Eighties

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this is a node, see tag

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an ah 6 24

Long before urbanites were blaming hipsters for high rents, gentrification and displacement, yuppies were being attacked as anti-working class. Yuppie culture was the target of countless articles from liberals and progressive writers during the 1980s, and "die yummie scum" t-shirts were a hot commodity among punk and hip-hop fans.

In a lengthy essay/think piece published by Politico on June 4, Philadelphia-based author Tom McGrath argues that 1980s yuppies helped pave the way for Donald Trump's presidency and the MAGA movement.

Trump has painted himself as a staunch defender of the working class, famously saying, in 2016, that he "loves the poorly educated." But according to McGrath, the Trump of the 1980s and 1990s symbolized urban yuppie "excess."

READ MORE: [Ex-federal prosecutor slams Mar-a-Lago docs judge’s 'dangerous and disingenuous' claims

"A wealthy New York real estate mogul may not have seemed particularly well-suited for the role of populist hero," McGrath explains, "but Donald Trump's historic realignment of white working-class voters not only delivered him the presidency in 2016, but changed the GOP as we know it. A recent Gallup survey indicates that more Republicans now identify as working or lower class than Democrats. And white voters without a college education, once a core Democratic constituency, remain a key element of Trump's reelection bid heading into November."

McGrath continues, "But for all the ink spilled over Trump's connection to the white-working class, it's actually a very different demographic that explains his ascension: yuppies."

McGrath, author of the new book "Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation," notes that "eye rolling" over yuppies during the mid-1980s subsequently "hardened into a deeper resentment of what became known as 'the elites.'"

"By 2016, families at the top of the economic pyramid controlled 79 percent of all wealth in America, up from 60 percent in the 1980s," McGrath explains. "The percentage of wealth owned by the middle class dropped from 32 percent to 17 percent. Ironically, it was Donald Trump — if not a yuppie himself, then at least a walking symbol of 1980s glitz and excess — who spotted the political opportunity, persuading many working‐class Americans that he was on their side."

READ MORE:['All she has to do is shut up': Ex-GOP rep skewers RNC chair for risking Senate over Trump 'vanities'

McGrath adds, "In office, Trump's only significant legislative accomplishment was a massive tax cut for wealthy Americans, though he also imposed significant trade tariffs on China — a curious mix of Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale."

READ MORE: ['Just not true': Reporter delivers rapid-fire fact-check of GOP Trump defenders]

*Read Tom McGrath's full article for Politico at this link.

In 1980, scientists announced a new theory for what had killed off the dinosaurs tens of millions of years ago: an asteroid had struck the Earth and clouded the atmosphere for years, freezing plants and animals. The theory fascinated the public, perhaps less because it addressed dinosaurs than because it addressed extinction. That struck a resonance with deep-set fears of nuclear war, which had revived around the time Reagan took office. As one scientist remarked, the asteroid theory "commanded belief because it fit with what we are prepared to believe... Like everyone else... I carry within my consciousness the images of mushroom clouds." The idea of global extinction caused by a blast coming from the sky, he said, "feels right because it fits so neatly into the nightmares that project our own demise." (88)

On Hallowe'en 1983, a group of respected atmospheric scientists held a press conference to make a carefully orchestrated announcement about a different climate catastrophe. They had come to fear that soot from cities torched in a nuclear war might blacken the atmosphere as much as an asteroid strike. Years of cold and dark might jeopardize the survival of all humankind. Didn't that prove that launching a nuclear attack, even if the other side never fired back, would be literally suicidal? So maintained a group of well-known experts, including West Europeans and Russians as well as Americans, and most prominently Carl Sagan — a chief spokesperson for the group because his fame, much more as an astronomy popularizer than as an atmospheric scientist, could attract television cameras. The scientists' aim was frankly political. They meant to reinforce a public movement that was just then calling on the United States to reduce its inventory of bombs. Meanwhile the announcement added another layer to public imagination of calamitous global climate change.

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1977 cooling over, consensus on warming

1981 

Election of Reagan brings backlash against environmental movement to power. Political conservatism is linked to skepticism about global warming. =>Government

IBM Personal Computer introduced. Advanced economies are increasingly delinked from energy.

Hansen and others show that sulfate aerosols can significantly cool the climate, raising confidence in models showing future greenhouse warming. =>Aerosols

Some scientists predict greenhouse warming "signal" should be visible by about the year 2000. =>Modern temp's

1984 Heartland founded (PM tobacco)

1987 montreal ~cfc

1988: UN sets up a scientific authority to vet the evidence on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  B1 elected

Denialspere really kicked in 1988  Thatcher says real, Hansen testifies to congress; media consolidation

Bush 1 elected 1988, lost 1992

1989 GCC founded, Berlin wall falls, GMI sees green as new red

1990: First IPCC report says levels of man-made greenhouse gases are increasing in the atmosphere and predicts these will cause :{global warming:(style="position:relative"):}:.

