The Age of Global Warming: A History (7 page)

*  The 1930s drought is now attributed to a cooler Pacific and warmer Atlantic diverting and weakening the jet stream blowing from the Atlantic away from the Midwest  (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0319dustbowl.html).

5

Turning Point

Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future … This experiment, if adequately documented, may yield a far-reaching insight into the processes determining weather and climate.

Hans Suess and Roger Revelle, 1957
[1]

In 1962, when
Silent Spring
was first published, ‘environment’ was not even an entry in the vocabulary of public policy.

Al Gore
[2]

After the Second World War, Callendar exchanged ideas with the younger generation of climate scientists such as Gilbert Plass and Charles Keeling. In 1956, Keeling obtained funding for an observatory at Mauna Loa in Hawaii to record atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. Over time, results from Mauna Loa would show rising levels of carbon dioxide, the Keeling Curve as it became known. 

Five years later, Callendar finished the last of his essays. In his 1938 paper, he wrote that ‘the course of world temperatures during the next twenty years should afford valuable evidence as to the accuracy of the calculated effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide’.
[3]
His 1961 paper concluded that the trend toward higher temperatures was significant. Yet Callendar’s confidence was undermined by the downturn in global temperatures in the 1950s and 1960s. England’s three skating Christmases of 1961, 1962 and 1963 – the coldest since 1740 – shook Callendar’s belief in the Callendar Effect.
[4]

The post-war era began by subscribing to Francis Bacon’s belief that the progress of science and technology aid mankind’s mastery of nature and improve his material wellbeing. That belief was to be challenged and then recede over the course the second half of the twentieth century. During it, the prime source of ideological hostility to the Baconian view of man’s relationship with nature shifted from the Right to the Left of the political spectrum; the conservationism of the century’s first half would be supplanted by environmentalism and the public role of scientists would change from illuminating and enabling mankind’s progress along the path of greater material wellbeing to issuing warnings about economic growth and telling governments how they should mitigate the effects of such progress. For a development of such enormity, it all happened with surprising speed.

The end of the Second World War and the start of the Cold War saw the return of fears that the US might run out of raw materials, exacerbated by the Korean War. In January 1951, President Truman appointed William Paley, president of the CBS network, to head a Materials Policy Commission. ‘We cannot allow shortages of materials to jeopardize our national security nor to become a bottleneck to our economic expansion,’ Truman wrote to Paley.
[5]
  

When its eight-hundred-and-nineteen-page report,
Resources for Freedom
, appeared the following year, it was unmistakably a product of its time.

The United States, once criticised as the creator of a crassly materialistic order of things, is today throwing its might into the task of keeping alive the spirit of Man and helping beat back from the frontiers of the free world everywhere the threats of force and of a new Dark Age which rise from the Communist nations. In defeating this barbarian violence moral values will count most, but they must be supported by an ample materials base. Indeed, the interdependence of moral and material values has never been so completely demonstrated as today, when all the world has seen the narrowness of its escape from the now dead Nazi tyranny and has yet to know the breadth by which it will escape the live Communist one.
[6]

Soaring demand, shrinking resources, upward pressure on costs, the risk of wartime shortages all threatened to stop or reverse Americans’ rising standard of living. It sounded as if
Resources for Freedom
would be the latest product of the Jevons cookie cutter. Instead,
Resources for Freedom
turned out to be the most comprehensive official statement of the ameliorist position made by any government or intergovernmental body before or since. It was a popular fallacy, the report concluded, ‘to regard our resource base as a fixed inventory which, when used up, will leave society with no means of survival’. American history showed why. ‘In developing America,’ the commission asserted, ‘our forebears consumed resources extravagantly, but we are certainly better off in materials than they were. It would be unreasonable for us, their posterity, to suggest that they should have consumed less so that we might consume more.’
[7]

Using resources today is an essential part of making our economy grow … Hoarding resources in the expectation of more important uses later involves a sacrifice that may never be recouped; technological changes and new resource discoveries may alter a situation completely.
[8]

To act in this way, the report suggested, would be rather like the early settlers of New England conserving bayberries to provide light for a generation that lives by kilowatts.

