Thirty-seven years ago, on this day, January 27 1986, engineers at the company Morton-Thiokol were begging their own bosses, and NASA administrators, to delay the launch of the Challenger Space Shuttle. They feared it could explode on the launch pad, because seals keeping fuel away from air were not going to work because the rubber they were made of had lost its elasticity, thanks to unexpected sub-zero temperatures in Florida.
As per the Wikipedia entry about one of the engineers, Roger Boisjoly.
Following the announcement that the Challenger mission was confirmed for January 28, 1986, Boisjoly and his colleagues tried to stop the flight. Temperatures were due to fall to −1 °C (30 °F) overnight. Boisjoly felt that this would severely compromise the safety of the O-ring and potentially the flight.
The matter was discussed with Morton Thiokol managers, who agreed that the issue was serious enough to recommend delaying the flight. NASA protocols required all shuttle sub-contractors to sign off on each flight. During the go/no-go telephone conference with NASA management the night before the launch, Morton Thiokol notified NASA of their recommendation to postpone. NASA officials strongly questioned the recommendations, and asked (some say pressured) Morton Thiokol to reverse its decision.
The Morton Thiokol managers asked for a few minutes off the phone to discuss their final position again. The management team held a meeting from which the engineering team, including Boisjoly and others, were deliberately excluded. The Morton Thiokol managers advised NASA that their data was inconclusive. NASA asked if there were objections. Hearing none, NASA decided to launch the STS-51-LChallenger mission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Boisjoly
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 348.8ppm. As of 2023 it is 419.
The context was NASA was under a lot of pressure to launch, because of previous delays and because there was a civilian – a teacher called Christa McAuliffe – on board.
What I think we can learn from this
Hierarchies are “reality distortion fields”. But reality – especially physics and chemistry – will impinge, sooner or later.
It’s probably a good idea to listen to scientists and engineers who say something is really unsafe.
There is such a thing as “organisational decay” – Organizational decay is a condition of generalized and systemic ineffectiveness. It develops when an organization shifts its activities from coping with reality to presenting a dramatization of its own ideal character. In the decadent organization, flawed decision making of the sort that leads to disaster is normal activity, not an aberration. Three aspects of the development of organizational decay are illustrated in the case of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration. They are (1) the institutionalization of the fiction, (2) personnel changes in parallel with the institutionalization of the fiction, and (3) the narcissistic loss of reality among management.
What happened next
In case you didn’t know, the Challenger was torn apart 73 seconds into its flight.
Boisjoly spent the rest of his life trying to get other people to learn from what had happened. By all accounts, a mensch.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
Schwartz, H. 1989. Organizational disaster and organisational decay: the case of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Industrial Crisis Quarterly, 3, pp.319-334.
And a blog post of mine, inspired by reading Schwartz
Fifty three years ago, on this day, January 26, 1970, a Nixon-era scientist (a professor in Applied Physics no less) called Hubert Heffner expressed (understandable!) uncertainty about climate change. In September the previous year Daniel Moynihan had written a memo – now famous on the internet – about the possible consequences of carbon dioxide build-up.
“Moynihan received a response in a Jan. 26, 1970, memo from Hubert Heffner, deputy director of the administration’s Office of Science and Technology. Heffner acknowledged that atmospheric temperature rise was an issue that should be looked at.
“The more I get into this, the more I find two classes of doom-sayers, with, of course, the silent majority in between,” he wrote. “One group says we will turn into snow-tripping mastodons because of the atmospheric dust and the other says we will have to grow gills to survive the increased ocean level due to the temperature rise.”
Heffner wrote that he would ask the Environmental Science Services Administration to look further into the issue.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 325ppm. As of 2023 it is 419.
The context was the US administration of Nixon was trying to use environmental issues to change the conversation in Europe, away from, well, you know, napalming Vietnamese children. That’s part of the context of the Moynihan memo. The Germans were underwhelmed by this as a tactic. Meanwhile, the United Nations bureaucracy was grinding forward with preparations for the Stockholm conference, to be held in June 1972.
