, whether the topic is energy, the environment or the economy

Germany is likely to be on the losing side. It gave up on nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster in 2011, when an earthquake and tsunami caused a meltdown in Japan

Countries from Belgium to Bulgaria followed

scrapping plans to build nuclear power stations and pledging to switch others off

Nuclear power is another debate in which Paris gets its way.

the EU is a dealmaking machine, with consensus forged via a mix of bribery, blackmail and back-scratching.

Gas power is undergoing the same kinds of debate as nuclear power. While gas generates carbon emissions, it is cleaner than coal, argue its supporters.

If the politics are linked, so are the policy consequences

A likely compromise is that while stiff rules could remain for day-to-day spending, countries could be able to spend more freely in the name of the green transition. If nuclear power is labelled green in the private sector, it becomes harder to avoid a similar designation when it comes to public money

On paper the European Commission, which makes the initial decision on how to treat nuclear power, is full of civil servants who offer technocratic answers. In practice, they know the question of nuclear power is political. They also know that life will be easier if they answer it quickly, preferably before a new German government containing a virulently anti-nuclear Green party is formed

Germany has pledged to close all its nuclear power plants by 2022

those countries that pride themselves on only using the cleanest energy will benefit from those that rely on more debatable sources.

The EU is an increasingly homogenous beast, with fewer carve-outs for those who want to do things differently. Collective decisions have collective outcomes. “To approach our atomic future separately…would have been insane,” wrote Monnet. The EU will approach its atomic future together, whether some countries like it or no

If a less democratic world is needed to deal with the climate, who are the people who’d like to bring a less democratic world into being?

The aim is not to reach net zero faster – neither party has laid out workable plans to do so – but to endear climate-conscious voters to an ethno-nationalist cause.

It’s not just the right, however, that has considered a turn away from democracy for the planet’s sake.

As much as US and UK liberals have talked up the promise of spreading democracy throughout the world this century, though, many centrists – as the Progressive International’s David Adler wrote in 2018 – are pretty down on democracy itself. Analysing the World Values and the European Values surveys, Adler found that centrists in wealthy countries were less supportive of democracy than their counterparts on either the left or the far right. Less than half of centrists in the US thought elections were essential; only 25% saw civil rights as a critical feature of democracy.

Actually existing centrist politicians, meanwhile, such as Emmanuel Macron in France, haven’t shown any willingness to address the climate crisis at the speed or scale it demands.

Openly authoritarian governments hardly fare better. China has rolled out an impressive array of green technologies over the last decade with massive industrial policy. Yet still it continues to prioritise fossil-fuelled growth, with its 14th five-year plan pledging to reduce “emissions intensity” by just 18% through 2025, and the planned opening of 43 new coal-fuelled power stations

But India, like China, has missed the deadline to update its emissions reduction plan in advance of UN climate talks in Glasgow this November.

There is simply no class of enlightened technocrats in powerful governments waiting in the wings to save the day.

A proposal for curbing emissions from the developed world so that the billion individuals who live without electricity can enjoy its benefits would probably pass in a landslide in a world referendum,” the writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor has argued, “but it would likely fail if the vote were limited to people in the wealthiest countries.”

In the less upbeat SSP3, “resurgent nationalism” and “concerns about competitiveness and security” start to emerge as countries go their own way in trying to adapt to and (more rarely) mitigate rising temperatures.

A best-case scenario detailed in their report by IPCC scientists, Shared Socioeconomic Economic Pathway 1, involves “more inclusive development” and unprecedented collaboration among the world’s governments to manage the global commons

The best hope in the short term is for a popular front to browbeat the middling centrists who claim to “believe science” into actually acting on it, and beating back the illiberal right accordingly.

Christian vaccine refusal not only rejects self-care, it enhances risks to innocent and vulnerable neighbors. Even vaccinated people can catch relatively rare breakthrough cases. And every person—regardless of vaccination status—is vulnerable to the strains placed on a region’s hospitals when COVID runs rampant. 

As a person created in the image of God, taking care of yourself is an independent good. Taking care of yourself so that you can care for others is an even nobler good. 

