Fifty five years ago, on this day, April 10th, 1969, new US President, Tricky Dick Nixon, was schmoozing, trying to get ahead of the environment issue (huge since the Santa Barbara Oil Spill) and also distract from the ongoing atrocities in Vietnam.
Nixon to North Atlantic Council April 10, 1969 – “Having forged a working partnership, we all have a unique opportunity to pool our skills, our intellects, and our inventiveness in finding new ways to use technology to enhance our environments, and not to destroy them.”
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-commemorative-session-the-north-atlantic-council
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 324.6ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Nixon was bombing the crap out of Vietnam. It turned out he had not got a “secret plan for ending the war”, as he had promised during the 1968 election campaign. Bombing Vietnam back into the Stone Age was causing a certain diplomatic froideur. And so he was hoping to throw the environment onto the table as something for the Europeans to focus on instead of all the dead, napalmed, Vietnamese babies.
What we learn is that there are dead cats and fluffy cats. You throw a dead cat on the table when you want to distract from something but you can also throw some kittens onto the table and say, “Aren’t they nice?” Both tactics are used.
What happened next? The Europeans were largely unconvinced. They had their own European Conservation Year. There were talks about NATO and its Committee on Challenges for Modern Societies. And Daniel Patrick Moynihan was writing memos by September.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
References
Hamblin, J.D. Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism
Also on this day:
April 10th, 2010 – activists hold “party at the pumps”
April 10, 2013 – US companies pretend they care, make “Climate Declaration”