Obama needs to feel the heat

By Bill McKibben

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Here's a story of two presidents, Barack Obama of the United States and Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives.

Both are young and charismatic. Both were elected last fall to replace discredited incumbents (Nasheed's predecessor ruled the island nation for three decades and kept him in a political prison for years).

Both have troublesome legislatures (the opposition party controls the chamber in the Maldives).

But on the biggest question the planet faces — if we'll take action in time to slow down global warming — they couldn't be more different. One, Nasheed, is leading the fight. The other, as we saw recently when he announced that there would be no new treaty anytime soon, is only half in the battle. They both plan to go to the U.N.-sponsored climate conference in Copenhagen next month, but Nasheed will be there to say: Seize the moment. Obama will be there to spin, to say, no doubt elegantly: Chill.

To understand the difference between the two men is to understand much of the politics of global warming, as well as the chances for an agreement on climate change significant enough to matter.

In Nasheed's case, geography almost requires him to be outspoken. His nation is what you picture when you picture paradise: 1,200 tiny islands, each ringed by a reef with a lagoon, white sand beaches and coconut palms. A small fraction have been turned into tourist resorts, but most are either uninhabited or home to fishing communities that go back thousands of years.

But the highest point on most of those islands is only a few feet above sea level. They can't cope with the rising oceans that every expert says global warming will bring, and they can't cope with the dying coral that comes when seawater gets hotter and more acidic. And so Nasheed has made global warming his rallying cry.

He's versed in the latest science. He knows, for instance, that trying to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius and atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide to 450 parts per million is no longer viable. That given what science now shows, the much tougher target of 350 parts per million represents his country's only chance for survival. As Rajendra Pachauri, the only scientist ever to accept the Nobel Prize for his work on climate, said this month: At 450 ppm, the Maldives and many other islands, as well as larger low-lying countries such as Bangladesh, "will be completely devastated."

So Nasheed has gone to work. Some of his actions have been symbolic: As part of a global day of climate action, he trained his entire cabinet to scuba dive so they could hold an underwater meeting on an endangered coral reef; they signed a resolution to be presented at the Copenhagen summit demanding that nations take steps to return the atmosphere's carbon level to 350 parts per million. And some of his actions have been entirely practical: To show its willingness to lead, the Maldives (a poor nation) has committed to being carbon neutral by 2020. There are lots of wind towers on the way, and I've seen plans for farming seaweed to make biofuels.

Contrast that with Obama. He too has acted; in fact, he's done more than his three predecessors combined. He's taken admirable steps on automobile fuel economy, put stimulus money into green job plans and surrounded himself with an excellent cast of scientific advisers. But doing more than George W. Bush on global warming is like doing more than George Wallace on racial healing.

So it's not good news that, internationally, Obama's spokesmen have stuck to the 450 ppm-2 degree target. And it's not good news domestically that Obama turned climate legislation over to Congress to produce, slotting it behind health care on his list of priorities. He should have been able to predict what would happen: The already none-too-strong Waxman-Markey (House) and Kerry-Boxer (Senate) bills have been laden with ever more gifts to ever more special interests and ever more loopholes to undermine their targets. And now the Senate legislation has apparently been handed to Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., for some more tweaking, an exercise that seems unlikely to end well.