What I think we can learn from this
It was still okay at this point to be just not quite sure. We must not allow hindsight to condemn folks for not knowing for sure (I think by late 1970s that argument becomes much much less viable).
What happened next
In August 1970 the first Council on Environmental Quality report came out, with a chapter written by Gordon MacDonald – see here .
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
One of the reasons I have continued with All Our Yesterdays is because there are definitely lots of smart activists and academics out there doing great work who deserve a signal boost and the chance to cross-fertilise. One such person is Prof. Cyrus Mody… who kindly agreed to this interview. (If you read Dutch, check out this interview too).
1) Who are you and how did you come to be working on the 1970s Oil Industry from a perch in Netherlands?
I’m an historian of science and technology at Maastricht University. A lot of my research wanders into business history, environmental history, energy history – but my PhD is in Science and Technology Studies, and I approach all my research from the direction of science and technology. That’s perhaps my main contribution as a scholar – to get historians of science to think more about business, and to get business, environmental, and energy historians to think more about science (and to get all of them to think more about technology). Until recently, I was making those points mostly with respect to fields related to the microelectronics industry – fields like semiconductor physics, electrical engineering, nanotechnology, materials science. But in the course of that research (and in reading the secondary literature on similar science-oriented industries such as biotechnology) I noticed that the oil industry was absolutely everywhere in high-tech (and yet hardly anyone had pointed out that ubiquity). So around 2012 I started preliminary work on the project that became Managing Scarcity and Sustainability by trying to map all the “spillovers” from the oil industry into other high-tech domains that I could find.
At the time I was at Rice University in Houston – a great place to do oil history and energy humanities, and a wonderful place to be an untenured assistant professor because I had a lot of freedom to teach what I wanted and enough resources for the kind of research I was doing at the time. But I could see that I couldn’t study all the oil spillovers I was uncovering on my own – that would require becoming an expert in the history of too many fields, each of which deserved its own study. For reasons I won’t go into, at Rice I was never going to be able to put together the kind of team needed to tackle this topic. But in the Netherlands, team projects are common. It wasn’t an easy decision to move, but in doing so I’m now surrounded by a much more vibrant local/regional history of science and technology and STS community than I was in Houston, and I’ve been able to hire an incredible team (Odinn Melsted, Jelena Stankovic, and Michiel Bron) to work on Managing Scarcity.
2) Tell us about , “Managing Scarcity and Sustainability: The Oil Industry, Environmentalism, and Alternative Energy in the Age of Scarcity.” – what is the project, and how might it help us understand what is going on now?
Managing Scarcity and Sustainability (https://managingscarcity.com/) is a five-year project funded by the NWO (usually translated as Dutch Research Council; award VI.C.191.067). Our main focus is oil actors’ involvement in the global debate about resource scarcity, environmentalism, and sustainable growth/development in the “long 1970s” (which we usually define as the years 1968 to 1986). By “oil actors” we mean, firstly, oil firms as well as allied firms and trade associations; but we also mean individual oil executives and scientists and engineers with oil industry experience, as well as the firms (e.g., solar energy start-ups) and organizations (e.g., philanthropic foundations) that those individuals led.
The project is sort of two-pronged: on the one hand, we look at the technologies that oil firms (and the start-ups they invested in) developed in response to growing awareness of resource scarcity and environmental problems. Here, we’re mainly interested in solar, geothermal, and nuclear (both fission and fusion) energy as well as auxiliary technologies such as biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology; but we’re also trying to draw in researchers who are studying other oil spillovers, e.g., wind energy or fuel cells and advanced batteries. The oil industry was deeply involved in lots of alternative energy in this period, but pulled back (in many cases, abandoned) those investments in the 1980s.
