AMSEcast Conversations: Climate Change Science from Eisenhower to Bush

0:00 This is Alan Lowe, and before we start the program, I want to say just a few words about President Jimmy Carter, who at the time of this recording was laid to rest this past week. I was honored over the years to meet President Carter on a few occasions. I was always impressed with his warmth and his intelligence. But our featured guest on this AMESYcast episode, Jay Hakes, knew the president very well, having served for many years as the director of the Carter Presidential Library Museum in Atlanta. Working with the President and Mrs. Carter, he helped transform that institution into something befitting Carter's legacy. Now, it's true that Carter's time in the White House had its share of challenges, and he had his share of detractors.

0:41 But as Jay and others have illustrated in recent years, historians are now revisiting some elements of his administration and seeing a more positive picture. And one thing that cannot be denied is that Carter was a man of great character who led his life with compassion, faith, and integrity. Agree or disagree with his policies, it's hard to deny that Carter was always guided by his determination to do what he believed was right. With his death at age 100, the world has lost a true servant leader. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy this episode of AMSECast. Welcome to AMSECast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a global leader in science, technology, and innovation.

1:26 My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum of Science and Energy and the K 25 History Center. Each episode of AMSECast presents world renowned authors, scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between, sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics. Welcome. I'm Alan Lowe, Executive Director of the American Museum of Science and Energy and the K 25 Atomic History Center, both located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I'm so glad you could join us on this new type of AMSECast episode. On an occasional basis, in addition to our single guest audio only episodes, we're going to provide you with video programming that we're calling AMSECast Conversations.

2:14 These AMESYcast conversations will still include the terrific guests you'd expect from our podcast, and sometimes we plan on bringing in other experts to be part of these conversations. Our guest today is Jay Hakes, and we'll discuss his terrific new book, The Presidents and the Planet, Climate Change Science from Eisenhower to Bush. Now, you will recall that Jay has been our guest on AMSECast before, when we discussed one of his previous books, Energy Crises. Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Hard Choices in the 1970s. Now, I first met Jay when he served as Director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, a post he held for 13 years, Jay, is that right?

2:54 13 years. Now, prior to that, he had been Administrator of the Energy Information Administration during the Clinton Administration. Jay also served President Obama as Director for Research and Policy for the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Commission. Thank you. We're also joined today in our conversation with Jay by two experts in the field of energy and environmental policy. David McCullum is part of the distinguished R& D staff in the Mobility and Energy Transitions Analysis Group at ORNL and holds a joint faculty appointment in the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at UT. I should say University of Tennessee in Knoxville. When I was in Texas, UT was University of Texas, which we know is incorrect.

3:37 Charles Sims is the Director of the Center for Energy, Transportation, and Environmental Policy and the TBA Distinguished Professor of Energy and Environmental Policy at the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at UT Knoxville. He also is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics. So gentlemen, welcome to AMSECast Conversations. Thank you so much for being here today. Appreciate it. Jay, we're going to dive into this book, which I've so enjoyed, Presence and the Planet, just one planet. When did some scientists realize that climate was changing and human activities were the major driver of that change? So let's go back to kind of that beginning of this process. Well, there were a few lonely voices around the world, calendar over in the United Kingdom, but it really starts in the late 50s with two scientists that.

4:23 Every science student and all of us should know more about Roger Revell, who was an oceanographer by training, and Dave Keeling, and they were both at the Scripps Institution in La Jolla, California. And basically, what the two of them came up with is that this carbon dioxide, which we know traps heat, is staying in the atmosphere. It's not going back into the ocean, and Revell, as an oceanographer, said, You know, the ocean can only accept so much at a time. And he got Keeling to measure it. He set up a site in Hawaii and a few other places. So from this, we learned that the carbon dioxide was staying in the atmosphere where it would trap heat.

5:08 And also we found from Keeling's measurements that if you measured it at different places in the world, the levels were the same. That's actually pretty important because it alerts us that we're dealing with a global pollutant, which is a little more complicated than dealing with, say, a toxic spill into a river. So between the two of them, they got this started, and they both published in academic journals, and Ravel also testified before Congress and other things. So I sort of trace it back, what I call the modern era of climate change science, to the late 1950s. The name Ravel is going to come up a lot. today.

5:49 Uh, let's talk quickly about Keeling though. There's the Keeling curve. So what was that? Was that, that graphing out of that, uh, seeing that, that, uh, impact on the world? Yeah. Keeling starts making these measurements and, and to kind of his surprise, it's a jagged line because in the Northern Hemisphere, which is most of the land mass, there's Plants are growing and dying, and you can actually see that in the carbon measurements in the atmosphere. But Keeling, over the years, was almost obsessed with measuring this, and so he was able to track the rise throughout his lifetime. He's not with us anymore. His son is quite a notice expert in atmosphere.

6:30 Climate change can be somewhat of a controversial subject with people, but Keeling's data is been sort of sacrosanct. I don't, I'm not aware of anyone who says that carbon dioxide is not collecting in the atmosphere because Ravel was sort of a Leonardo da Vinci type interested in a lot of things. Keeling was very focused on how much atmosphere was accumulating. Charles and David, I know we talked before we taped today that some of the folks in this book are the people you, you read about as you were beginning in your profession is Killing and Ravella, those two of those folks. And can you tell us about the impact that they had as you began your studies and got into this field?

7:15 From my perspective, it's always been a little bit more about the economics. And so, what we usually focus on is how has the information and the climate science progressed over time, and then how has that been received, right? And so we go through this notion of proving, okay, the climate is changing, and then moving on to, okay, are humans causing this change, and then how does the recognition that it's changing influence policy, and then how does the recognition that it's human caused influence policy. And so, Looking back at the science from my social science perspective, I don't know as much about the science, but we look at it as terms of, okay, at what point did this start to become accepted by the mainstream? What point did we transition from talking about documenting the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere to documenting the impacts that that has?

