The Untold History of Climate Science and Politics

Guest

Jay Hakes

Author, “The Presidents and the Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush”

Transcript

Jay Hakes: One constant theme in the book is that there’s a tendency among scientists to see climate change as a reason to study everything they’ve been curious about. And anything as broad as climate has a lot of moving pieces to it. You don’t necessarily have to understand all of those with exactitude to know what you need to do.

Bill Loveless: In 1953, the New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series, From Here to Eternity won the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture. And on May 24th, 1953, deep in the education section of the New York Times, there was a short piece titled How Industry May Change Climate. In the years after, scientists went from writing about the possible impacts of pollution on climate to warning U.S. presidents. An energy policy expert and scholar Jay Hakes says there’s much more to the story. From scientists and economists who quietly work to address growing environmental threats to lawmakers and staffers who deliberated in Congress and the White House over what to do about them, Jay says, there’s a history that hasn’t been told. In his new book, The Presidents and the Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush, Jay looks at these early climate change pioneers and asks about the challenges they faced. What was it like trying to influence the White House? What solutions did these pioneers offer? And can their stories further our discourse about climate change today?

This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I’m Bill Loveless.

Today on the show, Jay Hakes. Jay is a scholar and author on U.S. Energy policy. From 2000 to 2013, he served as the Director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. He also served in both the Obama and Clinton administrations, including a seven-year stint as Director of the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Jay’s other books include Energy Crises: Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Hard Choices in the 1970s, and A Declaration of Energy Policy Independence. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Jay Hakes, welcome back to Columbia Energy Exchange.

Jay Hakes: Great to be here, Bill.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, well, it’s always great to talk to you, Jay, and we have done so so many times over the years on so many different subjects, but here we go again. I’m excited to talk about this new book. You’ve written extensively about energy over the years, especially U.S. energy policy. In fact, we discussed your last book, Energy Crises: Ford, Nixon, Carter and Hard Choices in the 1970s, on this show back in 2021. Why this book, and why this book now?

Jay Hakes: Well, climate change is the great issue of our time. There’s a lot of books coming out on climate change, and so I took a look and tried to see if there was something that I could offer that might be a little different. Of course, I headed a presidential library for 13 years, so I know a lot about government documents and how you get to them, even if they’d been classified before, and I know how energy infrastructures work. I’ve even in my life been on a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, so it seemed to me that I was seeing some gaps in the other books that I thought I could fill. And so it was a multi-year project with a lot of research, and I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, many hours in the libraries and archives. I know you start first thing in the morning and work it through all day. I don’t even think with a lunch break.

Jay Hakes: A lot of people think everything that’s known is on the web, and I’m trying to disabuse people of that. The Netscape browser came into use in the early 1990s, and that’s when EIA jumped on the bandwagon to try to make the information available. But there’s a lot of stuff before that, important stuff that hasn’t been digitized. And so I go sit and do the long hours in the research room so the reader of the book doesn’t have to do that. But I think I’ve uncovered every once in a while you’ll find a document, aha, that we didn’t know about that before.

Bill Loveless: And those documents with notations, you can take a president’s speech, but you find the drafts with the notations and the margin by his advisors, the president. I find that all fascinating throughout this book. We see references to climate change daily in the news media today, but there were glimpses of the topic as far back as the 1950s when Dwight Eisenhower was in office. You start the book by recalling a story in the New York Times in 1953. It was a five-paragraph piece placed deep in the paper’s education section, as you know, and the headline was How Industry May Change Climate. For you that and occasional other news items on the topic way back when are important markers in this tale, right?

Jay Hakes: Right. There’s several milestones throughout the ’50s. The article you were referring to in 1953, Eisenhower’s first year in the White House, it was really based mostly on the work that Callendar did in the United Kingdom. He was an amateur scientist over there and people weren’t really listening to him that much, but he made a case that the Industrial Revolution was putting all this carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and we knew that carbon dioxide was a heat-trapping gas. But then in the mid ’50s, a guy named Roger Revelle gets involved and he’s saying, “Most scientists don’t believe Callendar. They think it just falls into the ocean.” And he gave some reasons why he thought that wasn’t true. And so in the mid ’50s you could really say most scientists were not accepting what we consider today climate change science. By the end of ’50s, most of the people paying close attention were starting to re-evaluate their position.

