Speaker 1: The past two years has seen the Supreme Court of
Speaker 1: the United States fundamentally reshaped the government's ability to regulate
Speaker 1: greenhouse gas emissions. I'm primarily talking about rulings in three
Speaker 1: cases West Virginia versus EPA in twenty twenty two, and
Speaker 1: then two cases called Loperbright and Corner Post in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four. Loperbright got a lot of attention because it
Speaker 1: is the case that got rid of what's called Chevron deference.
Speaker 1: Chevron deference was a president that was in place for
Speaker 1: a number of decades. It basically said that when legislation
Speaker 1: or a particular statute has not been explicit about exactly
Speaker 1: how a law should be implemented by an agency, it's
Speaker 1: up to that agency to decide how to implement the law.
Speaker 1: The idea of being that laws are often quite vague,
Speaker 1: it's up to regulatory agencies to implement those laws based
Speaker 1: on what they're exports are telling them. That is gone now,
Speaker 1: which means prepare to see a lot of lawsuits about regulations,
Speaker 1: particularly environmental regulations. The Corner Post ruling came out during
Speaker 1: the same Supreme Court session and got almost no coverage,
Speaker 1: but is equally problematic when it comes to environmental and
Speaker 1: climate policy. That case got rid of the statute of
Speaker 1: limitations on legal challenges to previously passed legislation. So if
Speaker 1: you think about the most recent ten years or so,
Speaker 1: you know, an administration comes in, they pass a new
Speaker 1: power plant rule, it gets challenged, that makes its way
Speaker 1: through the court. We have not seen, for example, a
Speaker 1: challenge to a rule that came about in the Clinton
Speaker 1: administration because there was a statute of limitations on that
Speaker 1: sort of litigation. Now that's gone. So just think about
Speaker 1: what that might mean if the Koch brothers, for example,
Speaker 1: continue to fire up their litigation machine and start filing
Speaker 1: suits challenging all of the past twenty years worth of
Speaker 1: environmental regulations. That is what we are in for in
Speaker 1: the years ahead now. Before West Virginia came along and
Speaker 1: said that because the Cleaner Act didn't explicitly lay out
Speaker 1: climate policy, the EPA cannot use it to regulate greenhouse
Speaker 1: gas emissions. Another case, Massachusetts versus EPA, ruled that in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy when the Clean Air Act was passed, climate
Speaker 1: science was quote in its infancy, and they inferred from
Speaker 1: that that Congress could not possibly have meant for that
Speaker 1: Act to be used to regulate anything related to climate change.
Speaker 1: In a new study in Ecology Quarterly, Naomia Rescuez and
Speaker 1: a handful of other researchers with her at Harvard University
Speaker 1: decided to look into whether that is even true this
Speaker 1: idea that climate science was in its infancy in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: What they found was that climate science really was not
Speaker 1: in its infancy in nineteen seventy. Then, in fact, there
Speaker 1: was not only quite a bit of scientific knowledge about
Speaker 1: climate change, both at the oil companies themselves as we know,
Speaker 1: and also in the government, but that even in a
Speaker 1: lot of popular culture, climate change as a thing that
Speaker 1: was happening and that was understood to be caused by
Speaker 1: fossil fuel combustion, was pretty commonly known. They found all
Speaker 1: of these really incredible examples of late night talk shows
Speaker 1: talking about it, beat poets talking about it, movies, TV shows,
Speaker 1: all kinds of spots where it seemed unlikely that people
Speaker 1: would be talking about this issue if it was not
Speaker 1: more widely known. That research calls into question a lot
Speaker 1: of the assumptions that some of these recent rulings have
Speaker 1: been based on, which makes things a little more interesting.
Speaker 1: I talked to Aresquez about her research, what was new
Speaker 1: and surprising to her, how this history shapes how we
Speaker 1: understand the whole history of climate science in general. And
Speaker 1: I also called up Patrick Parento at Vermont Law School
Speaker 1: to ask about how this new research might play into
Speaker 1: the cases we're expecting to see in the next couple
Speaker 1: of years. That's all coming up after this quick break.
