On this day, 56 years ago, US President Richard Milhous Nixon gave a speech at the North Atlantic Council where he bemoans the “gathering torments of a rapidly advancing industrial technology.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 324ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that in the 1968 presidential election, there had been some fleeting talk of environmental issues ( It would have been more if Bobby Kennedy hadn’t gotten whacked, but there you are) and Nixon had mouthed the right pieties.
But there’s various other contexts. First, days after his inauguration in January 1969 Nixon had to go out to Santa Barbara and look glum and competent when the Santa Barbara oil spill happened and everyone was starting to be worried about where more oil spills might come from, etc. Secondly, Nixon had the problem of the atrocities that the US military, with help from Australia and South Korean mercenaries, were committing in Indochina, and was keen to have a change of subject. So the idea of using NATO to tackle the “challenges of modern society” wasn’t as outlandish as it may seem, in retrospect.
What I think we can learn from this is that politicians will say whatever they think their marks want to hear – this is surely not controversial.
What happened next Well, within a few months, “Earth Day” was announced. Weirdly though, a good emote wasn’t enough – the environmental problems kept on coming, and the pressures to legislate kept on coming, so you had the National Environmental Protection Act signed into law, and then in a few months after that, you had the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, which will possibly not last much longer, and may, in fact, be killed off between me recording this on the third of March, and you reading it on the 10th of April.
You also had the Council on Environmental Quality, releasing a report in August 1970 that has an entire chapter about the atmospheric implications of carbon dioxide build up, written by Gordon MacDonald.
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:
April 10, 2006 – “Business warms to change” (Westpac, Immelt) – All Our Yesterdays
April 10th, 2010 – activists hold “party at the pumps”
April 10, 2013 – US companies pretend they care, make “Climate Declaration”