Bill Loveless: I want to talk about some of those developments because they’re so interesting. But the book refers to U.S. presidents, Eisenhower to Bush, but it’s as much about the climate change pioneers whose work dates back to these 1950s, right? I mean, you mentioned Roger Revelle. I want to talk specifically about some of them, but first I want to understand why they are really the stars of your story.

Jay Hakes: Well, we point to scientists like Galileo and Einstein and other great scientists that we learn about in our school textbooks who suddenly said, “We need to look at the world differently.” The two people that deserve the most credit for that are Roger Revelle and Dave Keeling, both who were at the Scripps Institution, which is now the University of California San Diego. Wally Broecker at Columbia was another important person in that. I read their obituaries, it was like, “We’re not giving these people enough credit.” And so if there were some people there that were doing the breakthrough work, we need to understand why did they do it, what basic points did they make, and make sure that their children and all the people that are concerned about climate change today, we owe these people a debt. And so that was a big part of my motivation too in writing the book.

Bill Loveless: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit more about Roger Revelle. No name appears more in your book than this scientist as far as I can tell. I have to acknowledge, he’s someone whose name I never came across in my many years of covering energy and climate as a reporter. I’m afraid to say that, to acknowledge that, but it’s true. Who was he, and why was he so influential?

Jay Hakes: Well, one of the reasons we didn’t run into him so much, he died in the early 1990s at an elderly age, and he had been the chief oceanographer for the Navy during World War II. So he was very well-connected in the science community. He in the mid ’50s was of such eminence that he was invited to a state dinner with Dwight Eisenhower. Well, he gives a paper, and then he writes an article saying, “This carbon dioxide is staying in the atmosphere, I think.” And then he hires Dave Keeling to go to Mauna Loa and set up this measurement system for carbon dioxide so it wouldn’t just be a theory, we’d have the facts.

During this time, he’s testifying before Congress and saying, “We need to look at this climate problem.” He was head of one of the sections for the International Geophysical Year, so during the ’50s, he’s talking with scientists at the White House, he’s testifying before Congress. He’s not focusing entirely on climate change, but he’s mentioning it as something that we need to look at. I think there’s not really that much awareness of how active he was in the ’50s in talking about this issue. I mean, he was quoted in Time Magazine in the mid 1950s. He was actually on an evening science program that NBC had. You have to remember, this was the time when the Russians launched Sputnik. Part of the Cold War was we had to have better science than the Russians had, so people like Revelle became kind of celebrities during the ’50s.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, I remember that reference to that series that appeared on NBC. I was saying, “Wow.” I was struck by the fact that it gained that sort of prominence on TV at the time, a program that really was kind of wonky on science, right?

Jay Hakes: There was a lot of cache with science, but Revelle, I mean, I am not a biographer, so I didn’t feel like my forte would be writing a biography of Revelle, but his influence continues even after his death. Because his student when he was at Harvard, one of them was Al Gore, and many other prominent journalists and world leaders took his course at Harvard, so he influenced either directly in most cases or indirectly in other cases every president from Eisenhower through Clinton.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, remarkable figure. And of course, Dave Keeling, another prominent figure that appears throughout your book. His measurements on atmospheric carbon, they were published back in 1960, you write may well mark the beginning of the modern era of climate change science. Tell us a little bit more about him because these measurements became so significant in the studies of climate throughout the decades.

Jay Hakes: Yeah, Dave Keeling’s a very interesting person because a lot of good scientists, their forte is curiosity. He starts getting this fascination with studying carbon in the atmosphere. He would even go to mountains on the West Coast and take his sleeping bag out there so he could get measurements at midnight with very crude equipment at first. The Atomic Energy Commission was paying for this stuff, and they said, “Well, why are you doing this?” And later on he said, “Well, I was having fun.”

Well, what happened is, because of him, we now have continuous time measurements from 1958 to the current time, and to my knowledge, no one has ever questioned his data. I mean, he is very careful about how he does all of his measurements. So people argue about a lot of things, but no one says, “Well, I doubt that the carbon is really accumulating in the atmosphere,” which is quite an achievement because in the mid 1950s, most scientists thought it was not accumulating in the atmosphere.

Actually, there’s an engraving of Keeling on the wall of one of the National Academy of Sciences buildings in Washington. He’s received many awards. His son is now an atmospheric scientist at the University of California San Diego. But Keeling and Revelle were quite a pair. They were very different in temperament and how they communicated with the public, but they both made these very solid things.

