Larry Edwards (bio at end of interview) kindly answered some questions…
1. A bit about where and when you were born – small town, big city. What were your early encounters with “nature”
I was born (1948) and raised in San Francisco, in a district where in the 1930’s the city had sprawled out beyond its confining Twin Peaks to Ocean Beach. Nature was a nearby half-square-block park and the beach 2.5 km away. Further afield, we took a family vacation by car every other year, with nature outside the car window, if not at the destination. More often we took day trips by car down “the Peninsula” on a narrow two-lane highway through what is now Silicon Valley. and beyond. It was orchard after orchard, and, sometimes (in between) odd bits of wild-looking places, and a few big greenhouses. All gone now!—under subdivisions, corporate developments and a massive multilane freeway. It became not a wistful look at tranquil places and bits of nature, but relentlessly grim disappearances, year by year.
In my college years, I finally got out into nature often, in the county surrounding that much smaller city. And with my pals, at the end of summer I got into the High Sierras for multi-week mountaineering and rock climbing. (In the days before permits were needed to get into that wilderness!)
2. Specifically on the International Geophysical Year and how you encountered it as a primary school student. What do you remember? Were there films you saw, books you read. Was it down to a science teacher, a geography teacher?
The International Geophysical Year (IGY) was a big deal. It kicked off in July 1957, after much anticipation by the public. There were lots of newspaper stories, and a big poster in the Post Office (next to the FBI’s Wanted posters – haven’t seen those for years!). That September I started 5th grade, and Miss Phillips (who had us for all subjects) was sciency. What I remember of that year is: our ant farm; and learning more about IGY, the solar system and (in a very general way) the carbon cycle and the greenhouse effect. The latter two weren’t about “climate change” (which I didn’t become aware of until much later) but about what sustains the web of life and a comfortable climate.
Sputnik was launched that October. With the US behind in the “space race,” hot topics were that as well as science and technology in general, both in our class and society wide.
3. Do you remember what you thought at the time?
It was an exciting time for a young science-inclined kid, with new science coming out of the IGY and technology developing rapidly.
There was also the trepidation of duck-and-cover exercises under our desks, in fear of a nuclear war. Our classroom still had pull-down blackout shades for the windows, left over from WWII, which had ended only a dozen years before I started the 5th grade. For context, Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev’s epithet to the US, “We will bury you” was made in 1956. Tom Lehrer wrote his satirical song “We Will All Go Together When We Go” in 1959.
As added context for those times (but not known to me then), Keeling had started his work at Mauna Loa in 1958, and Plass’ 1955 paper and 1959 article (that you posted about recently, Marc), bracketed my 5th grade year. The 1955 paper was tentative, posing a lot of questions and needs for more data, and the 1959 article expressed an increase toward certainty about CO2 as a main cause of climate change. It seems the IGY may have helped. This context is interesting for me, looking back.
4. After the IGY, were you ‘sensitised’ to environmental issues, and books such as that of Rachel Carson?
I don’t recall particular books on environmental issues until my college years. While I was there, there was the first Earth Day (1970). From high school through college, my continual concerns were loss of nature, city sprawl, pollution, use of non-renewable resources, and the rapid spread of nuclear power projects. I was reading about all of that in newspapers, later in books like “Silent Spring” and Raymond Dasmann’s “The Destruction of California” (a big influence on me), and many others. The public internet came decades later, so it was newspapers, magazines, books, and journals (college library), plus public events.
Early in college (’67 or ‘68), a Physics professor impressed us with how just a small 2oC increase in global average temperature would be devastating, and could happen. It was a very brief side-mention during a lecture, quite apart from the course material, but his explanation was compelling to me.
One thing that really sensitized me was, during high school in the mid-1960s, Pacific Gas & Electric started building a nuclear power plant at Bodega Head, on the coast north of the Golden Gate. It was big, controversial news. Mentally, I cheered on a lawsuit against it. The suit succeeded when a “minor” fault was discovered in the rock pit being dug for the reactor vessel (though not dissuading PG&E). Later, a few miles from my college in southern California, construction of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant was about to begin. Seismic controversy brought the Atomic Energy Commission to town for a week-long technical hearing, held in one of the temporary WWII buildings at an abandoned Army base a few miles down the highway. I cut classes to attend the whole thing. A physics professor was fired, later, for being outspoken against the plant. Six decades on, now, the devil is still operating at Diablo Canyon, a continuing controversy for California.
The year I got my aeronautical engineering degree (1971), a huge national controversy arose over the Supersonic Transport (SST) Project. For years, Boeing and Lockheed had independently worked on their differing designs. To build a prototype had become a matter of national pride, but neither company could afford to do so. A funding bill for the prototype was progressing through Congress, in which either Boeing or Lockheed would be picked to proceed. This was unending, high-profile news. The Anglo-French Concorde had first flown two years before, with construction having started when I was still in high school.
The corporate and political promoters’ grand plan was for a fleet of 500 American SSTs, flying at over 50,000 feet. Besides the project’s cost, a big controversy was the likely climate impact. Scientists feared high-impact global chilling would result. (Perhaps they got the sign of the impact wrong, but as we know now, they were correct about how sensitive the climate is to human-caused upset.) So, throughout my senior year I wrote letters to senators (no email in those days), begging for the project to be cancelled – not that I could have any influence, but I felt I had to do my bit. Three months before I graduated, Congress killed the bill — once and for all ending this SST project. Immediately, the two companies fired 30,000 engineers and managers, depressing the aerospace industry and sending an economic shock. So, my career took a turn to other engineering and eventually to environmental and climate advocacy.