The other prong looks at a network of current and former oil executives who stoked the global debate on resource scarcity, environmental problems (including climate change), and sustainable development. At the center of that network were: Robert O. Anderson (chair of both Atlantic Richfield – a mid-size oil company – and the Aspen Institute, as well as donor to many other environmental organizations and think tanks); Maurice Strong (a Canadian diplomat, chair of the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment and the 1992 UN Rio Conference on Environment and Development, but also an executive or board member with various oil companies including Ajax, Dome, Petro-Canada, and Tosco); and George Mitchell (often known as the “father of fracking” but also the sponsor of a series of Limits to Growth conferences and other environmental/sustainable development activities). Through collaboration with the Club of Rome, the United Nations, the Nobel Foundation, and an array of think tanks, this network was incredibly influential in the emergence of institutions of global environmental governance from the 1970s until the early 1990s.
What can we learn from this? Well, first, that climate denialism and obstruction weren’t inevitable. All across the oil industry in the 1970s executives were publicly saying that we would need to rely more on non-fossil fuels: nuclear fission in the short term, geothermal in the medium term, and nuclear fusion and solar in the long term (by which they meant after the year 2000). And their companies invested accordingly. We’ve also known for a while that oil firms were aware of climate change in this period; but members of the Anderson-Strong-Mitchell network weren’t just aware of it, they were some of the loudest voices in the world drawing attention to it and calling for global governance structures to address it. Which means, second, that we have to look for a more complex explanation for why denialism became a more common strategy from the late 1980s onward. Our working hypothesis is that the declining price of oil meant these firms had less cash to invest for the long term. But, perhaps more importantly, the election of neoliberal regimes in the US, UK, Netherlands, Canada, and elsewhere meant those firms could no longer rely on the state as a partner in development of both alternative energy and climate regulation. Neoliberalism also encouraged hostile takeover bids by people like T. Boone Pickens, which forced oil firms both to liquidate assets in order to fend off those bids, and also to refocus on their “core competency” of getting oil out of the ground in order to assure investors that their main priority would be short-term returns rather than responsible long-term development of alternatives.
3) What is the “nanobubbles” project? What inspired it, what has it achieved, what next?
NanoBubbles is a large project funded by the European Research Council’s Synergy program (award 951393). We are a couple dozen researchers across more than a half-dozen universities in the Netherlands and France, drawn from history, sociology, philosophy, library science, computer science, nanoscience, STS, and other fields. The aim is to better understand the difficulties that scientists face in attempting to correct the scientific record, and also to study the systemic inducements to exaggeration, defense of erroneous claims, and even outright fraud in science. Some members of the group have personally experienced damaging repercussions from their attempts to correct errors in the scientific record; others have developed tools and approaches for studying some of the channels through which errors propagate (e.g., journal articles). My own interest stems in part from my earlier work on nanotechnology and in part from my current work (within Managing Scarcity) on climate denialism and on the oil industry’s inflation of “bubbles” in high-tech fields such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence. We’re about 18 months into the project, a lot of which was spent on hiring people and getting our infrastructure in place (e.g., ethics protocols), so our achievements thus far are mostly preparatory to what comes next; but I’d point you to work by some members of the project (Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, and colleagues) on “tortured phrases” as an example of what we’re working on (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02134-0). Ultimately, at least in the Maastricht corner of the project (i.e., myself, Candida Sanchez Burmester, and Max Rossman), we’d like to do both traditional, labor-intensive qualitative research (participant observation at labs and conferences, historical research at archives) and also develop automated tools for scaling up qualitative research to much larger Ns in order to better understand how claims and counter-claims do or don’t circulate through (and gain traction within) scientific communities.
4) What do you think the main thing academics/politicians/activists/citizens need to understand/do differently around energy to help us miss our climate targets by a smaller margin than we otherwise would?
