Thirty-five thousand feet above India on the way to Bali...

Exactly a decade ago, the nations of the world gathered in Kyoto, Japan and negotiated the first treaty with commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  I was in Kyoto with an NRDC delegation led by NRDC Founding Director John Adams. I remember vividly the speculation that went on for days about whether Vice President Gore would travel to the conference to try to break the deadlocked talks.  It would be very unusual for a Vice President to show up at such multilateral negotiations, particularly where there is a high risk of failure.   

Gore did decide to come to Kyoto.  At the time, we saw it an act of political courage and a sign of the VP’s deep personal passion about curbing global warming.  Gore’s twenty-four hour visit to Kyoto made a difference.  The American negotiators led by Stuart Eisenstat finally hammered out a deal after a night without sleep for most of delegates and many of us observers.

It is clear now that the Federal Government then was ahead of the American people.  The Clinton Administration had pushed forward with the negotiations even though the Kyoto Protocol would be dead on arrival in the Senate. President Clinton recognized that the U.S. public really did not appreciate nor understand the threat of global warming.  Five months before the Kyoto talks, he called for public education, but the resulting efforts, including a day-long White House conference, were limited. The Kyoto conference and Gore’s bold intervention got a lot of attention in the media, but the interest in climate change then began to fade again.   

Today we have the total opposite situation. Instead of being at the center of the negotiations in Bali, the United States is on the sidelines.  The main worry is whether our government will attempt to block the rest of the international community from moving forward.  The U.S. is even more isolated with the recent election of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in Australia.  One of Rudd’s first actions was to ratify Kyoto and to assert his leadership on climate change.  

The U.S. Government has fallen way behind its own citizenry.  Even three years ago, almost 90% of the public wanted the U.S. to ratify Kyoto.  A recent poll found 76% favor a treaty that would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2050.  This public concern is already being translated into action at the municipal and state level.  More than 600 mayors have pledged to meet the Kyoto targets in their own cities; and the states are taking action to reduce emissions and create carbon markets.  U.S. business interests are increasingly demanding the government put into place economy-wide mandates. 

Climate change is no longer an abstraction for Americans.  At the time of Kyoto, it was for most people a distant threat.  For me personally, “global warming” has gone from being a problem I took on for my grandchildren to one which could harm my own children within my own lifetime.  We are now all seeing and feeling climate change. I was struck recently by an open letter from hunters and fishermen in Iowa who called upon the Presidential candidates to address global warming.  They have seen the changes in duck migrations and trout streams.  For millions of others, it was the photos of polar bears on melting ice floes. These could be some of the most important images of our times. They helped to connect people to the threat climate changes poses not only to the bears, but to all of us.

Al Gore will be coming to Bali next week.  He will once again be at the high-level climate talks, not as a government official, but rather as a Nobel Prize and Academy Award winner. Gore has educated not only Americans, but people worldwide about what the scientists have been warning us now for almost two decades.  We can only hope that his message on the need for rapid and dramatic action to combat global warming will be heard.