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no lnx

Back to the Future: How 1980s ‘greed is good’ culture spawned Donald Trump

Written by Liz Langley March 17, 2020

If you were a 20something in 1980something you’re probably loving the recent pop culture revival of that decade. Stranger Things, has a fourth season due out this year,  American Horror Story: 1984 is streaming on Hulu  and if I had anywhere to go I might rock some chunky pearls and taffeta, too, but as charming as this nostalgia is there was nothing quite like being there. The 70’s was my favorite decade aesthetically, but, truth, it was homespun, handmade, gritty and populist. The most popular TV shows were about poor and working class people, we never questioned polyester) and in 1977 President Jimmy Carter blew off riding in the presidential limo and walked from his swearing in to the White House, in part, as he wrote in his diary, to show his intention of “a reduction in the imperial status of the president and his family.”

It was a lovely moment but when the 80’s rolled up in a Mercedes, snorting champagne and telling us it was okay to like money it was a breath of fresh designer air. Being 70’s kids, we inhaled.

There’s one tinge of ickiness stuck to the otherwise joyful 80’s nostalgia wave, which is that it was the decade from which seeped Donald Trump. It made me wonder, was the fun-loving 80’s was in its ability to spawn someone so awful? Why was the 80’s so besotted with money in the first place?

Actually the 80’s money mania and Trump’s place in it started years earlier and with very understandable reasons.

“The 70’s were dominated by (New York City) being close to the brink of bankruptcy,” says George Arzt, a New York media veteran who runs a public relations firm and was press secretary to Mayor Ed Koch. The city didn’t go bankrupt but it “was right on the brink, and that would have been terrible for the city’s credit and for all the people working for the city.” Arzt recalls President Gerald Ford’s refusal to bail New York out and the New York Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

Things weren’t much brighter in the rest of the country.

“I don’t think people remember, when they talk about the 80’s, they talk about the second half,” says Jamie Malanowski, senior speech writer at the office of Governor Andrew Cuomo, author and editor at the now-defunct but much-beloved Spy magazine. “They don’t really remember the first half when there was still a pretty strong recession, the AIDS epidemic seemed so mysterious and terrible and no one had a grip on it. We were still coming to the grips with the idea of a “rust belt,” among other painful issues.

New York narrowly escaped bankruptcy and the economy improved in the 80’s across the country.

“It took awhile for that Reagan optimism to lock in and float everybody,” Malanowski says. “And then after that it was John Hughes movies and one happy thing after another.”

Happy, ambitious and pumped.

We had “Michael J Fox’s character in Family Ties as a kind of materialistic kid of hippie parents,” Madonna’s Material Girl and “the hyper violence of the Rambo movies and the Schwarzenegger movies, and their muscled up bodies, it was, power power power,” Malanowski says.

Even sleep was amped in the 80’s: people didn’t take naps, they took power naps.

So we became conspicuous consumers for the same reason you’d dance in the rain storm that follows a drought. We were celebrating.

“We were back,” Arzt says of New York, which was particularly debilitated in a financial crisis in the 1970’s and early 80’s. Finally the city was “taking care of business,” cleaning up the parks and subways. The 1980’s, became an era “akin to the roaring 20’s.”

So how did Donald Trump become, not just of the 80’s, but as Malanowski wrote in 2015, the embodiment of it, with his swooping hair, self-aggrandizement and terror of not winning?

It starts in 1971, Arzt says, when Donald would make his first foray into Manhattan real estate by buying the Commodore Hotel, a property right near Grand Central Station. Fred Trump, Donald’s dad, had made his fortune in real estate in Brooklyn and Queens and, according to the New York Times, contributed heavily to Democrats, Mayor Abe Beame and Gov. Hugh Carey, connections Donald could use. Daddy also guaranteed the loans Donald needed to get the job done.

He also got what NPR calls “unprecedented 40-year tax abatement from the city.”

Wayne Barrett of The Village Voice wrote about the project in 1979, “The bureaucrats’ assumption seems to have been that the modern bankrupt American city ought to be opening hotels for its visiting rich while closing hospitals and schools for its unwanted poor.”

“But the big event was Trump Tower in ’83,” Arzt says. Trump successfully sued the city for tax breaks on that project.

“No subsidy was left untapped,” the Times writes of Trumps unending maneuvers to get out of paying taxes on his projects.