Before we leave Keeling, one of Keeling’s achievements which nobody mentions that much is he discovered that it was a global pollutant. In other words, wherever you measured it, the measurements would come out the same if you got away from the transient air pollution of the day. And even Revelle had to be convinced of that. That is a huge discovery because this is an environmental issue that is different from almost all the others. We have one or two other global pollutants, but most of them are local toxic dumps into a river or regional sulfur dioxide can cross state borders and international borders, but it’s not a global pollutant. So the stakes are raised. The world has to find a solution to this. And I think we forget that that was another intellectual breakthrough that Keeling made back when he was collecting this data in the late 1950s.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, and of course, those readings from Mauna Loa are still ones that are considered among the most, if not the most, prominent ones available in looking at atmospheric carbon throughout the world today.

Jay Hakes: Yeah, it’s the gold standard, and we’re very fortunate to have that.

Bill Loveless: Among the presidents you write about is John F. Kennedy, JFK. He’s best known in science for his challenge to put a man on the moon in 10 years. But he was someone who seemed to acknowledge the potential impacts of carbon emissions on the earth’s climate. You said he was the first to recognize, at least in a fleeting way, this phenomenon. How so?

Jay Hakes: Yeah, just from a personal standpoint, the Kennedy role was the most exciting for me in a lot of ways because it’s been totally unknown as far as I know. A lot of people say, “Well, public officials didn’t know about this till the late 1980s.” Well, you and I know that’s not true, and other people have brought it back to Lyndon Johnson, so there’s been some awareness, but not of Kennedy. So when I started this book, I did word searchers of every presidential message and speech looking for climate change, carbon dioxide, global warming, and I didn’t come up with anything on Kennedy.

So I’m out in Roger Revelle’s files out in California, and I find this letter in 1961 from Ted Sorensen’s office, the speechwriter for Kennedy, thanking Revelle for his input into this speech. So I say, “Well, I better take another look at that speech.” And what Kennedy says and Revelle actually wrote this because he was asked by the White House to review the document, until he reviewed it, that wasn’t in there, what he said was, “We must better understand the interaction between the oceans and the atmosphere because they can have great effects on our climate.”

Now, you could easily read that and miss it, but that was the gist of Revelle’s 1957 article that we needed to study this more carefully, i.e., we need to get Keeling out there collecting the data and doing a lot of other things. So then as I get into it, I find that Kennedy mentioned it on two other occasions. One was a film, and there’s only one other person in the film, Roger Revelle teaching at the blackboard in front of a class. And then shortly before Kennedy’s death, he’s giving a speech on the 100th anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences, and he repeats this language again, and Revelle is sitting behind him, they’re both in academic garb. And later I find an oral interview with Revelle, and he says, “That was my only face-to-face meeting with Kennedy.” But he actually was brought into the Kennedy administration as a full-time science advisor for a while. He was appointed by Kennedy to the Peace Corps Advisory Committee with Eleanor Roosevelt and LBJ and Supreme Court Justice Douglas and Harry Belafonte. I mean, he was kind of a science superstar during the Kennedy administration.

Bill Loveless: Again, just a remarkable figure. So there’s a glimpse during JFK’s time, and we head into the administration of LBJ, Lyndon Johnson, in the 1960s. You say that’s a time when the climate topic, quote, “moved briskly from academic journals read by university professors to its inclusion in White House deliberations.” In fact, you write that in 1965 LBJ issued the first presidential warning about potential climate change. This was pretty significant.

Jay Hakes: Yes. Things start to get more specific in the Johnson administration. He has an advisor, Donald Hornig, which almost nobody has heard of. He was put in by Kennedy just before he died, and he continued into the Johnson administration. He was very aware of climate change, and because of a celebrity, people at the White House were talking to Revelle, he was in the White House within months of Johnson becoming president to advise him on the Great Society planning. He met Johnson several times, there’s a very good picture in the book of him talking with Johnson, but his big contribution was the 1965 study which basically laid out the science of environmental protection, which was quite new at the time.

Climate change is a big part of that, which I think actually comes as a little bit of surprise to our current Supreme Court because they keep claiming, “Well, when they did the Clean Air Act, they didn’t know about climate change.” Well, they sure did. And so that was quite an achievement. And when you look at that document today, not only does it talk about climate change in considerable detail, it says that it’s likely we’re going to have to do away with the internal combustion car. This is in 1965. So we treat that as a new discussion that we’re having today, but it has deep, deep roots.