8:00 And then how that then translates into a whole new world of climate science that didn't exist in the 1950s. I mean, I think what's fascinating is that both of these guys were not necessarily Focused on that when they started. And I think there was initially a lot of pushback and saying, well, the science is not well developed. These guys aren't even really, they don't even study these things, right? They're kind of oceanographers and things. And over time now we have this whole field of climate science that has come up to try to provide some more credence to that. And then I'll leave it at that for now. We'll go, we'll go into some more of that later. And not to pun fully intended, there seems to be a sea change in how that's viewed, though, just over the past several years, right? So, I was director of the Baker Center from 03 to 09.

8:41 I remember, you know, we had a couple of discussions on climate change. And back then you still could find Some people saying, well, it's not human cause, it's not this, it's not that. It seems now, though, that that is accepted. In fact, more and more people in the public accept this, that aren't thinking about it every day, though they probably should be. So what has that been? Has that been just the overwhelming evidence of the science? better explanations of what's going on and the effects that we need to worry about now and in the future. What do you think explains that? And I'm sorry, Jay, to get off on this topic, but it interests me of how you really have seen this, this change in how the public views climate change overall.

9:21 Yeah, I think over time it's just the cumulative weight of science has just added up, added up, added up. Reading this book helped me to appreciate more than I probably should have how much, how much good quality science there was already in those early days. But just more and more people, now there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, you know, worldwide studying this issue and it's just accumulated. We've seen also, thanks to efforts here in the U. S. early on that seeded kind of these Comprehensive scientific assessments of the scientific literature on first on the physical science basis and then kind of the impacts of climate change and then solutions to it. Eventually now we have like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, which is an international process.

10:04 Now it's a global process. It's in the seventh cycle, dating back to 1990, but there were those smaller kinds of efforts that were happening here in the U. S. at those times, getting the word out about this issue, certainly among folks in Washington. But now, as you said, just now, 50, 60 years later, it's hard to avoid. Right? Hearing about this issue, either in the news, in a school, or else there are still some disagreements over, for political reasons, and still a lot of uncertainty in certain areas of the sub scientific disciplines, but I think we now know, yeah, it's pretty clear the main effect on the planet. It's a, it's a great example of Like, I don't know if everybody saw the documentary on the Beatles, right? Where, where, uh, where they have, each of them is basically contributing something else to this process of creating this song or this album.

10:49 Right. And it's similar here, right? You have folks that are documenting the concentrations and CO2, and then you have a whole nother group that's having to come through and kind of document how those, are how those concentrations are then impacting climate and you need another team that comes through and documents how changes in climate are, are having physical impacts on humans. And then you have to have a whole nother team that goes through and talks about, okay, well, what can the humans do to prevent that? Right? So it was definitely a chain. And I think when we teach this at our, in my classes, we talk a little bit about how the science translates into policy. You have to break that down. Cause I think a lot, in a lot of cases, people were saying, I don't believe in climate change. When what they might have been saying was, I don't believe that the impacts to me are going to be as bad as you say they're going to be, right?

11:29 And they may have believed the climate science at some point, and I think that's what you were referring to, Alan, is gradual acceptance of the climate science, but I may have been saying I didn't believe climate change when really what I was saying was I don't believe it's going to affect me as much as you say. I see. Yes, Jay. If you want to understand the science culture of the 1950s, uh, you may have heard this movie Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer. Both Keeling and Revell were getting money from the Atomic Energy Commission and other funding sources and both of them believed in staying in their lane. So you can read their public announcements and then you can see what they were saying in oral interviews or Personal correspondence.

12:11 And so they, and they realized that their funding had to go through different administrative changes where interests may change. So both of them sort of believed they should stay in their lane. And one of the things that Revell did was he was, as I say, almost a Renaissance man. And when he was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was one of the leaders in trying to include economists and other social scientists as part of the science community. They could apply for grants from the National Science Foundation. So that was how he looked at it. I think he was very disappointed what he got from economists, and that's a big part of this book.

12:56 Because their models are not adequate to deal with 50 years in advance, and so that was a big problem. But what impeded action was a couple things. One is when the climate science was developed, a big part of the motivation of the federal government was we thought we could control climate and the weather. And so if you're going to Do that, uh, their unfortunate side effects are attached to it. So, you want to get, you have to be precise, because you might create more problems than you, than you solve. And the climate science debate couldn't get away from this idea of certainty.

13:37 That we have to have certainty before we act. Now, if you look at the Clean Air Act, you, you look at, by the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1980s. They're working on probabilities. My argument is the risk level was clear enough in 1960 that we should have done something. I mean, you don't buy fire insurance because you're sure your house is going to burn down. And then we're using models at that point to predict what's going to happen. And all the models agreed with each other pretty much by the end of the 1970s because the temperature data is not as systematic as the carbon accumulations data.

14:20 So there were legitimate reasons in the 1970s to say, well, carbon has a heating effect, but maybe if you take into account sulfur and other processes, maybe you were actually cooling. So, Keeling, who almost never commented much about the political implications, said one time, we may not, in the 20th century, be able to take action because people won't believe the models. And, of course, the political community wanted certainty because they wanted an excuse to postpone taking tough decisions. But he says in the 21st century, They may be seeing the actual evidence. In the 1980s, for instance, in the model, it would show that you were likely to get more severe storms with greenhouse gas emissions.