At times, the report reads like a point-by-point refutation of Jevons. On recycling, it sided with Keynes, who, as we saw in Chapter Three, had criticised Jevons for hoarding scraps of paper. It was another popular fallacy, the commission said, to equate physical waste with economic waste, an attitude which can lead to ‘devoting a dollar’s worth of work to “saving” a few cents’ worth of waste paper and old string.’
[9]
The waste paper bin does have an economic function after all.

The commission had three fundamental convictions. Growth is good (‘it seems preferable to any opposite, which to us implies stagnation and decay,’ was the common sense justification); belief in private enterprise, the profit motive and the price system; and internationalism.
[10]
Trade was good for America and America was stronger when its allies were stronger. If the US did not work to raise living standards in the rest of the free world, it would ‘hamper and impede further rise of our own, and equally lessen the changes of democracy to prosper and peace to reign the world over.’
[11]

Resources for Freedom
made two fundamental recommendations – a do and a don’t to maximise economic efficiency. ‘There is no magic formula which will yield the right answers … Yet there is one basic economic principle which, if applied to the limit of available facts and injected consciously into each judgment, can provide a basic thread of consistency. THE LEAST COST PRINCIPLE.’
[12]
The commission recognised the risk of interest groups exploiting political concern about the availability of resource supplies to cut legal privileges and special deals for themselves.

The second recommendation was a plea to avoid protectionism and autarky. ‘The United States must reject self-sufficiency as a policy and instead adopt the policy of the lowest cost acquisition of materials wherever secure supplies may be found.’ The idea of self-sufficiency, the commission observed, ‘amounts to a self-imposed blockade and nothing more.’
[13]
It urged that tariff and other barriers to trade be removed, as these were adding to the free world’s material problems. ‘By interfering with market pressures of supply and demand, they prevent normal development of the tendency to move toward the lowest cost sources of materials – a movement which, as the commission has pointed out, is essential in promoting the most rapid economic growth of both the United States and the less developed countries.’
[14]

The US should unilaterally eliminate import duties on any commodity if the US was likely to become dependent on it. In the case of petroleum – ‘the great enigma of future energy supplies’ – the commission envisaged with equanimity that by 1975 the US would have increasingly turned to foreign supplies, although it suggested stockpiling in case of war.
[15]
It went on to urge repeal of the Buy American Act 1933 and similar protectionist legislation, ‘a relic of depression years and depression psychology’.

In the history of concern about industrialised societies running out of resources, which started in 1865 and continues to the present,
Resources for Freedom
stands apart. Based on its examination of history, the commission rejected the depletionists’ assumption that there was a fixed lump of resource which, when used up, was gone forever. Compared to the drumbeat of depletionist reports that punctuated the 1970s prophesying resource-induced and environmental catastrophes before the end of the twentieth century, the view of the world set out in
Resources for Freedom
turned out to be right. The world reached 1975 (the time horizon adopted in the report) and the beginning of the twenty-first century closer to the state envisaged in
Resources for Freedom
than the predictions made by the depletionists. For that reason alone,
Resources for Freedom
demands attention and a respectful hearing.

It would have been easy for the Paley Commission to have lapsed in to paranoia. The international situation in 1952 was much riskier than fifty years later. The Soviet Union had acquired the Bomb, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, and the US and its allies were fighting a war in Korea in which the American commander had requested the use of atomic weapons against China.

The policy optimism of
Resources for Freedom
reflected the outlook of a governing elite that a few years earlier had led America to victory in the Second World War and had just put in place the architecture that would win the Cold War. It was confident about America’s future and the capacity of its economy to keep growing. It had the self-confidence to be internationalist. Far from falling for the illusion of ‘energy independence’,
Resources for Freedom
recognised that American prosperity and security were enhanced by an open trading system.

The same year as the Paley Commission produced its report, Congress passed the Domestic Minerals Program Extension Act. It requires the federal government to reduce American dependency on foreign sources of critical or strategic materials and remains in force to this day. In 2003 congressional testimony, the director of the US Geological Survey admitted that shortly after passage of the Act, ‘minerals were in surplus rather than shortage … by 1956, even uranium was in over-supply’.
[16]
Thus within months of the Paley Commission’s report, the market had solved the problem it had been established to examine, insofar as there had been one in the first place. It would be another twenty years before politicians and policymakers thought that they, rather than markets, were needed to solve the problem of resource scarcity.