Bill Loveless: Yeah. I recall in the book, the head of the American Petroleum Institute at the time took note of that reference to transportation and the internal combustion engine and what might become of it eventually and expressed some concern.

Jay Hakes: Yeah, there’s certain things I couldn’t pin down. The head of the API at the time, or the executive vice president who was really running the show, was a former Texas congressman who was in the White House a lot. He was a good friend of Lyndon Johnson’s, and he was helping Johnson raise money for the University of Texas, which was then going to be the resting place for Johnson. I checked all their meetings, can I find a transcript of the meeting or something? Did they ever discuss climate change? They might not have because there was a certain protocol that you didn’t lobby in situations like that, but it’s an interesting period, and like so much of the other things, it deserves more attention than it’s gotten.

Bill Loveless: Right. Who was that fellow, by the way? I’m trying to remember back. I remember-

Jay Hakes: Frank Ikard.

Bill Loveless: Frank Ikard, yeah. Former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma. But yeah, that report just struck me. I mean, it was a blunt warning, and tell me if I am recalling this wrong, but a blunt warning that burning coal, oil, and natural gas were adding huge quantities of carbon dioxide to the earth’s atmosphere, right?

Jay Hakes: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Bill Loveless: Let me read on a bit here because I just found this so interesting, quote, “By the year 2000, there will be about 25% more CO2 in our atmosphere than at present. This will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that market changes in climate, not controllable through local or even national efforts, could occur.”

Jay Hakes: Yeah, there were five people on the committee that wrote the part on climate change chaired by Revelle. Keeling was on it. Broecker from Columbia was on it. There was a carbon dating specialist, which Broecker also was, and there was a modeler who was expert in climate. So those five people, but I’m pretty sure most of that report was written by Roger Revelle. And again, a lot of people just say, “Well, Revelle wrote this article back in ’57,” and leave it at that. No, he was on the inside, and he was very prophetic about not everything exactly, but the general picture was pretty clear even back in 1965.

Bill Loveless: Again, amazing considering so often people think, “Well, climate change is a topic for presidents to deal with in relatively recent history.” But boy, here we go, 1965, and there it stands out in the LBJ administration.

During the Nixon years, there were a lot of significant developments on environmental awareness and policy. There was this signing of the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act of 1970, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. But with the 1973 Arab oil embargo, there was also a lot of fear over U.S. energy security. Did climate change play much of a role in his administration?

Jay Hakes: Well, there were couple of things. One is temperature data, unlike the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is erratic. In other words, if you look at temperature since the Industrial Revolution, it’s going up and up and up, but there are periods when it cools. You can have a volcano or the sulfur dioxide is a coolant. And so there was a period there where scientists really weren’t absolutely sure that the earth was warming. This lasted about six years. And that was when Nixon and Ford were president. But Gordon MacDonald, who’s another important scientist, was appointed by Nixon to the Council on Environmental Quality, and he wrote these reports on White House analyzing carbon dioxide. And another thing that Ford and Carter did, in the book, I tried to also track the progress of technology, so under Nixon and Ford, the idea is the old Atomic Energy Commission labs, which had focused solely on military uses of nuclear and to some extent civilian nuclear power, should be leading the charge on finding alternatives to traditional fuels. They set up what was called ERDA, which was the predecessor of the Department of Education.

Bill Loveless: The Department of Energy.

Jay Hakes: Department of Energy, yeah, sorry, there’s two DOEs.

Bill Loveless: ERDA was what? Energy Research and Development-

Jay Hakes: Development Administration.

Bill Loveless: … Administration. Right.

Jay Hakes: Solar research before that had been under the National Science Foundation, and that was switched to the lab and they started a new lab in Colorado for solar research, which at first was the Solar Energy Research Institute and now is the National Renewable Energy Lab. That might not normally be included in a study of climate change, science, and politics, but you do have to track technology. And not to jump too far ahead, solar becomes a pretty big part of this whole discussion, so it’s good to look at the roots of that as well.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, that period, it was a difficult period for so many reasons, the Ford Administration coming after Nixon’s resignation. But I recall you referred to a paper the National Academy of Sciences put out in 1975 called Understanding Climate Change: A Program for Action, which suggested, okay, maybe they were ready to take some action. But I think by action, the paper appeared to suggest more study of climate change, right? There was a lot of uncertainty.

