Sixty years ago today, on Thursday August 26th 1965, Carl W. Borgmann stood in front of hundreds of young Americans in Knoxville. Borgmann, who was the director of the Ford Foundation’s Science and Engineering programme, was there to deliver the commencement address for the University of Tennessee. He probably gave it little thought, but he was doing something unprecedented – he was using a commencement address to warn young people about the threat of carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere.
[Update 31/8/2025 – a comprehensive Wikipedia page has been created about Borgmann, in response to this article. It’s really good]
[Update 1/9/2025 – here’s an interview with Martha Crago, Borgmann’s daughter.]
His speech was given the unwieldy title “A Conversation Ethic. Man’s Use of Science: Some Deferred Costs “ when it appeared the following year in the Massachusetts Audubon Society magazine. He began by explaining what he would not talk about.
“I would rather not deal today with new discoveries in science – not because they are not exciting, for they are, nor because I don’t feel quite comfortable with some of them, which is certainly true, but because another topic seems more urgent to me. Even as I contemplate what man may know through science, I am impelled to ask what he will do with this knowledge – not only with his new scientific discoveries, but with his older ones too, and his ingenious technologies.”
Borgmann laid out many of the challenges – physical, social and moral – facing the United States and the world. Then, two thirds of the way through the speech he said the following startlingly prescient phrases.
“Now consider the burning of fossil fuels. If everyone does it at the average we now have achieved, there will be whole new sets of problems; in fact, many American communities face them presently. What shall we do with the inevitable wastes of our energy-producing processes, with our ash heaps, with the smog of Los Angeles, with the unnatural warming of our rivers?”
Borgmann asks the students to imagine that technology will burn fuels more cleanly, before presenting them with the central dilemma.
“But even if we could afford devices which allowed for our fuels to be completely burned to water and carbon dioxide, another change in our environment is likely. Carbon dioxide, as it becomes a greater proportion of the atmosphere, behaves somewhat like the glass of a greenhouse. It traps heat from the sun, and climatic change results – not overnight, but slowly and surely. This process appears to be already under way, in fact.”
Borgman followed this with a critique of nuclear power – “The preparation of the fuel and the handling and storage of the radioactive waste ash are not without dangers to man and his future.”
Borgmann was sixty at this point. Born in Missouri he had graduated from the University of Colorado in 1927 before working on the technical staff of the Bell Telephones Laboratories and gaining a master’s degree in chemical engineering and a PhD from Cambridge University. He had worked at the universities of North Carolina, Colorado and Nebraska before becoming President of University of Vermont in 1952.
In 1958, Borgmann had started working for the Ford Foundation. His job basically involved handing out money in the form of grants in the resource and environment field.
Borgmann was therefore extremely well equipped to understand the carbon dioxide problem.
Where did he get his information? While carbon dioxide build-up had been covered in both the scientific press, and even by President Lyndon Johnson a few months earlier, by far the most likely source of inspiration for Borgmann’s comments lie with a group that the Ford Foundation helped to fund – the Conservation Foundation.
Established in 1948 the Conservation Foundation had organised some of the pivotal meetings of US academics and policymakers in the 1950s and early sixties around environmental problems.
As Rebecca John reported a year ago, the Conservation Foundation’s March 1963 workshop was pivotal in raising awareness within governmental circles.
“The present liberation of such large amounts of fossil carbon in such a short time is unique in the history of the earth,” the report stated, “and there is no guarantee that past buffering mechanisms are really adequate.”
This rise in atmospheric CO2 was “worldwide,” the summary reported, and, while it did not present an immediate threat, would be significant “to the generations to follow.” The document went on to say, “The consumption of fossil fuels has increased to such a pitch within the last half century, that the total atmospheric consequences are matters of concern for the planet as a whole.” Relief was likely “only through the development of some new source of power.”
Given the Ford Foundation’s ties with the networks of corporate philanthropy and policy-shaping institutions such as the Conservation Foundation, it seems highly likely that a copy of the report landed on his desk.
In all probability, however, this was not the only source Borgmann had. Through the 1950s, and especially around the time of the 1957-8 “International Geophysical Year,” the possibility of modifying the weather and the climate had been much discussed. Carbon dioxide build-up had appeared in cartoons, public education films and on television programmes. The previous year, in August 1964, Popular Mechanics had run a story about the changing air.
A large portion of Borgmann’s speech appeared the following spring, in the magazine of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. From there, it was approvingly cited in an article entitled “The Future Role of the Biologist in Protecting our Natural Resources“ by the biologist Richard Goodwin in the journal Biological Conservation.
In a February 1968 luncheon speech at the New York Waldorf Astoria called “A Challenging Future”, delivered to extractive metallurgists, Borgmann covered similar ground, trying to explain that there were limits to both resources and the planet’s capacity to cope with the consequences of human ingenuity.
Meanwhile, other, more senior figures were beginning to use commencement addresses to warn students of threats in their future. On June 10, 1966 Glenn Seaborg, head of the Atomic Energy Commission warned students at UC San Diego that “at the rate we are currently adding carbon dioxide to our atmosphere (six billion tonnes a year) within the next few decades the heat balance of that atmosphere could be altered enough to produce marked changes in the climate – changes we might have no means of controlling.” Seaborg continued, saying “I, for one, would prefer to continue to travel toward the equator for my warmer weather than run the risk of melting the polar ice and having some of our coastal areas disappear beneath a rising ocean.”
By 1969 students at commencement addresses were proclaiming that “the future is a cruel hoax”
Borgmann was not, of course, responsible for this upsurge in awareness. What is remarkable though, is that the young people to whom he spoke in 1965 would have very little inkling of global atmospheric threats besides the possibility of nuclear war. Four years later, such threats were far more commonplace.
Borgmann closed his 1965 commencement address by invoking the words of Adlai Stevenson, twice Democratic presidential candidate and ambassador to the United Nations, who had died the previous month.
“We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.”
Borgmann lived a long life. He died in 1998. Three years earlier 1995 the IPCC’s Secod Assessment Report had declared that human impact on the atmosphere was already “discernible.” The year before he died, the Kyoto Protocol was agreed (though the US Senate had already signalled its unwillingness to be part of any global deal).
The warnings of carbon dioxide build-up he had given in 1965, when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was at only 320 parts per million (it is now 430ppm) had come to pass.
Also on this day
August 26, 1970 The Alkali Inspector’s report…
August 26, 1973 – Sir Kingsley Dunham points out the C02 problem
August 26, 1991 – Norwegian PM says “we cannot delay.”