15:07 There are memos saying, don't discuss this in public. We don't want to alarm the public. And So, that wasn't really, it was just, it was mentioned at a couple of hearings and things like that, but it's kind of brushed aside. Now, you can see the storm, you know, if you live in Louisiana, where I live, or you live in Florida, your insurance is going through the roof. So, I think that's the reason that we set up a very higher bar for understanding climate change than we do for other public things. Policy issues to act and we had to wait. And the trouble is when you wait on climate change, the carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for over a hundred years. Yeah. So as Rave said in one National Academy study, the die will have to some extent been cast.

15:53 Right now, I'm just thinking maybe this is an unfair question for you. Do we have examples from the 20th century or before sense of where the public has said, or a big part of the public has said, we don't believe that. When you have this, this kind of weight of science starting to accumulate, where there's that battle to say, perhaps it's with, okay, this comes to a head about the same time that the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change is established. The U. S. approval of the treaty was in the later days of the, uh, Reagan administration when Howard Baker was his chief of staff and Baker and Schultz Both believed we needed to take action on climate change.

16:37 And about that time, certain groups, business groups, started to get serious about, we've got to do something about this. And they were doing test radio ads on the Rush Limbaugh show, which was kind of in its more emphasy at that time. And they were running ads around the country. Well, you know, actually it's cooling. These were written by a PR firm that was, you know, they went. Scientific studies, but they then started to finance certain scientists who would publish op ed pieces and form think tanks and things like that. They weren't the kind of scientists that ended up on the panels of the National Academy of Sciences or, or whatever.

17:18 So it's really in the Bush 41 administration where it really comes to a head. And so in the book, I've, I've got Go to Market, Go to Market Grit, Shapero, GTMG, Go to Market, Go to Market, invited to the White House to meet with the Chief of Staff. Until then, the interactions between universities and big corporations like Bell Labs or Exxon, you know, those companies had these very distinguished scientists. So they were working back and forth, giving grants back and forth.

17:59 People were visiting Revell. And I have identified places where industry tried to slow down the train a little bit. But nothing like we started to see in the 1990s where it really became highly adversarial. I see. Let's step back for a moment from H. W. Bush and Chief of Staff Sununu, if I remember correctly, back to, uh, back to Ike. And we heard something about Ike this week at a great conference at the Baker School, hearkening back to Atoms for Peace. So, can you tell us a bit about how Eisenhower was introduced to the possibility of climate change and how that factored in or not into the Atoms for Peace program? Well, Eisenhower had a great respect for science.

18:41 I think we lost something with the end of the Cold War. While the Cold War was still going on, it was like Reminiscing for the Cold War now. I mean, there was this great respect for scientists, and Eisenhower would have this. Because, you know, they were interested in the nuclear subs, so they were interested in oceanography. And Eisenhower would say, we're going to take action subject to the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences. Same thing with nuclear power. We're going to take action based on the recommendations from the Atomic Energy Commission. And I don't know that Eisenhower himself encountered climate change science. He might have. But Ravel was such a celebrity that he was actually invited to a fairly small with Eisenhower and his wife Mamie Eisenhower.

19:30 And then Eisenhower, near the end of his presidency, appointed Alvin Weinberg to the Presidential Science Advisory Committee, and Weinberg was aware of the climate change issues. So, people like Revell were You know, advising the White House to some extent. Weinberg obviously was advising Eisenhower mainly on military issues. So, it wasn't till Kennedy that I can document that the President himself, you know, knew about it. But certainly people at the Eisenhower White House did. Yes, and Merveille again. played a big role with JFK. Oh, Ravel was involved with every president. I mean, even after his death, his former student, Al Gore, became Vice President of the United States.

20:16 So, so he was very influential. And this, even the people who knew him and his family don't seem aware of all the things he did. I mean, he, he was flying to the Vatican to speak at a Special Science Conference organized by the Pope. He was in Nairobi talking about how we need to involve the developing nations. And so, Ravel is a long story, and you probably have to read the book to get the full grasp of it. But I think he has been underestimated. And Keeling, you know, his Graph is on the wall of National Academy of Sciences in Washington, so, and I think most scientists know about the Keeling Curve, but I, I think the variety and the immenseness of Revell has, has not gotten full credit so far.

21:07 And as you said, his student Al Gore, when I was director of the Baker Center, Eons ago now, it feels like, Al Gork, Vice President Gork, came to speak for us. We did a session on, on environment, climate change, and so forth. And he essentially gave us a preview of what became an Inconvenient Truth movie. The slide shows. Oh yeah. Packed that auditorium. But it was one of those surreal moments where I met him at the car and took him Down the hallway, the old student center at UT. And, you know, people, these kids realize, wait a minute, that's Al Gore. That was a fun moment. He was terrific and and again spoke to a very packed house that day. I actually have the syllabus of the course that Ravel taught Gore. It has on the syllabus, it lists the name of the students.

21:49 It turned out that one of Ravel's teaching assistants, his son was a professor at Emory in Atlanta and he heard me speak and he says, you know, I think my dad has the syllabus from that course. That's very neat. That was fun. So, what, what impact, so he's, he's, Ravel is there with JFK, what, how did JFK view the issue, did he really have awareness of the issue? Well, JFK was very interested in oceanography. Again, it was because the nuclear subs were considered our big advantage in the Cold War. And so he kept talking about it all the time, so he has an oceanography speech that he gives, several months in the administration. So his advisor is a guy named Jerome Wiesner from, later became president of MIT, but he knew Kennedy because of the Boston connection.

22:37 And his good buddy, Roger Revelle, they'd worked together on the nuclear experiments at the Bikini Atoll after World War II to find out the impacts of radiation on the deep seas. He says, We're doing this and I I know the guy who's the leading oceanographer, he's going to review this speech. So I saw the, the draft of the speech before Ravel. Edited it. And so then there was added a little paragraph and it basically said we need to understand better the interaction between the oceans and the atmosphere because that interaction affects our climate. I had done them. Electronic word search. I had missed that, but I'm in the Ravel archives and there's a letter from the White House thanking him for his help on this speech.

