Dissertation FINAL

MAKING GLOBAL WARMING GREEN: CLIMATE CHANGE AND AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALISM, 1957-1992 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Joshua P. Howe July 2010 © 2010 by Joshua Proctor Howe. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/cp892qc1059 ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Richard White, Primary Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Robert Proctor I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Jessica Riskin Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives. iii Abstract Making Global Warming Green: Climate Change and American Environmentalism, 1957-1992 investigates how global climate change became a major issue in American environmental politics during the second half of the 20th Century. The dissertation focuses on the complex institutional, political, and professional relationships between scientists studying climate and America’s professional environmentalists during this tumultuous period. Throughout the early history of global warming, the geographical and chronological scales of climatic and atmospheric change transcended the existing legal and regulatory mechanisms of American environmental politics. Only scientists had the technology and expertise to recognize threats to these novel components of the environment, and their exclusive access all but forced them into a prominent role as environmental advocates. But scientists’ particular forms of advocacy often reflected the values and interests of their disciplines more than they did the middle-class quality-of-life concerns at the center of the mainstream American environmental movement. Scientists framed climate change in terms of development and natural resources, and they sought to influence elites in government and at international scientific organizations more than they worked to mobilize the American public. As American environmentalists began to take up the fight against global warming in the 1980s and ‘90s, they too found themselves trading in the language of scientific consensus and government-sponsored global solutions rather than the locally focused, middle-class consumer values originally at the heart of the movement. More than just a political history of global warming, this research presents a new history of American environmentalism that takes into account the science and politics of an issue that has emerged in the twenty-first century as one of our greatest challenges. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………….iv Introduction………………………………………………...1 Chapter 1: The Cold War Roots of Global Warming……..19 Chapter 2: The Supersonic Transport: Scientists, Environmentalists, and the Atmospheric Environment……………………………………….67 Chapter 3: Systems Science, the Stockholm Conference, and the Making of the Global Environment……………………………………….112 Chapter 4: Climate, “The Environment,” and Scientific Activism in the 1970s………………………………………………166 Chapter 5: Scientists, Environmentalists, Democrats: The New Politics of Climate Change Under Ronald Reagan…………………….228 Chapter 6: Mechanisms of Change: Knowledge and Regulation in a Warming World……………………………………………...283 Conclusion………………………………………………...324 Bibliography………………………………………………338 v Introduction The history of global warming is at once a romance and a tragedy. As a romance, it is a story of remarkable scientific and political achievement. Between 1957 and 1992, a relatively small community of scientists and environmentalists transformed a scientific curiosity at the fringes of the Cold War research system into the centerpiece of both American and international environmentalism. Atmospheric scientists studying climate and climatic change built new institutions, established new disciplines, launched unprecedented cooperative international research initiatives, and ultimately created a new way of understanding the global atmosphere and humans’ relationship to it. Alongside American environmentalists, these scientists introduced the problems of the global atmosphere—and the threat of anthropogenic CO2-induced climate change in particular—into American politics and public life. They promoted and helped to shape an international framework for regulating emissions based on international cooperation and the best available scientific knowledge. Their success has led our society to begin proactively seeking solutions to global warming, and in this sense Making Global Warming Green, much like Spencer Weart’s survey of the history of climate science in the 20th Century, The Discovery of Global Warming, tells an optimistic tale.1 But concomitant to the story of scientific and political success on climate change is a story of a larger political failure. Despite scientists’ and environmentalists’ remarkable efforts to study, popularize, and advocate for action on global warming in the 1 In narrating this story of success I diverge from Weart in my reliance on a mix of archival and published sources and in my persistent focus on the place of climate change in American environmentalism, but to the extent that Making Global Warming Green tells the story of the development of a scientific field—climate science—I, too, present that story as the qualified scientific triumph I believe that it is. Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), xvii. 1 20th century, these groups have after fifty years almost categorically failed to prevent the type of environmental change they have warned against for so long.2 Fossil fuel energy continues to support an expanding global economy, and greenhouse gas emissions consequently continue to expand as well. Environmentalists have certainly inspired gains in energy efficiency and land use changes around the world, but for the most part the climatic benefits of these gains are artifacts of more traditional local and regional efforts to control other environmental problems like common air pollution and deforestation. Concentrated at about 315ppm in 1959, as of May 2010, CO2 sits at 392.24ppm. The rate of increase has risen from around 1ppm per year to closer to 2ppm per year.3 The problem itself is not getting better; it is getting worse. How to reconcile these two stories? Within the limited historiography that exists, historians of global warming have tended to separate scientific success from political failure.4 This separation is in part an artifact of chronology. Climate scientists found 2 In a remarkably self-aware book, Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), James Gustave Speth takes the failure to produce action on global environmental problems as a jumping off point for an analysis of the global environmental politics in the last quarter of the 20th century. 3 For information on current CO2 concentrations, see the organization “CO2 Now,” http://co2now.org/; See also “Carbon Dioxide, Methane Rise Sharply in 2007,” NOAA, April 23, 2008, http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20080423_methane.html 4 Critical histories of global warming are few and far between, but a few important works have laid the groundwork for the field. If there is a single, standard narrative of the history of the science of global warming, it is Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming. The accompanying website, The Discovery of Global Warming: A Hypertext History of How Scientists Came to (Partly) Understand What People are Doing to Cause Climate Change, also provides a wealth of resources and discussions on interactions within the scientific community and between science and politics, the media, the environmental movement, the international community, and the public. The interpretive framework is very schematic, but the lack of nuance does not detract from its utility; indeed, it may facilitate it. James Roger Fleming offers perhaps the most critical and nuanced historical work on the science of climate, both in myriad articles on weather modification and in his Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Fleming is careful to note how the ideas about the concept of climate—its scale, its impact, and its permanence—have changed over time, although he, like other historians of science, has a tendency to focus on the details of “first references” and “discoveries,” some times to the detriment of his discussion of these events’ historical significance. Erik Conway’s Atmospheric Science at NASA: A History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2008) attacks the history of atmospheric science from the perspective

Load more