Also during the 1960s and early 70s, Congress created the Council on environmental quality (CEQ). Its role, create policies that promote environmental quality and the conservation, economic, health and environmental needs of the nation.

Nixon 1969 to 1974

President Nixon had the same climte change information as President Johnson and more. Plus, as the science advanced and atmospheric carbon dioxide density increased, the evidence became stonger. As presidents to follow, the evidence of an approaching irreversible climage "tipping point" grewer as atmospheric carbon dioxide density increased.

Additionally, in 1970 Nixon stated in his annual plan for participation in the World Weather Program, "In the longer term, the quality of the atmosphere may determine whether man survies or perishes."
The same year, Nixon's director of the Office of Science and Technology, Edward E. David, stated that "The federal government must play a leadership role becasuse these efforts are so large and so long-term that the fragmented power industry cannot be expected to do the job itself." Interestingly, David's moved to Exxon soon after leaving the Nixon administration. Today we know that by 1979, Exxon knew full well that greenhouse gases add to global warming, the cause of climate change.

1967 in 1967, US Department of Commerce reported that the panel on electrically powered vehicles, "the automobile and air pollution: a program for progress," recommended that admissions standards be set for vehicles.

"Two months later, Pres. Nixon wrote to his director of OST regarding UNE SCO conference on environment, "man in the environment: a view toward survival," on the obligation and responsibility of government to protect future generations from global climate change and polluted oceans." Baby boomers will remember the name John Ehrlichman from the Watergate escapades. It was John Ehrlichman of all people who pursued the development of non-internal combustion engines, I'm saying that with John Ehrlichman who wanted to get around ice machines for electric vehicles, EV machines. So Ehrlichman knew the importance of electric vehicles in the hazards of internal combustion engines.

standards be set for vehicles. Keep in mind, these are government proposals to combat the new climate change. They recommend liberal adjustments to curve catastrophic climate change. Standing way of these liberal adjustments, or a right wing Republican push to halt any change in the status quo, business as usual. There's too much money to lose been burning fossil fuels and creating internal combustion machines "ice machines." As part of the explanation for the question "what happened?".

Ford 1974 to 1977

Ford administration gets credit for creating a first corporate average fuel economy or café standards. So again we see that some Republicans understood the crisis at hand, and these Republicans had done the right thing. They were practicing what I call intergenerational moral responsibility or IMR, and not intergenerational moral corruption,

 

Now before we get too excited about the Republican Party not stand in the way of combating climate change, I want to point out that the Ford administration gets credit for creating a first corporate average fuel economy or café standards. So again we see that some Republicans understood the crisis at hand, and these Republicans had done the right thing. They were practicing what I call intergenerational moral responsibility or IMR, and not intergenerational moral corruption, or what I call IMC.

I want to be clear that I do not claim the label of liberal or conservative as a flight political descriptions I'm liberal in the sense that liberal means freedom. I should not mean freedom to destroy the future prospects of coming generations, human and nonhuman.

 

 

Carter 1977 to 1981

Carter took a more wholistic, meaningful approach to environmental issues like climate change and over population. Today, I should note there's another "caravan" leaving Honduras for the US southern border, and it includes thousands of young kids. As a self-proclaimed

What we know now is that science is the remedy for political deception, but, sadly the American population has little interest in science. Public apathy, and corporate and oligarchs' money buy off our political representatives, too. Otherwise, how else do we explain presidential climate deception for over a generation?
We know that Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Ford knew enough about the new climate change. Only with President Carter do we find a clear and forceful definition of our situation. He understood the science of climate change and placed politics aside, in part.

Johnson alerted us; Nixon widened interest in environmental issues, and Ford staid the course for his part, however feeble his efforts turned out.

 

I am saying that the United States government could not refute the facts presented by Juliana in a US court room under the Trump administration.

In "They Knew," we learn that every president since President Johnson had enough science information to move US energy poolicies toward conservation, renewables, and more.

President Carter 1977 to 1981

Carter approached climate change with a sense of urgency and concern. He knew that following generations grew increasingly endangerd by the new climate change. He and his administration knew that humanity caused the new climate change, which is now irreversible. Humanity had two options at that time. One, reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas density to pre-industrial levls, or two, wait many thousands of years for nature's remedies.

I'm quoting the text here:

(1) The US Government knew enough about fossil fuels and climate change to act, (2) The government received abundant warnings to reduce fossil fuel use as part of the national energy system, and (3) that notwithstanding those reasonable and available alternatives, the federal government continued to foster a fossil fuel based energy system.

What we know now is that science is the remedy for political deception, but, sadly the American population has little interest in science. Public apathy, and corporate and oligarchs' money buy off our political representatives, too. Otherwise, how else do we explain presidential climate deception for over fifty-five years?“

We know that Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Ford knew about the new climate change. Only with President Carter do we find a clear and forceful definition of our situation. He understood the science of climate change and placed politics aside, in part.

Johnson alerted us; Nixon widened interest in environmental issues, and Ford staid the course for his part, however feeble his results.

President Carter 1977 to 1981

The Global 2000 report and brought light to a host of issues that other presidents may have considered, but failed to bring together for political action,hh

Among these were carbon dioxide atmospheric density, acid rain, and that ugly fact, human population growth would continue. Conceivably at that time, human population would increase 50% by the end of the century, the 20th century.
Carter timeline
Carter promoted a new energy direction. He said, "that we put this
nation on a path to a sustainable energy future, one based on increasingly on renewable resources and on energy conservati
Note that he did not say this new direction would occur over night. But it
be on a path to sustainable energy future. This is an idea Carter's energy critics seem to ignore.
He sought a "true energy security" based on renewable energy, conservation, and self-reliance.

James Speth's book they knew, reviews US presidency sense Pres. Carter to Pres. Obama. The book rose out of decades of James's best experiencing government, his observations of the United States government in matters related to climate change and climate science, and the dereliction of civic duties by US presidents. In the appendix of the new, Speth goes into court procedures in the trial known as Julianna versus the United States. Julianna is a member of children's trust, and organization for which James Speth volunteered his professional and expert knowledge for children's trust case against the United States government. In Julianna versus the United States, the plaintiff, Julianna, argued that the United States government failed to protect children of the United States from the hazards of the new climate change.

Throughout the book they knew, James Speth makes clear the presidents of the United States new, what they did not do and should have done, and what could have been done but for their dereliction of civic duty. I call what the presidents of not done intergenerational moral corruption, and there's plenty of that to go around in United States government, politicians, corporations, and individual oligarchs – – billionaires with control of media resources.

As I said in previous videos, Julianna versus the United States failed because it was not in the correct venue. There's no way to get Julianna's case before the United States Congress which is where it belongs. What stands out most strikingly is the fact that expert witnesses for Julianna were never contradicted by the US government. This is the say the US government could not argue a case against government climate deception going back decades. I would include Jimmy Carter in this deception, but in the case Pres. Carter, there's good faith efforts that history documents. As for following presidents, we have everything from ignoring climate change, accepting the science and then ignoring climate change hazards, and of course outright denial of the new climate change caused by human beings.

This is all redundant but I'm going to repeat it again and again. Cannot be said often enough coming generations if any, have a right to know and we have a duty to make sure they know what their government did and didn't do.

this in this video I will talk about James Speth. children's trust, and Juliana. For certain I will repeat myself here as I do in other videos on this segment of climate deception and its focus on climate deception in the United States White House.

It's impossible to put the subject into just a few words. We have to put it in the context of altering the shape of their's atmosphere. We need to put it in the context of worldwide acidification of the global ocean. We need to put it in the context of United States presidents and congresses bowing down to corporate interest in all of our interest for the sake of Mammon if you will. Yeah, I get little moral here because is not easy not to be moral when were talking about the future of humanity and wild nature biodiversity that is. Who gave leaders around the world, particularly in United States White House, permission to destroy the future prospects of coming generations?