Long-term, the commission foresaw little risk of resource depletion. As land-based resources became more costly, and as technology improved, man would increasingly turn to the sea.  ‘Covering seventy-one per cent of the earth’s surface, the sea is a great reservoir of minerals. In its three hundred million cubic miles of water, the sea probably contains, in solution, all the elements found in the earth’s crust.’
[17]

Such a view would have confirmed the worst fears of Rachel Carson, an aquatic biologist working for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, whose book,
The Sea Around Us
, had been published the previous year. ‘We will become even more dependent upon the ocean as we destroy the land’ – a view which reflected what one of her admirers has called her aesthetic of ocean-centrism.
[18]

Although trained as a scientist, Carson had always assumed she was going to be a writer. She majored in English, switching to zoology. ‘I thought I had to be one or the other; it never occurred to me, or apparently anyone else, that I could combine the two.’
[19]
  Her favourite writers were Henry Thoreau and Henry Williamson. She kept Thoreau’s journal beside her bed and her first book,
Under the Sea Wind
, was inspired by Williamson’s
Salar the Salmon
.
[20]

‘I never predicted the book would have a smashing success,’ Carson said of
Silent Spring
, which was published in 1962.
[21]
It spent much of that autumn at the top of the
New York Times
bestseller list and sold over one hundred thousand copies in the week before Christmas. In August,
Silent Spring
sparked a question at President Kennedy’s press conference on the dangers of DDT, leading to a report by the President’s Science Advisory Committee. It concluded that Carson had been right to warn about the dangers of pesticides. In his address to the UN General Assembly in September, President Kennedy tried to move international relations beyond Cold War divisions to the common challenge of improving the conditions of mankind. Plunder and pollution were the foes of every nation and Kennedy proposed a worldwide programme of conservation.
[22]

At one level, Carson’s crusade against pesticides failed.
[23]
According to an official Environmental Protection Agency appreciation of
Silent Spring
sixteen years on, ‘Americans now apply more than twice the amount of pesticides they did before
Silent Spring
was published.’
[24]
What
Silent Spring
changed was vastly more consequential. In a review for the Book-of-the-Month Club, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas compared
Silent Spring
to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
for its revolutionary implications.

‘You are a poet not only because you use words so well,’ wrote one of her fans in a letter that evidently meant much to Carson as she copied it to a friend, ‘but because by describing non-human life, you make us readers understand our place on earth so much better. As I drive home along the Hudson tonight I’ll feel more human for having read your lovely, loving words today.’
[25]

Silent Spring
’s title was a masterstroke, suggested to Carson by her editor. Discarded titles included ‘Man against the Earth’ and ‘The War against Nature’, which better describe the larger dimension of the book’s purpose at the cost of the book’s capacity to provoke the kinds of reaction (those lovely, loving words) if its purpose had been made plain in its title. Spring has an almost religious quality about it. ‘In a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven,’ Thoreau wrote in
Walden
. ‘Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbours … There is not only an atmosphere of good will about him, but even a savour of holiness groping for expression.’
[26]
For modern man to destroy spring is tantamount to extinguishing the possibility of redemption.

The book opens with what Carson described as a fable for tomorrow, the silent spring. A rural town in the heart of America hit by a ‘strange blight’ casting an ‘evil spell’; sudden deaths which doctors couldn’t explain – children dead within a few hours; apple trees that yielded no fruit; birds that trembled violently and couldn’t fly: ‘No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.’
[27]
Although the town did not exist, Carson wrote that every one of the disasters had actually happened somewhere, allegedly silencing the voices of spring in countless towns across America.
[28]

The book proceeds to catalogue a string of disasters. A dog and baby exposed to an insecticide. Within an hour the dog is dead and the baby little more than a vegetable.
[29]
Two children in Florida dead after touching a bag that contained a Parathion – a favourite means of committing suicide in Finland, we’re told.
[30]
An unfortunate chemist who swallowed 0.0424 ounces of Parathion to assess its effects – paralysed before he could reach the antidotes.
[31]
The housewife scared of spiders who sprayed her house three times with an aerosol containing DDT and petroleum distillate. She felt unwell, saw a doctor and was found to be suffering from acute leukaemia – dead the next month.
[32]