Speaker 1: I'm Amy Westervelt and this is drilled. I wanted to
Speaker 1: just ask you first, what prompted you to start looking
Speaker 1: into this. Did you start doing the research after West
Speaker 1: Virginia versus EPA or was there another.
Speaker 2: Well, this paper has been super long in coming, and
Speaker 2: it's actually taken a long time, partly because it turned
Speaker 2: out to be a much much bigger project than we expected.
Speaker 2: That party is, we all had other day jobs, so
Speaker 2: this is like being actually as a second project or
Speaker 2: a third project. So the short answer is, actually, I've
Speaker 2: been interested in this question really ever since Mass versus EPA,
Speaker 2: when Big in court said that in nineteen seventy climate
Speaker 2: science was in its infancy and implied therefore that there
Speaker 2: was no way Congress could have really understood the problem
Speaker 2: enough for them to intend for the cleaner app to
Speaker 2: apply to CO two rehouse gases. Yes, well, I say science,
Speaker 2: who was working on the history of cloud science. That
Speaker 2: statement that client science was in its infancy.
Speaker 3: I knew it was wrong.
Speaker 2: I just knew that was false, because already by that
Speaker 2: time I had been working probably about five years already
Speaker 2: on the history of climate science.
Speaker 3: And I knew that already in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2: You know, in the fifties we see the beginning of
Speaker 2: what becomes a sustained you know, half a century of
Speaker 2: important scientific work on CO two, the greenhouse effair and
Speaker 2: its potential implications. But what I didn't know was how
Speaker 2: much had that been communicated to government. And you might
Speaker 2: recall Emergency of Doubt. We cite the nineteen sixty five
Speaker 2: Peace Sack Report on Environment that has a whole appendix
Speaker 2: about climate change. And we know by the time we
Speaker 2: wrote Merchants of Doubt, which was in twenty ten, we
Speaker 2: knew that at least President Johnson was aware of it.
Speaker 2: We know that that report landed on his desk, and
Speaker 2: we know that he mentions CO two and climate in
Speaker 2: his Special Message to Congress that year. So I knew
Speaker 2: that there was a pretty significant scientific conversation already taking
Speaker 2: place by nineteen sixty five. I knew that Dave Keeling
Speaker 2: by sixty five had already concluded that he had enough
Speaker 2: data to say, Yeah, this is going to be a
Speaker 2: big deal. And we knew that it had reached the
Speaker 2: executive branch through Peasact. But what we didn't know at
Speaker 2: that time was how broad was the conversation and did
Speaker 2: Congress know about this, because obviously we have separation of
Speaker 2: powers in the US government, so it's plausible that, you know,
Speaker 2: the executive branch might know stuff that they did not
Speaker 2: communicate clearly to the legislative branch. So that was something
Speaker 2: that I had been interested in for a long time.
Speaker 2: And then at some point I can't remember exactly when
Speaker 2: this was, but it was shortly after I moved to Harvard's.
Speaker 2: This would have been twenty thirteen, fourteen fifteen, something like that.
Speaker 2: Jody Freeman called me kind of asking the same question,
Speaker 2: you know, what did we know about what was known
Speaker 2: about this issue when the Cleaner Act was written. Because
Speaker 2: the preambleton Cleaner Act includes the words whether in climate
Speaker 2: so ut any straightforward, non tortured reading of the statue,
Speaker 2: it obviously relates to weather and climate, because the words
Speaker 2: are in the statue and were that you talks about impacts.
Speaker 3: Impacts on weather and climate are one of the things
Speaker 3: they say. It seems pretty obvious.
Speaker 2: But the other side had argued in a couple of
Speaker 2: amikas briefs, oh, well, when they used the word climate,
Speaker 2: they didn't really mean it the way we mean it
Speaker 2: today to mean global climate change. They were just talking
Speaker 2: about the climate of California or the climate of North Carolina.