Read this book they knew. And by the time you work your way through it, knowing fact by the time you work your way through Pres. Carter, you'll wonder what the hell happened. The James Speth does a lot in answering really important questions but does a lot more than needs to be answered. And we need those answers. So I'm going to repeat myself to hopefully across anyone cares to listen. I hope that anyone cares to listen carries the message into their own social world. Everybody needs to read this book, they knew. Get busy. The table outside and writing I the shower and sat down a solid its own little bit and not have to it went by so after that I can see the snow was in the shower

 

From Pres. Carter forward while acknowledging the role of presidents Johnson, Pres. Nixon, and president for as coming crisis and climate change. In his book, they knew, gust of Speth tell how he was retained for free services as an attorney. His role was to provide testimony about his historical knowledge of US federal government and its defendants knowledge of climate change, climate science, and alternative pathways to power United States energy system.

As James Speth points out in his book they knew, by the end of the Carter administration, over 40 years ago.

"He used his contextual knowledge to present historical government evidence" of the individual institutional actors involved and the historical context of the events in question." I guess I guess I don't need to remind anybody how many hundreds of not thousands of people that passed through presidential administrations without bringing up the climate crisis. Well thank goodness we have James Speth to Melbourne of climate change hazards.

It takes up three important issues. One, the federal government had basic climate science information. Two, the federal government had abundant recommendations for reducing and replacing fossil fuels. Three, and to their shame, the federal government continues to foster an energy-based system of growing needs for fossil fuels. That is to say, in spite of knowing that we were creating a dangerous environment, a dangerous planet for human habitation, our United States government played a part in, and colluded with the fossil fuel industry through lobbyists, directly and indirectly. United States White House became a friendly place for fossil fuel Corporation lobbyist. And in fact, to United States presidents would have on the climate science information they needed while having huge conflicts of interests because of their fossil fuel income history.

He describes how Pres. Carter, the federal government that is had the basic information about climate science and how fossil fuels affect climate change. The government also had plenty of recommendations for reducing fossil fuel in the context of the national energy system. Plus, the US governmen spite of having knowledge of reasonable alternatives to fossil fuels, federal government fostered an energy system based on fossil fuel growth and dependency.

 

, we know that US presidents knew the following:

Presidential administrations knew this stuff:

One. Basic science a climate change.
Burning high levels of fossil fuels leads the climate dangers.

Two. Besides climate hazards, they knew pathways to save transitions away from fossil fuels.
Conservation, efficiency, solar, and other renewables could play a significant part in reducing carbon emissions.

I believe that had good faith efforts to advance climate literacy among the American public, and a significant infrastructure for conservation, efficiency, solar, and so forth, we would live in a different planet today. We would not be having this conversation in children's trust when the been moved to sue the United States.

In They Knew, we learn that Speth took on his legal assignment for free and that he worked in the Carter administration. And fortunately for us, the man had the good sense to take notes, keep up with presidential administrations' climate policies, and to act with intergenerational moral responsibility.

In accepting this legal assignment to work for free, James Speth would represent a plaintiff by the name of Juliana for the trial of Juliana versus the United States. Juliana in turn would represent a group of young Americans, teenagers belonging to the organization known as children's trust. So James Speth works for children's trust in the name of Juliana versus the United States. Juliana is one of the older plaintiffs in this case against the United States.

James Speth testified about US federal government's role in devising and pursuing energy alternatives to fossil fuels. He also testifies how same government pursued policies to further fossil fuel based energy.I don't believe in making a mistake here. On the one hand and some time, presidential administrations would claim some knowledge of climate change and then turn around and ignore it or discount it and even work against climate scientists. On the other hand, it seems that President Reagan ignored climate change while president Trump called a hoax and continue to discount this existential threat.

Those presidential administrations claiming knowledge of the new climate change and its hazards included both Democratic and Republican administrations as follows:

President Johnson warned about the threats of climate change.
Pres. Nixon what in some way express concerns about the hazards of climate change as did members of his administration
Pres. Ford would carry the torch forward in his own short-lived presidency.
Pres. Carter would advocate conservation and efficiency with renewable energy. He had full knowledge of the coming climate crisis while his approach same less focus on climate change and more on technological fixes. Some people would say that Carter's approach was more of a "liberal" approach, and I recognize the term "liberal? Is a highly misused term these days, a liberal fix means to "fine-tune" the American economy, which is exactly what some Republican administrations have been known to do during the fiscal crisis.
Both Bush presidencies acknowledge the problem of climate change and pledged to do something about it, bold Bush presidencies more or less downplayed and ignored the climate crisis, and both Bush presidencies and their feet firmly planted in the fossil fuel industry.
President Clinton for both of us terms was also well aware of the knowledge made available to president Johnson in 1965. And we know that President Clinton was an avid reader and took presidential briefing seriously. In fact, VP Gore advocated light green approaches to fine-tuning the American economy to combat the new climate change.
President Obama and at his fingertips the latest most up-to-date climate science information at the time. Yet, as Mitch McConnell claimed on the first day of the Obama ministration, the Obama administration is going nowhere and history proves that is the case. However the Obama reneged in some ways. In no means was Obama climate warrior.
President Trump of course stands in his own circle of climate knowledge. There was none. No amount of evidence-based, peer-reviewed, reproducible, falsifiable climate science and its predictions interest Trumpory a circle of advisors.

 

all the presidents from Johnson knew that climate change would occur in tandem with fossil fuel burning, but for little things like forests
and other photo synthesizing environments. For sure, they know the importance of Arctic ocean ice cover which we refer to as "albedo," a Latin term meaning white and for our purposes meaning a reflective material. Guess the presidents knew this stuff. So what happened.?

 

 

FIf you're new to the subject, you may be interested in knowing that president Johnson, Pres. Nixon, Pres. Ford, Pres. Carter, President Reagan, Pres. George Herbert Walker Bush, and his son Pres. George Walker Bush (both both father and son enjoyed the benefits of being closely tied to fossil fuels as well as the ruling elites in Saudi Arabia.)

By the time US came out of the heavy influence of five episodes of Republican presidential climate denial and deception, it was time for the Democrats to take the stage of the presidency in find seats for whomever in the Oval Office. For certain, climate scientists may have found a kinder acceptance among the Democratic presidents, but they surely did not have influence of places in the Oval Office at least not influential enough.

Well, this government dedicated to fossil fuel based energy systems was forewarned about the hazards of burning fossil fuels at least as far back as president Johnson. My focus here though, begins with Carter.

I believe these presidencies reveal something about human beings. How can they have so much information and know so little? The fact is, that plenty of information about climate, climate change, and climate science. Like I say, they ignored it, the twisted information, and most recently, it's become a political weapon. More on this when I get to Trump sometime in the future.

 

Excuse my long winded introductiom to what President Carter knew about clmate change and greenhouse gases.

What follows is long-winded and is long-winded because I need to make clear there is nothing magical, mysterious, or difficult to understand about Earth's climate and climate science. It helps to understand by looking at climate science history and applying oneself. So excuse this long introduction toPres. Carter's administration.

Here I comment on climate science knowledge available to the Carter administration from the day he took power.

For certain, president Carter received climate information developing between the 1930s and 1970s. We should keep in mind, too, that this knowledge developed from a growing body of research into the nature of greenhouse gases beginning as early as 1824 with the work of Joseph Fourier.

Joseph Fourier studied greenhouse gases in close cylinders using sunlight. He learned that different combinations of gases, chemicals that is, produced more or less temperature increases depending on the chemical. So today we use the term greenhouse gases to describe carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases that for your research.

