On this day, 33 years ago, February 5 1990, President George H.W. Bush gave a welcoming address to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was then meeting in the US to push towards its first report (released May/August that year).
https://www.c-span.org/video/?11033-1/presidential-address
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 354.5ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Bush had mouthed all the right words on the campaign trail in 1988 “those who worry about the Greenhouse Effect are forgetting about the Whitehouse Effect” blah blah. Once in office, he’d allowed various attack dogs to slow down any progress.
The speech, we now know, had been the subject of bureaucratic fighting…
REINSTEIN: The President made a welcoming speech at the January 1990 meeting, but it was unusually warm. Every time we hosted an international meeting on climate change, it was exceptionally warm, record warmth for the day.…
As an indication of the White House approach, the leaders of the Energy Department and EPA had collaborated to produce a text for the President for this meeting, and they proudly brought it to the White House and gave it to [pictured, White House Chief of Staff] John Sununu saying, “We have got a statement here that both of us can agree on: Energy and environment.”
Sununu’s response was to tear up the document and throw it in the trash and say, “Thank you but no thank you. Don’t do this again unless I ask you to.” Sununu and I got along for whatever reason….
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-intergovernmental-panel-climate-change
What I think we can learn from this
Behind most speeches/statements there’s an untold tale of fighting….
What happened next
Bush and his dogs kept on keeping on. In 1992 the Europeans blinked in a staring contest, and targets and timetables were removed from the draft of the text of the climate treaty…