ENERGY WATCH #1 - August 7, 2018
In an amazing historical essay published in the New York Times on 1 August – Losing Earth: the Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change – author Nathaniel Rich tells the amazing story of the decade from 1979-1989 (and actually also the decades before) “when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change” – and what was done with that knowledge. Or rather: what was not done.
It is widely accepted nowadays that the ones who are most to blame for our climate crisis are the fossil fuel companies – ExxonMobil above all, as reflected in the #ExxonKnew campaign. Environmental campaigners say the companies knew all about the dangers of climate change, but hid their knowledge from the public, in the same way that the tobacco companies did with their product. A number of court cases currently going on in the U.S. are based on this idea.
However, Rich shows convincingly that the reality is a bit more complex than that. In fact, everyone at the highest levels of the U.S. government knew – certainly by the end of the 1980s, but actually a lot earlier than that. But no one acted.
Rich in no way exonerates the oil companies (as some critics have charged), but he notes that “the coordinated efforts to bewilder the public did not begin in earnest until the end of 1989. During the preceding decade, some of the largest oil companies, including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.”
So what really happened? I can’t tell the whole story here, but I will reproduce some of the highlights (I recommend reading the whole essay, it’s freely available on the internet):
- “In a 1957 paper written with Hans Suess, climate scientist Roger Revelle concluded that ‘human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.’ Revelle helped the Weather Bureau establish a continuous measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide at a site perched near the summit of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii, 11,500 feet above the sea — a rare pristine natural laboratory on a planet blanketed by fossil-fuel emissions.”
- “After nearly a decade of observation, Revelle had shared his concerns with Lyndon Johnson [president from 1963-1969], who included them in a special message to Congress two weeks after his inauguration. Johnson explained that his generation had ‘altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale’ through the burning of fossil fuels, and his administration commissioned a study of the subject by his Science Advisory Committee. Revelle was its chairman, and its 1965 executive report on carbon dioxide warned of the rapid melting of Antarctica, rising seas, increased acidity of fresh waters — changes that would require no less than a coordinated global effort to forestall.”
- “In 1974, the C.I.A. issued a classified report on the carbon-dioxide problem. It concluded that climate change had begun around 1960 and had ‘already caused major economic problems throughout the world.’ The future economic and political impacts would be ‘almost beyond comprehension.’ Yet emissions continued to rise, and at this rate, [geophysicist Gordon] MacDonald warned, they could see a snowless New England, the swamping of major coastal cities, as much as a 40 percent decline in national wheat production, the forced migration of about one-quarter of the world’s population. Not within centuries — within their own lifetimes.”
- “The president’s plan, in the wake of the Saudi oil crisis, to promote solar energy — he had gone so far as to install 32 solar panels on the roof of the White House to heat his family’s water — was a good start, MacDonald thought. But Jimmy Carter’s plan to stimulate production of synthetic fuels — gas and liquid fuel extracted from shale and tar sands — was a dangerous idea. Nuclear power, despite the recent tragedy at Three Mile Island, should be expanded. But even natural gas and ethanol were preferable to coal. There was no way around it: Coal production would ultimately have to end.”
- “On May 22 [1979], Frank Press [top scientific advisor to four U.S. presidents] wrote a letter to the president of the National Academy of Sciences requesting a full assessment of the carbon-dioxide issue. Jule Charney, the father of modern meteorology, would gather the nation’s top oceanographers, atmospheric scientists and climate modelers to judge whether MacDonald’s alarm was justified — whether the world was, in fact, headed to cataclysm.”
- “The publication of Jule Charney’s report, ‘Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment,’ several months later [in 1979] was not accompanied by a banquet, a parade or even a news conference. Yet within the highest levels of the federal government, the scientific community and the oil-and-gas industry — within the commonwealth of people who had begun to concern themselves with the future habitability of the planet — the Charney report would come to have the authority of settled fact. It was the summation of all the predictions that had come before, and it would withstand the scrutiny of the decades that followed it.”