I'm still talking about the Carter administration here, no one to make sure that we are clear the research into greenhouse gases began in the early 1800s and develop up until the beginning of the Carter administration. Elsewhere on the Internet YouTube's channels you can find information about greenhouse gases in the role and planet warming, not only warming the earth but Venus and Mars as well.

Now, I went to this fact so that we are in the alkalized against ignorant politicians claiming that they cannot comment on climate change because, as they say, "I'm not a climate scientist."

We don't need to be a medical doctor to know that smoking cigarettes will damage your lungs over time. And you don't need to be a climate scientist to understand the burning seams of black coal and lakes of oil will cause some changes to the environment.

So now we have some background to greenhouse gases work our way into Pres. Carter's administration, link to Pres. Reagan's administration, and then in order, George Herbert Walker Bush, followed by his son George Bush (both bushes having their wealth and oil as well as friendships with Saudi Arabia's ruling elites.

Advertising about Republican presidents after Pres. Carter for three consecutive administrations and White House. While the Democratic presidents fail us to including Pres. Biden. In some way, it's administration backpedaled, reneged, or ignored depending catastrophic climate changes wasted upon generations to come.

When Pres. Carter entered office, to raise concerns carbon dioxide. Today, January 3, 2022, methane has joined carbon dioxide is a volatile and great existential threat to the unborn, babies, toddlers, and everyone else yet to be part of a a future with diminishing prospects. At our presidents taken up the mantle of climate, we could at least slowed carbon dioxide emissions and possibly stopped the growing threat of methane (that is natural gas) in Earth's atmosphere. You can look up methane and melting tundra for yourself.

"This period was marked by the work of scientists such as Guy S. Callendar, Roger Revelle, Gilbert Plass, and Charles D. Keeling. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, these scientists started sounding alarm bells." Now climate science could no longer remain quiet and subservient the government bureaucrats and politicians. Revelle class and Keeling would be followed by others including James Hansen, but Hansen requires another video because it could not have been a clearer warning to the US government, politicians, and the fossil fuel industry.

Government funding made it possible to monitor atmospheric carbon dioxide density with the aid of Keeling's monitoring equipment on top of Mount Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Before long it became clear that atmospheric CO2 in the northern hemisphere increased and showed a direct correlation with the passing of seasons. This means that this equipment was so sensitive, that has plans to hook up carbon dioxide in the spring and summer, and then released it in the fall and winter, atmospheric carbon dioxide density followed the seasons. It increased and decreased in atmospheric density through the seasons. What we know now is that Mount Mauna Loa was gas measuring devices, definitely can to Joseph Fourier's research in 1824 1827, with this equipment gave science a tool to measure a growing threat to life on earth.

By 1955, the geophysical fluid dynamics laboratory began to operate and today resides at Princeton University. Today, climate modeling improves with computer technologies. The role of computer science cannot be dismissed in the field of climate science any more than the role of physics and chemistry play core roles and climate science.

And if that's not enough for climate deniers, the national center for atmospheric research in Boulder, Colorado began researching climate change.

Climate laboratories began in the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) as did the Rand Corporation began focusing on climate change for military applications. The Defense advanced research projects agency (DARPA) jumped into the growth in climate science as early as 1958 when the Soviet Union Sputnik brought fear and trembling to both United States politicians and the general population.

As a result of Sputnik, much attention focused on developments and atmosphere – ocean climate models and the response of the climate system to increases in carbon dioxide. You should not be surprised at this point when I say that the Department of Defense through the office of Naval research also began to fund climate change science.

Again I define a pollutant is any chemical or substance causing degradation of human or nonhuman habitat. In effect, if we poison croplands with Monsanto and there is a pollinator die off, lots of butterfly and bee populations, then we can say there is a correlation between herbicide poisoning and habitat degradation from a pollutant

By 1965 climate change became most evident to the United States government. Pres. Johnson had key reports on climate change to refer to in November 1965. Responding to the environmental pollution panel of the president science advisory committee, he was the first president to sound the alarm on atmospheric carbon dioxide pollution.

From the report it was clear that by the year 2000, ocean warming, sealevel rise, and other adverse impacts would follow burning of fossil fuels. And eventually, a 200% increase in the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would occur.

By the in the 1965, the National Science Foundation published the report "weather and climate modification: report of the special commission on weather modification." This weather modification means human change climate, we now call the Anthropocene. We call this era and humanity the Anthropocene because humans are now the single source of climate change, not geography.

The weather and climate modification report stated that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere increased 10 to 15% in the 20th century. These changes were causing serious heat imbalances. These imbalances, incidentally, are measured in part by CO2 densities in the atmosphere and oceans because the to exchange CO2 easily enough. We do the atmosphere we do to the oceans and vice versa.

It found that the applications of these changes cannot be ignored. Recall Rotondo 1965, December. That's 56 years ago folks, almost to human generations, sociologist Tellus what happened? Or tell you what happened. Politicians and ideological interference into science. (Seven National Science Foundation, 42.)

The National Academy of Sciences stated "to embark on any vast experiment in the atmosphere would amount to grocer responsibility." Footnote 8. National Academy of Sciences, weather and climate modification's problems and prospects, volume 1: summary and recommendations, final report of the panel on weather and climate modification to the committee on atmospheric sciences (Washington DC: National Academy of Sciences – national resource Council, 1966), eight. Exhibit. E – four.

Then, in 1967, US Department of Commerce reported that the panel on electrically powered vehicles, "the automobile and air pollution: a program for progress," recommended that admissions standards be set for vehicles. Keep in mind, these are government proposals to combat the new climate change. They recommend liberal adjustments to curve catastrophic climate change. Standing way of these liberal adjustments, or a right wing Republican push to halt any change in the status quo, business as usual. There's too much money to lose been burning fossil fuels and creating internal combustion machines "ice machines." As part of the explanation for the question "what happened?".

Now before we get too excited about the Republican Party not stand in the way of combating climate change, I want to point out that the Ford administration gets credit for creating a first corporate average fuel economy or café standards. So again we see that some Republicans understood the crisis at hand, and these Republicans had done the right thing. They were practicing what I call intergenerational moral responsibility or IMR, and not intergenerational moral corruption, or what I call IMC.

I want to be clear that I do not claim the label of liberal or conservative as a flight political descriptions I'm liberal in the sense that liberal means freedom. I should not mean freedom to destroy the future prospects of coming generations, human and nonhuman.

Also during the 1960s and early 70s, Congress created the Council on environmental quality (CEQ). Its role, create policies that promote environmental quality and the conservation, economic, and health and environmental needs of the nation.

Of course you may know Daniel Patrick Moynihan if you follow environmental issues. He served as Pres. Nixon's counselor for urban affairs. Moynihan pointed out the following: quote it is now pretty clearly agreed that CO2 content will rise 25% by 2000. This could increase the average temperatu thatre near the Earth's surface by 7°F. This in turn can raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter."

I should point out at this time, demoralize, that in December 1965 when the science foundation published its weather climate modification report in year Pres. Johnson warned us about climate change because of fossil fuel burning.

vn
The Mekong Delta in Vietnam accounts for roughly a third of the rice in Southeast Asia. As of now, I understand that a 2 foot rise in the global ocean means that the Mekong Delta will be flooded by saltwater, which will destroy the Mekong Delta as a as a rice producer. Is terribly ironic that we, citizens of the United States, mom that little country for 10 years for whatever reason. And we, citizens of the United States, have refused to address climate change over the last 65 years. Vietnam, a country that posed no threat in any way to the United States, ever, was suffering the consequences of American environmental negligence.

So were looking at significant causes to Earth's heat balance then. And it's going had terrible ramifications around the planet as both atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and global ocean concentrations of carbon dioxide increase, meaning that one passes carbon dioxide to the other and back as concentrations increase, as the balance changes. Know that at some point, the oceans will stop absorbing atmospheric CO2 which is what the oceanographer from Scripps laboratories in San Diego California pointed out. I was Roger revelle. It pays to know climate change history.