Speaker 2: They were thinking about local effects and climate. Well, so
Speaker 2: we thought, well we could answer that question. And it
Speaker 2: is true that sometimes words can be used in different ways,
Speaker 2: and it is true the word climate can refer to
Speaker 2: local or global climate.
Speaker 3: So I hired.
Speaker 2: Colleen, my GRADUA student coming in the near Christiansen, who's
Speaker 2: the second althar on the paper, to just do a
Speaker 2: little bit of digging, and very quickly the project grew
Speaker 2: and we discovered this really astonishingly broad and deep conversation
Speaker 2: among scientists and among Congress and members of Congress about
Speaker 2: this issue about global climate change related to greenhouse gases
Speaker 2: in the atmosphere. And so we started working on this,
Speaker 2: raised a little money pay for calling to be a
Speaker 2: research assisted and as it grew, when we found more
Speaker 2: relevant things than we recruited in Hanna Conway to join
Speaker 2: the project. And then West Virginia happened, and this so
Speaker 2: called Major Questions doctrine. And one of the things that
Speaker 2: the court said in that case, as you know, was
Speaker 2: to introduce the standard of the vast economic and political significance,
Speaker 2: and generally that if something is a vast economic and
Speaker 2: political significance, that it raises the bar for agency regulation,
Speaker 2: and that therefore the statute has to be absolutely explicit
Speaker 2: before an agency could make choices. Now, we could argue
Speaker 2: about the justificational wisdom of that claim, but I'm not
Speaker 2: a legal experts so.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't want to get into that.
Speaker 2: But what we did know when that decision came out
Speaker 2: was that we actually had people in the nineteen sixties
Speaker 2: talking about the potentially vast economic and political significance of
Speaker 2: doing something about C two, And we even had conferences
Speaker 2: where people from Ford Motor Company had been at the
Speaker 2: conference discussing these issues. There was a report on electric
Speaker 2: cars by the Department of Transportation that specifically talks about
Speaker 2: how CO two might force us to convert the entire
Speaker 2: automobile fleet to electric. Well that kind of lit a
Speaker 2: fire on us and said, Okay, we've a work on
Speaker 2: this project for years, kind of back burner. We need
Speaker 2: to put this on the front burner and we need
Speaker 2: to get this written. And so that's the story about
Speaker 2: the paper and why it's now coming out. So it
Speaker 2: absolutely is relevant to West Virginia, but it was not
Speaker 2: motivated originally about West Virginia.
Speaker 3: That's so interesting.
Speaker 1: I know you're not a legal scholar, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to try not to ask you legal strategy question.
Speaker 3: But I have curious if you've heard from folks.
Speaker 1: In the legal realm about how having this information might
Speaker 1: help with the next I mean, like, I know, the
Speaker 1: EPA's most recent power plant guidelines have already been challenged,
Speaker 1: and I imagine that they're going to fall into this
Speaker 1: thicket of major questions doctor and now post Shavon Dufferin's
Speaker 1: staff too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I'm sort of careful about that.
Speaker 2: I don't spend a lot of time talking to lawyers
Speaker 2: who are actively engaged in these kinds of cases in
Speaker 2: advance of me doing my research, because I really want
Speaker 2: us to look at the evidence as objective as possible
Speaker 2: and let the tips fall, and then it's up to
Speaker 2: lawyers and judges to decide the consequences and implications.
Speaker 3: So I mean, this isn't part of a legal strategy.
Speaker 2: And although I'm sure that some of our opponents will
Speaker 2: probably claim that it's not part of a legal strategy,
Speaker 2: wasn't written to support any kind of particular legal approach,
Speaker 2: or much less any particular case. But obviously we think
Speaker 2: it has implications. We wouldn't have done the work if
Speaker 2: we didn't think it mattered. And so let me read
Speaker 2: you something that actually Ashton wrote in response to a
Speaker 2: query from a different journalist about this. So asked MacFarlane
Speaker 2: with jdphd student who's just finished his jd at Harvard
Speaker 2: Law School and now is working with me doing a PhD.
Speaker 2: And we recruited to partici making this party because we
Speaker 2: felt like we did want a little bit more legal insights.