Well, energy and climate are too complex to point to a single “main thing.” But the lessons I’d draw from Managing Scarcity and NanoBubbles are these: denialism and obstruction weren’t inevitable, and at one point a significant portion of the oil industry was working toward some kind of transition in both technology and governance; oil firms bear plenty of blame for their later support of denialism, but there are other actors (particularly neoliberal politicians and economists as well as the financial industry) who bear lots of blame too (and if we only address the oil industry but not those other actors we’ll never actually resolve the core issues); but even if some oil actors of the 1970s (people like Strong and Anderson) were moving in a more positive direction than that of their successors, their program was still too oriented to technological solutionism and economic growth; instead, we need an approach that prioritizes cultural change over (though not necessarily exclusive of) technological innovation, and that is willing to entertain alternatives to economic growth.
Ten years ago, on this day, January 25, 2013, one of the white men who has been born with a “safe pair of hands” had the good grace to admit that he’d misunderestimated the speed and breadth of climate impacts. Nick Stern, former World Bank economist, had been tapped on the shoulder by then-Treasurer Gordon Brown in 2005, and had produced a report (“the Stern Review” on the Economics of Climate Change). Interviewed by two Guardian journos at Davos 6 years after its release, he said
“Looking back, I underestimated the risks. The planet and the atmosphere seem to be absorbing less carbon than we expected, and emissions are rising pretty strongly. Some of the effects are coming through more quickly than we thought then.” (Had I known this), “I think I would have been a bit more blunt. I would have been much more strong about the risks of a four- or five-degree rise.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 395.8ppm. As of 2023 it is 419.
The context was that the international climate negotiations were beginning to crank up for the next “big” meeting (Paris 2015) and folks at Davos (where the rulers of the world and their consiglieres, lackeys and hangers-on go to be seen) were making the right noises.
What I think we can learn from this
The people with the safe pairs of hands? Always ask yourself – safe for WHO? Safe for WHAT?
What happened next
Davos kept going (everyone should read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, imo. It’s set in Davos, but with a different cast of characters, different sensibility.). The Paris Agreement happened. And everyone was saved.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
Thirty nine years ago, on this day, January 24, 1984, Canadians got to understand what was coming, via a CBC documentary, including Stephen Seidel, one of the authors of a recent US EPA report “Can we delay a greenhouse warming?”
As per the Climate State website –
Topics discussed include, the scientific consensus, weather patterns, sea level rise, adaptation, climate actions, or the greenhouse effect. This 1984 documentary outlines our understanding of global climate change at the time.
There’s weather, and then there’s climate. Weather patterns come and go, but forecasting has become much more accurate through improved meteorological techniques. Climate change is harder to predict. But, as the CBC’s Peter Kent shows in this 1984 documentary, it’s happening.
Carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere have been steadily rising, and by the year 2100 the average global temperature may rise by five degrees Celsius due to the greenhouse effect.
“Good evening. Tonight on The Journal a full edition devoted to the greenhouse effect, which will eventually cause the greatest global climatic change since prehistoric times. The full effect won’t be felt for a century or more, but younger members of our audience may well live to experience the first changes. Our grandchildren almost certainly will. We fully expect a certain amount of scepticism among viewers in this unusually cold winter to the proposition that warmer weather is ahead for Canada and the rest of the world. However, as you’ll see, the scientific community is virtually unanimous in the prediction of a warming trend, and that the irreversible warming will create major disruptions of what we’ve come to consider as normal weather patterns. The only disagreement seems to be in the timing and magnitude of the disruptions caused by the greenhouse effect.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 344.2ppm. As of 2023 it is 419
The context was that in late 1983 two big reports on climate (an EPA one saying ‘srsly, trouble ahead’ and an NAS one saying ‘meh’) had been released. Climate was now a suitable topic for documentaries and panel discussions, at least to break up the monotony of “are we all going to fry in a nuclear war?” And the two kinda dovetailed, what with the concerns about a nuclear winter…
What I think we can learn from this
Again, we have known. The people who were children then are adults now, and I don’t see a whole lot of transformational change, so expecting today’s kids to organise transformational change when they are “grown up” is, um, optimistic.