So is the weather and climate modification report stated, "the implications of this upon this tropospheric stability cannot be ignored"

Moynahan advised Pres. Nixon. Nixon's administration informed Pres. Ford. And of course, Pres. Carter, having his wits about him and knowing how to read and ask critical questions, understood the pending crisis. He did the right thing. President Carter practice what I call intergenerational moral responsibility.

Here I went to quote directly from the book they knew by the stuff".
Now what good would it had done to follow electric vehicle model and discard the internal combustion engines, the ice machines? Well today we know the answer. The global oceans arising, Arctic sea ice is melting, pollinating insects that toward extinction, in invasive species spread. My point is that Richard Nixon new. For we know Carter with no. But this project on presidents begins with Carter because he had a program in place however inadequate and misdirected may have been.

There was a sentiment that restoring nature to its natural state reach beyond party ideologies and factions. In this time. Young Americans were not interested in reaping the grim consequences of climate denial and climate deception. These were the sentiments of Pres. Richard Nixon, in his annual message to the Congress of the state of the union, January 22, 1970

Pres. Nixon one of the United States to take part in an annual plan for the world weather program. Quoting, "in the longer term, the quality of the atmosphere may well determine whether man survives the parishes. Now, these are heavy comments by Richard Nixon. Nixon was an anti-Communist warrior. He's the one that read baited Helling Kay Hagan Douglas in the debate by calling her "communist."

So is not so unlike a Republican in those days to read and they Democrats as we find today among some of the Republicans calling Democrat socialist and communist, even though they don't know the meaning of either because they do not define their terms clearly and distinctly. I suppose by their way of thinking the Tennessee Valley Authority was socialist as was the Manhattan project.

 

Be that as it may Nixon had the scientific explanation for climate change in mind. In fact, for instance, Dr. Edward E David, Nixon's director of the OST, helped draft the Nixon administration's proposals on alternative

Of course the Arctic Ocean comes into view and in the same year Eugene Peterson the chief of the Bureau of land management's division of basin studies noted that "Arctic Ocean could analyze for half of every year affecting weather patterns in the northern hemisphere." (Footnote 13. Eugene K. Patterson, carbon dioxide affects global ecology," environ. Sighing and technology, three, in all 11 (1969): 1168)

Let's take a brief look at the incestuous relationship between the White House and the fossil fuel industry for just a moment. Here's a good example and may blow your mind.

What follows concerns Dr. Edward E David. One-time bureaucrat under Pres. Nixon, and later, became president research and engineering at Exxon,. Before I go further, I must point out that Exxon's engineering and technology department practice cutting edge ocean and climate research. You'll benefit by reading Exxon: the road not taken in learning for yourself the role of Exxon's engineering and technology efforts in the late 1970s.

 

This is what Dr. David Junior wrote on October 20, 1970. "The federal government must play a leadership role because these efforts are so large and so long-term that the fragmented power industry cannot be expected to do the job itself." 20. Edward E. David, Junior, memorandum for Peter Flanagan, October 20, 1970. Exhibit. E – 13. See also Sam Roberts, "Robert E David Junior." Who elevated science under Nixon, dies at 92, "New York Times, February 28, 2017.

 

The White House and the greenhouse New York Times, May 9, 1989

Here I define a pollutant as any substance that degrades human or nonhuman habitat.
I also want to point out that climate deniers over the decades are funded by fossil fuel corporations or PR efforts funded by fossil fuel corporations. On the side of science, the typical evidence-based peer-reviewed science remained the hallmark of science practices. I point this out because scientist are not hiding behind anything. They are doing the research and most importantly, they published the research for anybody on the planet to disprove or otherwise contradict.

What we expect reproducible and falsifiable claims by science, including the science of climate change.

I need to point out to that terms like sustainability ecology, conserving an ecological balance by avoiding depletion of natural resources belong to the realm of intergenerational equity. From my parents iand grade school I learned that current generations have an obligation to future generations; I now call this "intergenerational moral responsibility (IMR)." This is no different then the policies held by colleges and universities. They decide how much of their endowment or earnings to spend on the current generation while protecting the interests of future generations. They know how to reinvest for future generations, then, as we must invest in atmospheric co2 reduction and Artic Ocean ice renewal, generation after generation.

By May 9, 1989, as with President Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush did not stand alone when it came to climate change. The threat to earth's atmosphere by cholo-flourocarbons created a sense of urgency among industrial leading countries. The polluting carbon dioxide also became a threat. A warming atmosphere ensured that the atmosphere and oceans would warm, ice would melt, and then cause deadly feedback loops. The evidence we now have in todays's climate change history. would become deadly.

It's in the context of this historical moment that president George Herbert Walker Bush began to renege on his promises, his plans to change the US course of climate change, American bureaucrats tone down there climate change rhetoric including that of the president. For example, the office of management and budget softened government scientists testimonies and climate change.

Most noteworthy, NASA's own climatologist, James Hansen testified before a Senate committee headed by Sen. Al Gore. The final message coming out of the White House came as a heavy-handed intervention into the greenhouse information.

President Bush said he would do and what he did became most obvious. He had said "those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forgetting about the "white house effect"; as president I intend to do something about it." What he did in fact, was to rearrange the issue to the benefit of the fossil fuel industry.

Basically, President Bush's places in the sand so as not to hear clear evidence and when he did speak, invoked the tobacco strategy, cause doubt.

Extractive economies shift burdens and risks down the world’s hierarchies.Illustration by Robert Beatty
In 1621, the Dutch East India Company—the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or V.O.C.—arrived at the Banda Islands with a formidable navy. The global spice market was fiercely competitive, and a number of European powers had already sailed to this Indonesian archipelago and tried to strong-arm the locals into accepting various treaties. The V.O.C. had recently sought a monopoly on the spice trade with the islands, home to the precious nutmeg. Nutmeg, valued for its culinary uses and its medicinal properties—rumor had it that it could cure the plague—had long been traded across vast networks that traversed the Indian Ocean and linked Africa and Eurasia. At one point, a handful of the seeds could buy a house or a ship. But the V.O.C. couldn’t secure a deal. The islands lacked a central authority; instead of kings or potentates, they merely had respected elders.

Frustrated, the Dutch turned to a military tactic of extortion they called brandschattingen—threatening an enemy with arson—and swiftly delivered on the threat, torching the villagers’ houses, food stores, and boats. Dutch forces captured and enslaved as many of the Bandanese as they could, and murdered the rest. Soon after the massacre, the V.O.C. became, by some measures, the largest company in human history, worth more than ExxonMobil, Apple, and Amazon combined.

“Like a planet, the nutmeg is encased within a series of expanding spheres,” Amitav Ghosh writes in his illuminating new book, “The Nutmeg’s Curse” (Chicago), which begins with this grisly episode. Surrounding the nutmeg core are other layers, notably a lacy red mantle called mace, which is itself traded as a precious commodity, while the exterior of the dried seed is grooved with ridges that evoke geological structures. Ghosh carves through the historical layers of the global exploitation of nutmeg and the genocide and domination that made it possible. “No trade without war, and no war without trade,” Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the fourth governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, declared.

Ghosh has a larger point. Extraction, violence, empire: all these perennials of human history tend to march together. The global marketplace, created and shaped by forays like the V.O.C.’s in Indonesia, is fixated on growth in ways that have led to an era of depredation, depletion, and, ultimately, disruptive climate change. Ghosh wonders whether our planet, after four centuries of vigorous terraforming, has begun to turn against its settlers, unleashing wildfires, storms, and droughts. It sounds like nature’s own version of brandschattingen.