Speaker 2: And he's studied with Jodi Freeman and Richard Lazarus and
Speaker 2: all the big name environmental law professors at Harvard. So
Speaker 2: here's why he wrote the major questions. Doctrine requires a
Speaker 2: clear statement from Congress to authorize regulatory action of vast
Speaker 2: economic and political significance. The doctrine reflects an assumption that
Speaker 2: Congress would be exceptionally clear when granting an agency highly
Speaker 2: significant regulatory power. How do we determine what counts as
Speaker 2: a quote major question and a quote clear statement. The
Speaker 2: Supreme Court has implied that the inquiry depends on both
Speaker 2: context and history. Yet the Court missed large swats of
Speaker 2: relevant history about climate change, which we present in this article.
Speaker 2: This history is important not only to the wholesale question
Speaker 2: of whether the Cleaner Act covers greenhouse gases, which we
Speaker 2: think it clearly does and our paper then supports that,
Speaker 2: but also to the retail question of whether any new
Speaker 2: climate regulation is sufficiently well authorized. And then he goes
Speaker 2: on to say, the Court has not said, perc actually
Speaker 2: how history informs the major question analysis, nor what types
Speaker 2: of historical material matter most. Our key point is there's
Speaker 2: a whole lot of history that the Court overlooked, and
Speaker 2: it should not overlook that history in future climate cases.
Speaker 2: And I guess what I would add to that is
Speaker 2: that so much of what the Court claimed was about
Speaker 2: this issue of the clear statement, and they've repeatedly implied
Speaker 2: both in Mass versus EPA and in West Virginia, you know,
Speaker 2: sort of continue to imply this idea that there's no
Speaker 2: way that Congress could really have intended this to apply
Speaker 2: to Co. Two A because they didn't really know and
Speaker 2: be because they hadn't anticipated the vast economic significance. And
Speaker 2: we think this paper shows that both of those implications
Speaker 2: are wrong.
Speaker 1: I called up Patrick Parento at Vermont Law School to
Speaker 1: ask about how this new research might come into play
Speaker 1: in some of the cases we expect to see in
Speaker 1: the months and years ahead.
Speaker 4: The bottom line is, what we're now talking about is
Speaker 4: the margin. We know we're going to lose almost all
Speaker 4: of the cases that make.
Speaker 5: It to the Supreme Court docket.
Speaker 4: It's now a question of can you in some cases
Speaker 4: work the margins?
Speaker 5: And that means either Roberts or Barrett, maybe.
Speaker 4: Even sometimes Kavanaugh, almost never Gorsich or Alito or Thomas.
Speaker 4: If you're alert as an advocate, as a lawyer arguing
Speaker 4: these cases.
Speaker 5: There's got to be a way to.
Speaker 4: Cobble together votes if you can convince them that the
Speaker 4: text of the statue ought to be interpreted in a
Speaker 4: certain way that they call the best reading.
Speaker 5: That's where we've come to. What's the best reading?
Speaker 4: Of the text of the statue, since we're all textualists now,
Speaker 4: as Justice Kagan has famously said, and so you know,
Speaker 4: the best reading does to some extent turn on what
Speaker 4: was on Congress's mind. Intend what can we infer from
Speaker 4: the type of words and language they used was their intent?
Speaker 5: And we know that both of the cases both are
Speaker 5: the rules I.
Speaker 4: Should say that are now in litigation, the car rules,
Speaker 4: the tail.
Speaker 5: Piper rules, and the power plant rules.
Speaker 4: We know the odds are one or both of them
Speaker 4: are going to wind up on the.
Speaker 5: Supreme Court docket.
Speaker 4: But the point is the combination of all these decisions
Speaker 4: West Virginia lowerl Bright Open Ruling, Chevron Corner Post knocking
Speaker 4: out the six year statute of limitations, meaning pretty of
Speaker 4: the rules on the books is fair game. We haven't
Speaker 4: begun to see the avalanche of lawsuits that we're going
Speaker 4: to see with specific legal foundation and Koch Brothers' money. Man,
Speaker 4: oh man, So you have to look at that whole
Speaker 4: suite that we've seen, and of course we've got more coming.