What happened next
Broadcasters kept broadcasting. Four years later, in Toronto, the world did finally wake up…
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
Sixty six years ago, on this day, January 23, 1957, New Zealand scientist Athol Rafter laid out what was ahead of us, at an ANZAAS meeting
“A New Zealand scientist said that if the existing percentage of carbon dioxide gas in the air was doubled, the earth’s temperature would rise enough to melt polar ice caps and flood many major coastal cities.”
and
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2023 it is 419
The context was that with the coming of the ability to do carbon-14 dating, it was obvious that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were indeed climbing (at this point Charles David Keeling’s meticulous measurements at Mauna Loa were still over a year away from starting). The International Geophysical Year was about to begin, and everyone was rather excited…
What I think we can learn from this
The science of this did not used to be controversial, and people have known for a hella long time…
What happened next
The scientists kept going, with their pesky impact science, measuring the problems caused by production science….
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
this last week the best post I put up on this site was the fab interview with Sabine Clarke. Read it here.
Coming up this week there are posts on “organisational decay”, taskforces as catnip for liberals, a 1984 Canadian documentary and a 1970 “what’s going ON?” memo from within the Nixon Whitehouse.
I’d like to say thanks to Sam and Richard for their proof-reading and their thoughts. If YOU want to help proofread future posts, get in touch. If you want to write a post, get in touch.
Lastly, with permission, I am quoting someone’s friendly critique of the site/the project. (fwiw, I agree with it, and will try to act on it. What do other people think?)
OK this seems like a good place for me to present an overarching criticism and a challenge. I know we will disagree about this, but after reading all these entries I developed a sense of something missing..
So what I would like to propose is related to the overall purpose of this project. It already provides great stuff in terms of orientation for people within a history of endless loops, lessons not learned and so on, but what about trying to go one step further…
If you have any ideas for how things should and could be done differently, from today, and if you see any possibility at all that people reading these entries might be receptive to them, (having just read learned something about all the ways we have been doing things wrong), then would this not be a good place to share them?
Suppose that every entry you attempted to link to other articles you have written in a section at the end of the entry called “what we do now”, or “so what can we do differently”, or “how we can apply this lesson”… A section like that wouldn’t need to be unique for each entry, you would just think, “ok, if that is the lesson we get from looking at this historical event, then how do I normally suggest we avoid this, or account for this in our actions? What pro-active suggestions do I have for the movement and for orgs?” Then you would just link to the relevant articles where you lay that out, using those links in a repetitive way as necessary, since likely there are fewer solutions than the occurrences of failure…
Obviously, this would then change the scope of the project a bit. You would be focussing not just on our “yesterdays” but on our present, but I think something like this might be necessary. Not only does it seem like a practical step, but it might also increase readership. People might generally be more willing to engage with their failures if they don’t see them as unavoidable, pre-destined things and if they don’t have a sense that there are alternatives or fixes of any kind. They will bury their heads deeper
I should clarify, obviously the “what I think we learn from this” section already goes some way to providing what I think is missing, I just think it doesn’t go far enough. Rather than just providing lessons about how to think about certain things, we need more thinking about how to actually apply those lessons. That’s sort of what I am getting at here.
Twenty seven years ago, on this day, January 22, 1995, John Major was given an opportunity to have a legacy that wasn’t a cones hotline or sleaze. Oh well…
“THE PRIME Minister’s own advisers will this week publicly challenge him to introduce green taxes to ‘radically change the way society works’. They could even replace income tax. In their first annual report, experts appointed by John Major urge him, as a priority, to put environmental protection at the heart of government economic policy. The panel, headed by Sir Crispin Tickell, warden of Green College, Oxford, and Britain’s former ambassador to the United Nations, will argue that conventional taxes on wages and employers’ national insurance contributions should gradually be replaced by taxes on the use of energy and natural resources by industry and consumers.”