Given that the heedlessness of the global marketplace got us into the climate crisis, you might be skeptical that more of the same will get us out of it. But many governments have adopted a hair-of-the-dog approach, embracing market-based solutions such as emissions trading and carbon taxes. The results have been discouraging: global emissions have been rising quickly, and we’ve fallen short on nearly every indicator of climate progress. (The aim has been to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 or two degrees Celsius, in the hope of avoiding the most catastrophic scenarios of climate change.) Although market-based approaches can yield incremental improvement, there’s little evidence that they can produce the “transformational” change that U.N. scientists say is necessary.

If the market is still treated as a default source of solutions, Ghosh suggests, it’s because, in a world created by corporations such as the V.O.C. and colonial sponsors such as the imperial Dutch, everything, including the planet, is considered a resource to be exchanged or exploited, and progress and “rationality” are measured in impersonal dollars and cents. Profit and security are reserved for those at the top of the world’s hierarchies, and are achieved by shifting the risks and the burdens toward those at the bottom. Some people get a storm-surge barrier—a specialty of certain Dutch multinationals—and exquisitely climate-controlled interiors; others watch their villages be swallowed by the sea.

If you’re wedded to market solutions, you’ll insist that our failure to act arises simply from suboptimal legal rules and market conditions. Maybe all we need are a few technical adjustments in pricing or institutional design. But our paralysis didn’t arise from happenstance. Every decade that we delay comprehensive climate action is another decade that certain companies can profit from their stake in the world’s energy system. Activists and reporters have exposed well-funded and elaborate misinformation campaigns sponsored by these companies. The revelations haven’t made much difference.

What Kate Aronoff shows, in her timely book “Overheated” (Bold Type), is that the “old-school” approach to corporate climate denial has given way to new, subtler strategies. Yesterday’s denialists insisted that climate change was a hoax, funding dodgy science and blitzing coöperative media outlets such as Fox News with industry “experts.” But under mounting public pressure many companies have withdrawn their support from denialist think tanks like the Heartland Institute; those companies are now funding academic research at big-name universities that shy away from overt climate-change denial.

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David Attenborough on Spiders with Personalities

One of the new strategies is to acknowledge climate change but to put polluters in charge of remedying it. Aronoff describes a 2018 proposal by Royal Dutch Shell, billed as a pathway to two degrees Celsius, that would have maintained similar levels of fossil-fuel production for decades. The scenario depended on carbon removal deployed on an immense scale—orders of magnitude above our current capabilities, and with potentially dangerous implications for food, energy, and water security. Earlier this year, Shell was rebuked by a Dutch court, which ordered the company to reduce its carbon emissions by forty-five per cent by 2030.

Small witches fly around a bird house that is decorated with candy like Hansel and Gretel.
Cartoon by John O’Brien
Despite such setbacks, oil and gas corporations have largely succeeded in slowing the energy transition that threatens their bottom line. Even from a technocratic perspective, though, our inaction on climate is irrational. Any serious long-term financial projection should take note of the fact that mass death, disease, and destruction are likely to make everybody worse off. One recent study estimates that as many as a billion people could be displaced during the next fifty years for every additional degree of warming, implying a level of social upheaval that might involve pitchforks. Even the International Energy Agency, an organization started by Henry Kissinger, now calls for a halt to all new oil and gas fields. Giant corporations such as Chevron and Exxon have been attacked for their inaction on the climate crisis not just by Greenpeace supporters but by their own shareholders, who insist that the safety of their investments depends on cutting emissions.

Why haven’t governments and political institutions forced a course correction? That’s a question taken up in “White Skin, Black Fuel” (Verso), by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, of Scandinavia. The book shows how, in the political arena, arguments about economic rationality get woven together with hierarchical structures and the pursuit of domination, portending what it calls fossil fascism. In particular, its authors are struck by how the European far right has used the “funnel issue” of hostility toward immigration to promote hostility toward renewable energy.

“Migrants are like wind turbines,” France’s Marine Le Pen has remarked. “Everyone agrees to have them, but no one wants them in their back yard.” To the north, the far-right Finns Party (formerly known as the True Finns) led a national campaign against wind turbines, featuring a press conference in which a man wept over the damage he believed the structures had inflicted on him and his family via infrasonic waves. The Party even published a cartoon—detailed in “White Skin, Black Fuel”—in which a Black man dressed only in a grass skirt makes hysterical climate predictions, flanked by a diminutive woman, evidently a Finnish regulator, who insists that “we have to spend more on wind turbines.” Oil companies have learned subtlety, but these far-right parties have other priorities.

“Even after fulfilling their ambitions in the region, the officials of the V.O.C. were never satisfied with their spice monopoly,” Ghosh writes. He attributes this reaction to a framework he terms the “world-as-resource,” in which landscapes are considered to be factories, and nature, like a native population, is viewed as a proper object of conquest. In Indonesia, the V.O.C. eventually followed up the massacre of a people with an effort to extirpate a botanical species. When the price of nutmeg fell, the company tried to limit the global supply of the spice by eradicating every nutmeg tree outside the Dutch plantations on the Banda Islands.

Spectacles of destruction like these would seem to reflect the often maligned workings of the profit motive, as people such as Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes have stressed. But Ghosh, mulling over why the world has been so slow to decarbonize, thinks that this explanation is incomplete. He wants us to reckon with broader structures of power, involving “the physical subjugation of people and territory,” and, crucially, the “idea of conquest, as a process of extraction.” The world-as-resource perspective not only depletes our environment of the raw materials we seek; it ultimately depletes it of meaning.

The authors of “The Nutmeg’s Curse,” “Overheated,” and “White Skin, Black Fuel” have different stories to tell about our bafflingly self-destructive climate politics. But they mesh into a broader narrative about hierarchy, commerce, and exploitation. An account of why climate politics is broken, needless to say, won’t tell us how to fix it. Still, these authors do venture some ideas. The second half of “Overheated” sketches out the contours of a “postcarbon democracy”; we learn about ongoing political efforts to redistribute the ownership of utilities from investors to communities, and about the promising 2018 struggles of public employees against the governments of fossil-fuel-reliant states such as West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. “The Nutmeg’s Curse” sees potential in what it calls a “vitalist” politics, and in an associated ethic of protection that would extend to “rivers, mountains, animals, and the spirits of the land.” Ghosh identifies this ethos, in contrast to the world-as-resource view, with peasants and farmworkers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—places and people long seen as peripheral to history. He also draws our attention to legal victories by indigenous peoples, including the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling, in 2012, that the rights of the Sarayaku people, in Ecuador, had been violated when an oil company dug wells on their lands without consulting them; and court rulings that side with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in its struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

These victories aren’t on the scale of the challenges we face, and the political proposals may feel airily idealistic—more of a wish list than a to-do list. Still, getting serious about climate change, as these micro and macro histories make clear, means aiming higher than defeatist “realism.” Climate catastrophe isn’t going to be averted simply by our changing the way we think about the planet and its peoples—but it’s likely to arrive sooner if we don’t. ♦

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The fossil fuel industry donated quite a bit to George W. Bush's 2001 presidential campaign. A number of insiders were unsure whether Bush would towline for them or, against their interests, heed the warnings of climate scientists.

And fossil fuel doubters had good reason to question bushe;s allegiances. During his campaign then candidate Bush claimed that carbon dioxide should be treated like a pollutant. As a pollutant that would require regulation because of the clean air act.

The clean air act carried a lot of weight in political circles. In fact, it it had its own hotline to the United States government. Citizens across the country had the opportunity to become environmental whistleblowers.

Interestingly, George W. Bush's all the links between climate change and national defense. And indeed he did have a concern with national defense. We find this in the US invasion of Iraq and bombing of Baghdad back to the Stone Age. Never mind that the so-called "weapons of mass destruction" were unavailable for press pictures, the incursion into a rack continued far beyond national defense issues.

