Category: United States of America

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Agnotology United States of America

1964, Jan 11: The Merchants of Doubt have work to do

On this day, January 11, in 1964 the  Surgeon General of the United States Dr. Luther Terry, M.D., published the landmark report Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the United States. 

It sparked national and worldwide anti-smoking efforts.  But of course, as documented in the “Merchants of Doubt” by Naomi Oreskes and Stephen Conway, the tobacco industry was waaay ahead of the curve, having started highly effective campaigns to cast doubt on the science, and then to reframe it all as “personal responsibility”. Sound familiar? It should: the subtitle of the must-read Oreskes and Conway book is “How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming”.
Why it matters. This “agnotology” (the creation of ignorance) has been a staggeringly successful tool of predatory delay.  And “education” is no defence.  In fact, those who’ve received “good” educations are often more vulnerable to insidious propaganda and careful framing than those who did not have the right clothes, accent, habitus to get through the obstacle course and win the prizes. If educated people (including the author of this blog) had gotten off – and stayed off – their asses in the early 90s, we might – just might – not be looking down the business end of 4 degrees by the end of the century. Oops

Categories
Ignored Warnings United States of America Weather modification

1958, Jan 8: “The masters of infinity… could control the world’s weather”, says LBJ

On this day in 1958 future President Lyndon Baines Johnson was speaking at the Democratic Caucus

“From space,” declared Johnson at the Democratic Caucus in January of 1958, warning of the technologically and scientifically superior Russians, “the masters of infinity could have the power to control the earth’s weather, to case drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the level of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream, and change temperate climates to frigid” (Howe, 2014:27).

Why this matters – this sense of paranoia and fear, that matters might be beyond our control, and that we must redouble our efforts to be In Charge –  is, I fear, what is behind the coming push for geoengineering “solutions” as a kind of last throw of the dice. It’s good to remember that weather modification predates concerns about atmospheric build up of C02, and that the same types of people have been advocating both (this is not to say that there aren’t well-intentioned ‘progressive’ types who want a better world and don’t see a way out of the mess that doesn’t involve more god-technology japes).

What happened next?

As president, Lyndon Johnson gave a “Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty“ which included the prescient lines

“Air pollution is no longer confined to isolated places”. This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Entire regional airsheds, crop plant environments, and river basins are heavy with noxious materials.”

This was in February 1965  though, while LBJ was tag-teaming the USA into the thousand year long invasion of Vietnam, so the sentences possibly didn’t get the attention future generations might have hoped they would.


See also

Jan 1st: blog post – Control the weather before the Commies do…

Further reading

Monbiot,, G. (2006) No Quick Fix on Paul Cruzen

Wasser, A. (2005) LBJ’s space race: what we didn’t know then. The Space Review, June 20.

Categories
Economics of mitigation Predatory delay United States of America

1971, Jan 6: the whiff of sulphur (taxes) and 20 more years of #PredatoryDelay

On this day 51 years ago the idea of – gasp –  putting a tax on something that was causing environmental damage (cuh-razy communist idea) was kicked around within the Nixon administration.

We know this thanks to a really great book called Behind the Curve, by Joshua Howe, which looks at the climate issue before it became famous (see review in Environmental Politics here [paywalled]).

“As early as 1970 the Nixon administration considered levying a tax on SO2 tied to energy production from coal.”

(Howe, 2014:148)

And the footnote has it – John C. Whitaker to Ken Cole, memorandum, Jan 6 1971 “Sulfur Dioxide Emissions Charge,” memo for John B. Connally [sic] Jr. secretary of treasury, Nov. 11 1971. The tax was never implemented, in part because the Office of Management and Budget showed that it would work too well, taxing SO2 emissions out of existence before the program could generate enough revenue to meet Nixon’s pro-business political goals. (Howe, 2014:244) 

Why this matters – we are told that this is all impossible to do anything about – over-emphasised complexification, as part of the predatory delay.  Of course, climate is a much bigger/wider issue than acid rain, and carbon (in the form of fossil fuels) is far harder to replace in the production chain than CFCs or sulfur.  But the basic point – that you can put up taxes on things you are trying to discourage, as long as you think about/do something serious about  the distributional effects on the poorest and most vulnerable – should be entirely uncontroversial. As we will see, this has not been the case.