The balance is clear. It is incumbent on the Christian to take care of themselves, including by taking medicine “in order not to become contaminated” (a nice definition of a vaccine before vaccines were invented). To the extent that he or she takes risks, those risks should be on behalf of others

In addition, my liberty doesn’t extend to materially impairing your ability to pursue happiness.

The idea that liberty has limits is inherent in the American social compact

Through more than two centuries of controversy and progress, our classical liberal legal system is learning to harmonize these three unalienable rights.

I have liberty, yes, but my liberty does not extend to taking or endangering your life

I also fear that the relentless right-wing political focus on religious liberty has obscured two realities—that our liberties have limits when they collide with the rights of others, and that the exercise of our liberty carries with it profound moral responsibility. 

In March I wrote to warn that Christian vaccine hesitancy was a looming national problem. That which we have feared has come to pass. Indeed, as both the geographic concentrations of unvaxxed Americans and the survey data demonstrate, Christian vaccine refusal is helping sustain this pandemic:

Foremost among them are protections for life and health.

By contrast, what does the anti-vax Christian seek? The liberty to risk both the lives of others (through the physical danger of COVID and/or the danger of swamped medical facilities) and their pursuit of happiness (through the continued physical, economic, and social strains of a pandemic extended in part but the choices of anti-vax citizens). 

let’s be honest and clear. The majority of Christians seeking religious exemptions are using religion as a mere pretext for their real concern—be it fear of the shot or the simple desire to do what they want.

I’m quite concerned that long-standing, justified Christian concerns for religious liberty have inadvertently created a sense of religious entitlement that obscures the desperate need for religious responsibility.

For the Christian believer, the pursuit of freedom is inseparable from the pursuit of virtue. We do not seek liberty simply to satisfy our desires or to appease our fears. In fact, when we pursue the freedom to make our neighbors sick, we violate the social compact and undermine our moral standing in politics, law, and culture. Christian libertinism becomes a long-term threat to religious liberty itself. 

Our founders recognized the threat of libertinism to liberty. “Our Constitution,” John Adams wrote, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.” In fact, a sufficient degree of vice would, Adams argued, “break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”

it is increasingly clear that many of the remaining holdouts need their hearts to change before their minds will change. It’s their moral framework that’s broken, and when that framework is broken, reason and virtue have difficulty penetrating a hardened heart.

The proper framework is easy to articulate, yet hard to create. Take prudent measures to protect yourself. When you choose to take risks, take risks for others. And always recognize that liberty isn’t license. Believers should seek freedom to pursue virtue, not to indulge their desires or appease their fears. 

In more prosaic legal terms, the state is able to regulate even the strongest of liberties when it possesses a “compelling governmental interest” and places those regulations in proper limits

Now is the time to take a clear stand. Not in a way that mocks or condescends, but one can be firm while also being respectful. As the Apostle Paul told Timothy, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power, love, and sound judgment.” The power is not political power, but the power of God over the fears of man. The love is for God and for our neighbor. And sound judgment should help us separate lies from truth and tell us that no argument for liberty should trump our responsibility to spare our nation and our neighbors and finally take the vaccine. 

And from 1940 to 1945, he stood alone, and then with the United States, to (yes) save the liberty of the world.

From 1935 to 1940, as a failed and isolated politician, Churchill was utterly, repeatedly right about the dual threat of German aggression and British pacifism

Then, two extraordinary achievements

the main accusation against Churchill — like the main accusation against Jefferson — is racism. Did Churchill’s imperialism postulate that the Britons were among the “higher-grade races”? And did this contribute to his disdain for Indians and others? The answer to both questions is yes — with the recognition that such attitudes were not far removed from those of American imperialists in the 1890s who assumed the “White man’s burden” in the Philippines. (Theodore Roosevelt was also a firm believer in racial hierarchy.)

The charge that he had a blind spot about India the size of a subcontinent is baked. (“I am quite satisfied with my views on India,” he said, “and I don’t want them disturbed by any bloody Indians.”)