That point in history, skeptics of the Bush invasion plan question the presidents close ties to the fossil fuel industry, considering that he came from an oil family as did his father, George Herbert W Bush. But the difference between the two waging war against the single resource dictatorship, is that father Bush had sense to stop outside of Baghdad. Now we know the rest of that story.

The point remains, the second President Bush understood the links between national security and climate change. But you wouldn't know this by what follows.

By June 2001, President Bush claimed to be uncertain about much of global warming and the science laying claim to human activities causing the new climate change. He did pledge to use science and diplomacy to bring balance to the Earth's climate.

Then, in February 2002, the president offered a milquetoast like voluntary plan to slow the growth of heat trapping gases. He advised that a tax incentive to businesses for voluntarily reducing carbon dioxide emissions. We know where that went.

In June 2002, President Bush distanced himself from the negative effects of global warming. He called his Environmental Protection Agency's report to the United Nations "bureaucratic" hot air. Mind you, since Joseph Fourier demonstrated the power of greenhouse gases to heat surrounding air molecules, science has known the effect of greenhouse gases and especially carbon dioxide. These gases do chemically react and warm the surrounding environment.

Visit NASA.gov or climate kids on the Internet for more about this well-known chemistry and physics of greenhouse gases.

When did you know though, in October 2004 Bush would reaffirm his stance on the Kyoto protocol. His claim was that it "would have cost America a lot of jobs. It's one of these deals where to be popular in the halls of Europe you sign a treaty." So we might guess who had the presidents air at the time, neither deep nor shallow environmentalism shared a place in the presidents Oval Office because the seats were taken by the fossil fuel industry.

Surely, by February 2005 when President Bush visited Europe after his second inauguration you had reason to be in a state of panic. So iiIf by this time you had environmental credentials, your trust in the second Bush oil presidency, you were prepared for the president to seek new technology in the fight against the effects of rising temperatures.

As an environmentalist, deep or shallow, you would have invoked a willing suspension of disbelief. You could not believe that informed, concerned, president of the United States could willingly ignore and exit stencil threat poised by the new climate change.

You heard the same president claim to recognize the problem on July 6, 2005. He claimed that "an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem "of global warming. Interestingly, in the last month a similar proclamation echoed in the halls of cop 26 in Scotland. There, as in President Bush's genuine concerns, climate took a backseat to fossil fuels.

Of course, there were moments of hope as in the president'sstate of the Union speech on January 23, 2007. There again he claimed that a technological fix would save humanity from the coming climate coming catastrophe. and most amazingly, he claimed that renewable fuels like ethanol stood a good chance as a technological fix.

To a Reuters reporter, President Bush would claim that without China and India's agreement or tell carbon dioxide emissions, there can be no effective approach to climate change. We have here in these notions of unilateral drawdown of CO2, a declaration of marching off to hell because that's what our neighbors are doing. But for its strong language, I must strongly recommend the movie "don't look up" to get at the logic behind this type of thinking. It's the same or similar logic used in the mutual assured destruction doctrine for the accumulation of nuclear warheads. That doctrine helped the proliferation of nuclear warheads to such countries as China, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, and who knows in what suitcases nuclear devices now reside?

Be that as it may, by May 31, 2007, President Bush would say that he one of the top 15 emitters of carbon dioxide to "work together to develop a long-term global goal to reduce greenhouse gases." He wanted this done by the end of 2008. Of course it didn't happen then anymore that it happened last month in Glasgow, Scotland.

President Bush did invite the European Union members and 11 industrial countries to Washington for September 27-28 meeting. Their goal, solve the coming climate change catastrophes.

Well, we all know where that went because went into the same trashcan future presidents would throw issue of climate change. But for Pres. Biden, no one president has made the public more aware of climate change, for as little good it is has done.

Interestingly, the the fossil fuel industry switched from its climate denial posture, and now acknowledges that fossil fuels cause the new climate change. Even more interesting, they claim, in part, to have known all along and to have embraced the science. See "Exxon: the road not taken." Fossil fuel industry
timel demonstrated ine from Reuters

 

George Bush understood (without using that particular label) that  environmental  intelligence also mattered to national security. Even then, he could see worldwide the effects of drought, desertification, floods, famine, and other natural events in displacing entire populations and turning stability into unrest and disruption.
Adding all this together, a decade later, then-President  Bush was prepared to grasp the implications of climate change as articulated in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, and ensure that America took the lead in developing, and continually improving the necessary environmental intelligence to characterize the threat,signing  the Global Change Research Act of 1990  into law, and leading the U.S. delegation at the  United Nations Conference on Environment and Development  (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June 1992. He trusted the input from scientists on this as much as he’d trusted the analysis of his own CIA years earlier.

 

FACTBOX-Bush's evolving policy on global warming
By Reuters Staff

 

Despite the huge amount of fossil fuel funding upon which George W. Bush was elected president in 2001, insiders in the monopoly-dominated oil industry remained unsure that he would fight for them - and against climate scientists.

Bush had suggested during his candidacy that CO2 should be treated as a pollutant and, therefore, subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act - even if the international Kyoto Agreement was not economically favourable for America.

Bush’s fence-sitting was strategic: swing states such as Florida were environmentally conscious and speaking out would likely give Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore the advantage.

But, optimistic environmentalists remained hopeful while wary oil-men were worried that it demonstrated a willingness to agree to the broad principles of the treaty.

A Rumoured Speech

Shortly after his inauguration, a rumour circulated that Bush planned to include a line reinforcing his earlier pledge in a forthcoming speech.

Word of the speech reached the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a Koch- and Exxon-funded think tank that helped donate to Bush’s presidential campaign. CEI set to work. As their founder and president, Fred Smith later told Newsweek: “We alerted anyone we thought could have influence and get the line, if it was in the speech, out.”

Despite the think tank’s best efforts, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman testified, on 27 February 2001 at a Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works subcommittee, that she was in favour of regulating CO2 emissions under the Clean Air Act.

A week later, she signed a joint statement at the G8 Environment Ministers Meeting which said: “We commit ourselves to strive to reach agreement on outstanding political issues and to ensure in a cost-effective manner the environmental integrity of the Kyoto Protocol.”

The President’s Position

At this, the denial machine set in motion. Haley Barbour, a lobbyist for a utility firm that stood to lose if greenhouse gases were regulated, urged Vice President Dick Cheney in a March 1 memo to persuade Bush not to align with the “eco-extremism” of those who saw carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

I do not believe that the government should impose on power plants mandatory emissions reductions for carbon dioxide, which is not a ‘pollutant’ under the Clean Air Act
A group of far-right Republican senators wrote an open letter to their new president. In light of Whitman’s testimony, they asked that Bush clarify his position on climate change, “in particular the Kyoto Protocol, and the regulation of carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act.”

Aware of the rising tide against her, Whitman went to the Oval Office to fight her case on the morning of March 13. But, Bush had already composed his response, shortly to be sent via Cheney to the senators, which he read to her.

“I do not believe,” read the letter, “that the government should impose on power plants mandatory emissions reductions for carbon dioxide, which is not a ‘pollutant’ under the Clean Air Act.”

Information from the Department of Energy had shown that consumers’ energy bills might be affected, and that this warranted a re-evaluation of his earlier pledge, “especially… given the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of and solution to global climate change.”

Polluter Pull-Out

Whitman left defeated, just as the puppeteer Cheney arrived to hand-deliver the President’s response to the senators.

By the end of the month, the world’s biggest polluter had pulled out of Kyoto.

Whitman, who later said the decision was “the equivalent to ‘flipping the bird’ frankly to the rest of the world,” was the one to deliver the news. “We have no interest in implementing that treaty,” the former New Jersey Governor told assembled journalists.