What happened next?

It would be another 20 years before anything substantive got done about sulphur in the US, with the 1990 Clean Air Act.  The question  of whether emissions trading mattered, or whether technological developments independent of a price-on-sulphur has given academics, activists and policymakers something to write and talk about too. 

Further reading

Bohr, J. (2016) The ‘climatism’ cartel: why climate change deniers oppose market-based mitigation policy. Environmental Politics, Vol. 25, 5.  https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2016.1156106

Brigham Daniels, Andrew P. Follett, and Joshua Davis, The Making of the Clean Air Act, 71 HASTINGS L.J. 901 (2020). Available at: https://repository.uchastings.edu/hastings_law_journal/vol71/iss4/3

Gabriel Chan, Robert Stavins, Robert Stowe, and Richard Sweeney (2012) THE SO2 ALLOWANCE-TRADING SYSTEM AND THE CLEAN AIR ACT AMENDMENTS OF 1990: REFLECTIONS ON 20 YEARS OF POLICY INNOVATION. National Tax Journal, 65 (2), 419–452


Lohmann, L. 2006. Carry On Polluting: Comment and analysis in New Scientist. The Cornerhouse, 2 December.

Categories
Activism Australia UNFCCC United States of America

1992, Jan 3: Greenpeace vs POTUS on Climate Change

On this day, 30 years ago, to coincide with the visit of President George HW Bush to Australia, Greenpeace Australia took out newspaper adverts of the Statue of Liberty with smoke billowing from her torch, calling on the United States to drastically reduce its carbon emissions. 

The context for this was that negotiations for the climate treaty to be signed in Rio later that year were well underway. And all the signs were that the US would play a spoiling role. 

This matters, because that’s exactly what Uncle Sam did. The French said rightly, that targets and timetables for emissions reductions by wealthy countries should be included in the text of the treaty. The Americans replied, “if you put those in, we’re not coming.” The French blinked, reasoning that timetables and targets could be inserted later. They were at Kyoto, vastly inadequate, but there. And then the Americans didn’t ratify and withdrew from the process.

We are still living with the consequences of this. And our children, other people’s children, other people’s children will all also live with those. Not to mention all the other species we “share” this planet with. 

It’s always worth remembering that these agreements that we live with now were the result of previous proposals, compromises and in this case -as in many others – naked veto power.

Categories
International Geophysical Year Technophilia United States of America Weather modification

1958, Jan 1: Control the weather before the Commies do…

On this day, 64 years ago the New York Times had a front page story with the title “US is Urged to Seek Methods to Control the World’s Weather”. New York Times, 1 January, p1

Written by one John Finney it begins…

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 — A special advisory committee recommended to President Eisenhower today an expanded and vigorous Government research program into how to control or modify the world’s weather

This was of course peak-Cold War. A few months previously the Russians, having captured better Nazi rocket scientists than the Americans had managed to paperclip, had aput a small metal ball into orbit, causing panic and despair.

It was also in the middle of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) ( at topic to which we will return).

Given the general paranoia and offense to the Uncle Sam’s amour propre, it’s surprising we didn’t end up with a “cloud gap” to match the illusory-but-useful bomber gap and missile gap…

Why this matters: we need to remember that the early history of understanding the climate is wrapped up in military needs (think about the British Navy and the Met Office) and computational models – see Edwards, 2010). It’s all part of the whole “give me absolute control over every living soul” thing that is steadily dooming us.

There is a strand of conspiratorial thinking, and fiction, which has ‘weather wars’ successfully being fought (I have a bunch of these novels, and should write about them. They’re fun, while bonkers).

What happened next? The IGY yielded a great findings (though the Pentagon briefly baulked at continuing to fund the C02 measures on Mauna Loa – that’s for another time). Weather modification experiments continued, but came up against the limits of human power.

References

Edwards, P. (2010). A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. MIT Press

Finney, J. (1958) “US is Urged to Seek Methods to Control the World’s Weather”. New York Times, 1 January, p1

Further reading

Fleming, J. (2012) Fixing the Sky: the Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. Columbia University Press.

Hamblin, J. (2013) Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism. Oxford University Press

Harper, K. (2008). Climate control: United States weather modification in the cold war and beyond. Endeavour, Volume 32, Issue 1, pp. 20-26.