Ghazi, P. (1995). Go for green tax, says Major’s team. The Observer, 22 January, p.5.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 360ppm. As of 2023 it is 418.
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The context was that the UK government had signed up to the UNFCCC at the Rio Earth Summit, and there was rhetoric flying around about not merely stabilising emissions but reducing them. This was underway because coal plants were being closed, but some people were trying to get longer-term thinking going, including Crispin Tickell, who had been trying to get the British state to take climate seriously since the late 1970s… To be fair, their task was that much harder because of an attempt in 1993 to dress up a VAT increase as an environmental measure, which had poisoned the well (see a blog post in March for more details…)
What I think we can learn from this
Possibly good ideas have been lying around for decades. Getting any of them implemented requires more than just mandarins (i.e. mandarins are necessary but not sufficient).
What happened next
Nothing significant
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
References
Ghazi, P. (1995). Go for green tax, says Major’s team. The Observer, 22 January, p.5.
Sixty-one years ago, on this day, January 21, 1960, 435 workers were buried alive when a mine in Coalbrook, Free State collapses. (South Africa)
In the words of scholar Alan Copley,
“At least 435 miners died when a large section of the mine collapsed on 21 January 1960. The Coalbrook Disaster can be attributed in large measure to the rise of the racist, capitalist apartheid state in South Africa after 1948. As the first major crisis of 1960 in South Africa, it dramatised and foreshadowed many of the debates that ensued during that year about the nature of the apartheid state. Key causes of the disaster were the exponential increase in demand for coal following the opening of the Taaibos power station in 1954 on the one hand, and the cumulative effects of unsound mine labour practices based on race on the other.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 316..9 ppm. As of 2023 it is 419. .
The context was Apartheid and profits squeeze, of course.
What I think we can learn from this
There is no such thing as free energy. Someone is going to be on the pointy-end. The less they look and sound like you, the easier it is for you to ignore their existence, their suffering.
Personal note – I remember in 1986 (or possibly 1987) being the cause of frustration and exasperation of a very smart fellow student at my posh school, who was a big fan of nuclear. When I talked about the dangers (this was just post-Chernobyl) he pointed to all the people who died digging up coal. I said that was different and irrelevant. He got irritated (rightly) and was told off by his father. My bad, Tim, my bad (which is not to say I am now pro-nuke).
What happened next
More apartheid, for decades. At a global level, it’s apartheid pure and simple. You might even call it, um, Global Apartheid.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
References
Cobley, A. (2020) Powering Apartheid: The Coalbrook Mine Disaster of 1960, South African Historical Journal, 72:1, 80-97, DOI: 10.1080/02582473.2020.1728577
January 20, 2011 – Shell tries to change the subject from its own emissions
Twelve years ago, on this day, January, 20, 2011, Shell tried to change the subject.
“After being called by an official from Royal Dutch Shell regarding the April 2011 conference in Banff, Alta., that was to focus on “less controversial” aspects of the climate-change debate, such as energy efficiency and transportation demand management, [Canadian associate assistant deputy minister Mike] Beale felt compelled to state what was missing. “I had to point out – nicely – that the initiative seems to sidestep the gorilla in the room of emission reductions from O&G (oil and gas), but that otherwise, it seems like a great idea,” wrote Beale in the Jan. 20, 2011 email, released to Postmedia News through access to information legislation.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 391.5ppm. As of 2023 it is 419.
The context was that the post-Copenhagen conversation was grinding on (just because Canada had pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, that didn’t mean the ant-climate action folks had downed tools).
This should also be seen in the context of Shell’s multi-decade efforts at minimising, distracting and subject-changing (they don’t do outright denial anymore, it’s all about the predatory delay).
What I think we can learn from this
Trying to have an honest conversation about what we are up against and what needs to be done will continue to be difficult when your interlocutors want to derail the conversation, and will use subtle means to do it sometimes….
What happened next
Shell has indulged in all sorts of cool-washing, involving hipster women and also Jean-luc Godard rip offs.
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