The charge that he maliciously caused the Bengal famine — in the sense that Joseph Stalin caused the Ukrainian famine — seems half-baked.

To me, the charge that the author of Gallipoli and Narvik could display terrible military judgment is baked.

My best advice is to read the book alongside Andrew Roberts’s invaluable “Churchill: Walking With Destiny” and judge for yourself.

Wheatcroft puts every baked and half-baked leftist criticism in one place.

a revisionist biography by Geoffrey Wheatcroft titled “Churchill’s Shadow.” Wheatcroft portrays Churchill as the sum of his misjudgments and the embodiment of imperial bigotry

The world that emerges from the pandemic will be shaped by an adversarial rivalry that is not just about each side’s relative power, but has become an existential competition as each side strives to demonstrate the superiority of its system of government.

Starting with the Winter Olympics in February and culminating with the 20th Communist Party congress later in the year, China will stage a series of tightly choreographed events designed to project the competence, clout and all-round superiority of party rule, and formalise Mr Xi’s position at its helm beyond the ten-year tenure that has hitherto been the norm.

As the year goes on, the near certainty that, health permitting, Mr Trump will be the Republican presidential candidate in 2024 means America’s political debate will be overshadowed by fears of the biggest constitutional crisis since the civil war.

If the theatre of politics makes Western democracy look dysfunctional relative to Chinese autocracy, 2022 may offer a different verdict on which system delivers the most competent economic management. From tech companies to post-pandemic reopening, China and America are taking starkly divergent approaches to similar challenges

America and the rest of the West will move into a living-with-covid mindset. The disease will not disappear, but become endemic. Booster jabs will become the norm, remaining travel restrictions will be relaxed and lockdowns will become a thing of the past

China, by contrast, will stick with a zero-covid policy throughout 2022. Having terrified its citizens about the disease and touted its toughness as a mark of superiority, China’s government cannot easily change course. The country will remain walled off from the rest of the world with long quarantines and sharply restricted travel.

In both of these cases, China’s draconian approach will eventually cause economic damage.

All this will complicate China’s already challenging macroeconomic environment. China-watchers have worried for years about the consequences of unwinding the country’s enormous property boom and the jaw-dropping levels of debt that accompanied it. The crisis at Evergrande, a huge developer, suggests that this tricky transition is at last under way. It will dominate 2022 as other property-related firms fail. Add to that structural challenges, from a shrinking workforce to a rapidly growing number of old-age dependents, and the economic pressures are considerable. Annual GDP growth could fall to 5%

With covid-19 behind it, its fiscal tightening mostly complete and (assuming some version of Mr Biden’s bill is passed) with a long-overdue effort to improve infrastructure under way, America’s economy could grow smartly, even as its politics frays. GDP growth of 4%, not far off China’s, is plausible.

in theory the two sides could make progress in plenty of areas, such as devising a sensible deal on trade and technology to replace the tariffs of the Trump era; agreeing on a common approach to cyber-security, nuclear non-proliferation or the militarisation of space; or finding ways to accelerate the clean-energy transition in the wake of the COP26 climate meeting in Glasgow.

The good news is that a military confrontation seems unlikely in 2022. The overriding need to preserve stability in the run-up to the party congress will discourage China from adventurism or excessive sabre-rattling, whether around Taiwan or in the South China Sea. The bad news is that the Thucydides Trap will not have gone away.

Not only is the process still prohibitively expensive, research has shown that so far it hasn’t been very effective. A 2019 study at Stanford University found that current carbon capture projects miss well more than half of the carbon dioxide in emissions.

Project Tundra’s managers hope they can achieve a significant breakthrough, aiming to capture 90 percent of the CO2 once they have the project in operation. Essentially, the carbon dioxide would be absorbed out of the “flue gas,” or exhaust, by amine-based solvents, which would be pumped to a regeneration unit that would heat the solvents and free the CO2 again, in a pure form. Then it would be condensed and pumped to natural caverns deep underground.

For now the project is still in the design and engineering phase, together with financial analysis. Equipment at the site has been used to test the process; now the results are being analyzed. If the pieces fall into place and the project gets a green light from regulators and company officials, construction could get started as early as next year.