- “Charney’s group had considered everything known about ocean, sun, sea, air and fossil fuels and had distilled it to a single number: three. When the doubling threshold was broached, as appeared inevitable, the world would warm three degrees Celsius. The last time the world was three degrees warmer was during the Pliocene, three million years ago, when beech trees grew in Antarctica, the seas were 80 feet higher and horses galloped across the Canadian coast of the Arctic Ocean.”
- “After the publication of the Charney report, Exxon decided to create its own dedicated carbon-dioxide research program, with an annual budget of $600,000. Only Exxon was asking a slightly different question than Jule Charney. Exxon didn’t concern itself primarily with how much the world would warm. It wanted to know how much of the warming Exxon could be blamed for.”
- “A senior researcher named Henry Shaw had argued that the company needed a deeper understanding of the issue in order to influence future legislation that might restrict carbon-dioxide emissions. ‘It behooves us to start a very aggressive defensive program,’ Shaw wrote in a memo to a manager, ‘because there is a good probability that legislation affecting our business will be passed.’”
- “Shaw turned to Wallace Broecker, a Columbia University oceanographer who was the second author of Roger Revelle’s 1965 carbon-dioxide report for Lyndon Johnson. In 1977, in a presentation at the American Geophysical Union, Broecker predicted that fossil fuels would have to be restricted, whether by taxation or fiat. More recently, he had testified before Congress, calling carbon dioxide ‘the No.1 long-term environmental problem.’ If presidents and senators trusted Broecker to tell them the bad news, he was good enough for Exxon.”
- “The company had been studying the carbon-dioxide problem for decades, since before it changed its name to Exxon. In 1957, scientists from Humble Oil published a study tracking ‘the enormous quantity of carbon dioxide’ contributed to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution ‘from the combustion of fossil fuels.’ Even then, the observation that burning fossil fuels had increased the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was well understood and accepted by Humble’s scientists. What was new, in 1957, was the effort to quantify what percentage of emissions had been contributed by the oil-and-gas industry.”
- “The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s largest trade association, asked the same question in 1958 through its air-pollution study group and replicated the findings made by Humble Oil. So did another A.P.I. study conducted by the Stanford Research Institute a decade later, in 1968, which concluded that the burning of fossil fuels would bring ‘significant temperature changes’ by the year 2000 and ultimately ‘serious worldwide environmental changes,’ including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap and rising seas. It was ‘ironic,’ the study’s authors noted, that politicians, regulators and environmentalists fixated on local incidents of air pollution that were immediately observable, while the climate crisis, whose damage would be of far greater severity and scale, went entirely unheeded.”
- “The ritual repeated itself every few years. Industry scientists, at the behest of their corporate bosses, reviewed the problem and found good reasons for alarm and better excuses to do nothing. Why should they act when almost nobody within the United States government — nor, for that matter, within the environmental movement — seemed worried?”
- “After the publication of the Charney report in 1979, Jimmy Carter had directed the National Academy of Sciences to prepare a comprehensive, $1 million analysis of the carbon-dioxide problem: a Warren Commission for the greenhouse effect. A team of scientist-dignitaries — among them Revelle, the Princeton modeler Syukuro Manabe and the Harvard political economist Thomas Schelling, one of the intellectual architects of Cold War game theory — would review the literature, evaluate the consequences of global warming for the world order and propose remedies. Then Reagan won the White House.”
- “For the next three years, as the commission continued its work — drawing upon the help of about 70 experts from the fields of atmospheric chemistry, economics and political science, including veterans of the Charney group and the Manhattan Project — the incipient report served as the Reagan administration’s answer to every question on the subject. There could be no climate policy, Fred Koomanoff and his associates said, until the academy ruled. In the Mirror World of the Reagan administration, the warming problem hadn’t been abandoned at all. A careful, comprehensive solution was being devised. Everyone just had to wait for the academy’s elders to explain what it was.”
- “On Oct. 19, 1983, the commission finally announced its findings [in a 500-page report, ‘Changing Climate,’] at a formal gala, preceded by cocktails and dinner in the academy’s cruciform Great Hall, a secular Sistine Chapel, with vaulted ceilings soaring to a dome painted as the sun. An inscription encircling the sun honored science as the ‘pilot of industry,’ and the academy had invited the nation’s foremost pilots of industry: Andrew Callegari, the head of Exxon’s carbon-dioxide research program, and vice presidents from Peabody Coal, General Motors and the Synthetic Fuels Corporation. They were eager to learn how the United States planned to act, so they could prepare for the inevitable policy debates.”