[NOTE: While he seemed phobic about paying those taxes and now lives off our taxes Trump proposed cutting heating aid to poor people in February to pay for coronavirus prep that his administration compromised by weakening funding in the first place. Just sayin’]

“We may laugh at Trump Tower and think it’s kind of gauche. but at the time, it was a shot in the arm. There were a lot of places where we gave developers the store to get them to come back to New York,” Malanowski says, “I wouldn’t say he’s unique,” with many developers taking advantage of the city’s financial situation at the time.

Nor was he unique in being what Malanowski calls a “hot” personality, like the felonious Oliver North or the famously cantankerous George Steinbrenner. We’re talking about the era of Morton Downey Jr. here, not the smart, unruffled cool of Barrack Obama. Trump  was part of a crowd of “transgressive” personalities and “he wasn’t the worst of them,” Malanowski says.

Other transgressors at the time included Ivan Boesky who inspired the decade-defining Gordon Gekko line “Greed is Good” and who went to prison for insider trading and Jim Bakker, the televangelist who was indicted in 1989 on mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy and is now out and on TV hawking a cure for the Corona virus for $125 a bottle.

Trump, though, was “the one who survived and kept breaking new ground,” Malanowski says. “When the others died off or kept repeating themselves he’s gone on to bigger and worse things.”

What made Trump different in those early years was his publicity seeking.

“He was on top of the world, he tried to be a player. He would call up reporters and tell them gossip,” and used the press to get himself in their pages. Arzt says, “He wanted to be in the gossip columns.”

Tina Brown, editor of the Daily Beast and former editor of Vanity Fair said in an interview on CNN that at when The Art of the Deal came out in 1987 she liked the voice of the book, and found him, at the time, to be “fun,” and “just a great salesman.” In another interview, for Tech Insider, she said she thought of Trump’s book, “This is BS, but it’s authentic BS.”

He would go on Howard Stern’s radio show “and together they would be very amusing, if you weren’t the butt of their conversation,” Malanowski says. They would just be sort of outragous together, but, you know one, of them knew he was a comedian.”

Those interviews happened later, in the mid-90’s, but all this contributed to Trump’s ability to to handle himself in the media. All that’s been extremely useful to him,” Malanowski says, and also that it’s likely his TV experience – 14 years on The Apprentice “molded him more than his 80’s experiences.”

In her Tech Insider interview Brown said people underestimated the impact of that TV presence during the 2016 election.

So those of us who are enjoying the fun-loving 80’s and want to keep the sparkle on that most sparkly decade will feel a little better to know that Trump isn’t the 80’s fault. He may embody all the gross excess of the decade but he started long before and kept going long after.

“What you see now is what he was in the 70s and 80s,” Arzt says.

Maybe I thought of him as an 80’s guy only because I never saw his TV show. I had to look up the premise. It was pitting people against each other.

A Climate Chronology

Sharon S. Tisher, J.D.

School of Economics and Honors College

University of Maine

http://umaine.edu/soe/faculty-and-staff/tisher/

https://umaine.edu/soe/wp-content/uploads/sites/199/2020/03/Climate-Chronology-January-2020.pdf

