Dinosaur Dreaming. Gail Collins-Ranadive
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the CO2 in the atmosphere had increased to 339 ppm. Yet instead of dealing with this reality by finding and focusing on renewable non-carbon-emitting energy, the newly formed Department of Energy began promoting a massive program of synthetic fuels to be made from coal, tar sands, and oil shale. Because these synthetic fuels would produce more climate-altering gases than most other energy technologies, the government promptly produced a memo to downplay the growing climate concerns.
Returning state-side with a diesel-fueled vehicle we named Eliot for Pete’s dragon in a favorite children’s story, I was oblivious that public awareness of the greenhouse effect of burning fossil fuels was increasing, or that conservative reaction was gearing up to deny any environmental concerns that could lead to governmental regulations and threaten profits.
By the 1981 Presidency of Ronald Reagan, global warming had become a political issue. To implement spending cuts on climate-related environmental research and to stop funding for CO2 monitoring, Reagan appointed an Energy Secretary who claimed that there was no real global warming problem. By then CO2 parts per million were topping 340 and global temperatures had risen a half a degree.
Congressman Al Gore, who had once studied under a leading climate scientist, joined others in arranging for congressional hearings from 1981 onwards. These hearings gained enough public attention and concern to reduce the funding cuts for atmospheric research…for the time being.
But a polarized political debate developed. As the research became more solid, contrarians began claiming that increases in CO2 should be encouraged and not suppressed, because CO2 is good for plants. In 1983 an Environmental Protection Agency report said global warming was “not a theoretical problem but a threat whose effects will be felt within a few years,” with potentially “catastrophic” consequences. When the Reagan administration reacted by calling the report alarmist, the dispute got wide news coverage. CO2 emissions were 340 ppm.
I was tooling around D.C. in my diesel dragon that sounded like a tank, smelled like a tank, and drove like a tank. The changing climate was not on my radar screen. Nor, apparently, was I paying attention to the summer droughts and heat waves in full swing when NASA scientist James Hansen testified in a Congressional hearing on June 23, 1988. He stated with high confidence that long term warming was underway, with severe warming probable within the next fifty years, likely causing storms and floods. CO2 emissions had reached 351 ppm.
It’s not that I was politically absent and abstinent. In fact, utilizing my new M.A. in Peace Studies in the 1980s, I was part of a grassroots campaign to establish a federally funded institute for peace. I rode to the Senate committee hearings as far as the Pentagon with my husband’s carpool, encouraged by my military neighbors to open up non-violent options to the wars they had to fight. Ironically, when the bill finally passed Congress, it was attached to the military budget and signed by Reagan. And I had learned a valuable lesson about how our government really works, in contrast to what I’d been taught in high school civics class.
But if there was increased media attention on the scientific community’s broad consensus that the climate was warming, that human activity was the likely primary cause, and that there would be significant consequences if the warming trend were not curbed, I must have missed it. Apparently, these facts did encourage some discussion about and interest in passing new laws concerning environmental regulations that were simultaneously and vigorously opposed by the fossil fuel industry.
From 1989 onwards, with CO2 ppm pushing well into the 350s and global temperatures inching towards one full degree of warming, the fossil fuel industry funded organizations “to spread doubt among the public in a strategy already developed by the tobacco industry.”
In fact, some of the tobacco industry’s “scientists” became vocal against the prevailing climate science findings, and, supported by and in support of conservative interests, became politically involved; instead of publishing their opinions in peer-reviewed science journals, they spoke directly to the public through their articles, books, and the press.
This became a period when legitimate skepticism about basic aspects of climate science was no longer justified. Those spreading mistrust about this issue became “deniers.” As their arguments were increasingly refuted by the scientific community with new data, these deniers turned to political arguments, made personal attacks on the reputation of mainstream scientists, and promoted ideas of a global warming conspiracy.
With the 1989 fall of communism, the attention of conservative think tanks turned from the “red scare” to the “green scare,” which they saw as a threat to their goals of private property, free trade market economies, and global capitalism. Into the 1990s, conservative think tanks launched campaigns against increased regulations on environmental issues from acid rain to ozone depletion, second-hand smoke, and the dangers of DDT, using the argument “that the science was too uncertain to justify any government intervention.”
This strategy would continue for the next two decades, influencing public perception and discourse by shifting it from the science and data of climate change to a discussion of politics and the so-called controversy. For instance, an advertising campaign funded by the coal industry sought to reposition global warming as “theory” rather than “fact.”
Yet worldwide concern over global warming had prompted the creation of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that resulted in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed by all countries in 1985. The IPCC began as a small group of scientists mandated to assess scientific information relevant to human-induced climate change, its impact, and the options for adaptation and mitigation. It serves as an autonomous intergovernmental body in which scientists take part both as experts on the science and representatives of their governments, produce reports which have the firm backing of all the leading scientists researching the topic, and which then have to gain consensus agreement from every one of the participating governments before its reports are shared with the public. And because IPCC climate change assessments include input from scientists from all the world regions as well as policymakers representing all the world governments, endorsement of its findings are reliable, incontrovertible, and widely quoted.
At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, 154 nations signed U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change that called for governments to reduce atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases with the goal of “preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with Earth’s climate system.” But President George H. W. Bush became the loudest voice in the room calling for mandatory emissions cuts to be replaced by voluntary ones, and only signed once this revision was made.
He cited “scientific uncertainty” and economic risk, and declared “the American way of life is not up for negotiation.”
Meanwhile, the 1990s found me in seminary, where I celebrated my 50th birthday as a first-year student in 1994. After living in a nine-room, three-bathroom home, I’d moved into one small dorm room, with a community bathroom down the hall. I had no phone and no car, both by choice: I needed silence and solitude to discern what was next in my life.
At the end of the first year, I went home for the summer to end my thirty-year marriage and fully move out of the family home. After selling my relatively new luxury car because it felt obscene to keep it, I returned to Berkeley and made my way to the nearby Saturn dealership.
A spin-off of General Motors, this new company promised a different kind of buying experience, a commitment it more than lived up to—I was treated as an intelligent woman, capable of deciding what best fit my needs, wants, and budget. As an added bonus, I got to finance my first solely owned car and establish a credit history for my new single life.
I promptly named my new car Columba, short for columbine—Latin for dove—the wildflower that had become a metaphor for my new life. Columba was a pale plum color, and could get 28 mpg in the city, 37 on the highway. Meanwhile atmospheric CO2 had reached 360 ppm.
After the previous year’s walking as far as my legs and available time would let me, I now had access to hiking trails up in the Berkeley Hills, and Marin County and the Pacific Coast highway