On this day, July 18, in 1979, Senator Abraham Ribicoff asked for some advice about “synfuels.”
The context was, the Carter Administration, desperate to reduce US dependency on problematic Middle Eastern Oil (not the dictatorships – that’s fine – it’s the interruptions to supply that’s the problem) was proposing an expensive crash program to develop synthetic fuels (synfuels). These would be incredibly energy intensive to produce… Not everyone was convinced this was a good idea…
“In 1979 [Gordon] MacDonald wrote an article for the Washington Post arguing that subsidizing synthetic fuels, as proposed by the Carter administration, would be a mistake. He pointed out that synthetic fuels would produce even more CO2 than the current U.S. mix of fossil fuels. The article drew the attention of U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT), who had recently been warned about the issue by West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt” (Nierenberg et al. 2010: 324)
MacDonald is quoted as saying
“Although many complex factors affect the climate, it is generally thought that the result of continued carbon dioxide production will be a warming of the atmosphere “that will probably be conspicuous within the next 20 years,” the report said. “If the trend is allowed to continue, climatic zones will shift and agriculture will be displaced.”
Gordon J. MacDonald, environmental studies professor ad Dartmouth College, who is one of the authors said in an interview that large-scale use of synthetic fuels — made from coal or oil shale — could cut the time involved by half.
“We should start seeing the effect in 1990 without synthetic fuels. . . . but if you use them, the effect would be much more pronounced by 1990,” he said.
[See also New York Times, also 11 July 1979]
Actually, unless I am missing something, Nierenberg et al. have got this wrong – and they don’t actually cite the “article in the Washington Post,” which is pretty poor form.
What Ribicoff appears to be responding to are articles in the Post and the Times about an actual report. This was to the Council on Environmental Quality. And it isn’t just Macdonald – “ the other authors of the report were George M. Woodwell, director of the Ecosystems Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory; Roger Revelle, a member of the National Academy of Sciences; and Charles David Keeling, professor of Oceanography of the Scripps Institute for Oceanography” (Shabecoff, 1979).
ANYWAY, that was the 11th, and this blog post is about the 18th. And here we are –
“One incident provides a small example of the work that the Academy does outside the formal structure of reports and out of public view. On July 18, 1979, even as the Charney panel was gathering at Woods Hole, the Academy’s president, Philip Handler, got a call from Senator Abraham Ribicoff. The Senator was cosponsoring a bill on synfuels, and he wanted to know the implications of greenhouse warming. Handler went to the National Research Council’s Climate Research Board, and the very next day, it produced a statement on carbon dioxide and energy policy. The statement confirmed that global warming could be a problem. The statement told Senator Ribicoff that the massive expenditures required to create a national synthetic fuels capability should not commit the nation to large-scale dependence on coal for the indefinite future. This is the first time that an Academy group issued a specific policy recommendation, ambiguous although it may be, related to global warming. Olson 2014 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4077050/
Why this matters.
We. Knew. Never forget, we knew.
What happened next?
Synfuels got killed off by Reagan, along with a lot of good stuff. And we had to wait until 1988 to wake up. A decade lost (but then, we would have pissed it against the wall, I guess).
References:
Nierenberg, N. Tshinkel, W. and Tshinkel, V. (2010) Early Climate Change Consensus at the National Academy: The Origins and Making of Changing Climate. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 40, Number 3, pps. 318–349. [online here]
Olson, S. (2014) The National Academy of Sciences at 150. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 24; 111(Suppl 2): 9327–9364.
Published online 2014 Jun 23. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1406109111
Omang, J. (1979) Synthetic Fuels Danger To Climate, Scientists Say. Washington Post, 11 July.[online here]
Shabecoff, P. (1979) Scientists Warn U.S. Of Carbon Dioxide Peril. New York Times, 11 July