Welcome to a new style of All Our Yesterdays post! From the last four years of posting, there’s clearly a lot of stuff going on.
On January 1, 1958, American policymakers were reported to be worried that if THEY didn’t control the weather, those dirty commies would… January 1, 1958 – control the weather before the commies do! -Twelve years later, arch red-baiter President Nixon, had gone all Greta (remember, less than a week after his inauguration the Santa Barbara Oil Spill served as the start of the modern American environmental protest movement.) saying it was “literally now or never.”
January 1, 1970 – President Nixon says 1970s is the critical environmental decade – “It is literally now or never.”
Eleven years after that, a book by scientist William Kellogg and sociologist Robert Schware was published, the fruit of various labours under the auspices of the Aspen Institute.
January 1, 1981- “Climate Change And Society” published
Seven years later, after scientific consensus had hardened even further, another “conservative” (Radical right) president, the by-now-quite-senile Ronald Reagan put his signature to the Global Climate Protection Act – one of the various motherhood and apple-pie efforts by various US senators in the aftermath of the 1985 Villach conference.
January 1, 1988 – President Reagan reluctantly signs “Global Climate Protection Act” #CreditClaiming (Later that year the carbon dioxide problem finally became a political issue, thanks to a bunch of factors.)
The EU, which had in the early 1990s tried to get a carbon tax off the ground finally managed to start an emissions trading scheme. This made banks, consultants and economists happy.
Finally, famed (and far-too-often-right) climate scientist James Hansen warned in a newspaper interview,
January 1 2007 James Hansen – “If we fail to act, we end up with a different planet”
Well, we failed to act, and the different planet is beginning to make itself obvious. Fun times in the Fafocene.
Are there other climate-related events that happened on this day that you think deserve a shout out? If so, let me know.
As ever, invite me on your podcast, etc etc.