23:23 So I said I better go back and look at it more carefully. And so, you know, you read that and you wouldn't notice it, but it basically was the point that Ravel made in his 1957 article. And so that was repeated in a movie that Kennedy did. called Oceanography, and there's only one other person in the film, Roger Revelle. And then shortly before Kennedy's death, he spoke at the 100th anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences. He's all an academic. Garb sitting behind him is Roger Revelle. So, oh, and I haven't even mentioned that they ended up hiring Roger Revelle to be an advisor to the Kennedy administration.

24:06 He was this celebrity at the beginning, and he was appointed to the advisory committee on The Peace Corps, you know, along with Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Belafonte and LBJ. But then he was slated to become the president of the University of California, San Diego, which he had basically created, but they picked somebody else. So he wrote Weissner and said, uh, you have any jobs there in Washington? So they hired him to be a president. Climate Science Advisor to the administration. And so people like Gordon MacDonald, who's another person that people may not have heard of but was a very important climate scientist, he learned about it at that time from Roger Revelle. I mean, you talk to anybody in the early years and they'll, you know, from Daniel Moynihan to Gordon MacDonald, oh yeah, I first learned about this from Roger Revelle.

24:54 You know, I'm just curious, talking about the history of this whole issue and something I think you said earlier, David or Charles, I'm forgetting now. But as you work with students or, you know, young professionals, knowing this history, how valuable for them to have that grounding, that understanding of how we've gotten to where we are now. We did a program here with the help from Humanities Tennessee about a year and a half ago called the Stem of History, where we tried to show those, those connections and how it was useful for students. Historians understand at least some of the science or the issues they're dealing with and kind of vice versa. I'm not trying to lead your answer here, but what do you think in terms of that connection for the people you work with, the people you interact with?

25:36 Yeah, I can just quickly say the first students, young people in general, people say young researchers and scientists. It's nice reading this history because you see that science has never been linear. Right? There's some serendipity along the way, some connections that you make with people, new ideas come to life. Some people go and call the sacks. Sometimes they're roadblocks and people have to shift course, you know, funding gets shut down, you know, under this president and then back up on the next. And this is a normal course of history in our profession. Charles and I were applying for grants all the time and trying to keep up a scientific program, the momentum going in a certain direction, but one has to be flexible. And I think what we saw in some of these early scientists, they.

26:17 They had that North Star. They knew something. They were on to something important. Turns out to be maybe the most important problem in our civilization. And they kept at it in different ways and they were pretty clever about it. So, I think this book has been really helpful for me to see that. I don't know, Charles, if you? Yeah, I mean, I think if you do this work long enough, you're going to run into roadblocks and you're going to run into dead ends. If you're starting off and you don't have this context, it can be a bit disheartening when you run into those roadblocks, but when you see the long course that we've all come through and the roadblocks that have been put there before, and the way we have adjusted course, as David said, and moved on to something, I think that's the kind of context they need. Because they do come in, especially without the initial context, thinking, we have to get going.

27:00 We've clearly not done anything. Why have we not done anything? And they want to do something immediately. And then they're running as fast as they can. And then they hit a wall. And then they just, to have that resilience to jump back up takes that long view, I think. You know, just to hammer that home, I was watching an interview the other day on television by one of the better interviewers. And they were talking about how climate change was causing all these problems. And then at the end of it, the host said, and we haven't done anything about it. Well, I'm one that argues very rigorously that we haven't done enough about it, and we've fallen far short, but to say we haven't done anything about it, that creates the deer in the headlights. I'm working on an op ed right now called, The Deer in the Climate Change Headlights, because if you don't emphasize the solutions, or the at least partial progress we've made, then you're gonna Be very discouraged, indeed.

27:53 Stepping back into our presidential history, a president who did an enormous amount for the environment was LBJ, with the various Great Society programs, so how did this issue of climate change factor into the decisions made during the Great Society? Well, I mean, it's kind of astonishing when you think about it. In the early months of the LBJ administration, particularly Bill Moyers, who was a, You Young, very smart staff guy for, for the president. And then there was a guy that no one talks about named Daniel Hornig, who actually worked on the Manhattan Project, uh, replaced Weisner under Kennedy. And Johnson didn't have anyone else in mind, so he continued.

28:34 He was pushing this. So, uh, They have this meeting of intellectuals and so they have, you know, John Kenneth Galbraith as an economist and they have Clinton Roster, a historian at the time, I remember reading as an undergraduate, and all these distinguished people. Uh, and there's at the White House meeting with the president in the room, um, they have one person from the academic, uh, natural sciences, Roger Revelle. And so he's on a subpanel with Margaret Mead, the , the, uh, anthropologist and they write a subcommittee report laying out climate change. Now, it was kind of oriented towards the controlling climate and, and weather, which was not really.

29:17 Revelle's big thing. So that's for starters. And he's in and out of the White House all the time. There's a great picture in the book of Revelle talking with Johnson. But the big thing that is worthy of historical mention is in 65, they published the scientific underpinnings of environmental regulation. At that time, People were kind of used to smog in cities. They were kind of used to rivers that caught on fire. They were used to dumping old tires next to the federal highway. And all of a sudden, these scientists, and they said, you know, we need baseline measurements.

30:00 You know, it doesn't have to be toxic to be a pollutant. And so there's a whole Climate change is mentioned up front very prominently. There's a whole big section. Uh, the committee is chaired by Roger Revelle , uh, Dave Keeling is the For Gump of Climate Change. Yes. David, David Keeling is, is Dave Keeling, is is a member and some of the modelers from the Weather Bureau and at Princeton. And so this thing is very prophetic and, and in the bigger report, , it says. We will likely need to replace the internal combustion engine. So, that's treated now, it's one of the controversies being discussed right now.