1979 (July) A National Research Council report estimates “the most probable global warming for a doubling of CO2 to be near 3°C with a probable error of ± 1.5°C.” The Ad Hoc Study Group on carbon dioxide and climate is chaired by MIT meteorologist Jule Charney. The 22 page “Charney report” estimates that based on then current trends in fossil fuel combustion, these temperatures will be reached some time in the first half of the 21st century. The forward to the report by Verner Suomi, Chairman of the Climate Research Board of the National Research Council, notes that “For more than a century, we have been aware that changes in the composition of the atmosphere could affect its ability to trap the sun's energy for our benefit. We now have incontrovertible evidence that the atmosphere is indeed changing and that we ourselves contribute to that change. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are steadily increasing, and these changes are linked with man's use of fossil fuels and exploitation of the land. Since carbon dioxide plays a significant role in the heat budget of the atmosphere, it is reasonable to suppose that continued increases would affect climate.” Suomi directs a cautionary warning to policymakers: “The conclusions of this brief but intense investigation may be comforting to scientists but disturbing to policymakers. If carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible. The conclusions of prior studies have been generally reaffirmed. However, the study group points out that the ocean, the great and ponderous flywheel of the global climate system, may be expected to slow the course of observable climatic change. A waitand-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late.” In addition to characterizing the impact of the oceans in delaying observable atmospheric warming, the study explores the impact of both positive and negative feedback mechanisms: “A strong positive feedback mechanism is the accompanying increase of moisture, which is an even more powerful absorber of terrestrial radiation. We have examined with care all known negative feedback mechanisms, such as increase in low or middle cloud amount, and have concluded that the oversimplifications and inaccuracies in the models are not likely to have vitiated the principal conclusion that there will be appreciable warming. The known negative feedback mechanisms can reduce the warming, but they do not appear to be so strong as the positive moisture feedback.”* Forty years later, Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academy of Sciences, will write in an editorial in the journal Science that the Charney report’s calculations “have proven to be remarkably on target:” “The Charney report demonstrates the power of scientific prediction. Since its release, scientists have built a formidable evidence base on climate change. At no time since 1979 has the science backed down from its dire predictions for the prospects of human civilization to prosper in a world warming well beyond limits encountered in all of human history.”** *Jule G. Charney et al., Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment (Washington: The National Academic Press, 1979), https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12181/carbon-dioxide-and-climate-a-scientific-assessment *Marcia McNutt, “Time’s Up, CO2,” Science 365, no. 6452 (August 2, 2019): 411, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6452/411 1980 Three years after its first climate report, a second National Academy of Sciences report on anthropogenic warming stresses uncertainty about the extent and timing of climate changes In response to the Charney Report in 1979, the White House Office of Science and Technology asks the National Academy of Sciences to opine on the likely timing of increases in global temperature. The study is chaired by economist Thomas Schelling. According to the report (a letter, not a full assessment), “In view of the uncertainties, controversies, and complex linkages surrounding the carbon dioxide issue, and the possibility that some of the greatest uncertainties will be reduced within the decade, it seems to most of us that the near-term emphasis should be on research, with as low a political profile as possible [emphasis in original document]…We do not know enough to address most of these questions right now. We believe that we can learn faster than the problem can develop.”* John Perry, a meteorologist and chief staff officer for the Academy’s Climate Research Board, will criticize this assessment in a guest editorial in the Journal Climatic Change entitled “Energy and Climate: Today’s Problem, not Tomorrow’s,” by arguing: “If we have good reason to believe that a 100 percent increase in carbon dioxide will produce significant impacts on climate, then we must have equally good reason to suspect that even the small increase we have already produced may have subtly altered our climate…. Climate change is not a matter for the next century; we are most probably doing it right now.”** * Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010) ,175-6. **John Perry, “Energy and Climate: Today’s Problem, not Tomorrow’s,” Climatic Change, September 1981 3, no. 3 (1981): 223- 225, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02423215 1980’s The Reagan Administration cuts energy R&D funding by more than half and reduces funding for climate research Numerous battles erupt in Congress over the Department of Energy’s attempts to reduce its climate research budget and the content of climate research programs. As Karen Fischer-Vanden comments, public dissatisfaction with some of the Carter Administration’s R&D funding decisions “fed an already existing national trend toward more conservative views—including the desire for less government and industry deregulation where preferred actions of private businesses are induced through market mechanisms.”* “Carter had earlier asked us to lower our thermostats and wear sweaters,” writes Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, “He wore one himself. Reagan, who succeeded Carter in the White House, wore only a smile. For him, there was no energy crisis. Whereas Carter had insisted that only the government could manage the energy crisis, Reagan, in his first inaugural, demanded that government get out of the way. Speaking of general economic conditions at the time, he said, ‘Government is not the solution to our problem.’ He went on to call for America to return to greatness, to ‘reawaken this industrial giant,’ and all sorts of swell things would happen.”** The Reagan administration is instrumental, however, in supporting the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer [see 1985] and the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international organization to assess scientific and socio-economic information related to global climate change [see 1988]. * Karen Fisher-Vanden, “International Policy Instrument Prominence in the Climate Change Debate: A Case Study of the United States.” ENRP Discussion Paper E-97-06, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, August 1997, 3. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/51e2/55ee1e32368df19d41ab1ac5d34a04e7a6e5.pdf **Richard Cohen, “Wish Upon A Pump,” Washington Post, July 8, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/07/07/AR2008070702215.html 1 1981-2 The Reagan Administration urges the National Academy of Sciences to restrain its concern on the climate issue In meetings leading up to a 1983 National Academy of Science (NAS) report, Department of Energy officials advise NAS that they “[do] not approve of …speculative, alarmist, ‘wolf–crying’ scenarios….” A White House Office of Science and Technology official advises NAS staff that there is no need for alarm, because “technology will ultimately be the answer to the problems of providing energy and protecting the environment.”* * Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010) ,182. 1982 Reagan appointee Frederick Koomanoff speaks in support of “serious, sustained and systematic investigation” of the CO2 issue At a Reagan Administration–sponsored conference entitled Carbon Dioxide, Science, and Consensus, the Reagan appointee to the Carbon Dioxide Research Division, Frederick Koomanoff, opens the proceedings with the observation that “[the] Executive Branch and the Congress clearly regard the CO2 issue as one deserving serious, sustained and systematic investigation. The credit for this lies in the good science and solid research that has and is being performed.” James C. Greene, science consultant to the House Committee on Science and Technology, warns, “A veil hangs ominously over the earth, from pole to pole, over all the continents, and over the oceans… To a significant degree, man has put it there. It is called simply enough, carbon dioxide pollution. If today’s worst case scenario becomes tomorrow’s reality, it will be too late to reverse the atmospheric buildup or to ameliorate the severe adverse human and environmental impacts of this pollutant.”* *John Perlin, “You Won’t Believe What I Found in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Regarding Climate Change,” CleanTechnica, Dec. 8, 2015, http://cleantechnica.com/2015/12/08/you-wont-believe-what-i-found-in-the-ronald-reaganpresidential-library-regarding-climate-change-i-sure-was-surprised-cleantechnica-exclusive/ 1982 Exxon Corporation management receives “wide circulation” of a primer on CO2 and climate change As reported in a 2015 InsideClimate News investigative report, “Exxon: The Road Not Taken,” the primer given to Exxon management is based on extensive research performed by the company since 1977. The primer states that heading off global warming “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.” Unless that happens, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered. …Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.” The primer is marked “not to be distributed externally.” In a September, 1982 report summarizing Exxon’s own climate research, Roger Cohen, head of theoretical sciences at Exxon Corporate Research Laboratories, states that "Over the past several years a clear scientific consensus has emerged," which concludes that a doubling of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would produce average global warming of 3 degrees Celsius, plus or minus 1.5 degrees C. “There is unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth's climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere." Cohen urges publication of these findings because it is our "ethical responsibility is to permit the publication of our research in the scientific literature," while he acknowledges the "connection between Exxon's major business and the role of fossil fuel combustion in contributing to the increase of atmospheric CO2." Exxon will follow his advice: “Between 1983 and 1984, its researchers published their results in at least three peer-reviewed papers in Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences and an American Geophysical Union monograph.”* * Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer, “Exxon: The Road Not Taken”, InsideClimate News , Sept. 15, 2015, http://insideclimatenews.org/news/15092015/Exxons-own-research-confirmed-fossil-fuels-role-in-global-warming 1983 The views of climate scientists and economists diverge markedly in a new National Academy of Sciences report on climate change The National Academy of Sciences report, “Changing Climate: Report of the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee,” includes five chapters detailing the likelihood of climate change written by climate scientists, including Roger Revelle [see 1957, 1965], and two chapters by economists, including Thomas Schelling [see 1980]. The views diverge markedly. Schelling argues that it is a mistake to assume a “preference for… dealing with causes rather than symptoms… It would be wrong to commit ourselves to the principle that if fossil fuels and carbon dioxide are where the problem arises, that must also be where the solution lies.” The economist William Nierenberg, who chairs the Committee, stresses human migration and adaptation as the likely most economical approach to the problem. Physicist Alvin Weinberg writes a scathing critique of the report, as “so seriously flawed in its underlying analysis and in its conclusions… Does the Committee really believe that the United States or Western Europe or Canada would accept the huge influx of refugees from poor countries that have suffered a drastic shift in rainfall pattern?”*[see 1989] * Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 177 - 181. 1985 The Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer becomes the first global treaty with enforceable provisions addressing atmospheric pollution U.S. leadership plays a pivotal role in achieving the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, an international agreement on a clear timetable for reducing the production of chlorofluorocarbons and halons that degrade the atmospheric ozone layer.* The Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department meet with considerable opposition to the treaty in the Reagan cabinet, but President Reagan ultimately supports the treaty provisions.** As Cass Sunstein later observes in The New York Times, “There is a real irony here. Republicans and conservatives had ridiculed scientists who expressed concern about the destruction of the ozone layer. How did Ronald Reagan, of all people, come to favor aggressive regulatory steps and lead the world toward a strong and historic international agreement? A large part of the answer lies in a tool disliked by many progressives but embraced by Reagan (and Mr. Obama): cost-benefit analysis. Reagan’s economists found that the costs of phasing out ozone-depleting chemicals were a lot lower than the costs of not doing so — largely measured in terms of avoiding cancers that would otherwise occur. Presented with that analysis, Reagan decided that the issue was pretty clear.”