“This carbon sequestration project really gets us excited,” he said. “It gives coal a role in stabilizing the grid.” He added: “If there are better solutions than coal out there, so be it. We just believe those solutions don’t exist.”

There are warning signs, nonetheless. Even though the price of oil has bounced back after the disastrous months when the pandemic struck last year, and production at existing wells is humming along, there’s little new drilling in the Bakken. The number of rigs has fallen from 55 in early 2020 to 23 today.

Her attitude about the coal-powered electricity she uses in her car is that it’s not great, it’s probably on the way out, it’s better than using gasoline.“Gas is a continuous circle of energy wastage,” she said. “You have to use energy to extract it, you have to use energy to transport it, you have to use energy to refine it, you have to use energy to transport it back.

Kathy Neset moved to the Bakken with a degree in geology from Brown University in 1979 and built a successful oil-field consulting company on the vast, windswept jumble of low hills and ridges, once good only for cattle raising. She understands perfectly well that electric cars are coming, yet she has faith that new uses for petroleum will keep the oil sector in business.

“Do we blow away like tumbleweeds? Or do we evolve?” she said in an interview at her gleaming office building in Tioga, N.D. “This is an industry that has a history of adopting, evolving and changing with the nation. I don’t see oil going away in any of our lifetimes. It’s our way of life. Where we lose out on transportation we will gain on new technologies.”

Destiny Wolf, 39, an upbeat advocate for electric vehicles, also feels the stigma of driving a Tesla — in her case a Model 3.Oil workers, Wolf said, see electric vehicles as an attack on their livelihoods. “You know, sitting there at a red light, they drive up, roll down their windows, they start yelling and cursing at me,” she said. “If that’s your existence, it’s really sad.”

Neset said she believes that investment firms, especially those that have signed on to corporate governance protocols that embrace environmental and social goals, “just don’t want to put their capital into new drilling until we figure out a way to handle this in a clean way.”

“In rural America there is very little you can do without that [oil],” Ness said. “We just don’t have opportunities here. It enables us to build schools, rather than close schools.”

Charles Gorecki, CEO of an incubator at the University of North Dakota called the Energy and Environmental Research Center, is promoting a plan similar to the coal industry’s Project Tundra. But it would go further — he envisions the injection of carbon dioxide into deep caverns as a way of enhancing the extraction of more oil. More carbon would go into the ground than would come out of it as petroleum, he said. North Dakota could even import carbon dioxide from other states.

“There is an enormous amount of space to store CO2,” he said. “What we need to do is make it an economically attractive option. The goal is to reduce carbon emissions. It should be by any and all means.”

A new state body called the Clean Sustainable Energy Authority is charged with promoting clean-energy technologies — with the understanding that the energy being talked about is from coal, oil or natural gas. Carbon capture is one idea; another is hydrogen-powered vehicles, using “blue” hydrogen from natural gas.

“Even if we transition to all electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles, North Dakota will have a part to play,” said Joel Brown, a member of the CSEA. “I think of it as a moonshot for the state of North Dakota.”

In the history of the Bakken, 3 billion barrels of oil have been pumped out. Brown said 30 billion to 40 billion more barrels is still in the ground and recoverable.

“We have to make that Bakken barrel just a little bit cleaner than every other barrel in the world,” said Ron Ness, head of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, a trade group. “You look at the standard American family and the affordability of the combustion engine, and I think gasoline is going to be around for a long time.”

North Dakota went from being the 10th-largest oil-producing state in 2005 to the second in 2015.

Watford City is in McKenzie County, which between 2010 and 2019 was the fastest-growing county in the United States, according to census figures. In the late 1990s, said Steve Holen, the school superintendent, people thought the county would soon have nothing but bison and nursing homes. Oil changed all that, and residents are reluctant to let that go.

So the oil sector, too, is putting its chips on carbon capture.

Consequently, there’s a widespread conviction in the Bakken that electric vehicles will never amount to much. “It’s a cultural challenge,” said Neset. “I’m not sure how many of these cowboys and cowgirls are going to want to jump in an electric car.”