Speaker 4: When you look at that, the agency lawyers and.
Speaker 5: The staff technical staff, you.
Speaker 4: Know they've got to be thinking, man, can we get
Speaker 4: five votes? Can we get five votes, you know, and
Speaker 4: do you just do a headcount and you figure out
Speaker 4: who can we get to support this interpretation. But you know,
Speaker 4: they're zeroing in on already what was It's sometimes called
Speaker 4: antecedent interpretations of a statute.
Speaker 5: In this case, we're talking Clean Air Act.
Speaker 4: So for the car rules and the power plant rules,
Speaker 4: they're going back to the nineteen seventy Act, increasing forward
Speaker 4: and the history and how they've been interpreted before, so
Speaker 4: that the newest, the interpretation.
Speaker 6: Of today is not new. So now we'll find out.
Speaker 5: Now we will.
Speaker 6: Really find out if APA's attempts to testify these two rules.
Speaker 6: We'll find out whether it's possible for EPA to get
Speaker 6: the five votes they need to uphold these two rules,
Speaker 6: or whether Morrissey and Company West Virginia Company are right
Speaker 6: that no matter what EPA tries to do to address climates,
Speaker 6: they're going to lose because everything they do is a
Speaker 6: major question. They don't get any difference. The best breaking
Speaker 6: of the statue is not what EPA says it is.
Speaker 5: Et cetera.
Speaker 4: So in that sense, this really robust, sophisticated analysis of
Speaker 4: the history of the Clean Air Act, it's got to
Speaker 4: make a difference.
Speaker 1: Okay, there are a number of things in here that
Speaker 1: are really interesting and that had not been published before
Speaker 1: and that people did not know about in terms of
Speaker 1: this history. I imagine there were things that were surprising
Speaker 1: you too. What were some of the most surprising discoveries
Speaker 1: in terms of when people were talking about what, Well,
Speaker 1: there were.
Speaker 3: A bunch of things.
Speaker 2: The biggest surprise actually was was, you know, Sports Illustrated
Speaker 2: and the Weekly Reader, and just to see the way
Speaker 2: that this had permeated into popular culture and popular conversation
Speaker 2: very very early on, and I think we all fell
Speaker 2: in love with the Alan Ginsburg piece. Here's this beat poet, right,
Speaker 2: he's a poet, not a scientist. He's on the MERV
Speaker 2: Griffith Show, which is one of the most popular talk
Speaker 2: shows on television in those days. I mean MERV Griffith
Speaker 2: was the opera of the nineteen sixties. And he's talking
Speaker 2: about climate change. He's talking about the ice caps melting,
Speaker 2: and he's linking it to cars. He says, pollution from
Speaker 2: automobiles can melt the ice cap and you know, flood
Speaker 2: the coastal cities of the world. I mean, that is
Speaker 2: one hundred percent global climate change. As we understand it today,
Speaker 2: and Alan Ginsburg has got it in a nutshell in
Speaker 2: the nineteen sixties, he's talking about it on Primetime. And
Speaker 2: then the other piece I really loved was so then
Speaker 2: and Ashton found this. So then this angry constituent in
Speaker 2: Washington State rites to his senator, Henry Jackson. And Henry
Speaker 2: Jackson was one of the most famous powerful senators of
Speaker 2: that time, someone whose name was well known to me
Speaker 2: that I remember from my own childhood. I mean, I
Speaker 2: remember we didn't like Scoop Jackson because he was very
Speaker 2: pro Vietnam War. So this is a very famous name.
Speaker 2: I mean, this whole project, all these names that I
Speaker 2: already knew kept popping up. These were not minor people.
Speaker 2: So Scoop Jackson's one of the most powerful people in
Speaker 2: the US Congress at the time. The constituentent writes to
Speaker 2: him complaining, asking him to do something about it, and
Speaker 2: Jackson reads the letter and instead of just throwing it in
Speaker 2: the bin or thinking it's a hoax or whatever, or
Speaker 2: the guy's crazy, he writes a letter to the president's
Speaker 2: science advisor Lee to Bridge. This is the advisor to
Speaker 2: Richard Nixons or Republican president, and he says to to Bridge, well,
Speaker 2: you know what about this? Is there any truth in this?
