Ana Unruh Cohen, DPhil, is a climate scientist and policy expert who has served in various roles in Congress, the White House, and NGOs during her 25-year career kindly agreed to write a commentary on the CO2 Newsletter, Vol. 1, no. 6. You can read other commentaries – and issues – here.
It is April in Washington, DC as I review the ‘message in a bottle’ from 1980 that has washed up on my screen thanks to the diligence of Marc Hudson of All Our Yesterdays. Fittingly much of the August-September 1980 CO2 Newsletter Vol 1, No 6 is devoted to an April hearing that same year in the Senate Committee on Energy and Resources.
Twenty-five years ago—in the fall of 2001—I arrived in DC as a freshly-minted DPhil in Earth science ready for a new challenge in the halls of Congress. After almost 5 years in the UK in the somewhat cloistered life of a graduate student, I was aware of the climate politics playing out on the international stage around the Kyoto Protocol and what had come up in the 2000 U.S. presidential election campaign between Al Gore and the ultimate winner George W. Bush. I was ready to dive in with my climate knowledge and eager to find a way to advance climate policy. I had no idea that more than 20 years before Senators were hearing similar warnings about the risks of climate change and the need to shift our energy generation from fossil fuels to carbon-free sources like solar and nuclear power. During my time in DC, historians have done more work on the development of climate science and climate policy that has sparked my own curiosity. But it wasn’t until I opened this volume of the CO2 Newsletter that I learned about the April 1980 Senate hearing.
Opponents of policies that would curb fossil fuel use and address climate change try to make the concern about global heating seem like something new—or for those that call it a hoax, something newly made up—but as the CO2 Newsletter documents back in the spring of 1980 Senators were asking “what we politicians and Congress need to do” about the CO2 problem. This wasn’t a hearing to just explore the science though. The senators already understood that climate impacts and energy decisions were two sides of the same coin. They heard from climate science luminaries George Woodwell, Wally Broecker, and William Kellogg, but also about energy policy from Gordon MacDonald of the MITRE Corporation and David Rose of MIT. That day the senators heard predictions that proved accurate like it taking between 10 to 20 years before warming due to carbon dioxide would be detected against natural fluctuations. Fifteen years later, in 1995, the second IPCC Assessment Report concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests there is a discernible human influence on global climate.” Dr. Woodwell suggested the CO2 problem might be “the preeminent international issue in management of resources during the early decades of the next century.” The gathering of world leaders in Paris 2015 to hammer out the UNFCCC Paris Agreement lends weight to that prediction.
In surveying the world in 2026, I’d argue that it is the most prevalent international resources issue, impacting energy, agricultural, biodiversity, immigration, and economic development around the world. One of the predictions from the 1980 hearing is still open: will the CO2 content of the atmosphere reach 500-600 ppm sometime in the first half of the 21st century? The answer to that depends on the twin focus of the Senate hearing, energy generation.
The energy debate in the Senate hearing, and captured in the rest of the CO2 Newsletter, feels as if it could be posts on social media today—the promise of nuclear power, the risks of nuclear proliferation, the need for domestic energy security, the elevation of natural gas as a cleaner fossil fuel, and the energy paradigm shift of solar power. In 1980 the U.S. was recovering from the economic consequences of the OPEC oil embargo. Sadly in 2026, the world is suffering from the economic consequences of the U.S. joining Israel in bombing Iran and Iran’s subsequent retaliation to close the Strait of Hormuz to almost all ships. Both events force re-evaluation of energy policy for economic security that have implications for the CO2 problem.
Luckily, we now have lithium-ion batteries, and their competitors, rapidly expanding the scope of possibility for both energy security and curbing carbon dioxide pollution. Batteries are noticeably absent from the Senate hearing; understandably so since the first commercial lithium-ion batteries were not sold until 1991. They are opening up alternatives in transportation the Senators and the expert witnesses did not foresee and answering concerns about solar variability that were raised in the spring of 1980. The world is in a race to avoid the potential catastrophic impacts of the climate crisis that the CO2 Newsletter records. Coupling battery technology with wind and solar gives us some hope of avoiding the worst while enhancing energy security.
While the reporting on the Senate hearing captured most of my attention, this issue of the CO2 Newsletter reports on other important climate issues that we are still grappling with today including attribution of weather events, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and a report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences on the “Economic and Social Aspects of Carbon Dioxide Increase” led by future Nobel-prize winning economist Thomas Schelling.
Looking back at the history of climate science and policy can trigger wistful thoughts of “what-if?” And relatable feelings of sadness about what we have lost and anger at fossil fuel and other vested interests that have fought to prevent climate action. Although it can be hard, we need to take the long-known climate science coupled with ever improving clean energy technologies and ask “what now?” We can never surrender our fight to curb carbon pollution and for clean energy to provide a future for all the people and amazing inhabitants of this one Earth.