Jay Hakes: Yeah. Once constant theme in the book is that there’s a tendency among scientists to see climate change as a reason to study everything they’ve been curious about. And anything as broad as climate has a lot of moving pieces to it. You don’t necessarily have to understand all of those with exactitude to know what you need to do. But that study was one of many where I think… Revelle wasn’t involved in that study, but they were not looking at the [inaudible 00:27:24]. And also, in the academic world, which sometimes is called the ivory tower, there’s this intellectual curiosity, and they don’t see their role as telling people what to do. They think that the knowledge that they produce will lead people to come to the right conclusions.

Revelle’s sort of somewhere in the middle on that, he is pretty careful about what he says, but he starts working under Ford on a National Academy of Sciences, which is published in the first months of the Carter administration, it says, “Because of the long persistence of carbon in the atmosphere, if we wait to take action, the die may have already been cast.” And so that report was basically written under Ford. It was fairly heavily censored by the National Academy of Sciences from what Revelle really wanted to say, which was even more clearer than what he did say. So it’s a very fertile time, and I don’t think the whole Nixon-Ford era should be ignored at all. There’s actually quite a bit going on.

Bill Loveless: Quite a bit, but there were other bigger issues that just clouded over this one to the extent it might’ve gotten more attention.

Jay Hakes: Well, that’s always been the problem for climate change. Everybody says, “Well, this is really important, but right now we’re working on this other problem.” And so it is a hard time. There was a feeling that after you did the Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Water Act, the Ozone Protection Act, the amendments to deal with sulfur dioxide, well, now it’s time for climate change. And then somehow at that time, that’s when the opposition really mobilized to try to defuse the issue.

Bill Loveless: We’re going to get to that point of history in a moment, but we have to touch on Jimmy Carter, right? He’s responsible for so much innovation when it comes to U.S. energy policy, as you know better than just about anyone else. But you know that he was also the first president to be briefed, rather directly is the way you put it, he was the first president to be briefed rather directly on climate change. We’ve talked about papers that came up with LBJ, a glimpse of what JFK mentioned, but you say he was the first to be briefed rather directly on climate change. And this is what? Late 19…

Jay Hakes: This was in 1977.

Bill Loveless: ’77.

Jay Hakes: Yeah. When the Revelle report came out, it was customary to share reports with the White House Science Office in case they were interested so they could respond to any press questions, so Frank Press, Carter’s energy advisor, writes him about two weeks before the report comes out and describes it in very clear and stark terms of what we’re dealing with. I know that Carter read it because he initialed it up on the top of the page, which was his style. I have to remark on that. One of his senior aides one time annotated something going to his office and he reamed them out because he knew historians would have a problem if there were notations on documents that weren’t his. So when there were notations on document… Well, I know his handwriting.

But anyhow, he saw it, and what Press said was he said, “Photovoltaics are going to probably be the solution to this. They’re not competitive now with coal, but they probably will become cheaper than coal as we get into the 21st century. So the best thing that we can do is invest in renewable energy.” Carter did that and did it quite heavily. So yes, that to me was another milestone where I had the written document. The president got the document, he read the document, he approved the idea that we needed to spend more on solar energy.

Bill Loveless: And you write by the end of his term Carter had mentioned the accumulation of CO₂ in the atmosphere more than all previous presidents combined. But as you and I have discussed a number of times over the years, a big part of his policy was promoting the burning of coal in power plants, and a lot of that had to do with concerns over energy security.

Jay Hakes: In my last book that you were kind of enough to mention, I had the word hard choices in the title. I think it’s easy when you’re watching from the sidelines how energy policy gets made. I mean, right now, do you export liquefied natural gas? There’s a national security component to it, there’s an environmental component, there’s an economic component, and sometimes they don’t mesh. So the Carter administration was in a pickle of sorts because they did maintain throughout the administration a commitment to coal. This was sort of what spurred the first what I would call activism. Wally Broecker actually wrote ERDA just before the Department of Energy was formed saying, “You need to reevaluate your commitment to coal.” And then Gordon McDonald became almost a Jeremiah on the subject under Carter. Mainly it was inside baseball, but McDonald ended up writing an op-ed for the Washington Post saying, “We’ve got climate out there. We can’t continue building coal.”

And that was very unusual because McDonald was an inside advisor to the White House and the culture was you didn’t go out publicly. I mean, he was careful how he did it. But McDonald is another person. He’s discussed quite a bit in Nathaniel Rich’s book, Losing Earth, and if you haven’t read that book and you haven’t read my book, you may not know much about Gordon McDonald, but he’s another one of these important scientists. He first learned about it when he was a scientist in the Kennedy administration and met Revelle.