*** * United Nations Environment Program, Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer (New York: United Nations, March 22, 1985), https://treaties.un.org/pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XXVII-2&chapter=27&clang=_en ** Robert A. Wampler, “US Climate Change Policy in the 1980’s,” George Washington University National Security Archive, Dec. 2, 2015, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB536-Reagan-Bush-Recognized-Need-for-US-Leadership-on-Climate-Change-in1980s/ ***Cass Sunstein, “Climate Change: Lessons from Ronald Reagan,” New York Times, November 10, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/opinion/sunday/climate-change-lessons-from-ronald-reagan.html 1986 President Ronald Reagan removes the 32 solar panels that President Jimmy Carter installed on the White House roof in 1979 As David Biello reports in a 2010 article in Scientific American: “ ‘Hey! That system is working. Why don't you keep it?’ recalls mechanical engineer Fred Morse, now of Abengoa Solar, who helped install the original solar panels as director of the solar energy program during the Carter years and then watched as they were dismantled during his tenure in the same job under Reagan. ‘Hey! This whole [renewable] R&D program is working, why don't you keep it?’” The development director of Unity College in Maine, Peter Marbach, asks for the panels, and former President Jimmy Carter and Maine Senator William Cohen support the effort to move them to Maine. For a fee of $500 to the General Services Administration, Unity College takes possession of 16 of the panels, and drives them to Maine in a battered blue school bus to Maine, for installation on the Unity College cafeteria. “The rest went back into storage, too big to fit in an area that is much smaller than the White House roof. Once Marbach arrived back at the college, donations flooded in to help refurbish and install them, including a gift of $150,000 worth of pre–Mobil merger Exxon stock, money from actress Glenn Close and a mention by Al Gore during a campaign stop in Maine that year.” Some of the remaining panels are now in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Carter Library, and the Solar Science and Technology Museum in Dezhou, China. Observes Biello: “China now produce[s] some 80 percent of the solar water heaters used in the world today.”* [see 1979] *David Biello, “Where Did Carter’s White House’s Solar Panels Go?” Scientific American, August 6, 2010, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-house-solar-panel-array/ 1987 The Global Climate Protection Act mandates the development of a coordinated national policy on global climate change The Act articulates a substantially higher level of Congressional concern than did the 1978 National Climate Program Act, which it amends. Congressional findings are that “(1) There exists evidence that manmade pollution—the release of carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, methane, and other trace gases into the atmosphere—may be producing a long-term and substantial increase in the average temperature on Earth, a phenomenon known as global warming through the greenhouse effect. (2) By early in the next century, an increase in Earth temperature could (A) so alter global weather patterns as to have an effect on existing agricultural production and on the habitability of large portions of the Earth; and (B) cause thermal expansion of the oceans and partial melting of the polar ice caps and glaciers, resulting in rising sea levels… (4) While the consequences of the greenhouse effect may not be fully manifest until the next century, ongoing pollution and deforestation may be contributing now to an irreversible process. Necessary actions must be identified and implemented in time to protect the climate. (5) The global nature of this problem will require vigorous efforts to achieve international cooperation aimed at minimizing and responding to adverse climate change; such international cooperation will be greatly enhanced by United States leadership.” Congress accordingly mandates the following goals for national climate action: “United States policy should seek to— (1) increase worldwide understanding of the greenhouse effect and its environmental and health consequences; (2) foster cooperation among nations to develop more extensive and coordinated scientific research efforts with respect to the greenhouse effect; (3) identify technologies and activities to limit mankind's adverse effect on the global climate by— (A) slowing the rate of increase of concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in the near term; and (B) stabilizing or reducing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases over the long term.” * *Global Climate Protection Act of 1987, Pub. L. 100–204, title XI, Dec. 22, 1987, 101 Stat. 1407, https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2011-title15/html/USCODE-2011-title15-chap56.htm 1988 (June) NASA scientist James Hansen testifies in Congress on the reality of global warming, and its impact on current experiences of extreme weather During an unusually hot summer, NASA scientist James Hansen testifies in Congress on the reality of global warming: “Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to affect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves.”* Also testifying in this hearing are Syukuro Manabe of NASA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory [see 1967], Dr. George Woodwell, director of the Woods Hole Research Center, and Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric physicist with the Environmental Defense Fund. As The New York Times reports, “Until now, scientists have been cautious about attributing rising global temperatures of recent years to the predicted global warming caused by pollutants in the atmosphere, known as the ‘greenhouse effect.’ But today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.”** *Dr. James Hansen, “Statement from Dr. James Hansen, Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies” (Speech, New York, June 23, 1988) http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Environment/documents/2008/06/23/ClimateChangeHearing1988.pdf **Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun, Experts tell Senate,” New York Times, June 24, 1988, http://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/24/us/global-warming-has-begun-expert-tells-senate.html?pagewanted=all 1988 (June) Politicians from 46 nations and more than 300 scientists convene in Toronto at the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere Dubbed “Woodstock for climate change” by The New York Times, the final unanimous recommendation of the participants endorses a call for a 20 percent reduction in global carbon emissions by 2005.