On this day , August 28, 1971, a snarky opinion piece appeared in the New York Times, written by an oil lobbyist called Eugene Guccione (not the Penthouse guy!). It ran with the now-all-too-familiar sneers and (deliberate?) misunderstandings of what was being said.
A few days later, scientist Stephen Schneider wrote a good rebuttal, his first ever letter to a newspaper.
On this day, August 22, 1981 the New York Times had a front page story about climate change. Written by its legendary science writer Walter Sullivan, it began
STUDY FINDS WARMING TREND THAT COULD RAISE SEA LEVELS
A team of Federal scientists says it has detected an overall warming trend in the earth’s atmosphere extending back to the year 1880. They regard this as evidence of the validity of the ”greenhouse” effect, in which increasing amounts of carbon dioxide cause steady temperature increases.
The seven atmospheric scientists predict a global warming of ”almost unprecedented magnitude” in the next century. It might even be sufficient to melt and dislodge the ice cover of West Antarctica, they say, eventually leading to a worldwide rise of 15 to 20 feet in the sea level. In that case, they say, it would ”flood 25 percent of Louisiana and Florida, 10 percent of New Jersey and many other lowlands throughout the world” within a century or less.
It was based on a study by James Hansen. Hansen’s unit was punished by having Department of Energy funding pulled – 5 people lose their jobs (See Bowen Censoring Science page 212)
[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 338.48 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]
Why this matters.
Scientists getting punished for reporting the facts. Always a good look, eh? Never ever sends a chilling message.
What happened next?
Hansen and others kept going. That’s what good scientists do. By 1985, they realised shit was about to get real.
On this day, 25 July, 1977 the New York Times ran a front page story, by its science reporter, Walter Sullivan. Its title – “Scientists Fear Heavy Use of Coal May Bring Adverse Shift in Climate“
“Highly adverse consequences” may follow if the world, as now seems likely, depends increasingly on coal for energy over the next two centuries, according to a blue‐ribbon panel of scientists.
“In a report to the National Academy of Sciences on their two‐and‐a‐half‐year study, the scientists foresee serious climate changes beginning in the next century. By the latter part of the 22nd century a global warming of 10 degrees Fahrenheit is indicated, with triple that rise in high latitudes.”
Sullivan, W. (1977) Scientists Fear Heavy Use of Coal May Bring Adverse Shift in Climate New York Times, July 25, p.1
On April 26 1998 the New York Times ran a front page story. It began thus.
Industry opponents of a treaty to fight global warming have drafted an ambitious proposal to spend millions of dollars to convince the public that the environmental accord is based on shaky science.
Among their ideas is a campaign to recruit a cadre of scientists who share the industry‘s views of climate science and to train them in public relations so they can help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify controls on greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide that trap the sun’s heat near Earth.
An informal group of people working for big oil companies, trade associations and conservative policy research organizations that oppose the treaty have been meeting recently at the Washington office of the American Petroleum Institute to put the plan together.
Cushman, J. 1998. Industrial Group Plans to Battle Climate Treaty. New York Times, 26 April, p.1
The context is that the US had signed the Kyoto Protocol (this in itself was a meaningless gesture – it only had force if ratified, and the Clinton administration had no intention of trying to get it through the Senate, especially given the previous year’s Byrd-Hagel resolution, which had insisted the US should not sign any treaty that didn’t put emissions constraints on developing countries (looking at you, China). This was of course exactly the opposite of what they’d signed off on in 1992 (Rio) and 1995 (Berlin Mandate) but hey, consistency and hobgoblins, amirite?
On one level, this was hardly “news” – anyone who had been paying any attention at all from 1989 onwards; the George Marshall Foundation got going on climate, and then the Global Climate Coalition and the “Information Clearinghouse on the Environment” (1991) and the attacks on IPCC second assessment report by various well-connected loons, and THEN the attacks on Kyoto in the run up to the meeting in 1997.
See for example Cushman’s report on 7th December 1997, during the Kyoto meeting – “Intense Lobbying Against Global Warming Treaty: U.S. Negotiators Brief Industry Groups and Environmentalists Separately in Kyoto”
Why this matters
A part of the reason (not the most important part necessarily, and not the part we can do that much about) “we” have done so little on climate change is because of staggeringly successful campaigns of predatory delay.
See also – Ben Franta’s work on the American Petroleum Institute.
On this day, the 23rd of April 2009 journalist Andy Revkin broke a story in The New York Times about the Global Climate Coalition.
The Global Climate Coalition – cuddly-sounding name aside – was an industry pressure group that had between 1989 and 2002 been a major player in stopping any meaningful international action on climate change.
Revkin’s story – you can read it here – was that the head honchos at the Global Climate Coalition got given the truth about climate change by their own scientists,, and they chose to ignore it because it didn’t fit their in needs for predatory delay and doubt
Why this matters.
