Short Wave - A Climate Time Capsule (Part 1): The Start of the International Climate Change Fight

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

In 1992, diplomats and scientists at the United Nations negotiated the first-ever treaty intended to tackle the scientific phenomenon now known as climate change. This brought the issue to the forefront and led to a series of conferences that would occur almost every year for the next 30 years. Short Wave host Emily Kwong talks to freelance climate reporter, Dan Charles, about how those at the conference wrote a clear and ambitious goal that they didn't even fully understand.Email the show at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers. Emily Kwong here with a voice that should be very familiar to you. We have Dan Charles here. He's a longtime correspondent for NPR, now freelance reporter. Dan, how's life as a self-made story machine? I wish I felt like a machine, Emily. It's more like a distracted dog chasing squirrels, you know, the squirrels being stories.

There's a lot of, you know, story acorns out there to gather. And one of them is this kind of time capsule moment you've found from when the world was first coming to grips with climate change. Right. What happened was I was sitting in Glasgow, Scotland, November 2021, in the press center at this big international climate summit organized by the U.N. Yeah, you called us from Glasgow. I did. There were thousands of people at this meeting. Diplomats from all over the world were haggling over global goals for cutting. greenhouse emissions. These meetings happen almost every year, actually. They've been going on for the last 30 years. 30 years. So international actors have been trying to solve this problem for

basically my entire life. Yeah, and just half of my life, Emily. Well, here we are. Anyway, this whole process started with the mother of all climate change agreements, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was adopted in 1992. I'm sitting in Scotland, and I think I should actually take a look at this treaty. So I pull in the up on my computer, and I read this section right at the top that kind of stunned me. Article 2. What did it say? The ultimate goal of this treaty, it said, is to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at levels that would prevent any dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system. Anthropogenic interference. Anthropogenic, meaning human

caused. This sounds pretty clear and insensible. It does. But, you know, they failed, right? We are now seeing the effects of heat waves, droughts, rising sea levels. Yeah. And it got me thinking, what was going on in the minds of the diplomats when they drafted this language? Did they really intend to reach this goal? Was there a chance back then that the world could have avoided the global warming that's happening right now? Or were the seeds of failure already there, you know, in 1992? Sounds like you need a little time machine to go find out. Well, I did the next best thing. I got tapes of some of those UN negotiating sessions.

Oh, cool. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I heard the negotiator from India, for instance, Chandra Shekhar Dasgupta. We are disappointed that the convention does not provide for a time-bound program of stabilization of emissions from developed countries. That was Ambassador Dasgupta in 1992. I tracked him down at his home outside New Delhi to see what he thinks about it today. I'm sorry to, you know, for the delay. It's a murderously hot day here.

It's a 114 degrees Fahrenheit. Oof, it says a lot. Yeah. I tracked down a few other folks, too, and I think I found some answers. So today on the show, Dan Charles brings us a time capsule from the dawn of the world's fight against climate change. How a bunch of scientists and diplomats 30 years ago wrote a clear and very ambitious goal that even they didn't fully understand. And why the United States, almost by itself, vetoed the idea of binding commitments to cut greenhouse emissions. You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR.

Okay, Dan, we have time traveled back to 1992. There was no World Wide Web yet. The first George Bush was president. I wasn't even in kindergarten yet. Remind us, what did we know about climate change at that point? We knew that greenhouse gases were building up in the atmosphere. There was solid evidence that they were going to warm the planet. There was a lot of talk about it, even in the U.S. presidential campaign in 1988.

But the way Bill Hare describes it, he was part of the Australian negotiating delegation at the time and later worked for Greenpeace. He says the consequences hadn't yet come into full. focus. We all felt an oncoming threat. I guess none of us felt that it was an imminent threat like it is today. There's a moment that illustrates this feeling of, yeah, this is happening, but maybe it won't be so bad. It was right at the end when the head of the New Zealand delegation, Suzanne Blumhart, was making some final remarks, thanking the chairman and so forth. Mr. Chairman, I just want to add one small personal note here. I did buy a half-a-house. I did buy a house while I was here and it is actually directly at sea level. So this, I suppose, indicates

some faith I had in the process we're involved in at the moment. It's a very nice house. Wow. I asked the delegate from India, Chandra Shachar Dasgupta, about this. There is much, much greater public awareness of the dimensions of the problem now. So if it was all kind of theoretical back then, why did anyone feel the urge to develop a whole international treaty about it. Yeah. It actually started with something that I had almost forgotten about. Emily, remember the ozone hole?

I do. I remember learning about it in middle school science. There's an ozone layer way up in the stratosphere that protects us from cancer-causing radiation from the sun. And some chemicals were basically eating away at the protective ozone layer back in the day. Exactly. Exactly. So the world's atmospheric scientists had sounded the alarm about this in the 1980s, and governments reacted. In 1987, they all signed this treaty to phase out most of those chemicals.

And now today, the ozone layer is slowly recovering. Just hearing you spell it out like that, it's kind of an amazing success story, isn't it? Yeah, it really is. And Bill Hare, the Australian scientist, says this was a moment when the community of atmospheric scientists felt this power and responsibility. Science drove it. Science drove the politics, right? There was a real sense. We have just dodged this bullet. So he's saying now we're going to save the climate just as we saved everyone from that hole in the ozone layer.