Though the terms of the treaty would be finalised in Bonn that July, they would be made all but useless, with the world’s largest polluter out of the game.

Years later, freedom of information disclosures revealed the industry’s input to this decision.

A briefing note prepared for Paula Dobrianksy, Under-Secretary of State for Global Affairs, ahead of her meeting with Glenn Kelly of the Exxon-bankrolled Global Climate Coalition, states: “POTUS [President of the United States] rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you… Interested in hearing from you, what type of international alternatives to Kyoto would you support?”

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

In an investigation by journalists at the British weekly Observer, emails and internal memos have been uncovered that implicate President Bush's administration in deliberately covering up scientific evidence that links oil and gas emissions to global warming. For years environmental scientists have been warning of global warming, but the Bush administration has always insisted that the evidence is weak and inconclusive. Now, Observer journalists claim that there is evidence that such a stance has been a meditated move to play down the dangers associated with the oil industry - which remains one of the major supporters of the Bush white house; moreover, President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and other officials are all former oil executives. With the damaging emails that have come to light, these connections

y come under closer scrutiny. - YaleGlobal

Bush Covers Up Climate Research
White House officials play down its own scientists' evidence of global warming
Paul Harris
Sunday, September 21, 2003
White House officials have undermined their own government scientists' research into climate change to play down the impact of global warming, an investigation by The Observer can reveal.

The disclosure will anger environment campaigners who claim that efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions are being sabotaged because of President George W. Bush's links to the oil industry.

Emails and internal government documents obtained by The Observer show that officials have sought to edit or remove research warning that the problem is serious. They have enlisted the help of conservative lobby groups funded by the oil industry to attack US government scientists if they produce work seen as accepting too readily that pollution is an issue.

Central to the revelations of double dealing is the discovery of an email sent to Phil Cooney, chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, by Myron Ebell, a director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The CEI is an ultra-conservative lobby group that has received more than $1 million in donations since 1998 from the oil giant Exxon, which sells Esso petrol in Britain.

The email, dated 3 June 2002, reveals how White House officials wanted the CEI's help to play down the impact of a report last summer by the government's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in which the US admitted for the first time that humans are contributing to global warming. 'Thanks for calling and asking for our help,' Ebell tells Cooney.

The email discusses possible tactics for playing down the report and getting rid of EPA officials, including its then head, Christine Whitman. 'It seems to me that the folks at the EPA are the obvious fall guys and we would only hope that the fall guy (or gal) should be as high up as possible,' Ebell wrote in the email. 'Perhaps tomorrow we will call for Whitman to be fired,' he added.

The CEI is suing another government climate research body that produced evidence for global warming. The revelation of the email's contents has prompted demands for an investigation to see if the White House and CEI are co-ordinating the legal attack.

'This email indicates a secret initiative by the administration to invite and orchestrate a lawsuit against itself seeking to discredit an official US government report on global warming dangers,' said Richard Blumenthal, attorney general of Connecticut, who has written to the White House asking for an inquiry.

The allegation was denied by White House officials and the CEI. 'It is absurd. We do not have a sweetheart relationship with the White House,' said Chris Horner, a lawyer and senior fellow of CEI.

However, environmentalists say the email fits a pattern of collusion between the Bush administration and conservative groups funded by the oil industry, who lobby against efforts to control carbon dioxide emissions, the main cause of global warming. When Bush first came to power he withdrew the US - the world's biggest source of greenhouse gases - from the Kyoto treaty, which requires nations to limit their emissions.

Both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are former oil executives; National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was a director of the oil firm Chevron, and Commerce Secretary Donald Evans once headed an oil and gas exploration company.

'It all fits together,' said Kert Davies of Greenpeace. 'It shows that there is an effort to undermine good science. It all just smells like the oil industry. They are doing everything to allow the US to remain the world's biggest polluter.'

Other confidential documents obtained by The Observer detail White House efforts to suppress research that shows the world's climate is warming. A four-page internal EPA memo reveals that Bush's staff insisted on major amendments to the climate change section of an environmental survey of the US, published last June. One alteration indicated 'that no further changes may be made'. The memo discusses ways of dealing with the White House editing, and warns that the section 'no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change'.

Some of the changes include deleting a summary that stated: 'Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment.' Sections on the ecological effects of global warming and its impact on human health were removed. So were several sentences calling for further research on climate change.

A temperature record covering 1,000 years was also deleted, prompting the EPA memo to note: 'Emphasis is given to a recent, limited analysis [which] supports the administration's favoured message.' White House officials added numerous qualifying words such as 'potentially' and 'may', leading the EPA to complain: 'Uncertainty is inserted where there is essentially none.'

The paper then analyses what the EPA should do about the amendments and whether they should be published at all. The options range from accepting the alterations to trying to discuss them with the White House.

When the report was finally published, however, the EPA had removed the entire global warming section to avoid including information that was not scientifically credible.

Former EPA climate policy adviser Jeremy Symons said morale at the agency had been devastated by the administration's tactics. He painted a picture of scientists afraid to conduct research for fear of angering their White House paymasters. 'They do good research,' he said. 'But they feel that they have a boss who does not want them to do it. And if they do it right, then they will get hit or their work will be buried.'

Symons left the EPA in April 2001 and now works for the National Wildlife Federation as head of its climate change programme. The Bush administration's attitude was clear from the beginning, he said, and a lot of people were working to ensure that the President did nothing to address global warming.

https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/bush-covers-climate-research

https://redgreenandblue.org/2018/12/05/president-george-h-w-bush-quiet-climate-legacy/

Red green and blue, December 5, 2018

He did leave a climate legacy. The US global climate change research program that president George Herbert Walker Bush created in 1989 sought to "assist the nation in the world to understand, assess, predict, and responded human -induced and natural processes of global change."

President Bush's Secretary of State, James A. Baker, received word that the importance of climate change action. He received a memorandum from then acting assistant secretary Richard J. Smith stating:

"Global climate change is the most far-reaching environmental issue of our time. If the climate change within the range of current predictions actually occurs, the consequences for every nation in every aspect of human activity will be profound. As you yourself stated we cannot wait until all uncertainties have been resolved before we act to limit greenhouse gas emissions and to prepare for whatever climate change we are already committed to."

President Bush joined other world leaders to adopt a series of international environmental agreements, which included United Nations framework convention on climate change. United Nations framework sought long-term objectives to avoid dangerous human interference with Earth's climate system.

President Bush left the real summit declaring that Americans are "l leaders, not the followers." He also said that Americans would be "preeminent" as they follow the accords agreed-upon.

 

https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/why-climate-change-cant-be-stopped
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YaleGlobal Online
Most world leaders agree that global warming is a real and pressing issue, and Environmentalists still express hope that conservation - some immediate sacrifices - could save species, habitats and even some human lives. “Unfortunately, given the scale and complexity of modern economies and the time required for new technologies to displace older ones, only a stunning technological breakthrough will allow for reductions in emissions that are sufficiently deep to stop climate change,” write Paul J. Saunders and Vaughan Turekian, former Bush administration officials, for Foreign Policy. Economic reports suggest that extreme weather events are going to impose great costs, up to $100 billion annually. Great changes are in store for earth and all of its inhabitants, the authors conclude, and governments have a responsibility to prepare. – YaleGlobal
Why Climate Change Can't Be Stopped
Paul J. Saunders
Thursday, October 18, 2007
As the world's leaders gather in New York this week to discuss climate change, you're going to hear a lot of well-intentioned talk about how to stop global warming. From the United Nations, Bill Clinton, and even the Bush administration, you'll hear about how certain mechanisms-cap-and-trade systems for greenhouse gas emissions, carbon taxes, and research and development plans for new energy technologies-can fit into some sort of global emissions reduction agreement to stop climate change. Many of these ideas will be innovative and necessary; some of them will be poorly thought out. But one thing binds them together: They all come much too late.