A question about EVs that was put to a Bakken Facebook group elicited scathing, vulgar responses. “Let the retirees living in Florida, Arizona and California buy them. I am from North Dakota, give me a gas guzzling ‘truck,’” wrote one.

“Anyone that supports electric over gas and works in the Bakken is a hypocrite. Your job revolves around oil. No oil = No job for most. Easiest math I have ever done,” wrote another.

“Never, ever, ever,” wrote a third.But there are signs this hostility to electric is cracking.

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

Attempting to ease tensions with China to make cooperation on global public health possible won’t work, partly because Beijing cannot credibly commit to being more transparent and cooperative in the future.

For China’s leaders, the pandemic revealed the inexorable decline of the West, confirmed Beijing’s power and capabilities, and created more latitude for the CCP to do as it wished.

But in case cooperation fails, it must have a backup plan to rally allies and partners to provide a much greater share of global public goods, even if that means shouldering more of the costs.

as a number of U.S. embassy officials told the foreign policy analyst Colin Kahl and me for our book Aftershocks, this team’s cooperation with the Chinese government became more challenging as U.S.-Chinese rivalry intensified, largely because of China’s actions.

When COVID-19 hit, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintained near-absolute secrecy. All channels of communication between Beijing and Washington went silent, as they did between Beijing and other governments. Chinese leaders sought to conceal vital information about the emerging epidemic in China from the rest of the world, even attempting to prevent Chinese scientists from sharing the genetic sequence of the virus with scientists in other countries.

It is impossible to say for certain why the Chinese government behaved the way it did, but secrecy and control make sense in light of what the vast majority of China experts believe to be Xi’s top priority: regime survival.

Xi did not want to facilitate an international response to COVID-19 that could have attributed blame to China or isolated it through travel restrictions, either of which might have damaged the regime’s domestic legitimacy. Instead, Xi leveraged the pandemic to his advantage: China’s suppression of the virus became a matter of national pride, held up by Beijing in sharp contrast to the experience of the United States.

according to the UN, the pandemic could force a total of 490 million people into poverty—defined as the loss of access to clean water, adequate food, or shelter—pushing the global poverty rate to around seven percent by 2030, compared with the pre-pandemic target of three percent. 

Contrary to popular belief, some senior Trump administration officials grasped the national security threat posed by the virus faster than their European counterparts did. Top officials in the National Security Council began focusing on the pandemic in early January, just days after news of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, became public.

ven though Pottinger and other NSC officials were wise to the danger, they ultimately failed to persuade Trump to make the necessary preparations to deal with the pandemic when it inevitably reached the United States. 

As the administration began to formulate its response, those who favored a more comprehensive public health approach both at home and abroad were excluded or marginalized at crucial moments. The result was that the Trump administration focused more on holding China responsible for the outbreak and reducing U.S. reliance on Beijing than on the minutiae of global public health policy or the hard work of rallying the world to tackle the pandemic.

the pandemic and China’s response to it helped unify the administration behind a more comprehensive strategy to push back against Beijing. Between March 2020 and the end of the year, the senior official said, the United States put in place more containment measures than it had in the previous three years, including restrictions on Chinese technology firms, sanctions on Chinese officials, looser regulations on diplomatic contacts with Taiwan, and recognition of the repression in Xinjiang as a genocide. In this sense, the pandemic was a pivotal moment in the U.S.-Chinese rivalry. 

Competition between the two countries overwhelmed everything else, including U.S. cooperation with allies on the pandemic, leaving a global leadership vacuum that no one could fill.

The EU tried to step up by increasing funding for the WHO and for COVAX, the global initiative to share vaccines, but it never came close to organizing a global response. China’s assertive foreign policy, and its attempts to use pandemic assistance to advance its interests, aggravated European leaders and convinced them to harden their positions toward China throughout the course of 2020. 