30:41 But then what happened is, you can't see carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's, I sometimes, refer to it as the invisible pollutant. It's slow moving. You can't see it. And so beautification became kind of the byword in the Johnson administration, and climate change then sort of gets ignored. The only place that's paying attention to it is the Atomic Energy Commission, and basically in Weinberg. These weren't public commissions. But internally, when they sent this out for review, they were the ones that kept saying, hey, you know, let's not forget about this.

31:21 For one prominent reason, if you were looking for a non carbon fuel source, nuclear was certainly one option. I'm curious, I don't remember in your notes, Jay, Did you find any LBJ tapes of him talking to Revelle? No. If you all listen to the tapes. No, I think, I think that Revelle made a very interesting comment one time that I picked up on. He said, after he had this initial meeting with Johnson, he said, Bill Moyers appeared to me, to Johnson, what Ted Sorenson was to Ted Kennedy. And both of those advisors were very brainy. I know that Ted Sorensen knew about the climate science, and Johnson, when he met with that intellectual group I mentioned before, Ravel said, he looked kind of uncomfortable being with this group.

32:09 But people like Moyers were driving these ideas, and in later life, I, I didn't dig into this that much, but late in his life, Moyers starts writing about climate change and working with people like Bill McKibben who are sort of out there on the issue. The LBJ thing was kind of known before I wrote my book, but I think the extent of it was not really appreciated. We're going to step on to President Nixon now. And last week, wasn't it? I'm losing track of time. A little over a week ago. I helped, uh, thanks to the magic of Zoom. I moderated a conference at the, uh, Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. Remembering the 50th anniversary of President Nixon's resignation.

32:52 With Frank Gannon as well? He was there, yes. He sent me a copy of his slides. Oh yes, he had really interesting slides and we had a few other folks on there, Garrett Graff, who just came out with a Watergate, A New History, and I'm one of the supervisory archivists at Nixon as well. So it's a really interesting conversation, but made me feel extraordinarily old because I remember sitting there with my grandfather as President Nixon announced he was going to resign the next day at noon. But Nixon, you know, significant environmental advances during that administration, EPA, NOAA, and so forth, Clean Air Act. How did climate change factor into his administration's work toward improving the environment?

33:33 Well, he had several people working for him who were very familiar. Well, Daniel Moynihan, everybody said, why did Daniel Moynihan write a memo at the White House on climate change? He served on the advisory board at the Population Center at Harvard, the head of which was, Roger Revelle. And then David Freeman, who people in Oak Ridge probably have heard of. He was left over from Johnson's staff on the Science Advisors, and he wrote about climate change. And then Gordon McDonald was a member of the Council on Environmental Quality. So there's a couple of key things. One is, at that time, there was legitimate confusion about whether the earth was warming or cooling.

34:18 This wasn't just some Weird idea. Temperature data, you know, a volcano can have quite a bit of impact on world temperature. So, after the Industrial Revolution, The Earth is warming very steadily. But then, in the years before Nixon, the temperature trend had started to go down. There was, a lot of scientists were trying to justify this and not getting their models right. There was not really a call for action except, and this is a very current and important issue right now, because the Supreme Court has been arguing that the members of the current Supreme Court have been arguing that the Clean Air Act did not. include climate change.

34:59 It is extremely clear that it did. Ed Muskie, who is very important, LBJ said, I'm doing the environmental stuff I'm doing because Ed Muskie keeps after me to do them. And he, he hasn't gotten the credit he deserves in the history books either. But he was very aware of it. The, the Republican co sponsor of the bill mentioned climate change in the debate. The, the text of the Clean Air Act mentions climate. And yet, There are three members of the current court who have signed off on a dissent that said that there was no legal basis for distinguishing between carbon dioxide pollution and an airborne frisbee. It's in a footnote, but it's there.

35:41 So this Clean Air Act, it seems at first glance, I mean, I'm, my own view was, well, it's not that connected with climate change. It's very connected with climate change. So in the Ford and Nixon years, This cooling issue gets cleaned up. They understand what the problem is. Some deniers will mention it, but it's not credible. There's one more thing that goes on during here and since we're at Oak Ridge, I think it deserves special mention. Nixon proposed and Ford implemented taking the National Nuclear Labs and turning them into more diversified research institutions.

36:23 And it was called ERDA, the Energy Research Development Administration. And then it was quickly folded into the new Department of Energy when that was founded in 1977. So, my argument was, the creation of ERDA was actually more important. it was in the Department of Energy, because before that, solar energy had been part of the National Science Foundation. So then they founded what was called the Solar Energy Research Institute, which is now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. So, Nixon and Ford, I don't think People have gone around giving them credit for that. It was a reaction to the Arab oil embargo.

37:04 But it was a very positive reaction. It's saying, hey, we need to get smart about these things and look at all the fuels. And again, we aren't where we need to be today, but we're better off because of decisions like that. I wanted to ask you, what is the oil crises that happened in the 70s? Does that speed up? Are shift away from fossil fuels or does that that make us double down on fossil fuels in your mind? Well, I think there were two things going on. One is the Middle Eastern countries that showed that they could kind of boss us around or affect our economy. And two, we had a theory of peak oil that we were running out of oil and gas.

37:44 So So, the main initial reaction was, well, let's produce more coal. So this, this creates an awkward situation for Jimmy Carter, who's an environmentalist, but he inherits Nixon and Ford's thing, and, and they were talking about coal, coal, coal, Gasified coal, liquefied coal, and a guy who we know about, but the general public doesn't, Gordon McDonald was the guy who got up and said, you know, we can't be moving to this kind of coal economy because of climate change. So Carter's advisor, Frank Press, says, you have to distinguish here on solar between the thermal panels that were on the White House, which are.

