Thirty five years ago, on this day, October 23rd 1989 Republican Governor of New Jersey Thomas Kean issues an executive order. Yep. it was a broadly bi-partisan issue, until 1990-1991, and the beginning of the organised fight back by the fossil fuel interests…
https://nj.gov/infobank/circular/eok219.htm
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 353ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that at this stage you could be a Republican and still give a shit about climate change and be seen to be doing something or wanting to do something about it. The culture wars hadn’t really hardened the arteries of the body politic. That’s not to say that what the Republicans were proposing as solutions were going to work. But at least they acknowledged that there was a problem. The fact that that seems like a small mercy or something noteworthy tells you how decayed we are.
What I think we can learn from this is that we knew and that it wasn’t always a culture war.
What happened next remained governor of New Jersey until 1990 and the culture war hardened
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.
Also on this day:
October 23, 1955 – LA Times article says “our weather is changing”