Worth: What do you say to those who are heavily invested in the fossil fuels industry? There are significant vested interests in the status quo.

Some in the group you are describing seem determined to fight against reality itself and promote public confusion about global warming by relying on what can be called propaganda. Just to take one example, the executive team at Exxon-Mobil. They began, with the immediate past CEO, to spend millions of dollars per year to finance the spreading of disinformation designed to prevent the formation of rational policies on global warming. They’ve gotten away with it to an astonishing degree, but they are just putting off their payment to the piper. They have not distinguished themselves in the process. But sooner or later, they are going to have to look the truth squarely in the eye: Big changes are looming for them.

This happened before with the surgeon general’s report linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer in 1964. Some of the tobacco companies hired scientific prostitutes to promote the view that there was no credible evidence supporting the surgeon general’s conclusions. And America continued to lose more people to smoking-related premature death every year than all Americans killed in World War II. Now the companies that did that are in disrepute. Years from now, Exxon-Mobil’s behavior currently will be seen in the same way. It’s immoral.

Green Technologies

Worth: As the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, the United States will have to bear an enormous economic burden in addressing global warming.

If we see the reality of this challenge just in terms of burdens, we run the risk of completely missing the opportunities involved. The automobile companies, for example, have successfully lobbied for the lowest emissions and lowest mileage requirements of any advanced country on Earth. The auto companies elsewhere have been producing cars that are far more efficient in terms of mileage or emissions. The stated purpose was to safeguard the supposed economic benefits to our automobile companies. Yet, both GM and Ford, unfortunately, are losing market share and market capitalization at an alarming rate. The companies that are doing well, like Toyota, are those that have taken the lead in producing hybrids and more-efficient cars and trucks. The U.S. companies are still betting on advertising-led gas-guzzler strategies that American consumers are turning away from in droves. If our companies had looked at this in terms of the opportunities it presented, we might well be leading the world today instead of lagging behind and trying to stave off bankruptcy.

Kyoto

Worth: One of the reasons the Bush administration gave for refusing to sign the Kyoto treaty was that it would have imposed a burden on the U.S. economy that emerging economies like India and China would not have to bear. Is there some validity to this argument?

No, only superficially. Every international agreement since the end of World War II has involved a basic equation differentiating the obligations of the wealthier industrial countries and those of poorer developing economies. The precedent for Kyoto was the Montreal Protocol of 1987, which addressed the first crisis of the global environment, the stratospheric ozone depletion problem. The world agreed to a historic treaty in Montreal that has worked to solve the problem. The formula involved the industrial countries acting first, developing the technologies and methodologies to address the issues, then the poorer nations were brought on board in a second phase a few years later. In 1990, the London Amendments toughened those standards, and all nations of the world are now abiding by them.

When the nations of the world met in Kyoto, that same basic formula was applied to phase in the obligations of the wealthy nations first, and those of developing nations in the second phase. The idea that poor nations with a standard of living and per capita income only a tiny fraction of ours being asked to shoulder the burden of solving a problem we have largely created would be a formula for complete deadlock for any effort to solve a global problem like this.

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