Climate change is a big topic these days….on both sides of the aisle….the deniers and the worried.
The debate has been going on longer than most realize. I was around for the first Earth Day and the whole environmental movement….back in those days people were more worried about air pollution aka smog than they were about the changes in the climate.
You guys know me I will take every opportunity given to inject some history into just about any conversation…..and this is a good one to do so….
The whole environmental debate has been going on as long as some have been alive.
To judge by recent Supreme Court decisions, the world didn’t know much about climate change a half century ago.
In 2007, when the court ruled that the Clean Air Act of 1970 gave the Environmental Protection Agency the flexibility to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, former Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “When Congress enacted these provisions, the study of climate change was in its infancy.” Writing a dissent in a 2022 case looking at similar questions, Justice Elena Kagan argued that back in 1970 when Congress created the act, legislators gave the EPA the flexibility to keep up with the times, tackling problems (i.e., climate change) that couldn’t be anticipated.
Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, saw those opinions as a sign of how little people understood about the past. “I remember just being mortified by that,” she said. To be sure, at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, people were more worried about the immediate effects of smog than the long-term, climate-altering consequences of burning coal and oil. But Oreskes knew that scientists had been working to understand how carbon dioxide affected the global climate since the late 19th century. So she set about writing what she thought would be a short paper to correct the record.
In the process, Oreskes, along with other researchers at Harvard and Duke University, uncovered a lost history. As they searched troves of historical documents, they found plenty of other people were concerned about a warming planet, not just scientists, in the years before 1970. “We discovered a universe of discussions by scientists, by members of Congress, by members of the executive branch,” Oreskes said, “and the more we looked, the more we found.”
https://grist.org/science/lost-history-climate-1960s-clean-air-act-supreme-court/
You see? There has been those up trying to get the government to wake up and stop kicking the can down the road to placate the big money donors….but so far money talks and the environment be damn.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”