* * Nathaniel Rich and George Steinmetz, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” New York Times, August 1, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html 1988 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is created by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme The idea of an international organization under the United Nations focused on climate science and policy was originally proposed by UN officials in 1985, but rejected by the Reagan Administration, the Soviet Union and others, which preferred that this work be directed by domestic institutions and agencies. In 1987, according to an analysis by Tana Johnson, “Suddenly, the situation changed. By 1987, the Ronald Reagan administration in the United States hammered out a proposal for a new institution called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Other states were excluded from the deliberations but swiftly rubber-stamped the plan. Thus, in a brief period, the institutions addressing climate change shifted markedly. From being under the sole purview of domestic agencies, the issue was taken up by a new international body.”* The IPCC’s stated mission is “to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts.” The IPCC “reviews and assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change. It does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters.” All members of the United Nations are entitled to membership in the IPCC. As stated on the IPCC’s web page: “Because of its scientific and intergovernmental nature, the IPCC embodies a unique opportunity to provide rigorous and balanced scientific information to decision makers. By endorsing the IPCC reports, governments acknowledge the authority of their scientific content. The work of the organization is therefore policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive.”** *Tana Johnson, Organizational Progeny: Why Governments are Losing Control over the Proliferating Structures of Global Governance (Oxford University Press, 2014), 1, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/535bc5d5e4b0264746466c9f/t/54333741e4b075883baa9ad1/1412642625536/Chapter1_Organiz ational_Progeny_Tana_Johnson.pdf ** United Nations, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, accessed January 14, 2020, https://www.ipcc.ch/organization/organization.shtml 1988 The United Nations General Assembly starts the process of creating a treaty on climate change Declaring that “climate change is a common concern of mankind,” the General Assembly establishes an international committee to negotiate a climate change treaty at the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development. The General Assembly resolution “[r]equests the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization and the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, immediately to initiate action leading, as soon as possible, to a comprehensive review and recommendations with respect to:… (c) Possible response strategies to delay, limit or mitigate the impact of adverse climate change; (d) The identification and possible strengthening of relevant existing international legal instruments having a bearing on climate; (e) Elements for inclusion in a possible future international convention on climate.”* * “Resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, Conference on Environment and Development,” 43/196, United Nations, December 6, 1988, https://undocs.org/en/A/RES/43/196 1988 Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush promises in a campaign speech to act against climate change In Michigan on August 31, Bush states, ''Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forget about the 'White House effect'; as President, I intend to do something about it.'' He promises to convene an international conference on the environment. ''We will talk about global warming,'' he said, ''and we will act.'' Eight months later The New York Times notes that “Mr. Bush has not acted. He hasn't called for an international conference or even arranged a conference of his own policy makers to resolve their differences. Hence he is hearing no clear advice.”* *Editorial Board, “The White House and the Greenhouse,” New York Times, May 9, 1989, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/09/opinion/the-white-house-and-the-greenhouse.html 1989 A Department of State briefing memorandum urges the G.H.W. Bush Administration to engage proactively on the issue of climate change According to the February 15, 1989 Department of State briefing memorandum (declassified March 2015), climate change is “the most far reaching environmental issue of our time:” “There is no way that the U.S. can develop a credible international strategy on climate change unless it addresses U.S. emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion. Once we have developed a domestic strategy for stabilizing and then reducing our use of fossil fuels over time, we can then develop an international strategy which is consistent with our domestic strategy.” Another briefing memorandum dated February 9, 1989 and declassified in March 2015 from Frederick Bernthal, Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environment and Scientific Affairs, observes, “While it is clear that we need to know more about climate change, prudence dictates that we also begin to weigh impacts and possible responses. We simply cannot wait— the costs of inaction will be too high.”* * Department of State briefing memorandum, February 9, 1989, reprinted in Robert A. Wampler, “U.S. Climate Change Policy in the 1980’s,” George Washington University National Security Archive, December 2, 2015, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB536-Reagan-Bush-Recognized-Need-for-US-Leadership-on-Climate-Change-in-1980s/ 1989 The conservative George C. Marshall Institute issues its first report attacking climate science The conservative George C. Marshall Institute, with economist William Nierenberg [see 1983] on its Board, issues its first report attacking climate science. As described by historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, “Their initial strategy wasn’t to deny the fact of global warming but to blame it on the Sun. They circulated an unpublished ‘white paper’ …published as a small book the following year, entitled, ‘Global Warming: What Does the Science Tell Us?’ Echoing the tobacco industry strategy, they claimed the report would set the record straight on global warming. The Institute’s Washington office staff contacted the White House to request an opportunity to present it. Nierenberg gave the briefing himself, to members of the Office of Cabinet Affairs, the Office of Policy Development, the Council of Economic Advisors, and the Office of Management and Budget.” Presentations of the report to the G.H.W. Bush Administration “had a big impact, stopping the positive momentum that had been building” on climate change policy.* *Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 186-7. 1989 The G.H.W. Bush Administration takes unprecedented steps to censor a government scientist’s Congressional testimony on climate change. In testimony delivered to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Review on March 19, 2007, NASA scientist James Hansen stated that “[d]uring the past 25 years I have noticed an increase in the degree of political interference with scientific testimony to Congress.” He in particular describes a difference between his various testimonies to Congress during the Reagan Administration, where there was only one case where he and White House reviewers could not agree on acceptable language, and in that case he was given permission to testify “as an individual,” and negotiations with the G.H.W.Bush White House on testimony in 1989: “In 1989, after climate change had become of greater public and political concern, the constraints on communication via congressional testimony became stricter, at least in my experience. When I submitted written testimony to NASA Headquarters in 1989 for presentation to a Senate Committee chaired by Senator Gore, my secretary was instructed by NASA Headquarters to send the original typescript to NASA Headquarters so that they could insert several changes that were required by the White House OMB [Office of Management and Budget]. When I was informed of this I was angered, intercepted the typescript, and insisted that any changes had to be made in my office. Several acceptable rewordings were negotiated (NASA Headquarters being the intermediary between OMB and me), but three changes that OMB required were unacceptable to me. Unlike the case earlier in the 1980s, I was told by NASA Headquarters that I needed to accept the changes or not testify. I agreed to accept the changes, but I then sent a fax to Senator Gore requesting that he ask me during the hearing about those specific statements, because I wanted to make clear that they were the opinion of the White House OMB, not my opinion.” The changes demanded by the White House, detailed by Hansen in his 2007 testimony served either to exaggerate uncertainties about climate science, or discourage policy responses. * *James E. Hansen, “Political Interference with Government Climate Science,” Testimony before the Committee on Oversight and Government Review, U.S. House of Representatives, March 19, 2007, http://www.columbia.edu/_{jeh1/2007/Testimony_20070319.pdf}; Nathaniel Rich and George Steinmetz, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” New York Times, August 1, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html 1989 United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warns the United Nations General Assembly about the threat of climate change Prime Minister Thatcher, who holds a degree in chemistry from Oxford and has worked as a research chemist, states that “Of all the challenges faced by the world community in [the previous] four years, one has grown clearer than any other in both urgency and importance—I refer to the threat to our global environment. I shall take the opportunity of addressing the general assembly to speak on that subject alone.” Thatcher notes that, “We are seeing a vast increase in the amount of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere. The annual increase is three billion tonnes: and half the carbon emitted since the Industrial Revolution still remains in the atmosphere… Put in its bluntest form: the main threat to our environment is more and more people, and their activities: The land they cultivate ever more intensively; The forests they cut down and burn; The mountain sides they lay bare; The fossil fuels they burn; The rivers and the seas they pollute. The result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto. Change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world's climate, which could alter the way we live in the most fundamental way of all. That prospect is a new factor in human affairs. It is comparable in its implications to the discovery of how to split the atom. Indeed, its results could be even more far-reaching.”* *Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to the United Nations General Assembly (Global Environment),” (Speech, New York, November 8, 1989, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107817 1990 First assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: increase in global temperatures during the next century “greater than seen over the past 10,000 years” The first assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the result of the work of several hundred scientists from 25 countries, and describes itself as “the most authoritative and strongly supported statement on climate change that has ever been made by the international scientific community.” The Executive Summary begins with the statement: “We are certain that:… emissions resulting from human activities are substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and nitrous oxide These increases will enhance the greenhouse effect, resulting on average in an additional warming of the Earth's surface The main greenhouse gas, water vapour, will increase in response to global warming and further enhance it.” The IPCC predicts based on current models that under “Business-as-Usual” emissions of greenhouse gases the planet will experience “a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1°C above the present value by 2025 and 3°C before the end of the next century.” With respect to mitigation efforts, the report cautions that “the long-lived gases [carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, and chlorofluorocarbons] would require immediate reductions in emissions from human activities of over 60% to stabilise their concentrations at today's levels.” The report addresses and rejects the Marshall Institute argument for blaming the sun: “On a decadal time-scale solar variability and changes in greenhouse gas concentration could give changes of similar magnitudes. However …over longer time-scales the increases in greenhouse gases are likely to be more important…The changes predicted to occur by about the middle of the next century due to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations from the Business-as-Usual emissions will make global mean temperatures higher than they have been in the last 150,000 years.”* *Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment (Ca

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