During this period, there was hardly any international cooperation on vaccine development or distribution, no coordination on travel restrictions or the distribution of medical supplies, and limited cooperation on achieving a cessation of hostilities in conflict zones

The United States needs a strategy to address transnational threats under the conditions of great-power competition. It must aim to cooperate with rivals, especially China, to prepare for future pandemics and to tackle climate change

The economic disruption caused by COVID-19 devastated low-income countries, which received little in the way of international assistance. Especially hard hit were countries, such as Bangladesh, that had made significant development gains in the last two decades and were propelling themselves into the lower tier of middle-income economies.

Pandemics are not the only transnational threat that promises to intensify great-power rivalry and diminish the prospects for much-needed cooperation. Climate change could do the same.

the real challenge is determining what to do when cooperation with China and other rivals falls short of what is required. The United States needs a backup plan to tackle shared challenges through coalitions of the willing.

Countries that aggressively decarbonize could place sanctions and other trade restrictions on countries that do not, leading to counterresponses and new trade wars.

the impediments to cooperation between Europe and China on climate change “are becoming higher” and warn that “decision-makers must not underestimate the highly competitive aspects of how China is changing its energy production and consumption.” 

The United States and Europe will both compete with China for access to raw materials and in developing the technology needed to make their economies carbon neutral: magnets, batteries, high-performance ceramics, and light-emitting diodes, among other things

even if the U.S. government remains broadly aligned with Europe on climate policy, the Europeans could still become disaffected if Congress blocks meaningful climate action, such as commitments to cut carbon emissions or invest in clean technology. This, in turn, could diminish Europe’s willingness to help uphold the U.S.-led international order.

If, on the one hand, they mean softening U.S. rhetoric without conceding much of substance to China, they would do well to look to Europe, where governments were much more inclined than the Trump administration to cooperate with China, but China did not take them up on the offer.

If, on the other hand, they mean unilaterally making major geopolitical concessions to China—on its territorial acquisitions in the South China Sea, for instance, or the status of Taiwan—the United States would not only pay an extremely high price but also likely embolden Beijing further without actually securing cooperation on pandemics or climate change beyond what Beijing has already offered.

There is no getting around strategic competition with Beijing: it is deeply embedded in the international order, mainly because China seeks to expand its sphere of influence in Asia at the expense of the United States and its allies, which are in turn committed to thwarting Beijing’s plans.

The United States and China are also engaged in what Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, recently called “a competition of models.” China is seeking to make the world safe for the CCP and to demonstrate the effectiveness of its system. This entails pushing back against what it sees as pressure from liberal democratic countries that could thwart its objectives. For its part, the United States worries about the negative externalities of Chinese authoritarianism, such as censorship of international criticism of Beijing or the export of its tools of repression to other countries.

The United States also worries about what would happen to the military balance of power if China secured an enduring advantage in key technologies.

Even in diplomacy, friction will be endemic to the U.S.-Chinese relationship and will affect the broader international order for the foreseeable future. Outright confrontation can be avoided—but competition cannot. 

This competition places real limits on cooperation. Take the arena of global public health: many studies on how to improve pandemic preparedness call on world leaders to dramatically strengthen the WHO, including by giving it the same power to enforce international health regulations as the International Atomic Energy Agency enjoys with nuclear nonproliferation rules

The problem is getting every government to agree to a universally applicable mechanism for sanctions or some other enforcement mechanism. China will not agree to any reform that would involve intrusive inspections of its scientific research facilities.

The need for cooperation on transnational threats must change how the United States competes with China—not whether it competes.

U.S. officials should not give up on China entirely; instead, they should make a good-faith effort to work with Beijing, both bilaterally and in multilateral settings. Recognizing that there are strict limits on U.S.-Chinese cooperation is not the same as saying that no cooperation is possible.

Rather than unite the world around a common purpose, climate change is likely to deepen competition between major powers, especially as the transition away from fossil fuels creates economic winners and losers.

When it comes to pandemic preparedness, this means fully supporting the WHO (including by pressing for needed reforms) but also forging a coalition of like-minded states: a global alliance for pandemic preparedness that would regularly convene at the head-of-state level and work alongside nongovernmental organizations and the private sector.

