Angels by the River by James Gustave Speth

Author:James Gustave Speth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2014-10-13T17:00:39+00:00

I became more of an insider as the administration continued and after I was appointed CEQ chair. Thanks in major part to the little agency’s outstanding professional staff, we helped Carter achieve a strong environmental record. At the conclusion of his term, CEQ and other agencies were asked to reflect on what had been accomplished. I replied in a memorandum to the president dated December 15, 1980: “From the perspective of environmental quality, yours has been an historic Administration. No President has done more.” The memorandum went on to discuss the administration’s many achievements, including permanent protection of vast natural areas in Alaska; the first ever federal initiatives to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy sources; important actions addressed to three critical problems resulting from the use of nuclear energy: weapons proliferation, radioactive waste management, and nuclear safety; a halt to the traditional “pork barrel” process for construction of federal water resources projects; pathbreaking attention to international resource and environmental challenges; enactment of the strong national law regulating stripmining; executive orders protecting wetlands and floodplains; and a series of tough antipollution regulations at EPA.

When I review the many issues in which I was involved at CEQ, one towers over all the others. Thirty-five years ago, we at CEQ were at the center of the first serious effort in the United States to move the climate change issue into the national policy arena and to urge an eventual halt to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Throughout the 1970s, as the sophistication of climate models improved, scientists in the United States, Japan, and elsewhere were growing increasingly concerned. By 1977 the National Academy of Sciences was sufficiently comfortable with the evolving scientific understanding to issue a report on the dangers of an unrestrained buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by fossil fuel use.

Then, in 1979, when I was CEQ chair, I was approached by Gordon MacDonald, a top environmental scientist and a former member of the council, and Rafe Pomerance, then president of Friends of the Earth. They were seeking my help in focusing the attention of both the Carter administration and the public on the issue. In early May, 1979, I followed up with a letter to MacDonald and George Woodwell, one of the country’s top ecologists, asking them to cochair an effort to prepare an accessible, scientifically credible report on the problem, one that I could take to the president and others. By July the report was on my desk, signed by four distinguished American scientists—David Keeling and Roger Revelle in addition to Woodwell and MacDonald. Its contents were alarming. The report predicted “a warming that will probably be conspicuous within the next twenty years,” and it called for early action: “Enlightened policies in the management of fossil fuels and forests can delay or avoid these changes, but the time for implementing the policies is fast passing.”3

I soon presented the report to President Carter and others in his administration. The new Department of Energy reacted negatively.

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