Regrets for my letter writing? No – for an informed engineer it was an ethical necessity.
5. When and how did environmental issues ‘grab your attention’?
See above.
6. Why does it matter that people were being warned as early as 1957 about carbon dioxide build-up? What does that tell us about how seriously we take long term threats?
In my recollection of the International Geophysical Year (18 months in 1957 and 1958), I have no memories of carbon dioxide build-up being an issue publicly, certainly not in terms of impacts – though I may have forgotten or missed it. Possibly, since trouble would have seemed to be in the remote future, I suppose US news coverage at the time would have been observational rather than action indicating.
Certainly, the IGY inspired wonder, not fear, at least in me. But as I learned in 5th-grade, the carbon cycle and the greenhouse effect were well enough known for an aware public to be prepared to accept the tremendous impacts of fossil fuel use and other human activities (e.g., SST aircraft) that were exposed in American newspapers and magazines (no internet yet) one to two decades later. From that later time onward, all one had to do was read, even a little, to be aware.
7. What do you see for us, as a species, as a civilisation, in the near future?
I despair, much — but I optimistically keep pressing for urgent, effective action in any way that I can. (My only hope is to influence those who have influence, having none to speak of myself.) The climate situation is now far beyond dire. We are amidst an absolute, fast-worsening disaster. Governance, nationally and globally, has abjectly failed in what the Kyoto Protocol (1997) set out to do — prevent dangerous climate change; and that failure includes the Band-Aid – the Paris Agreement.
I believe that none of the actions presently on the table is workable for ostensibly getting humanity (and the natural world) out of this disaster. There is too much reliance on quickly building renewable energy, improving energy efficiency and on voluntary reduction of energy (and other) consumption. There is, in my estimation, no substitute for strong governance in this situation, akin to WW2-like emergency measures that can “renormalize” society to achieve a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels and deep cuts in other GHGs.
The problem is that initiating such renormalization takes: “leadership” that is lacking; trust in government that is at low ebb; and time – which we keep frittering away. There is always time, but now really no time left in terms of what it takes to turn government around, and to gain public trust for that process to happen. Even in the best imagined case – of no political friction – it takes time to pass legislation and implement it.
So, where to start on this? From polling going back years, a high proportion of the people (in northern, industrial countries) recognize the climate change problem, our cause of it, and a need for action. It seems that peoples’ latent energy for action is stymied by the momentum of society’s existing norms, by individual’s fear of missing out (“fomo”) while those norms are in place, and by the inability of individuals to have any real influence on changing on changing those norms. So, in life nearly all of us go with the flow, daily and annually (e.g. with long-distance vacations).
So the big question is: “What can change the course of this mighty river of human activities, executed by individuals each following their path of least resistance?” It is obvious by now that voluntary action is insufficient. How do we come to recognize that orchestrated collective action is needed, somehow with each of us making those sacrifices that are appropriate to our impacts and our ability to sacrifice?
I believe what has been lacking all along, in each of the US, Europe and elsewhere, is “a leader” who is trustworthy and instills the “necessity” of government stepping in to instill a change in society’s climate-related norms. In other words, for quickly phasing out the production and import of fossil fuels (like in 10-15 years) and greatly reducing methane emissions. This requires a bottom-up understanding of the “necessity,” and also an “acceptance” of the program based on: a “trust” that it will “apply to everyone” and will be “fairly applied”; that “no one will be left behind” (e.g. as in a Green New Deal); and – crucially – that the program is justifiable because it “will be effective.”
All those elements are crucial, in order to make possible (socially and politically) a capable climate change control program. As Irish scientist Barry McMullin has said, “the challenge is to make unpalatable policy palatable.” I believe we have no other option, except oblivion.
The challenge is a high one, because the above needed fast pace of phasing out fossil fuels and deeply cutting methane emissions can be expected to exceed how fast (or how much) renewable energy projects can be built and efficiency can be improved, for example. Rationing of energy and some goods, at least at some times and perhaps for a long time, must be anticipated, through a trustworthy program for administering it fairly that the public can accept as being necessary and fair and that will be well enforced (to prevent or minimize cheating, even by the wealthy).
It is only the dim prospect of such a program that gives me hope. Without that I see decade, after decade, after decade going by – as before – with, at best, marginal reductions of global emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and with unbearable pain and suffering continuing over the time horizon for us and the natural world, in every way imaginable.
We have got to get our greenhouse in order, starting without delay and at the fastest pace governments and society can possibly manage, sacrifices included.
8. Anything else you’d like to say.
It seems the above is already much more than you asked for. I am on Bluesky as @radreduction.bsky.social (radical emission reduction, eh?). Here are some climate-related publications I co-authored:
There are these on my ResearchGate page (which also has non-climate-related works):
Edwards, Larry; Cox, Stan (2020). Cap and Adapt: Failsafe Policy for the Climate Emergency. Solutions Journal, Vol. 11:3, Sept 2020
Heuwiesner, M; et al (2020). Degrowth of Aviation: Reducing air travel in a just way. A report by the Stay Grounded global network, Jan 2020.
And these can be found elsewhere:
Cox, Stan; Edwards, Larry (2022). Four scientists, a few small nations, and making unthinkable climate action possible. Resilience, 11 Feb 2022.
Stay Grounded (2021). Frequent Flyer Programmes Incentivise Climate Destruction. A well-researched blog article written by a Stay Grounded committee. 11 Aug 2021.
Larry Edwards has degrees in aeronautical and mechanical engineering.
Early in his career he settled in a small Alaskan town. From there for
nearly 50 years he has worked on pollution, forest and climate
concerns, both independently and professionally and on local, national
and global fronts.