- “It was the first study to encompass the causes, effects and geopolitical consequences of climate change. But […] it offered no significant new findings — nothing that wasn’t in the Charney report or the blue-ribbon studies that had been published since. ‘We are deeply concerned about environmental changes of this magnitude,’ read the executive summary. ‘We may get into trouble in ways that we have barely imagined.’”
- “The committee’s chairman, William Nierenberg […] argued that action had to be taken immediately, before all the details could be known with certainty, or else it would be too late. … But it’s not what he said in the press interviews that followed. He argued the opposite: There was no urgent need for action. The public should not entertain the most ‘extreme negative speculations’ about climate change (despite the fact that many of those speculations appeared in his report).”
- “Though ‘Changing Climate’ urged an accelerated transition to renewable fuels, noting that it would take thousands of years for the atmosphere to recover from the damage of the last century, Nierenberg recommended ‘caution, not panic.’ Better to wait and see. Better to bet on American ingenuity to save the day. Major interventions in national energy policy, taken immediately, might end up being more expensive, and less effective, than actions taken decades in the future, after more was understood about the economic and social consequences of a warmer planet. Yes, the climate would change, mostly for the worst, but future generations would be better equipped to change with it.”
- “George Keyworth II, Reagan’s science adviser, used Nierenberg’s optimism as reason to discount the E.P.A.’s ‘unwarranted and unnecessarily alarmist’ report and warned against taking any ‘near-term corrective action’ on global warming. Just in case it wasn’t clear, Keyworth added, ‘there are no actions recommended other than continued research.’”
- “Exxon soon revised its position on climate-change research. In a presentation at an industry conference, Henry Shaw cited ‘Changing Climate’ as evidence that ‘the general consensus is that society has sufficient time to technologically adapt to a CO₂ greenhouse effect.’ If the academy had concluded that regulations were not a serious option, why should Exxon protest? Edward David Jr., two years removed from boasting of Exxon’s commitment to transforming global energy policy, told Science that the corporation had reconsidered. ‘Exxon has reverted to being mainly a supplier of conventional hydrocarbon fuels — petroleum products, natural gas and steam coal,’ David said. The American Petroleum Institute canceled its own carbon-dioxide research program, too.”
The rest, as they say, is history. In an epilogue, Rich writes that “it is incontrovertibly true that senior employees at the company that would later become Exxon, like those at most other major oil-and-gas corporations, knew about the dangers of climate change as early as the 1950s. But the automobile industry knew, too, and began conducting its own research by the early 1980s, as did the major trade groups representing the electrical grid. They all own responsibility for our current paralysis and have made it more painful than necessary. But they haven’t done it alone.”
“The United States government knew. Roger Revelle began serving as a Kennedy administration adviser in 1961, five years after establishing the Mauna Loa carbon-dioxide program, and every president since has debated the merits of acting on climate policy. Carter had the Charney report, Reagan had “Changing Climate” and Bush had the censored testimony of James Hansen and his own public vow to solve the problem. Congress has been holding hearings for 40 years; the intelligence community has been tracking the crisis even longer.”
“Everybody knew. In 1958, on prime-time television, ‘The Bell Science Hour’ — one of the most popular educational film series in American history — aired ‘The Unchained Goddess,’ a film about meteorological wonders, produced by Frank Capra, a dozen years removed from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ warning that ‘man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate’ through the release of carbon dioxide. ‘A few degrees’ rise in the Earth’s temperature would melt the polar ice caps,’ says the film’s kindly host, the bespectacled Dr. Research. ‘An inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley. Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.’ Capra’s film was shown in science classes for decades.”
“Everyone knew — and we all still know. We know that the transformations of our planet, which will come gradually and suddenly, will reconfigure the political world order. We know that if we don’t act to reduce emissions, we risk the collapse of civilization. We also know that, without a gargantuan intervention, whatever happens will be worse for our children, worse yet for their children and even worse still for their children’s children, whose lives, our actions have demonstrated, mean nothing to us.”