We need to know in the words of Nick Tomalin, the British journalist who died in 1973, that “they lie, they lie, they lie”. If the truth is going to get in the way of their profits, they will lie. And these lies will be repeated by time policy wonks to create a “common sense” that maintains the status quo. Nothing that Gramsci would be surprised that nothing that you or I should be surprised that
Sakshi Aravind is a PhD student at University of Cambridge. (see her review of Andreas Malm’s book “How to blow up a pipeline” here, and see an interview here) reflects on the 32 years since this-
1990 Shabecoff, P. 1990. Environmental Groups Told They Are Racists in Hiring. New York Times, 1 February. WASHINGTON, Jan. 31— Several members of civil rights and minority groups have written to eight major national environmental organizations charging them with racism in their hiring practices
After thirty-two years, it is a small relief that we do not have to write letters about discriminatory hiring practices in environmental organisations. We have traversed some distance. Let us make past this momentary sense of satisfaction. We can sit down for a hard-headed debriefing about whether this ‘distance’ was noticeably significant in any particular direction or just self-congratulatory posturing about having made it past our front yards. Since I am writing about a small but exceedingly significant letter written in the year I was born, I cannot dismiss all that peoples’ persistence has achieved in these years. The concept of ‘environmental justice’ has found a strong foothold and bided its time in the social, political, and juridical spheres. Social movements for environmental justice, fair and equitable environmental policies, and opportunities for democratic participation are very vibrant. The environmental organisations do not have visible and impenetrable walls obstructing BIPOC members. The phrases ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’ seem boundlessly desired even by vampiric corporations. While it is easy to pin down ‘what changed’, ‘what did not’ is worrying. What have we done with the achievements, transformations, and progresses of the last 32 years as the nature of planetary collapse worsens?
When the racist hiring practices were seemingly remedied, how did the people responsible for those changes define the problem? What did they imagine they were solving when they hired a more representative workforce and opened their membership for all? It is important to document and assess the changes we have witnessed in the last three decades to classify what problems are fully addressed and what others have shapeshifted into another version of themselves. Whilst environmental movements and groups appear to be more representative, ‘representation’ does not fill the shoes of ‘recognition’. Even ‘recognition’ can be a lopsided concept if it is not constructive and does not allow for a plurality of voices across race, class, gender, etc. The big question of what changed between then and now should be: whether the change of heart in environmentalism confronted the entrenched whiteness (and consequently coloniality) that underlies the collective understanding of environmental injustices, policy choices, and the general direction of environmental movements. The problem of racism and coloniality in environmental movements is also structural. Hence, cosmetic changes in representation can only have incremental benefits and not the epistemic shift we need to counter the rapid destruction of the planet. Mercifully, we did not regress. However, environmental organisations also did not build on their knowledge on a required scale. There are no visible and invisible forms of environmental racism and environmental colonialism. There are either visible aspects that are hard to deny or the aspects that are wilfully ignored and diminished without any accountability—through entrenched knowledge and epistemologies that are vital to the sustenance and reproduction of colonial, white supremacist, capitalist nations.
If environmental movements and organisations had understood how ‘spaces’ (emphasis on structures as opposed to a handful of institutions) exclude BIPOC workers, activists, members, and environmentalisms, our responsibilities at the moment would have been lighter despite the number of challenges regarding environmental destruction and climate change. Something as simple as how wilderness is defined, what opportunities are available to benefit from the environment—even simple pleasures such as birdwatching—and what autonomy does BIPOC have on controlling and governing land, natural resources are steeped in relationships of expropriation and elimination. Therefore, it is still easy to please many people with Don’t Look Up as if it were the pinnacle of artistic expression. At the same time, Global South prepares for the worst of climate crises that have been building up due to imperialist plunder. In 1990, they were concerned about the absence of People of Colour in key organisations. Now, we are concerned about the absence of constructive voices that would define climate change as anything but a specific event; dismantle structures of accumulation, theft, and exploitation; demand reparations and imagine world-making practices in terms of kinship, care, cooperation, and justice.
If we think long and hard, a lot changed for the good. Nevertheless, the ways in which environmental injustices have been defined are still largely in the clutches of those who command the resources—social, political, capital et al. Effectively, the epistemic resources need redistribution along with material redistribution. Moreover, epistemic justice must follow environmental justice close at hand. Meanwhile, we keep writing and conversing in the hope that we might have done a little more towards the things we care for than what we inherited thirty years later.
On this day, the New York Times released a report, written by Andy Revkin, about how famed climate scientist James Hansen was being subjected to attempts at gagging him by some of George W Bush’s appointed goons. You can read all about it here. There’s a whole (very good) book about the campaign, called Censoring Science.
Hansen had already been up against this sort of stuff in 1981, when the incoming Reagan administration had cut his funding in retaliation to a previous front page story on the New York Times.
Why this matters?
Because if scientists, charities, think tanks, civil trade unions, etc, are gagged and silenced, then the public don’t get a real sense of “what’s up” (though by now, it amounts to wilful ignorance, and anyway, information on its own counts for nothing). This is all part of the long war against impact science, usually by no means exclusively, on the part of the “ right “. You have to remember that when the “left” is in charge, it also doesn’t go particularly well for independently minded scientists.
What happened next
Hansen is still publishing. You can see his Google Scholar page here because Hansen is in the old Yiddish term, a mensch.
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
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.
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.
