Lost opportunity: We could've started fighting climate change in 1971

[DBoon]

In 1971, President Richard Nixon’s science advisers proposed a multimillion dollar climate change research project with benefits they said were too “immense” to be quantified, since they involved “ensuring man’s survival,” according to a White House document newly obtained by the nonprofit National Security Archive and shared exclusively with Inside Climate News.

The plan would have established six global and 10 regional monitoring stations in remote locations to collect data on carbon dioxide, solar radiation, aerosols and other factors that exert influence on the atmosphere. It would have engaged five government agencies in a six-year initiative, with spending of $23 million in the project’s peak year of 1974—the equivalent of $172 million in today’s dollars. It would have used then-cutting-edge technology, some of which is only now being widely implemented in carbon monitoring more than 50 years later.

But it stands as yet another lost opportunity early on the road to the climate crisis. Researchers at the National Security Archive, based at the George Washington University, could find no documentation of what happened to the proposal, and it was never implemented.
...
It turns out that the monitoring proposal, which was authorized by the head of Nixon’s White House Office of Science and Technology, Edward E. David Jr., did get a second life in another form. After leaving the Nixon administration, David joined the oil giant Exxon, and as president of the Exxon Research and Engineering Company from 1977 to 1986, he signed off on a groundbreaking Exxon project that used one of its oil tankers to gather atmospheric and oceanic carbon dioxide samples, beginning in 1979. That research, which was first reported by Inside Climate News in 2015, confirmed fossil fuels’ role in global warming. It also showed the oil industry knew the harm of its products and is now a key piece of evidence in lawsuits by states and cities across the country seeking compensation from the oil industry for climate damages.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/nixon-administration-couldve-started-monitoring-co2-levels-but-didnt/

[Think. Again.]

1. K&R

Our need to stop the burning of fossil fuels has been nothing but missed and blocked opportunities since then. Still, we fight on.

[NNadir]

2. The origins of climate science date to the Early 19th century, with the work of Fourier...

...who sought to explain planetary temperatures based on the (then) recent discovery of infrared radiation.

What is surprising about this was that the first law of thermodynamics, the conservation of energy was not actually formally understood at the time.

This was well before the discovery of the Steffan-Boltzmann law.

Arrhenius formalized analysis of the point by the end of the 19th century, and the point was also driven by a steam engineer named Guy Callendar in the 1930's, who was not taken all that seriously as he was not a formally trained atmospheric scientist. Roger Revelle would call global warming the "Callendar effect."

Some of this is discussed here in a Nature News item from 2004: Pierrehumbert, R. Warming the world. Nature 432, 677 (2004)

Other people worked on the problem in the 1960s and understood it quite well, including Alvin Weinberg, once director at ORNL, working with Freeman Dyson. Dyson, Callendar, and Arrhenius all thought global warming would be an overall positive outcome. We now know better.

In the early 1970's I doubt that additional monitoring and discussion would have went anywhere, particularly with respect to the use of fossil fuels. Indeed the pro-fossil fuel antinuclear movement, dishonestly masquerading as an "environmentalist" movement, was gathering steam and successfully put a hold on the only viable option to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. (Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg, who had excellent credentials as a real environmentalist as opposed to an ersatz "environmentalist" pointed this out in several of his monographs.)

We are still doing effectively nothing about climate change, other than making it worse, and one notes that the fossil fuel marketing squads are still at it, among other things, here and elsewhere, working to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen," and talking nonsense about sequestration and other ineffective useless nonstarters, the worst of which is so called "renewable energy," a multitrillion dollar boondoggle that has entrenched the use of fossil fuels.

[Caribbeans]

3. 2 years later Dick and Hank literally tied the US Economy to OIL and the Petrodollar

which meant all this talk of "Global Warming" or "Climate Change" would have to wait 30, 40 more years.

But no one talks about Dick and Hank's abandoning of gold in favor of Saudi Crude and what they did. Understandable, really, for a nation that is all about appearances.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/092415/oil-currencies-understanding-their-correlation.asp

[NNadir]

4. Well you know Exxon is running ads these days pretending to care about climate change.

It is unsurprising to me that people seeking to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen" are also pretending to care about climate change.

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

A video ad from Exxon of the type produced here by fossil fuel interests specifically working on rebranding fossil fuels as hydrogen:

There is no limit to the disingenuous representations and overt dishonesty of the fossil fuel industry.

Any effort by any of its spokespersons and advertisers and three card Monty hydrogen rebranding sales people and salesbots to claim to give a rat's ass about climate change is obviously fraudulent.