38:29 Purely symbolic in my view. And photovoltaic panels, which can be improved at the speed of a iPhone. Press said, you know, photovoltaics are not ready now, and they might not be ready until the 21st century. But our best thing is to invest in photovoltaics because eventually it'll be cheaper than coal. And so that's pretty much it. That's pretty prophetic. And then when Carter passed the windfall profits tax on the oil companies, all of a sudden there was a big pot of money. So where did that go? It went. some of it to this coal stuff, but a lot of it went to solar. And you just look at it on a line graph and you see this huge bump that comes down with the next administration.

39:14 Well, Vervell said one time, he said, we got serious. We started driving 55 miles an hour. We got more fuel conscious of mileage standards. And, and, uh, and then when prices came down, we got lazy. And Ravel said something to the effect, maybe we need another Arab oil embargo to make us use energy more efficiently. So, what about nuclear? I know President Carter had to deal with the Three Mile Island incident. That being an alternative to combat climate change suddenly was thrown into a bit of a disarray. Yeah, this was kind of a marriage gone bad in the sense that people like Weinberg and others saw a perfect partnership between climate science and nuclear.

40:01 And so you have the three mile island and Carter incidentally helped develop, Rick overdeveloped the early subs and he also cleaned up the first major. nuclear accident in North America. So he's alive today at 99 and he's probably absorbed more radiation than almost any other person in the country. When Three Mile Island takes place, the cooling systems inside break down. It shows that not enough attention was being paid to it. But the containment vessel, which is basically two to three feet of concrete, contained it. So there really was not any external Basically, a lot of people wanted to not only put a moratorium on nudist plants, but they wanted to shut down the ones we had, kind of like Japan did after Fukushima.

40:56 Carter fought that very strongly, and some people in the nuclear industry did. viewed him as a opponent of nuclear because he didn't support the Breeder Reactor. In fact, in Oak Ridge today, there are probably still people mad about the Breeder Reactor. But I've been able to convince all those people, when I get a chance to talk to them, that the Breeder Reactor was not quite ready for implementation, and we would have been better off at that point to take Carter's suggestion and take that money and explore what are the different ways of generating nuclear power. So, then what happens? It's, it is extremely strange. When the industry group forms in the early nineties to oppose climate science, basically, some of the nuclear groups join in.

41:42 Some of the natural gas groups go in. And natural gas is actually, for a good while, going to benefit from going in. Trying to deal with climate science. I mean, eventually, that is a fossil fuel, and it leaks methane, so it's not forever. But how did that happen? And I can't fully explain that. I think it, it was partly they got mad at environmentalists, because I, I find when I speak in conservative areas, the first question is, do you support nuclear power? And I say, I think it's a good option if we can afford it. I, I think it's, uh, been proven to be Quite safe, and it doesn't take a lot of land, but the way we've produced it in the past has been extremely expensive.

42:24 And once I say that, they will listen to anything I say about climate change. If my answer to that was no, the door is shut. So I think the environmentalists, in looking back, may wish they had taken a somewhat different approach, and I think the industry might have wished they had taken a different approach. And that's why I say it's a potential, uh, a romantic relationship that could have been better than it was. Now, I want to step outside the U. S. for a minute because one thing I learned from your book was the views of Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister on climate change. I had no idea. Can you tell us a bit about how she approached the issue? And she was really kind of ahead of her time in a way.

43:06 She was a chemistry major at Oxford. Her position was as a conservative person that believes in small government, I should be opposing what climate change is. science is telling us to do. But as a scientist, I can't do that. So she was kind of famous. She had cabinet meetings that were devoted, the entire subject was climate change. And she actually came out here to, she went to Colorado, where the Atmospheric Research Lab is located, and she spent a day out there. And apparently when they finished the, the You know, they were using probably overhead projectors at that time.

43:48 When they finished the allotted time, there were still some slides that hadn't been displayed, and she demanded that the meeting be extended so they could view all of the slides. And if you go back, her speeches are easy, pretty easy to access. The, um, Margaret Thatcher Foundation has them all online. And, but there's two major ones that I cite in the book. So she's very prophetic. She was gone. She had been replaced by John Major by the time of the Rio Summit. And one might imagine if she was still there, I mean Prince Charles, now King Charles, was lobbying the Bush administration. But John Major didn't have the commitment to climate that Thatcher had.

44:32 But in Europe, The mainline conservative parties have pretty much accepted climate science, and I give Thatcher some of the credit for that. Talk to us about Rio a bit. That was 1992. What was accomplished there? What role? How did the Bush administration, H. W. Bush, approach that? Well, the Europeans were pushing very hard to stabilize in climate at 1990 levels by the year 2000. That sounds easier to do, but when you understand the energy infrastructure and the moving parts that have to be changed, to use energy differently. Very ambitious goal. And so the Europeans wanted a binding target.

45:14 And Bill Reilly, who is the secretary or the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, was pushing within the administration for that. A few other people were pushing for that. But The main thrust within the administration, coming from the economists at the White House and from Sununu, was strongly against that. And so, Bush basically decided not to support a binding resolution. They had a good point, and I try to be fair to all concerned. In the United States, a treaty supersedes U. S. law. So, most countries could sign a binding target, and It wouldn't mean that much.

45:58 In the United States, if it's in a treaty, it can be litigated. So there was some argument. But then, if that's your argument, then come back and support updating the auto efficiency regulations. They were way overdue from being renewed. It was right during the first Iraq war. So the idea that we shouldn't be dependent on oil. either for climate reasons or for middle eastern politics and the senators were mentioned in both by this point. By this point, climate change is right up there. And the administration fought very hard. They had the votes to break the filibuster to get it through. On the second vote, uh, the administration changed eight senators, I believe, and it went down and was not.

