That was almost fifty years ago. An edifying note from the President’s scientific adviser Jimmy Carter was circulating in the bays of the White House. In one page, one man, Frank Press, sounded the alarm about the soon visible effects of climate change, and called for immediate political action. Declassified Tuesday, June 14, and revealed by the British daily The Guardian, this note should have changed the story. But history is thus made up of “ifs” that change its course forever. Because Jimmy Carter’s successor to the presidency of the United States, Ronald Reagan, gently slipped it under the rug before it suddenly reappeared 45 years later.
On closer inspection, Franck Press was right on almost the whole line. And drew up analyzes that one could with hindsight qualify as premonitory. “The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere could be multiplied by 1.5 or even 2 in 60 years compared to pre-industrial levels”, he predicted with accuracy, while the current level is already more than 1.5 times higher than that of the 1700s.
This graph shows that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased 1.5 times between the pre-industrial era and today.
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“The urgency of the problem comes from our inability to quickly switch to non-fossil fuels once the effects of climate change become evident in the early 2000s,” wrote the geophysicist. Premonitory, they said.
This excerpt from the note written by the scientist Frank Press in 1977 for the attention of Jimmy Carter warns of the need to get out of fossil fuels.
The Guardian
And the scientist warns: “This rapid climatic fluctuation could lead to large-scale crop failures, at a time when the world’s population is exploiting agriculture to the limits of its productive capacities”. Could history have been different if this note had not fallen into oblivion when Ronald Reagan came to power? “Most certainly”, says climatologist François Gemenne, according to whom “the objective of keeping the rise in temperatures below 1.5°C was still achievable at the time”.
“We lost a decade”
Concretely, this note aimed to take key political decisions early enough to avoid finding ourselves in an impasse. Ditto for the Charney report that Jimmy Carter commissioned from the American National Academy of Sciences following this note in 1979, and which synthesized knowledge on the possible impact of human activities on the climate. “Global warming must be on the international political agenda to maximize cooperation and consensus building, and thereby limit political manipulation, controversy and division,” he said.
It was 1979 then, and almost everything we know about global warming today, we knew back then. The leaders of the 1980-1990 decade that followed should have taken matters into their own hands, based in particular on this note from Frank Press, as evidenced by the book Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, by Nathaniel Rich. The reality was quite different. “We have lost a decade”, is forced to note François Gemenne. Why then, despite the emergence of a scientific consensus on climate change from the end of the 1970s, has the planet missed its appointment with the essential protection of the climate?
Missed appointment
Several factors were important. First of all, a feeling shared by many American politicians, Reagan in the lead, that the climate issue had “a weak electoral benefit”, analyzes Nathaniel Rich. Added to this is a strong aspiration to neoliberalism, characteristic of the Reagan-Thatcher era, which made the implementation of economic instruments for the climate unthinkable. All crowned by massive pressure from the fossil lobbies, funding misinformation campaigns and bribing scientists to discredit climate action. “Reagan’s election makes us overjoyed,” the president of the National Coal Association of America reportedly said at the time.
Proof of his lack of interest in environmental issues, Ronald Reagan had the solar panels removed from the roof of the White House, which his predecessor had deployed. A symbolic decision which marks the end of the efforts initiated by Carter to organize the fight against climate change. The Frank Press warning note published three years earlier is buried, and the Charney report is also forgotten. Result ? In the 1980s, nothing was done in the United States, the world’s leading polluter, to stimulate a transition of which they would have had the capacity to be the instigator, and thus stop global warming at a time when everything was still possible.
“We would not be on the current trajectory”
“If we had taken political action earlier, we would not be on the current trajectory”, explains François Gemenne, recalling in passing that “the path on which we are committed is irreversible”. “If it is still possible for us to limit the rise in temperatures – and therefore to limit the damage – the temperature will not go down again, we will no longer know, in our lifetime in any case, the climate of the 20th century”, analyzes- he.
But the co-author of the latest IPCC report recognizes, however, that this note did not have the potential to trigger a radical shift either. “Even if it had been more publicized, I honestly don’t think that this note could have led to a change in model,” he admits. And for good reason: fossil fuel companies were funding climate skeptic lobbies at full speed, thus fueling a strategy of doubt. And, as we know today, doubt always benefits the person who instills it, whether for tobacco, pollution or the climate.
In the USA, the case of Exxon is emblematic of this phenomenon. As early as the 1980s, while the warning speeches of scientists held before the American Congress accumulated, the world leader in oil circulated notes internally, calling for “underlining the uncertainty reigning around scientific conclusions”. A year later, a climatosceptic lobby was created at the initiative of Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute, and was named “Global Climate Coalition”, to cast doubt on its intentions, while it was spending actually millions of dollars in disinformation campaigns.
On the other side of the Atlantic, if the 1977 note had little repercussion, the conclusions reached by European scientists are similar, but the intense lobbying of the fossil industries is also an obstacle to their transposition into the texts. “The weight of the oil lobbies is such that the carbon tax project, which Europe was already considering at the time, has been abandoned”, explains François Gemenne.
It will be necessary to wait a decade after the publication of the note for the IPCC to be formed, in 1988, after a long battle with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Finally, the note from the White House highlights one thing: from the end of the 1970s, the reality of climate change was already known, but the action of certain industrialists and politicians caused humanity to lose precious years. that we may never catch up with.