Bill Loveless: We’ll continue to talk about the role advisors play in administrations, but I think it goes without saying that advisors play an important role in an administration, though their contributions are not that apparent to the public, right?

Jay Hakes: Yes. Gus Speth is kind of known now as a writer on climate issues, but he was head of the Council on Environmental Quality for Carter. So when Carter’s making a statement on climate change, sometimes he’s using the papers that were briefing papers prepared by Speth. But there were other people in his administration who were very strong on coal. So they have to balance this out, and some people have more influence than others. I’ve worked at the White House for a while under Carter and have been somewhat involved in briefing the White House on issues over the years. Who’s up and who’s down at the White House makes a big difference. The economists weigh in, and the scientists weigh in, and the political office weighs in, and a lot of times they try to read the temperature of the Senate and the House, what is going to make them mad or what’s going to work with them.

So I think, again, it’s digging a little deep. I certainly don’t want to make this too complex for the reader, I’ve tried to make this available to the general audience, but I think the behind the scenes and introducing some of the characters that people might not remember adds to the realism of the book.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, there’s quite a bit of color there, and we’ll talk about that in a moment when we get to the George H. W. Bush administration. Let’s hit on Reagan’s administration here for a moment. You write about the changing directions is the way you put it in U.S. energy and environmental policies under the Reagan administration. The president then sought to curtail regulation and spending in these areas, but there was also a rebound in bipartisan attention to these issues in Congress late in the 1980s. I found that very interesting because, again, I was covering the Hill back in the 1980s. Some of this I recall, but some of what you wrote I found very revealing. What happened?

Jay Hakes: Yes, it’s almost like there are two Reagans. So in the first administration, he’s very influenced by his budget director, David Stockman, and his view is that all these energy research programs at the Department of Energy are worthless, “It should be done by the private sector. Let’s cut these budgets.” And that they also tried to influence the National Academy of Sciences to not emphasize the need for climate action. But then in the second term, they bring in Howard Baker from the Senate. They’re being investigated by the Senate on the Rongate scandal. And George Shultz is appointed a Secretary of State, and he actually is a believer that we need climate action, and he’s a pretty influential guy.

So in Reagan’s second term, they do three things that are pretty important in climate history. They deal with the ozone layer depletion, which those gases are also heat-trapping gases, so that’s helpful. They finally pass a law on appliance of energy efficiency, which previous administrations had done but the rules were never written. So that actually started our modern era of appliance efficiency. And Reagan supported the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the main body overseeing. So these three things are done under Reagan.

Well, you get the papers and you find out that what happened was the Senate had a bipartisan majority that could both break filibusters and could overcome presidential vetoes. So Reagan did not want to get in a fight with the Senate that he was going to lose. Again another unsung hero is John Chafee, a Republican from Rhode Island. He’s actually more specific about what he wants to do. He was writing the Council on Environmental Quality and saying that they should start including the cost of carbon in their government calculations for the Energy Policy Act. So that’s a pretty modern idea. So Chafee, he wrote these letters, and actually under both Reagan and Bush, there were proposals to do that that actually got pretty far before they got shot down. I love the presidential angle of this because I think most presidents are a little more complex than we give them credit for being.

Bill Loveless: Yeah. Because as we speak, I’m sitting in Rhode Island, not far from a conservation area named after John Chafee, who, as you note, was quite well-known as someone who was a champion for conservation. There were those accomplishments. We tend to think more of the attempts by Reagan to cut programs, cut the Department of Energy, eliminate the Department of Energy for that matter. We think back in the late ’80s there was… So many people I think refer to this point involving the climate scientist James Hansen as when, oh my gosh, Congress in Washington became aware of climate change. He gained fame for blunt statements he made to Congress in the late ’80s on climate change. And he had quite a bit of impact. Again, you are reminding us the topic was being discussed at some level in Washington years before, but he really put an exclamation point on it late in the 1980s.

Jay Hakes: Yeah, Hansen’s a very important figure. I do point out that these signs of progress actually were well in place before Hansen testified. But it was quite a time. The chairman of the committee was J. Bennett Johnson from Louisiana, and he said in his written remarks, he said, “As we are about to hear Hansen testify, we should remember there’s only one planet that humans can live on,” which I thought was a pretty perceptive statement.

