Climate Criminals: A Short Series Presents John H. Sununu
John Sununu’s role in the climate crisis is an example of being at the right place at the right time. From 1989-1991, Sununu was President George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff and a tireless contrarian when it came to the relatively new research regarding climate change. The first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was released in 1990, and John Sununu is disproportionately responsible for the United States’ dismissive response to it.
Sununu believed that “conspiratorial forces had used…scientific knowledge to advance a socialistic, ‘anti-growth’ doctrine” (Rich, 151). Sununu was in the White House during a pivotal time that put the United States on its current course as a major world power that operates as if climate change doesn’t exist—that continues to expand its fossil fuel production and consumption. Over and over, Sununu discouraged Bush from making any climate promises or putting too much stock into what Sununu considered questionable science. He also discouraged President Bush from listening to many of his top administration officials, including William Reilly, Bush’s head of the EPA and a staunch supporter of climate science, with whom Sununu’s relationship was especially adversarial.
Sununu’s biggest climate crime took place at the world’s first major diplomatic global warming summit in 1989 in Noordwijk, a Dutch resort town along the North Sea. The attendees expected to review the IPCC’s 1990 report and sign an international agreement to freeze “greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2000…After more than a decade of fruitless international meetings, they would finally sign an agreement that meant something” (Rich 165-166). Reilly and a group of top climate scientists were to attend as representatives of the United States, but distrustful of Reilly, Sununu decided to send Allan Bromley—one of Bush’s climate denying science advisors—to the conference as well.
At the conference’s final negotiation meeting where the delegates were planning on signing the international climate agreement—the first of its kind—things fell apart. Bromley, “at the bidding of John Sununu…forced the conference to abandon the commitment to freeze emissions…And with that, a decade of excruciating, painful, exhilarating progress turned to air” (Rich, 1717). Even without attending the conference, Sununu was able to derail it, destroying decades of international climate work. Delegates, including Reilly, returned home terrified of the precedent this first disastrous international conference had set.
What makes Sununu’s interference such a crime is that this first international summit took place at a time when belief in climate change and support for climate initiatives was bi-partisan. The Koch brothers (also climate criminals) had yet to start their disinformation campaign, an almost $200 million dollar endeavor that would purchase the Republican party’s belief in science.
It’s hard to imagine what the world could have looked like had Sununu not interfered with the signing of this first treaty. What other initiatives would have followed if the world had been able to get ahead of the disinformation campaigns and the corruption? It’s hard to imagine what today’s world would look like with 1990 greenhouse gas emission levels—350 parts per million (ppm) instead of today’s 420 ppm. What climate disasters could have been avoided? What communities and individuals would still be here if John Sununu never had access to the Oval Office?