Crucially, whenever the WHO declared an international public health emergency, alliance members would coordinate on travel and trade restrictions, as well as on public messaging and financial penalties and sanctions. Those penalties and sanctions would be aimed at those states that failed to provide sufficient access to or fully cooperate with the WHO. The alliance would support, not supplant, the WHO.

Sustained, managed competition with China could potentially help the United States build bipartisan support for investments in clean technology that would prevent Beijing from gaining an enduring advantage in this area.

ut the United States and the European Union will also need to build coalitions of the willing to deal with the international security consequences of accelerated climate change, such as extreme weather events that threaten large numbers of people, and to address the foreign policy dimensions of climate action, including managing the risk that a shift away from fossil fuels could destabilize countries and regions that are dependent on oil exports.

Cooperation across this divide should always be the first choice in times of shared crisis, but as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, the U.S.-led constellation must always have a backup plan. It did not have one in 2020. It needs one for the next crisis

It worked—there was no fighting in Pavlopil

sporadic shooting continues in eastern Ukraine. Just on October 12th, the day of an EU-Ukraine summit in Kyiv, monitors counted nearly 300 ceasefire violations

Mr Putin wrote an essay in July expanding his argument that Russia and Ukraine are a single nation. Since he has already annexed Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula, and sponsored the takeover of a big chunk of eastern Ukraine by ethnic Russian separatists, Ukrainians take his threats seriously

Russia will turn off the gas again

In 2009 it shut off the flow of gas through Ukraine for two weeks. This cost Russia a fortune, since its gas needs to pass through Ukraine to reach customers in Europe

Once it opens—which could be soon, though it is subject to legal and diplomatic challenges—Mr Putin will be able to choke off supplies to Ukraine almost at will

Technically Ukraine does not buy gas directly from Russia, but from downstream countries such as Hungary

it takes Russian gas in the east and substitutes its own gas, which is produced in the west of Ukraine, for transmission onwards. So if the flow through Ukraine were to stop, the east of the country would be in trouble

President Volodymyr Zelensky seeks shelter for his country inside NATO and the EU. But this is a non-starter. NATO members do not want to extend their principle of “an attack on one is an attack on all” to a country that Russia has already attacked.

Mr Zelensky’s first taste of geopolitics was when President Donald Trump urged him to supply dirt on Joe Biden, with a veiled threat that American support for Ukraine’s security might depend on his co-operation.

To cement relations with Germany, he waived sanctions that might have blocked Nord Stream 2 in May.

Oligarchs dominate the economy, control two of the bigger political parties and put other lawmakers on retainer. The IMF hesitates to throw money at a state from which billions have been stolen with apparent impunity.

Before the war two-thirds of people in Mariupol supported a pro-Russia political party. That share has halved. Mr Putin’s aggression has alienated the very people he claims to defend

Yet Russia still has a hand on Mariupol’s throat. The amount of cargo processed in its port has halved since 2012, first because of the war, then because Mr Putin made it harder for big ships to reach it from the Black Sea.

critics wonder if it is healthy for a city to depend so much on one tycoon. Mr Akhmetov is thought to be Ukraine’s richest man.

Mr Zelensky, a former comedian, has vowed to cut Ukraine’s oligarchs down to size. He is expected to sign a new law soon, which would allow a panel he appoints to label as “oligarchs” anyone who is very rich, finances a political party and controls media assets. This would make it harder for anyone so labelled to raise capital.

They also worry that the law might give Mr Zelensky too much discretion to cow his enemies and force them to sell their television channels to his friends.

His firms have huge unpaid debts to Naftogaz, the state wholesale supplier. This is money that could have been invested to raise domestic gas production. Meanwhile, a new Naftogaz CEO appointed by Mr Zelensky agreed to pay the state a fat dividend out of the firm’s frosty-day fund. This will help Mr Zelensky build roads, which are popular.

Chinese universities have organized classes to give students a “correct understanding” of the war, often highlighting Russia’s grievances with the West. Party newspapers have run series of commentaries blaming the United States for the conflict.

Mr. Xi has given that tale a more urgent, ominous spin. In doing so, he has embraced Mr. Putin as a fellow authoritarian lined up against Western dominance, demonstrating to the Chinese people that Mr. Xi has a partner in his cause.