What Hansen did, and I think it really takes on great resonance today, he was always interested how he could explain climate change to the public. So he would usually use Fahrenheit for his temperature projections rather than Celsius, which doesn’t sound quite so bad, but scientists talk in Celsius. The way he portrayed it, he says, “I can calculate the probability that there will be more days over 100 in, say, Memphis. There’s an X chance.” And so he’s saying, “10 years from now, 15, 20 years from now, the heat levels during the summer are going to be different than they are now.”

And so that was something that the public could understanding. If you have melting glaciers in the Arctic, that’s a long way away, but he’s saying, “This is going to affect your life.” And incidentally, he was getting pressure from several of his testimonies, not this one particularly, he gave as a private citizen and put his home address on the testimony because OMB and his bosses thought he was going too far. I guess until him, people like Steve Snyder were starting to speak out more bluntly than some of the earlier scientists, but Hansen might have been the first one to get arrested.

Bill Loveless: Right. Yeah, because here at Columbia, we’re quite aware of his work here at the university as well as [inaudible 00:42:47] on climate studies. He’s still going strong. Bush administration, George H. W. Bush, he struggled mightily internally over how to address climate change despite some significant developments during his tenure. He had the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, last time the Clean Air Act was amended, and they included provisions to protect the ozone layer. And then there was the historic Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. You refer to him as Bush in the middle. Why so?

Jay Hakes: Well, he was getting strong advice on both sides of the issue. The leader of taking action was the guy that’s still around and doing good things, Bill Reilly, who was the head of EPA. Bill had great press relations, and he was meeting with Bush and saying, “You need to do more. You need to do no more.”

On the other side, the economists in the administration were against taking action. His lawyer, Boyden Gray, was against taking action other than voluntary measures and things that didn’t do that much. But the big gorilla was John Sununu, the chief of staff and former governor of New Hampshire, and the father of the current governor of New Hampshire. And I should give a shout-out here to the Bush Presidential Library because George Herbert Walker Bush left instructions, “Open it all.” So I have all the memos, I have the annotations of Sununu in the margin. He felt like he knew more about climate science than any of the people that were working for the National Academy of Science, studies and things like that.

Now, he would talk to them, he’d bring them into his office, but he was also bringing in the fringe deniers, the people that were being funded by the Universal Church of Reverend Moon and the energy industries to counter the more common view. So Sununu had great influence with Bush. If someone is into this and wants to see something really interesting, go to the footnote. There was a tape that was made at MIT of Sununu and climate scientists of all persuasions and economists of all persuasions. The environmental groups were represented, Exxon was represented. They went on for I think about six hours, and it’s on tape if you know where to look on the MIT website. It’s fascinating. And some of those people are still alive.

The thing about this is climate change is a controversial subject, and people have memories of what they think they did or somebody else did. I like to get a tape of the meeting or the document that they wrote, and it’s very revelatory, I believe. It shows that things are not easy. But again, we want people to know what’s available and what happened, because I think if we dig into that, we’re a lot better prepared to deal for the issues of today.

Bill Loveless: But I mean, late in the Reagan administration, early in the Bush administration, there had been these achievements. They had dealt with the ozone layer. They had dealt with sulfur dioxide with a cap-and-trade program. And so it seemed the groundwork was there to then just move on to carbon, right?

Jay Hakes: Well, there’s a lot in the book about auto efficiency standards. The law was passed under Nixon to have auto efficiency standards, and Carter did the rules. So they hadn’t been updated since 1977, and you’d had the development of the SUV and all sorts of things. So they really needed to be updated. To me, this is sort of the crucible of are we going to proceed as part of the international effort to deal with climate change? So what happened was Senator Byron from Nevada had a very tough law to up the standards for efficient automobiles, and his timing was brilliant.

And so about the time, Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. So you think, “Boy, the timing’s perfect to pass this bill.” So it’s speeding ahead, and it’s a really tough bill, it almost goes a little bit further than I think was practical at the time, but it probably would’ve been modified in the House where John Dingell would be overseeing it. So it’s speeding through and it’s got two votes on a filibuster in the Senate. And the first one it passes with ease because all the Republicans are… Not all, but most Republicans are supporting it. The Democrats are supporting it. They’re talking about, “Boy, this is going to help solve the Middle East dependence problem, and then we’re going to make this major contribution to climate change.”