Exactly. So they organized big international conferences. And at one of those conferences in 1990, they actually came out with the goal that later found its way into the treaty. Ah, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Yeah, yeah, that paragraph that shocked me when I read it, you know, in Glasgow, the one about stabilizing concentrations of greenhouse gases at levels that will prevent any dangerous interference in the climate system. Dan, why did that sentence shock you reading it today? Because it talks about concentrations of greenhouse gases, not emissions, which is absolutely the key. And it's something that I think a lot of people still haven't fully grasped. the idea is as we burn fossil fuels, clear forests, release all that CO2, it builds up in the air, you know, like water filling a bathtub as long as the faucet is running.

You can cut fossil fuel burning in half, and that's great, but that just means the bathtub just fills up more slowly. It's still filling up. So to actually stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, you actually have to turn off the faucet. Meaning you have to stop burning coal and gas and oil. Yeah, cut net emissions all the way to zero, which is a huge, huge challenge. And to see that promise in a treaty signed 30 years ago, that's what kind of amazed me. I see. I mean, when you talk to these negotiators, do you think they really understood the implications of what they were putting down on paper?

Yeah, well, Bill Hare says he did. We knew what we were doing with that, right? We made sure the best of our abilities at that time, this was a very powerful article. But honestly, he seems to have been the exception. Most of the negotiators and even environmentalists treated that part of the treaty as kind of irrelevant. At least that's according to Michael Oppenheimer, who was there representing the Environmental Defense Fund. It's all so future-looking, so detached from actual government actions that nobody was worried about it. So the governments didn't worry about it because there's nothing anybody could hold them to in the near term.

So you're saying this big impressive goal in the treaty that got you so excited, it ended up not to really amount to anything. Yeah. Well, nobody was too focused on it at that time in 1992. It actually feels a lot more relevant today. Sure. People are now actually trying to figure out how to get to zero emission. So it's kind of come back into style. Yeah. Well, if that wasn't the thing people focused on at the time, what did they think was important? So there was a big struggle over a totally different section of the treaty called commitments, which talked about emissions, not concentrations, and whether countries had to limit those emissions right away. And in grappling with these commitments, were all countries going to make them or just some countries? That's a very important point.

These were just for richer countries, like those in Europe, the U.S., and Japan. In 1992, they accounted for close to half of all the greenhouse gas emissions. from the entire world and the vast majority of historical emissions. They were the ones who'd been filling up the bathtub, so to speak. And the representatives of developing countries, like Chandra Shakur Dasgupta, from India, argued successfully that developing countries should not have to limit their emissions because they hadn't created this problem. They first needed to basically catch up.

The first and overriding priority of the developing country parties is economic, and social development and poverty eradication. And China was one of those developing countries, too. And, I mean, China is now the number one country in the rankings of greenhouse gas emitters. That's right. And India's number three. And we are number two. So anyway, the big fight was over these targets, these commitments to limit emissions. The European countries wanted a provision saying that industrialized countries would bring

their emissions back down to 1990 levels by the year 2000. Hugo Shale, who was with the Austrian delegation, says this was more of a statement of political intent than a real plan. But still, he says it was important. I think that we were all conscious of the fact that some of the targets we were discussing were it was very unlikely that we would reach it. But there was also a spirit of unless we were setting ourselves ambitious targets, we would not come anywhere close to what we needed. Right. So that was the position of the Europeans. What was the U.S. saying at this time?

The U.S. was dead set against those targets. Oh, why? Okay. So I went to visit Bob Reinstein, the top U.S. negotiator. He's in his 80s now. He had helped negotiate the ozone hole treaty, but he told me when he heard about these climate change negotiations, he had a totally different reaction.

And I thought, oh, my God, they're going after fossil fuels. At that point, fossil fuels were nearly 90 percent. of global energy consumption. So Bob felt like trying to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions was an attack on the economy of the U.S. He did, and others too. He tells the story of going over to the White House before these negotiations got started,

sitting down with John Sununu, the chief of staff for George H.W. Bush, real tough guy. So we sit down and he says, so the Europeans want us to take emission targets. What are you going to do about that? I said, we've analyzed them in detail. and what they're proposing is not feasible. I mean, technologically, yes, economically, no, politically, no.

And if we're going to have a treaty that the U.S. can ratify, the targets can't be in it. And he said, okay. So those were his instructions, you know, no binding limits on greenhouse emissions. You know, it's U.S. versus the whole world. And that is where we're going to leave it for today, shortwave listeners. Tune in tomorrow to hear what negotiators thought they were agreeing to. And what the people who wrote the treaty back then think of it today. Can I play a little teaser, Emily?

Oh, why not? Let's do it. In those days, you could smoke in the UN. So here he is with his secrets. That's with one arm over Bob Reinstein saying, you've f***ed us. Spicy, Dan. I can't wait to hear the rest of the story. Can't wait. Tell it. Today's episode was produced by Eva Tespy. Edited by Giselle Grayson, our senior supervising editor, and fact-checked by Margaret Serino.

The audio engineer for this episode was Josh Newell. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Anya Grunman is our senior vice president of programming. Thanks to Jordan Wilms at the United Nations Climate Change Archive, who provided the archival audio. Renata Christ, Hugo Shaleigh, Dan Badanski, Richard Kinley, Cindy Baxter, and Helen Plume. I'm Dan Charles. And I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR.