FIVE
There were many environmental problems on the public’s mind as we entered the 1980s; climate change was not one of them. Air pollution, particularly smog, poisoned rivers and lakes, whaling, toxins, endangered species, and other near-term issues dominated the public’s concerns. Climate change would not have made the top ten.
The prior decade (actually eleven years) had seen a massive surge of environmental interest, a tide so powerful that it spurred Richard Nixon, who couldn’t have cared less about the issue, to solicit and sign the most sweeping array of environmental initiatives in American history. The list includes the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the forming of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (with its administrator given cabinet-level rank). The tributaries to this upsurge in concern were many: the image on June 22, 1969, of Ohio’s Cuyahoga River catching fire, the obituary for Lake Erie as a dead lake, smog, the near extinction of many species of whales, Rachel Carson’s warnings about DDT in Silent Spring, and on and on.
The public pressure and the political response provided some important data points:
1. On the positive side: When outrage reaches a certain threshold, the environment can become a voting issue. An implied correlative: public pressure can overcome the typical politicians’ fealty to special interests.
2. On the not-so-positive side: Public concern about the environment waxes and wanes, and when the public is distracted, special interests will eat away at enacted protections. This pressure is opportunistic, and its ebbs and flows tend to follow which party holds the presidency.
Consistently, Republican administrations since Reagan have, with varying amounts of intensity, pushed to weaken environmental laws and regulations. It’s been said that during the Reagan years the anti-environmental rhetoric was extreme but the actions moderate, while during the George W. Bush years the rhetoric was moderate and the actions extreme. To that I will add that during the Trump years the anti-environmental rhetoric was extreme and the actions were off the charts.
One last major data point: the environmental efflorescence of the 1960s and 1970s that spurred the raft of legislation also prompted many of the best and brightest coming out of college and law school to devote themselves to environmental work. The era saw the founding of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and many other NGOs, as well as the repurposing of staid, conservative environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, and the World Wildlife Fund. In subsequent years, many of these organizations formed powerful legal arms to serve as a counterweight to special interests even when the public interest was distracted.
One of the more notable young minds to attach himself to the environmental movement was James Gustave Speth (universally called Gus). Speth started out as the ultimate insider—Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law School. Immediately after getting his degree, he put his elite credentials and legal skills to work. Along with four other classmates from Yale Law School, he founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, which was dedicated to lobbying to influence environmental legislation and suing to right environmental wrongs.
Speth spent decades working within the system. There was his stint as head of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Carter White House. During the Reagan years, he helped found the World Resources Institute, chartered to work with businesses and governments to find solutions to environmental problems. Later he headed the United Nations Development Programme and still later the Yale School of Forestry (now the Yale School of the Environment).
Over the years, he moved from being an insider to what might be described as a radical insider,fn1 going from believing that environmental problems could be solved inside the system to believing that the system was the problem. In expert testimony (testimony that formed the basis of his latest book, They Knew: The US Federal Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis), he offered pro bono in a recent lawsuit over climate change, Speth wrote that the one consistent theme of administrations since climate change was recognized as a potential threat was “full throttle support for fossil fuels” despite clear knowledge of global warming and the availability of renewable energy alternatives.
His testimony came from experience. Speth took an early interest in climate change, and, in his more idealistic years, he thought government could rise to the occasion and address the issue. In 1977, as head of CEQ, he found himself in a position to do something about the problem.
Surprisingly, even though climate change was not a passionate issue for the public, it was subject to lively debate within the Carter administration. And Speth says they knew that dealing with the threat would require bringing the costs down on renewables. Carter famously installed solar panels on the White House roof, and, to support another major initiative on energy conservation, he would turn off the lights when he left a room—a gesture for which he was widely mocked.
Any administration is buffeted by competing interests, and the Carter White House was no different. Thus, while the administration fostered conservation and the development of renewables to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, it was simultaneously advocating to increase their use. With sharp memories of gas lines following the Arab oil embargo, there was a big push for U.S. energy independence, and to achieve that goal, the Carter administration made a concerted effort to increase the use of coal, the very worst of the fossil fuels, for electrical generation.
There was never any doubt about where Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, stood on fossil fuels. He ran an explicitly anti-environmentalist campaign. Remember trees causing pollution (a forerunner of Trump’s wind farms causing cancer)? As Speth put it, “He campaigned against latte drinking, Volvo-driving greenies.” Environmentalists lost ground on a lot of issues during his two terms. In addition to delaying action on ozone, he slashed the budget for the EPA, cut back on enforcement, and opened up huge expanses of public land for oil and gas drilling and coal mining. And for every environmental chicken coop, he found a fox to head it.
With Democratic control of Congress and a few pro-environment, moderate Republicans in the Senate, however, there was a counterweight to his actions. Moreover, his early fire-breathing anti-environmental appointees overreached. Both James Watt (Interior) and Anne Gorsuch (EPA) were forced to resign, and Rita Lavelle, who headed the Superfund toxic waste cleanup, ended up in jail for lying to Congress.
The successors to the firebrands were far more reasonable, according to Speth. There were cutbacks on research budgets, he said, but discussions of policy on climate change proceeded. Speth also gives decent marks to Lee Thomas, who came after Anne Gorsuch at the EPA.
Congress maintained a passing interest in climate change during the Reagan years. George Woodwell testified before the Senate on the issue in 1986. He noted that without controlling greenhouse gas emissions we were likely to see severe Arctic warming, an increase in wildfires, and melting of the permafrost, which would release more greenhouse gases, creating a situation in which “warming feeds the warming.” All these warnings have come to pass.
The last year of the Reagan administration saw climate change come roaring back as an issue. In 1988, a searing heat wave in the United States combined with dramatic testimony from NASA scientist James Hansen raised the profile of the issue. In a sweltering Senate chamber during July hearings organized by Senator Tim Wirth of Colorado, Hansen showed the senators his most recent model of what would happen to global temperatures if greenhouse gas emissions continued unabated. He also said that it was “ninety-nine percent certain” that the current observed warming trend was not natural but rather the result of human-sourced greenhouse gas emissions. As more than a thousand all-time heat records fell around the country, Hansen’s testimony got everyone’s attention.
Among them was George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s vice president, who was running against Michael Dukakis to become the next commander in chief. Apart from record-setting heat, 1988 was something of an annus horribilis in terms of environmental calamities. Huge fires tore through the Amazon rainforest, biodiversity was fast disappearing as humans destroyed ecosystems from the equator to the poles (the great biologist E. O. Wilson described this crisis as “the death of birth”), and the oceans were afflicted by pollution, overfishing, and heat-related dead zones, to name just a few of the environmental issues that made headlines that year. Bush noticed and decided to run as the environmental candidate.
Inadvertently, I helped him out on this. I was at Time at that point and had been hired to report and write my own stories on science and environmental issues. During the summer of 1988, I was contacted by Michael Deland, then EPA administrator for New England. The conversation turned to Boston Harbor, and Deland mentioned that Dukakis, as governor of Massachusetts, had failed to avail the state of federal funds that would have paid 90 percent of the costs of cleaning up the filthy harbor, and that because the funding window had expired, the state would now have to assume the burden of those costs. He called it “the most expensive public policy mistake in the history of New England.”
I thought it was worth investigating and went up to Boston. I gave Dukakis and his campaign staff every opportunity to offer an explanation, but the best that they could come up with was the bizarre assertion that Dukakis was proud of his record on Boston Harbor. Time published the piece in August, and the next thing you know Bush was on the deck of a boat on the fetid waters proclaiming that he would be the “environmental president.” The campaign hammered Dukakis on the disgusting state of the harbor, on Willie Horton, and on that comical photo of Dukakis in a tank.
Bush also claimed that he would provide leadership on global warming. On August 31, in a campaign speech, he said, “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the ‘greenhouse effect’ are forgetting about the ‘White House effect.’ In my first year in office, I will convene a global conference on the environment at the White House. It will include the Soviets, the Chinese …. The agenda will be clear. We will talk about global warming.”
Bush actually did convene a conference once president, but sometime between his campaign speech and the conference in April, the “lobbyist effect” came into play. The Chinese were not invited, and the briefing papers for cabinet members warned them not to use the phrases “global warming” or “greenhouse effect.” It’s hard to see how much progress can be made in a conference on global warming if a president is too afraid to even say the words “global warming” at a conference he convened to discuss the subject. This launched what has become a Republican tradition of undercutting international efforts on climate change, with subsequent GOP presidents upping the ante even as the evidence of changing climate became more obvious.
Still, the issue did not go away, although it lost momentum once the Bush administration abandoned the field. At Time, managing editor Henry Muller decided to make earth the “Planet of the Year,” and that “Man of the Year” issue received extraordinary attention around the world. Charles Alexander edited the issue and I was deeply involved in choosing the topics (and reported and wrote the section on biodiversity). Michael Lemonick wrote the section on climate change. In terms of newsstand sales, it was one of the most successful issues in the history of the magazine.
In sum, the 1980s were something of a mixed bag with regard to climate change. The decade witnessed the first noticeable signs of global warming. It was a decade of tremendous progress in the understanding of how climate changed (even if many of the results were not confirmed until the 1990s).
The decade also saw the first major expressions of public concern for a global threat to the atmosphere. There was both good news and bad news in this, and that requires some explanation. There are few people who have probed this issue more deeply than Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert on public opinion at Yale University.
Leiserowitz has spent decades monitoring what the American public knows about climate change and how they see the threat. One of the most enduring and notable aspects of the public’s view is how uninformed most Americans have been throughout the climate change era. One of Leiserowitz’s studies from 2002—fourteen years after the issue went mainstream—explored the question of the public’s knowledge of what caused global warming. Among the choices were (1) burning fossil fuels; (2) population growth; (3) deforestation; (4) depletion of the ozone layer; and (5) nuclear power plants. By far the most common answer was—drumroll, please—depletion of the ozone layer! That’s what 47 percent of respondents saw as the primary cause of global warming. “Fossil fuels” was the choice of only 23 percent of the people polled. Tony’s survey confirmed the findings of an earlier survey by GlobeScan where Americans also chose ozone depletion as the primary cause of global warming. Keep in mind that Tony’s survey came after more than a decade of a constant stream of articles and new items about climate change.
When Tony and I discussed this, I blurted out, “This is insane.”
His response was immediate: “It’s completely sane. It’s totally rational and, of course, totally wrong.”
Here’s what he meant. As Leiserowitz explains it, part of the problem lies in our very structure: we humans are physically and psychologically oriented to focus on things in front of us and on the ground. “We’re between four and seven feet tall, and our eyes face forward, rather than being on the top of our heads.” We naturally tend toward worrying about what is in front of us, not about the threat of invisible gases miles above our heads. In fact, until the issue of ozone depletion burst upon the scene, most environmental concerns were experienced as local, even if they were global—smog, burning rivers, toxins.
Moreover, environmental hazards are but one claim on the average person’s attention. There’s the job, money, relationships, the family, sports, politics, financial crisis, geopolitical tensions, and so on. And then many environmental questions involve science; Leiserowitz notes that only about 1 in 200 Americans actually knows a scientist. Asked to name living scientists, the most common responses on one survey were Einstein and Darwin, neither of whom is living.
So, given this crowded mental playing field in the mid-1980s, along came scientists saying that an invisible gas was damaging the upper atmosphere above Antarctica. That this issue was able to penetrate the noise and gain a foothold in Americans’ minds Leiserowitz attributes to genius marketing. The major piece of this genius was coining the phrase “ozone hole.” This is something any nonscientist could imagine. People could also easily imagine that if there’s a hole in the atmosphere, damaging UVB rays could penetrate to the ground and cause skin cancer. If there’s a hole somewhere, asks Leiserowitz, what do you do? You patch it! So people could imagine the solution.
Thanks to the brilliance of the phrase, by the end of the 1980s, much of the U.S. public was aware that invisible gases could hurt life on earth by damaging the ozone layer. Then along comes another group of scientists, this time talking about other invisible gases that pose a threat to the upper atmosphere. This seemed to demand more attention span than the public was willing to allot to the upper atmosphere.
Worse, these scientists didn’t have a catchy phrase like “ozone hole” but rather the somewhat vague “greenhouse effect” and the almost pleasant sounding “global warming.” Even worse, you can’t fix this with an easy patch by banning one group of chemicals. Rather, it seems, everything we do contributes to the problem.
Faced with these complexities, and the intense competition by other, immediate matters demanding attention, Leiserowitz says it’s little wonder that many in the public squeezed the two issues together in their minds. “A hole in the atmosphere lets heat in,” he remarked. “Totally rational and totally wrong.”
He might have added “totally disheartening” to that list. As we will see, ignorance about the nature of the threat, ignorance about the degree of scientific consensus, about the scale of its consequences, and about when it might happen continued through the next three decades (as late as December 2019, 43 percent of Americans polled by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation felt that plastic bottles and bags—the environmental crisis of that moment—were a “major” contributor to global warming), even as the impacts of climate change had begun to make themselves felt.
There was one other unfortunate reverberation of the ozone hole story. With regard to the attitudes of business and finance toward action on climate change, the 1980s were, as we shall see, even worse than a lost decade. They were the decade in which the business community perfected its weapons to stop any action on climate change.