[Years before the climate crisis was part of national discourse,
this memo to the president predicted catastrophe]
[[link removed]]

THE 1977 WHITE HOUSE CLIMATE MEMO THAT SHOULD HAVE CHANGED THE WORLD
 
[[link removed]]


 

Emma Pattee
June 14, 2022
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Years before the climate crisis was part of national discourse,
this memo to the president predicted catastrophe _

Frank Press, left, with President Jimmy Carter. Press wrote a letter
to Carter warning of CO2 emissions causing ‘catastrophic climate
change’., The White House, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual
Archives, Press Collection

 

In 1977 Star Wars hit movie theaters, New York City had a blackout
that lasted 25 hours, and the Apple II personal computer went up for
sale. It was also the year that a remarkable one-page memo was
circulated at the very highest levels of US government.

Years before the climate crisis was part of national discourse, this
memo outlined what was known – and feared – about the crisis at
the time. It was prescient in many ways. Did anyone listen?

 
[memo]
Click to view the full memo.
[[link removed]]
Photograph: Office of the President

By July 1977, President Jimmy Carter
[[link removed]] had only been in
office for seven months, but he had already built a reputation for
being focused on environmental issues. For one, by installing solar
panels on the White House. He had also announced a national renewable
energy plan .

“We must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of
energy we will rely on in the next century,” he said in an address
[[link removed]]to
the nation outlining its main goals.

The climate memo arrived on his desk a few days after the Independence
Day celebrations on July 4. It has the ominous title “Release of
Fossil CO2 and the Possibility of a Catastrophic Climate Change.”

One of the first thing that stands out is the stamp at the top,
partially elided, saying THE PRESIDENT HAS SEEN.

The memo’s author was Frank Press, Carter’s chief science adviser
and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Press was
a tall, serious, geophysicist who had grown up poor in a Jewish family
in Brooklyn, and was described as “brilliant”
[[link removed]]
by his colleagues. Before working with the Carter administration, he
had been director of the Seismological Laboratory at the California
Institute of Technology, and had consulted for federal agencies
including the Navy and NASA.

“Carter had a great respect for Frank [Press] and for science,”
said Stu Eizenstat, who served as Carter’s chief domestic policy
adviser from 1977 to 1981.

Press starts the memo by laying out the science of the climate crisis
as it was understood at the time.

Fossil fuel combustion has increased at an exponential rate over the
last 100 years. As a result, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is
now 12 percent above the pre-industrial revolution level and may grow
to 1.5 to 2.0 times that level within 60 years. Because of the
“greenhouse effect” of atmospheric CO2 the increased concentration
will induce a global climatic warming of anywhere from 0.5 to 5°C.

 
These far-sighted assertions were in line with the climate science
that originated the previous decade, when the US government funded
major science agencies focused on space, atmospheric and ocean
science. Research produced for President Lyndon B Johnson in 1965
found
[[link removed]]
that billions of tons of “carbon dioxide is being added to the
earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas”.

Press’s memo was on the mark. In 2021, for the first time ever, the
atmospheric concentration of CO2 reached 420PPM
[[link removed]],
the halfway point to the doubling of pre-industrial CO2 levels that
Press posited.

The potential effect on the environment of a climatic fluctuation of
such rapidity could be catastrophic and calls for an impact assessment
of unprecedented importance and difficulty. A rapid climatic change
may result in large scale crop failures at a time when an increased
world population taxes agriculture to the limits of productivity.

Press was right. We have indeed seen the catastrophic effects of a
climatic fluctuation, in the form of increasingly severe weather
events including droughts, heatwaves, and hurricanes of greater
intensity. Meanwhile, in many parts of the world heating has already
stemmed
[[link removed]]
increases in agricultural productivity, and large-scale food
production crises are thought to be possible.

The urgency of the problem derives from our inability to shift rapidly
to non-fossil fuel sources once the climatic effects become evident
not long after the year 2000; the situation could grow out of control
before alternate energy sources and other remedial actions become
effective.

This is correct. By the 2000s, the effects of the climate crisis had
become apparent
[[link removed]]
in some regions in the form of more deadly heat waves and stronger
floods and droughts.

Natural dissipation of C02 would not occur for a millennium after
fossil fuel combustion was markedly reduced.

This prediction by Press was actually debunked at least a decade ago
[[link removed]].
Scientists used to believe that some warming was “baked in”, but
scientists have since found that as soon as CO2 emissions stop rising,
the atmospheric concentration of CO2 levels off and slowly falls.

As you know this is not a new issue. What is new is the growing weight
of scientific support which raises the CO2-climate impact from
speculation to a serious hypothesis worthy of a response that is
neither complacent nor panicky.

 
But there were other currents mitigating against the sort of response
Press calls for. “​​The story of climate policy in the US,
generally, is one missed opportunities and unjustifiable delay,”
said Jack Lienke, author of the book Struggling for Air: Power Plants
and the “War on Coal.”

Many other issues may have seemed more pressing, or simply better
understood. As Lienke writes in Struggling for Air, “At a time when
Americans were still dying somewhat regularly in acute,
inversion-related pollution episodes, it is unsurprising that
legislators were more concerned with the known harms of sulfur dioxide
and carbon monoxide than the uncertain, seemingly distant threat of
climate change.”

The authoritative National Academy of Sciences has just alerted us
that it will issue a public statement along these lines in a few
weeks.

That public statement, released later that month, emphasized the
importance of shifting away from fossil fuel energy and highlighted
the urgency of starting to transition to new energy sources as soon as
possible: “With the end of the oil age in sight, we must make
long-term decisions as to future energy policies. One lesson we have
been learning is that the time required for transition from one major
source to another is several decades.”

So what happened? When Press’s memo made it to the president’s
desk, Jim Schlesinger, America’s first secretary of energy, also
attached his own note in response:

​​My view is that the policy implications of this issue are still
too uncertain to warrant Presidential involvement and policy
initiatives.

Carter seems to have heeded this warning, and did not make much
progress on climate crisis mitigation during his presidency. Yet he
did sign some significant pieces of environmental legislation,
including initiating the first federal toxic waste cleanups and
creating the first fuel economy standards.

A significant challenge facing Carter was his own contradictory energy
aims. Despite his goal of encouraging alternative energy, he also felt
there was a national security interest in boosting US oil production
in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis.

“We realized our dependence on foreign oil was dangerous and, very
importantly, alternative energy was in its infancy,” Eizenstat said.
“So Carter was both doing conservation and still encouraging more
domestic oil and gas as a way of reducing dependence on foreign
oil,” said Eizenstat. “As with all policy, you have conflicting
goals.”

Still, it seems possible that if Carter had been re-elected, the world
might have been in a better position regarding climate impacts today.
One of the first things Reagan did after winning the election in 1981
was take down the White House solar panels. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel
industry – whose scientists were already studying the ways
[[link removed]]
that fossil fuels were changing the climate – started spending tens
of millions of dollars
[[link removed]]
sowing doubt about climate science.

Did the Press memo accomplish anything at all? For one person it was
in fact a “transformational moment” – this was Eizenstat
himself. He says it was instrumental in his own future work on the
climate crisis, including his decision in 1997 to serve as the United
States’s principal negotiator for the Kyoto global warming
protocols.

Those protocols set the stage for the first international effort to
tackle climate policy on a global level. So even if Press’s memo had
a muted impact at the time, his warning wasn’t entirely ignored.

===

* Jimmy Carter; Frank Press; Climate Change; CO2;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]