For understandable reasons, environmental advocates don't like to concede this point. Eager to force deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, many of them hype the consequences of climate change-in some cases, well beyond what is supported by the facts-to build political support. Their expensive policy preferences are attractive if they are able to convince voters that if they make economic sacrifices for the environment, they have a reasonable chance of halting, or at least considerably slowing, climate change. But this case is becoming harder, if not impossible, to make.

To be sure, scientific studies and news reports make it clear that climate change is already happening, with greenhouse gas emissions as a significant driver of this change. Arctic ice has now melted sufficiently to open up the fabled Northwest Passage, provoking public jockeying between Russian and Canadian officials over potential oil and gas deposits. At the same time, the U.S. Department of Interior is considering placing polar bears on the endangered species list as a result of global warming. Extreme weather events have become more common, such as flooding in Africa and forest fires in the western United States.

New emissions limits in the United States and other major emitters such as Europe's key economies and Japan may slow the processes driving these events. But the mounting scientific evidence, coupled along with economic and political realities, increasingly suggests that humanity's opportunity to prevent, stop, or reverse the long-term impacts of climate change has slipped away. In fact, while greenhouse gas intensity (emissions per unit of gross domestic product) of both developed and developing economies has decreased significantly over the past decade as a result of greater efficiency measures, overall greenhouse gas emissions have nevertheless continued to rise. That's because as economies grow, they consume more energy and produce more carbon dioxide. And, obviously, each country wants its own economy to grow.

While some might argue that great reductions can be made in greenhouse gas emissions using current technologies (particularly by increasing efficiency), this is still debated within the scientific community. This argument assumes, among other things, that companies replace their current capital stock with the most efficient available today-something that is not likely to occur in the near future even in developed countries due to its considerable cost. For this reason, even if the Bush administration has been slow to publicly admit that human-induced climate change is real, it has been fundamentally right to focus on developing new technologies that might sever the relationship between energy consumption and emissions.

Unfortunately, given the scale and complexity of modern economies and the time required for new technologies to displace older ones, only a stunning technological breakthrough will allow for reductions in emissions that are sufficiently deep to stop climate change. According to Britain's Stern report, stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at 550 parts per million-twice pre-industrial levels, a level at which most believe there is already a higher probability of major climate disruptions-would require stopping the global growth in emissions by 2020 and reducing emissions by 2.5 percent per year after that. The longer it takes to stop the growth in emissions, the deeper the eventual cuts need to be.

And while the United States leads the world in investment in new energy technologies, spending nearly $3 billion in 2007, it would be irresponsible for us to count on an energy technology miracle to save the day. Excitement over increasingly "green" business practices is likewise misplaced; companies will do what they need to do to increase their profits and-when the cost is modest-to improve their images. This has reduced emissions and will continue to do so. But without meaningful international agreements that create both unrealistically tight limits and market mechanisms, the cuts will ultimately be marginal rather than decisive.

Without a technological or economic miracle, it would take a political miracle to reach an international agreement that would mandate the necessary emissions cuts to reverse the momentum behind our evolving global climate system. But once again, realities get in the way. The U.S. Congress is too divided to pass legislation sufficiently tough to make a major difference. And although some hope that regional or state-level cap-and trade systems could sharply reduce U.S. emissions in the absence of federal action, this is also unlikely because states face many of the same problems that challenge national governments. First and foremost, any states that impose emissions limits that are too tight in comparison with its neighbors' are likely to simply export their emissions without it resulting in a major overall reduction.

The international political environment also makes truly significant emissions cuts very unlikely. In 2010, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, developing countries will emit nearly 20 percent more CO2 emissions than developed countries. Indeed, only in China (and perhaps India) would emissions limits or cuts make more of a difference than in the United States. By one estimate, China has already surpassed America in emissions to become the world's leader and, with sustained high growth rates, will open the gap even further. In fact, if China grows at 8 percent for the next nine years, its economy will double in size-and its greenhouse gas emissions can be expected roughly to double as well. Moreover, as China's economy expands, it is turning increasingly to carbon-laden coal for electricity. And although China's energy intensity (energy consumed per unit of economic output) has decreased by nearly 5 percent per year for the last two decades as a result of greater efficiency, it is still nearly seven times that of the United States, according to the World Bank. At this rate, China's growth trajectory could add the equivalent pollution of another present-day United States to the climate system in a little more than a decade.

Dollar for dollar, the most efficient way to cut global greenhouse gas emissions would be, in theory, to invest hundreds of billions of dollars to improve China's energy efficiency. But Congress would never support such an approach. After all, which members of Congress would vote to undercut the competitiveness of U.S. companies, especially in the face of a weak domestic economy, public anger over outsourcing, China's currency value, and the U.S. trade deficit with China? More broadly, how long will voters in Europe and Japan, which have done the most to limit emissions, be prepared to make sacrifices for the global climate if they believe they are alone in doing so?

A realistic look at climate change suggests that it is time to change the debate. In 2005, a paper published by the U.N. Environment Program put average global economic losses due to "great weather disasters" at $100 billion per year, and projected that it was increasing at about 6 percent per year-enough to double every twelve years, and to total $2 trillion for the period from 2007 to 2020. Policy makers in the United States and elsewhere must start hedging their bets and prepare us to live in this new world. This emphatically does not mean giving up on efforts to slow climate change, which could still measurably reduce the costs of protecting the people and infrastructure most vulnerable to higher temperatures and new weather patterns. Nor should it suggest that the task of adaptation will be easy or cheap. World leaders will face many of the same dilemmas that complicate the current debate: Developed countries, which have produced most of the human-origin carbon dioxide in the air, will be in the best position to cope with climate change and developing countries will want them to bear a disproportionate financial burden for its consequences.

Still, we do have some of the tools we will need already. International lenders like the World Bank have only begun to invest in projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions; they need to give greater emphasis to projects that limit developing countries' vulnerabilities to climate change. The scientific community will need to do a much better job of predicting climate impacts at a regional and local scale. Governments will need to support this process, to collect and assess the information that results, and develop their own plans. Riding out the consequences of a warming world will be difficult, and we need to prepare now.

Paul J. Saunders is executive director of the Nixon Center and associate publisher of The National Interest. Vaughan Turekian is chief international officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has a Ph.D. in atmospheric geochemistry. They served together as aides to the under secretary of state for global affairs during the Bush administration from 2003-2005.

President Carter 1977 to 1981

Ex-Pence adviser warns of 'grave concern' among ex-Trump staffers

 

• defendants knew the basic science of climate change and knew that the continued burning of high levels of fossil fuels would lead to climate danger;
• defendants knew of pathways recommended by experts within government and others to transition away from fossil fuels, including through conservation, efficiency, and solar and other renewables.

 

The Global 2000 report and brought light to a host of issues that other presidents may have considered, but failed to bring together for political action,hh

Among these were carbon dioxide atmospheric density, acid rain, and that ugly fact, human population growth would continue. Conceivably at that time, human population would increase 50% by the end of the century, the 20th century.
Carter timeline
Carter promoted a new energy direction. He said, "that we put this
nation on a path to a sustainable energy future, one based on increasingly on renewable resources and on energy conservati
Note that he did not say this new direction would occur over night. But it
be on a path to sustainable energy future. This is an idea Carter's energy critics seem to ignore.
He sought a "true energy security" based on renewable energy, conservation, and self-reliance.

 

Reagan 1981 to 1989

 

 

 

George H.W. Bush 1989 to 1993olumn 6

 

 

 

George W. Bush 2001 to 2009olumn 7

 

 

 

Clinton 1993 to 2001olumn 8

 

 

CObama 2009 to 2017olumn 9

 

Trump 2017 to 2021