[ramapo]

5. Decades Squandered for Greed, Laziness, Ignorance and Delusion

The real turning point was the election of Reagan. Nixon was anything but an environmentalist but he was a good politician. He knew the public liked the idea of clean air and water and he signed into law a lot of environmentally-friendly legislation.

Carter understood the need for alternative energy. He believed in conservation. He installed solar panels/heating on the White House roof. He understood science.

Americans did not like the idea of not having the freedom to use as much energy as they liked. They wanted, and still want, big cars and trucks. Bigger than necessary. Americans didn't like thinking about any limits and need to modify lifestyles.

Reagan was in many ways a polite Trump. He put foxes in charge of the EPA and Interior. He was ignorant of science.

But the blame rests with all of us. Politicians only do what is demanded of them. We've kicked the can down the road and continue to do so. This will go on as long as possible. The reckoning will come and history will likely not look kindly at us.

[NNadir]

6. The real turning point was the rise of antinukism.

Last edited Sun May 19, 2024, 10:09 AM - Edit history (1)

People love to carry on about Jimmy Carter's solar panels, as if they mattered. They didn't. Trillions of dollars have been spent on solar panels in the last ten years with the result that climate change is getting worse faster, not better, slowly, or even quickly.

I love Jimmy Carter, the man, and voted for him twice, but his energy policies which are often praised, included Fischer-Tropsch coal to gasoline, a policy even worse than hydrogen (hydrogen being an intermediate.) Had this program been enacted and commercialized, we'd be much closer to 500 ppm than we are now (427 ppm as of this morning). (I crudely calculate that we will hit 500 around 2046.)

His worst energy decision was to forgo the recovery of plutonium from used nuclear fuels, although in his defense, the chemistry (Purex) was less than ideal in the 1970's. We can certainly do better now, in particular, because happily, we have more used nuclear fuel now than we did then.

Now, let's be clear on something. Jimmy Carter was not a nuclear engineer, hype aside, although he was knowledgeable about nuclear energy in a generalized way with some formal training in the Navy, and was probably the only person to have been involved in two nuclear meltdowns, one being the NRX meltdown in Canada, the other being TMI. In the former he briefly went directly into the core to loosen bolts, and he was in the control room at TMI days after the disaster took place. Nonetheless, he seems to have lived almost to centenarian status, outliving, by decades, all three of his siblings, all of whom died from genetic pancreatic cancer.

President Carter is among roughly 350,000 "liquidators" involved in nuclear reactor "clean ups."

We still have lots of idiots around claiming that Three Mile Island was a terrible disaster from a health perspective, almost to the point that they are willing to believe that the reason that everyone in Harrisburg will die is only because of the reactor. President Carter will die, but not because of NRX or TMI, and everyone who was in Harrisburg in 1978 will also die, but not from the effects of the reactor meltdown. The containment system operated as it was designed to do.

Since TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, hundreds of millions of people have died from air pollution without a peep from antinukes, here and elsewhere, and people still sit around at their keyboards, using computers largely powered by the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels whining about these three events as if they mattered.

In this century alone, according to the weekly data this morning at the Mauna Loa Observatory (which I monitor continuously) the concentration of carbon dioxide has risen by 58.33 ppm, to 427.03 ppm. Since people started whining insipidly about Fukushima, the increase in the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide has been over 34.6 ppm, some of this rise resulting on the Japanese decision to kill people by burning fossil fuels after shutting their nuclear plants for reasons they described as "safety."

Week beginning on May 12, 2024: 427.03 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 423.49 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 402.07 ppm
Last updated: May 19, 2024

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

The climate scientist Jim Hansen, noted in 2013, that nuclear power had prevented over 60 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly two years worth of emissions.

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

In the spreadsheet I keep of climate data, a fifty-two week running average of comparators of the same weeks 10 years ago shows that we have now reached a rate of increase of roughly 2.50 ppm/year (24.91 ppm/10 years to be exact) compared to around 1.50 ppm/year in week 19 of the year 2000 (15.02ppm/10 years). This means two years worth of the antinuke idiot wet dream of the shutting of nuclear power, realized partially in places like that coal dependent hellhole Germany, would have had us over 431 ppm now, with the antinukes still running around pretending to give a shit about climate change.

It would have been far worse with Jimmy Carter's coal to gasoline program, a program which, I note, had been industrialized in Nazi Germany and in Apartheid era South Africa.

We can all blame Reagan and Trump for climate change, but it's a weak effort to excuse ourselves. I feel, and I include myself, that if we really want to know who is responsible for climate change, one could do worse in identifying the real culprits by the use of a mirror.

The antinukes won, and humanity, and all ecosystems on the planet, lost.