And so if we had done that, we could have told the world, “Well, we’ve done the appliance efficiency standards, we’ve done the auto standards, and we’ve done the ozone layer,” which helps some. But there had to be two votes to break the filibuster. So Sununu gets on the phone, the auto workers get on the phone, the electric utilities, they had a deal with the auto companies that we’ll all work together. So they lost about eight votes on the second, and then auto efficiency standards don’t come back to 2007. So we basically lost about 15 years in updating, which was just tragic because our carbon emissions went up in the ’90s very strongly at the same time where they were dropping in the United Kingdom.

So to me, that automobile debate at that time was a signal whether we were going to kind of suck it in and do enough to really mount a serious effort or whether we would go a different way than the Europeans and basically say, “Well, the market will take care of it,” or we’re asking people to plant trees and things like that that are good things to do, but they’re not going to solve the problem.

Bill Loveless: Right. Right. And you write quite a bit too about just overall the differences between the U.S. and Europe over the approach to take to climate change, the disagreements over the… Eventually we had the Kyoto agreement and all of that where the U.S. and Europe took very different paths. Under Bush and President Bill Clinton, U.S. and European attitudes to climate change, of course, did diverge. To some extent we see the repercussions of those differences even today. How does our understanding of the period from Eisenhower to George H. W. Bush help us make sense of what’s today?

Jay Hakes: Well, I think it’s that we can look at the climate science and debate the climate science, but that debate’s kind of over because we’re not just using models anymore, we can see it with our own eyes. So it gets down to politics and it gets down to technology. And so, the timing of this book is somewhat dependent on when I finished my research, but it’s also not oblivious to the fact we have a presidential election coming up. And so politics makes a big difference. The Senate makes a huge difference. If you have the filibuster and you don’t have bipartisanship, it gets very difficult to legislate. The Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, is done under the Byrd Rule, which means it can only really be budgetary items. And so we’ve ruled out that we could do taxes, and it’s hard to do regulations with a filibuster.

So we should know that we have known about this, all of us, it’s been out there for us to know. I must say I didn’t pay as much attention at the time to these things as I maybe should have, but it’s been out there. I really think by 1979 or ’80 we had a firm enough scientific understanding to address this problem in a very serious way. So the issue is, why didn’t we? And then when we figure out why we didn’t, what do we do about it? We also recognize that there have been some achievements. I mean, I really resist the idea that we have done nothing, because if you adopt that attitude, then it’s almost defeatism. So the high risk estimations now for the future of carbon emissions are not as high as they were 20 years ago because of the penetration of solar panels, so we’re making some progress, it’s just not at a pace that’s sufficient.

Bill Loveless: Right. Well, as they say, past is prologue, right?

Jay Hakes: Absolutely.

Bill Loveless: And it’s important that we dig into these things, and boy, you certainly help us do it. The book is The Presidents and the Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush. Jay Hakes, my friend, thanks for coming on the show again, and thanks for this book and thanks for this conversation.

Jay Hakes: Always a pleasure.

Bill Loveless: That’s it for this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. Thank you again, Jay Hakes, and thank you for listening. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. The show is hosted by Jason Bordoff and me, Bill Loveless. The show is produced by Tim Peterson from Latitude Studios. Additional support from Lilly Lee, Caroline Pitman, and Kyu Lee. Roy Campanella is the sound engineer.

For more information about the show or the Center on Global Energy Policy, visit us online at energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media at ColumbiaUEnergy. If you liked this episode, leave us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can also share it with a friend or colleague to help us reach more listeners. Either way, we appreciate your support. Thanks again for listening. See you next week.

In 1953, the New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series, “From Here to Eternity” won the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture. And on May 24 deep in the education section of The New York Times, there was a short piece titled “How Industry May Change Climate.”

In the years after, scientists went from writing about the possible impacts of pollution on climate to warning U.S. presidents. And energy policy expert and scholar Jay Hakes says there’s much more to the story.

From scientists who quietly worked to address growing environmental threats, to lawmakers who deliberated in Congress and the White House over what to do about them, Jay says there’s a history that hasn’t been told. In his new book, Jay looks at these early climate change pioneers and asks about the challenges they faced.

What was it like trying to influence the White House? What solutions did these pioneers offer? And how can their stories further our discourse around climate change today?

This week, host Bill Loveless talks with Jay Hakes about his book “The Presidents and the Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush.”

Jay is a scholar and author on U.S. energy policy. From 2000-2013 he served as the director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. He also served in both the Obama and Clinton administrations, including a seven-year stint as director of the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Jay’s other books include “Energy Crises: Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Hard Choices in the 1970s” and “A Declaration of Energy Policy Independence.”

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