“The most powerful weapon possessed by the West is, aside from nuclear weapons, the methods they use in ideological struggle,”

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, it says, “some countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Transcaucasia have become forward positions for the West to contain and meddle in Russia.”

It describes Mr. Putin as cleansing Russia of the political toxins that killed the Soviet Union.

In 2013, propaganda officials under Mr. Xi put out a documentary on the lessons of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This latest take offers an even more conspiratorial interpretation

They regard China and Russia as both menaced by “color revolution,” the party’s phrase for insurrections backed by Western governments

“They actually believe their own narrative about color revolutions and tend to see this whole situation as a U.S.-led color revolution to overthrow Putin,”

“Both domestically and internationally, Xi has been pedaling this dark narrative since he took power,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview. “It allows him to justify his accumulation of power and the changes he’s made by creating this sense of struggle and danger.”

The Biden administration has cast the war as a contest between democracy and authoritarianism. Chinese officials are mounting a counternarrative that American-led domineering is the source of conflict in Ukraine and elsewhere.

The documentary attributes the decline of the Soviet Union to political liberalization, especially what Beijing calls “historical nihilism,” or emphasizing the Communist Party’s mistakes and misdeeds. It accuses historians critical of the Soviet revolution of fabricating estimated death tolls by many millions for Stalin’s purges.

Stalin, it argues, was a modernizing leader whose purges went too far but initially “were something of a necessity” given the threats to Soviet rule. It suggests that rock music and modern fashion were symptoms of the moral rot that later set in.

“They’ve taken only one lesson from all of this, and that is you do not allow any freedom of expression,”

Previous leaders in Moscow — above all Mr. Gorbachev and Nikita S. Khrushchev — are portrayed as dupes, bewitched by the siren song of liberal reform and Western superiority.

Officials overseeing the screenings are often described in official notices as calling for cadres to maintain firm loyalty to Mr. Xi.

“Loving a party and its leader is not a cult of personality,”

Chinese leaders have been debating why the Soviet Union fell apart ever since it dissolved in 1991. More than his predecessors, Mr. Xi has blamed the Soviet Union’s breakup on lack of ideological spine and Western political subversion.

“If you have the worldview that you see in this documentary, you could tell yourself the story that the Russians are facing a real threat from the West,”

Political loyalty has become more crucial to Mr. Xi as Beijing tries to contain Covid outbreaks with stringent lockdowns, and manage a slowing economy. China’s foreign policy is under scrutiny, after some Chinese scholars posted essays criticizing Beijing’s refusal to condemn Mr. Putin.

Universities and colleges have organized indoctrination lectures for students, suggesting that officials are worried that young, educated Chinese may be receptive to the criticisms that Beijing has been too indulgent of Mr. Putin.

“There’s an ‘either we hang together or we hang separately’ attitude that comes into play,” Mr. Johnson, the former C.I.A. analyst, said of Chinese leaders. “If it’s a strong nationalist approach, then who in the party doesn’t want to be a good nationalist?”

This convergence of fossil-fuel dependence, cultural conservatism, and isolation from the most dynamic modern industries captures how comprehensively the two parties are divided by their exposure to, and attitudes about, the changes reshaping America.

The irony is that the energy transition may represent the best chance for the states most reliant on fossil fuels to benefit from the new sources of economic growth.

Last year Walter co-wrote a detailed study on how a shift away from fossil fuels would affect the states. Replacing fossil fuels with lower-carbon energy sources, she said, will create “a tremendous amount of jobs in Republican states.”

The 19 states that top the EIA’s latest rankings—for the most carbon emitted per dollar of economic output in 2018—present a singular profile. They begin with Wyoming, West Virginia, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Alaska at the top of the list and then extend across the South (including Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas), the heartland (including Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska), and the Mountain West (Montana, New Mexico)

The political leadership in these states has opposed most efforts to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. Fourteen of these states, for instance, have joined in a lawsuit (led by West Virginia) now before the Supreme Court that could undercut the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions.