Fifty five years ago, on this day, February 9th, 1970, HRH Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands nailed it.
“The pollution of the biosphere is such a danger–only one of the threats to human survival, but currently probably the greatest and most immediate. The effects of carbon dioxide build-up are only now beginning to be recognized and assessed, and we shall have to take a long hard look at the whole question of the burning of fossil fuels. In my view we should be paying much more attention than we do to the collection and storage of solar energy, so that, in terms of power, we can live on income rather than on capital.
H.R.H. (1970). The European conservational scene. Biological Conservation, 2(4), 242–245. doi:10.1016/0006-3207(70)90002-9
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 325ppm. As of 2025 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Europeans had been switched on to climate change. And this is really the apotheosis of it, when His Royal Highness, the king Prince Consort of the Netherlands, explicitly mentions carbon dioxide build up at the beginning of the European Conservation Year, in the midst of a “great environmental awakening”
That’s really happened recently , you can argue Torrey Canyon in 1967 and the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969 and lots of other events since then (rivers catching fire etc).
What I think we can learn from this that the Dutch Royal family was on to this long before 1988 when Queen Beatrix gave her warning on Christmas Day.
What happened next The eco moment lasted for another two and a half years, and then was kind of finished off by a big public event, the Stockholm conference, that it’s like kind of an orgasm, and after all that effort and that moment of pleasure, people feel spent.
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.