Last week former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in researching and bringing awareness to global climate change. Adil Najam and William Moomaw, both of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, have served on the IPCC for several years and helped produce the panel's fourth assessment report. Najam was a lead author of this report, which was released this year. This week I sat down with Moomaw, a professor of international environmental policy and the director of Fletcher's Center for International Environment and Resource Policy, to talk about the recent award and get his opinion about climate trends.
Jamie Bologna: You basically won a Nobel Peace Prize last week.
William Moomaw: I guess I did, yeah. We were sort of joking about this. There are [so many] of us on the panel, so it is like being a "Nobel laur-ette."
JB: Still, how does it feel to win that award?
WM: It feels good. It means that the work of the agency has been recognized. Let me put it this way: Al Gore couldn't have won the award without us, because we provided him with all the data. He did a wonderful job of publicizing it, but the heavy lifting of getting all the information was done by the panel and all the researchers in the world whose data and articles were reviewed and analyzed and studied by the members of the panel over the years.
JB: How much control do we really have over the Earth's climate?
WM: What's really stunning is how, in the last few years, we've just seen dramatic increases in not only the carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, but [also in the] temperature. Eleven of the 12 warmest years on record occurred in the last 12 years, just to put it in perspective. The concentration of carbon dioxide is now about 37 percent higher than pre-industrial levels. So at the very least, we're changing the composition of the atmosphere. And through the carbon dioxide we're changing the acidity of the ocean, causing coral reefs to dissolve and shellfish to die off.
JB: So where do we go from here?
WM: You have to look at it in terms of what the opportunities are in transportation. For example, it's not that difficult to double the efficiency of the transportation fleet. ... In fact, had the United States not doubled the efficiency of the auto fleet between the 1970s and the 1980s, which is where we're stuck now ... our emissions from the auto fleet would be dramatically higher than they already are. They would just be enormous. So we already did that once, and it made a difference.
JB: What should the government do?
WM: Government policies can make all of these things happen more rapidly. It's clear that even at around $3 a gallon, gasoline is still inexpensive in most people's minds. We've hardly changed the amount we've driven. It should be possible to raise that price, and then what would we do with the revenues? We could use those as incentives for people to buy more efficient vehicles. ... The big [problem the government can help with], which should actually be the easiest, but is actually proving most difficult, is electric power. We have [a large number of] coal-burning power plants. The average age of those plants is over 40 years, which is beyond their design life. We have some plants that are 80-years-old that are still in use. They are incredibly inefficient, and under the Clean Air Act they are grandfathered in so that they're incredibly dirty. So not only are they producing heat-trapping gases, they are producing acid rain and smog, and they can continue to do this under the rules.
JB: Some people argue in favor of "clean coal." Is that a misnomer?
WM: Some people call it an oxymoron. I believe there's cleaner coal; "clean coal" may be a [bit] too far. What they're really talking about is integrated coal gasification, where you basically leave all the pollutants behind. So what goes into the power plant is clean, but then you've got this big, huge mess left over, and that's not clean. Go to South Africa if you want to see what coal liquefaction can do to the environment. It is really pretty ghastly what's been done there.
JB: In terms of human impact on global climate change, have we passed the breaking point? Have we come too far?
WM: The honest answer to that is nobody knows for sure. But if you look at what happened to the polar ice this summer, it has been decreasing year by year since the 1970's, getting thinner and smaller every summer. This summer it got so small that some winds coming out of the west were actually able to push a lot of the ice out of the Arctic Ocean basin, and for the first time in at least the last 100,000 years the Northwest Passage opened up for a few weeks. It would have been possible to sail a ship over the top of Canada. Now isn't that terrific? ... Global climate change is largely irreversible. Half of the carbon dioxide emitted from Henry Ford's first car is still in the atmosphere after a hundred years. Whatever we put in now will be there for a long time to come and there's not an easy way to pull it back out.
Jamie Bologna is a senior majoring in political science and Spanish. He can be reached at james.bologna@tufts.edu