46:44 Renewed till the second Bush signed a bill with auto efficiency standards in 2007. So, uh, that was a pivotal time. And in Rio, you know, it was very exciting in a way. I mean, you're bringing in all these countries from all over the world. Bush attended, which gave it a certain dignity, uh, that the American president had come. But when you go into a presidential archive, you can read all their internal correspondence about what they're saying about so and so and this and that, and it's, uh, in its own way, it's kind of entertaining. But at that point, you could say, well, you know, in 1992, that's a pretty big deal that we have this conference, and we pretty much say that you ought to stabilize by 2000.

47:30 Now. The United Kingdom went down substantially in the 1990s. actually accelerated faster in the 1990s than we'd been accelerating before. So we, we kind of failed the test in the 1990s. You state when we're talking about the H. W. Bush administration, you said by the time of that presidency, there'd been a breakdown of the old circle of scientific elites. So what do you mean by that? And then that being the case, how does a president or public servant then get reliable? Scientific information upon which to act. Well, this actually could merit a whole book, just the evolution of think tanks.

48:10 You know, when I write an op ed, I don't get paid for it, you know. I do it because I want to communicate with the public. And then I read the people that are also doing op eds, and I know through various sources how much they're getting paid. Five, ten thousand dollars per op ed. There's a group of scientists who aren't really publishing in peer reviewed journals. They don't have the prestige or the kind of people who are on the panels of the National Academy of Sciences who are already, who are heading up think tanks or they're being subsidized by the coal industry or, or whatever. And they're given almost as much credibility as these other people.

48:51 Even the Washington Post, the Washington Post during that time period was publishing a lot of. Climate denial op eds and my view is if you're going to publish it, find out who paid for it because the reader deserves to know that. So that's, that's kind of what I'm talking about. You know, maybe we over revered scientists in the 1950s during the Cold War, but we maybe need to get back to that a little bit. But in some ways it was good because Ravel always believed that science should speak with one voice. So if you read Ravel, he signed off on different reports in his career that are slightly different because you know, I've been on a panel of the National Academy of Sciences.

49:34 It's a group decision and I may not agree with every word in the report, but I'm I'm not going to file a minority report. So the idea that now scientists are just speaking out as individuals, you know, this and that and not doing it through this National Academy of Sciences process, I can argue both sides of that. But it does allow a lot of junk science to start coming into the dialogue. So what would you all recommend then if I'm a maker of public policy or if I'm just a citizen wanting to learn more about environmental policy? Climate change. What are those sources? How do I test the source I'm looking at? God knows on the internet you can find anything now.

50:14 How do you test that to know this is a valid, good source of scientific information? Well, I mean, some people wouldn't want to hear this, but most of our government sites, you know, NASA, NOAA, Energy Information Administration, EPA's stuff is fine. It's pretty good, uh, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I mean, you have hundreds of scientists come together and they put out charts. The thing is, they've all been through sort of a peer review process. So like when I testify before Congress, I'm, I'm testifying before Republicans and Democrats, people from Oklahoma, people from Vermont. At the end of my testimony, it's kind of been peer reviewed, you know, in the political dialogue.

51:00 And so I don't go in there with some wild idea that I can't back up. And we really lack the chance. One time, when peak oil was so big, I gave a speech to the National Association of Geologists, or one of the big groups, to show why peak oil was not true. And I said, any opponent who thinks it's a big deal, I'll appear with them on the stage and we'll discuss it together. No one, no one showed up. And it's kind of that way with climate change, and it's true on both sides. I mean, everybody's talking to people they already agree with, and what we need is a panel where everybody gets up and maybe we'll stay there for three hours and you can examine my assumptions and I'll examine your assumptions and I'll give you my evidence and you give me your evidence and then maybe at the end we'll know what the truth is.

51:55 And I would just add, yeah, also Jay, you mentioned IPCC kind of in the international context. In many countries, including the U. S., have like a national climate assessment, the NCA. In these circles, it is true, the scientists as much as possible try to speak with one voice and then they're They're scientists. They tend to be quite open about where there are the uncertainties. And there's certainly differences of opinions on certain topics. But these end up becoming, and I think whoever's listening to this podcast should see that, these are the authoritative sources in the field. And I think there are other analogs in other areas as well. Health and medicine and whatever you can imagine. I think this period where there was a bit of this divergence in how health As Jay was talking about how the science was perceived, it has a lot to do with this whole notion of science communication, right?

52:46 I mean, this was the period when we were talking about global warming, and then we used that terminology for a long time, and then people started to take that and use it against, against it. Oh, well, it's not warming, because I'm, our area is, right? It's very cold day today, right? Exactly, right? And then you start realizing, okay, let's not use that term. There's another term. So that's a, that's one example. Uh, I mean, David knows this as well, but I mean the, with, with the IPCC process, which is the gold standard in my mind, in terms of communicating the science, there's the peer review that's done by the scientists. And then there's a separate document that is created for the policy makers. And I think this is interesting where they go through and there's a bit of a veto power on the part of the governments to decide what they want. in their brief versus what's not in their brief.

53:29 And that is not necessarily misrepresenting the science, but it's just selectively reporting the science, right? And that becomes a key issue with the communication of the science as well. And David said scientists are very good at communicating, uh, the uncertainties in their model. I think sometimes I struggle with this. Honestly, I, I do think that there's some issues with reporting, not issues, but just communicating uncertainty is hard. I mean, probabilities are hard, right? If you sit down and try to talk about them, they're very, they're very confusing. So I think there's been struggles with reporting uncertainties, not necessarily in the models, but just the fact that. The modeling has natural uncertainty built into it. That's not necessarily, we don't know. There's just randomness.

