Why Obama Can't Wait on Climate

 Green Giants: Conversations with Global Environmental Leaders

As Obama addresses the U.N. climate summit, Jeffrey Sachs warns that dangerous changes are happening much faster than politicians have even begun to grasp.

Xtra Insight: Read more of Sachs’ talk with The Daily Beast about world hunger, the development models he hopes to see included when President Obama meets with African leaders Tuesday—and why everyone should quit criticizing Madonna for her Malawi adoptions.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and special adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, is often referred to as the most influential economic adviser of his generation. The author of two bestselling books, The End of Poverty and Common Wealth, Sachs spoke with The Daily Beast about President Obama’s actions on the environment and the prospects for international solutions to the climate crisis.

What grade would you give President Obama on climate and energy?

A for effort and A for the portfolio of policies that have been put on the table. But no more than a B for national strategy. I don’t believe this is going to get done by leaving it to the various committees of Congress. What I would like to see from the administration is a blueprint, a timeline, and a more integrated strategy. And that’s considered politically dangerous because it seems right now in America, putting any plan on the table is politically dangerous.

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It’s progress compared to the past, but it’s nowhere up to the intensity, speed, and coherence that this crisis requires. It will satisfy getting a foot in the door, but it won’t make a rapid and scaled breakthrough. A politician might say the latter is impossible anyway. The climatologists would say that may be the political reality, but it’s not the climate reality.

Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) recently told The Hill, “As news comes in that Arctic sea ice is at an eight-year record high and the trend of cooling in the Northern Hemisphere extends, it would appear the climate for the Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill isn’t very good.” Is there any truth to this?

No. Everything that we’ve learned in the last nine years tells us the situation is very serious and potentially already spinning out of control. There are short-term variations around long-term trends, and no one is claiming there’s a precisely known timetable or magnitude of effects. But events are taking course much faster and more dangerously than the politicians even begin to contemplate. The early stages of warming change the nature of the planet in such a way that it leads to an accelerated path of natural forces that amplify the human effects. The melting of sea ice, which changes the reflectivity of the planet, is an example of that.

So your bottom line message is we can’t do too much too soon?

Yes. And we don’t have to crush the economy.

And on that economic note, China recently surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest car market and emitter of carbon dioxide. What should our negotiating strategy be with them going into the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen?

We are doing a lot of negotiating and very little joint problem solving. I’m not so naïve as to think that it’s all a happy party where we sit down together, but it’s not all negotiation either. China is a coal-based economy, so carbon capture and sequestration (or CCS) is not just an important issue, it’s the important issue right now, and it’s a critical issue for the U.S. since we have 22 coal-producing states. We may be able to get some kind of announcement in Copenhagen. But if we do, it’s going to be a pretty empty one because it’s not going to be based on real strategies.