On this day, March 23, 1977, Jimmy Carter, then President of the United States, announced that he was gonna look into the future.
”I am directing the Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of State, working in cooperation with … other appropriate agencies, to make a one-year study of the probable changes in the world’s population, natural resources, and environment through the end of the century.”
President Jimmy Carter May 23,1977
This finally came out in mid-1980 as the “Global 2000” report, when he was a dead duck (rather than a lame one, which came later).
The Global 2000 report gave us the phrase “sustainable development” and, of course, had a section on carbon dioxide.
This was, after all, after the Charney Report, after the First World Climate Conference and so on.
Exxon knew, we knew.
Why this matters.
States had been doing these sorts of forecasting things for a few years. This one could have mattered. Oh well.
What happened next?
Carter was thoroughly blasted out of office in November 1980 (with an independent splitting the “progressive” vote), and Ronald Reagan became the meat puppet representative of a whole lot of ever-so-slightly regressive guys, who did everything they could to slow down the awareness of/consensus around the “carbon dioxide problem” as it was then called.