54:09 So I think those three, those three things all kind of fit in a bucket around communication where the communication started to become an issue. And a lot of times I think the scientists take that and they, they, they seem to think, well, we, we just need to put one more decimal point of precision on our estimates and then that'll make it, that'll make it work. And they're missing the point that it's not the science. I don't need to go from. From, from six decimal points of accuracy to seven, I just need to do a better job of communicating. And education, I think, is part of that as well. What we do with K 12 here, how we kind of introduce these concepts to students. And Jay? I can make one very specific suggestion. One is when one of the scientists was testifying, the, um, Senator said, why are you giving us this information in Celsius rather than Fahrenheit?

54:53 And the response was, well, the journals that we publish in all use Celsius. Climate change sounds a lot worse in Fahrenheit than it does in Celsius, and we still haven't gotten past that. I mean, the two degree warming, for one thing, is not average two degrees Celsius. It's a lot more here, less here. Effects. Wind currents and maybe eventually ocean currents and then you know, what's two point Celsius is what three point six Fahrenheit So, you know that that would be for starters Converting all journals read mainly by Americans to Fahrenheit So I think we need to wrap up today But I guess one question as we as we go out start with you David and Charles What would you say to our listeners in terms of?

55:41 Is there a positive view right now with climate change? What can we say? As Jay said earlier, we have big challenges ahead of us, but some things have been done. Where would you say we stand now? Are we in bad shape in how we're approaching it? Or have we made significant progress and we're on the right path or somewhere in between? You have to look really hard, I guess, to find a good thing. I think the one good thing is that the leaderships, we don't seem to be waiting on the federal government for leadership anymore. And I think Jay's point about this being a global pollutant really puts a lot of emphasis on the federal government to take the leadership role, but I think when you see the long track of where we've been, you've realized that waiting on that is creating a lot of stops and starts and things, and we have stopped relying on them to be the leader, and we start to see leadership coming from State governments, for instance, who are trying to pass their own climate policies.

56:32 There's limits to that, right? There's limits to how much the city of San Francisco can do, but it's good to see that there is some things that are happening at the local level, and then so hopefully you get sort of more of a bottom up groundswell of support for, for policy instead of all of us waiting for an administration to come in and somehow enact a policy that's not going to be overturned or ruled out in the Supreme Court or something. And the business, I mean, this is another example of where now, and then there's a whole other issue with sort of documenting those. Those steps that businesses are taking, that becomes another issue. Businesses can say they're doing a lot of stuff on climate change, and then you want to go through and document that so that they don't just Say it. Say it, right. But this is a point where businesses would have waited until the federal government was going to force them to do it for years.

57:15 And now they are the ones who are sort of taking the lead. And then I think now the next challenge becomes sort of documenting the actual impacts of the things they're doing so that we can hold their feet to the fire and show, yes, they are actually doing these things. Yeah, and I think what Charles just said here in the U. S. plays out globally as well. There's been this shift over time since, um, the early days when countries started coming together in Rio and then beyond to, in these international climate negotiations processes, the so called COPS, the Conference of Parties, that, that's shifted also from kind of a top down to a, more of a bottom up, you know, country driven. process, right? And so now countries are on, they're required, uh, they're on the hook since the Paris Agreement of 2015 to, um, put forward every single year or, or every few years, but then updates every year, the so called nationally determined contributions in DCs.

58:02 And then these, now these long term strategies, basically now every country has a, some semblance of a, or they're supposed to kind of have a roadmap, a plan to get there, which then filters down. There's a North star now for basically every country. In some cases, it's not very stringent in other cases. It's really ambitious, right? And that gives the signal to all the states, all the cities, all the companies, this is the direction of travel. And we are seeing a lot, and in this country with these major pieces of legislation in the past couple years, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Chips and Science Act, which are really moving the needle. And I think a lot of that stuff is still in the pipeline.

58:43 And a lot of, we're going to start seeing a lot of steel in the ground projects, you know, solar panels on people's roofs, electric vehicle chargers all over the place here in the later part of the 2020s and certainly in the 2030s. So there's, I think there's a lot of reason to be optimistic, but at the moment we are, there is still a, a so called gap, an emissions gap and kind of where we need to be to get to two degrees, 1. 5 degrees and where the world is, is heading. But the gap, yeah, can hopefully be closed in time. Yeah. Very good. And Jay, as we approach yet another presidential election. What is your view right now on where we stand with climate change? Well, you know, when I was writing the last two pages of a book like this, it's difficult. And I had an ending that was like, our political system has failed us, we got a filibuster, we don't have bipartisanship anymore, things are bleak.

59:32 And I changed that, and the end is a picture of Carter, I was at the event, he asked me to speak at it, but they took ten acres of his farmland in Plains and built solar panels panels there. I've had the chance to spend a lot of time with him over the years and I've never seen him so happy. And, but, the next year, MIT publishes a report that solar in the last 40 years had reduced costs by 99%. So, it shows what technology can do. And I know, Alan, you are very interested in innovation and the pace of innovation.

1:00:16 So, we know what we need to do, which is a big part of this. And so, we just can't do it at a leisurely pace. It has to be all everyone on board pulling their oar, uh, to even to keep it to 2. 5 degrees Celsius is going to take a pretty serious effort. I think technically we could keep it at 2. Uh, if you put the politics into it, that's a pretty heavy lift. But, but I, I, I think right now I'm more trying to oppose the pessimism because I don't see that leading to action. It just leads, don't blame me because I understand climate science, but.

1:00:56 There's nothing we can do about it. That's the worst. That's almost as bad as climate denial. Gentlemen, a fascinating conversation. Our first AMSECast conversation. Charles and David and Jay, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you all for listening and watching and join us next time on AMSECast Conversations. Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSECast. For more information on this topic or any others, you can always visit us at amse. org or find, like, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I invite you to visit the American Museum of Science and Energy and the K 25 History Center in person.

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