POLITICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
In hindsight: Consensus on climate change has not been limited to one end of the political spectrum.
In 1982, as a senior at Hobart College, I wrote a thesis on the role of human-induced climate change in the decline of ancient civilizations. I used current scientific knowledge about global warming to argue that history offers modern societies lessons to help them understand and mediate environmental crises.
In 1982 much of the scientific data I discovered had confirmed the rise of global temperatures due to the “greenhouse effect.” Some of that data came as a result of increased government funding during the Reagan Administration, as military leaders sought a better understanding of global weather patterns. Although Reagan ultimately did not act on warnings about rising global temperatures, focusing instead on building fantastical Cold War space shields, the U.S. Department of Defense has more recently offered explicit warnings about that particular danger. The final Defense Appropriations Bill of 2017 stated that “Climate change is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and is impacting stability in areas of the world both where the United States Armed Forces are operating today, and where strategic implications for future conflict exist.”
The Pentagon drew on its own history of contending with climate change. Recent evidence indicates that Naval Station Norfolk has experienced a sea level increase of 14.5 inches since the base was built during World War I. A historical perspective reveals that conversations about climate change and environmental policy have room to expand to include a diversity of voices and perspectives: Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, evangelical and secular, the military and private environmental advocacy groups.
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, told the U.S. Congress that “this generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through…a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.” Documents recently released by the Nixon Presidential Library show that President Richard M. Nixon’s urban affairs adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan promoted a worldwide carbon dioxide monitoring system, arguing that, “It is now pretty clearly agreed that the CO2 content will rise 25% by 2000. This could increase the average temperature near the earth’s surface by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter.”
Nixon, a Republican, supported other environmental initiatives such as the Environmental Protection Agency. But he ignored warnings on CO2. He later abolished the White House scientific adviser position that President Truman initiated in 1950. The political struggle over the role of science has shaped the national debate on global warming, as presidential administrations seesawed between supporting further study into the causes of global temperature increases or suppressing that information.
In 1989, George H. W. Bush, a Republican, established a “presidential initiative” called the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). This led Congress to mandate in the Global Change Research Act (GCRA) of 1990 the development of “a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.” Congress concluded that “industrial, agricultural, and other human activities, coupled with an expanding world population, are contributing to processes of global change that may significantly alter the Earth habitat within a few human generations” and “may lead to significant global warming and thus alter world climate patterns and increase global sea levels.”
The product of a bipartisan assessment of the risks of climate change, the GCRA compelled the Trump Administration to release the 2017 Climate Science Special Report, which argued, contrary to statements made by current White House personnel, that “global annually averaged surface air temperature has increased by about 1.8°F (1.0°C) over the last 115 years (1901–2016). This period is now the warmest in the history of modern civilization. The last few years have also seen record-breaking, climate-related weather extremes, and the last three years have been the warmest years on record for the globe. These trends are expected to continue over climate timescales… For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”
Climate change conversations have historically included a diversity of voices: Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, evangelical and secular, the military and private environmental advocacy groups.
Whether this assessment will find its way into policy remains to be seen. The Trump administration has offered “alternative explanations” of human-induced climate change and, in some instances, outright denial that climate change is real. But the release of the report is welcome news. A lead author of the report, Dr. David Fahey, Director of the ESRL Chemical Sciences Division at The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said recently that “there has been no political interference on the message. Whatever fears we had weren’t realized.”
As the debate over climate policy in the Trump administration took this turn, I was preparing a lecture for my American Environmental History course at Villanova University. I was surprised to find an early reference to the benefits of alternative energy from one of my favorite 19th-century figures, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln argued in a speech titled “Discoveries and Inventions,” given in 1860 prior to assuming the presidency: “Of all the forces of nature, I should think the wind contains the largest amount of motive power… And yet it has not, so far in the world’s history, become properly valued as motive power… As yet the wind is an untamed, unharnessed force, and quite possibly one of the greatest discoveries hereafter to be made will be the taming and harnessing of it.”
The party of Lincoln has turned its back on such thinking in its current proposed tax legislation. Under the current proposals, the expansion of wind and solar energy production (the biggest increases of which have been in red states such as Texas, Iowa, and Oklahoma) would lose its incentives, and new wilderness would be opened to oil and gas development. Such policies would further erode the American ability to mediate climate change and compete with international producers of wind and solar technology.
A historical perspective suggests that such policies are opposed not solely by liberals, but by a chorus of voices across the political and ideological spectrum that increase with each new record temperature, each new flood or hurricane, each new job in alternative energy, and each new government report that confirms that climate change is a real threat to national security as well as to individual health and well-being.
Paul C. Rosier’s column for the Lepage Center this fall focuses on environmental history. He is Mary M. Birle Chair in American History at Villanova University.