Speaker 2: And Leegia Bridge writes back a multipage letter in which
Speaker 2: he explains very carefully and patiently. He explains to Henry
Speaker 2: Jackson that yes, actually this is a real thing. And
Speaker 2: then a few months later he goes on Meet the
Speaker 2: Press again mainstream American television to talk about the issue
Speaker 2: and even says we might need to have a carbon tax.
Speaker 2: And this is in nineteen sorry I fraid of sixteen
Speaker 2: nine or seventy, but right before the passage of the
Speaker 2: Cleaner Act. So here you have a powerful senator, the
Speaker 2: science advisor to a Republican president, just talking openly and
Speaker 2: honestly about this issue and not being dismissive, not thinking
Speaker 2: to hoax, but actually taking it seriously and trying to learn.
Speaker 3: And I just thought that was kind of beautiful. It's
Speaker 3: so interesting. I also bought the Frank Capra movie.
Speaker 2: Capra Will Be Speak To And you know, mister science,
Speaker 2: I know that was brilliant too. Any Frank Capra, super
Speaker 2: famous name from the history of film. Right, So again
Speaker 2: I feel like for me, the biggest surprise overall is
Speaker 2: I knew scientists were talking about this, but as you know,
Speaker 2: a lot of scientific conversations can be very in the weeds.
Speaker 2: Scientists can really live in their own science bubble, and
Speaker 2: so what I didn't know was how broadly this information
Speaker 2: had percolated in the nineteen sixties. That I guess was
Speaker 2: the biggest surprise, And of course that reinforces our claim
Speaker 2: that Congress was aware of this. They were talking about it,
Speaker 2: they knew about it, they heard testimony about it, they
Speaker 2: were getting information from leading scientists like the President's science advisor,
Speaker 2: like the head of ENCAR, Gordon MacDonald, who's serving on
Speaker 2: CEQ at that time. Important leading scientists are talking to important,
Speaker 2: leading members of Congress, and that's crucial then in the
Speaker 2: context of the Major Questions doctrine for understanding what Congress
Speaker 2: knew about this issue and therefore what they could have
Speaker 2: intended when they wrote this law.
Speaker 1: In any of the stuff that you found, did you
Speaker 1: get any sense of why they steered clear of being
Speaker 1: more specific in the law?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wed think we do know that answer to that,
Speaker 2: and our group had a lot of discussions about this.
Speaker 2: I mean, part of this whole thing has to do
Speaker 2: with whether or not they understood CO two to be
Speaker 2: a pollutant, and therefore whether they intended these discussions about
Speaker 2: pollution to include CO two. The answer to that question
Speaker 2: is absolutely yes, and that was one of the other
Speaker 2: big surprises. It was astonishing to us how many conferences
Speaker 2: on air pollution in the nineteen sixties discuss CO two
Speaker 2: and how many reports that are written on air pollution
Speaker 2: mentioned CO two as a pollutant. So there's absolutely no
Speaker 2: question that they understand that CO two is a pollutant.
Speaker 2: But there's two things that we think happened. The first
Speaker 2: is that there's a very clear conversation about what kind
Speaker 2: of a pollutant is it. So while they recognize that
Speaker 2: it's definitely a pollutant, they also say, and this is
Speaker 2: it still comes up even today, that it's a different
Speaker 2: kind of pollutant. And so the way we've been thinking
Speaker 2: about it now is taking a parallel from public health
Speaker 2: to distinguish between a que and chronic threats, or cute
Speaker 2: and chronic disease. So they recognize that CO two is
Speaker 2: a pollutant, but they say it's a different kind of
Speaker 2: pollutant than the sort of things that are leading to
Speaker 2: smog in Los Angeles or New York other urban areas,
Speaker 2: and the immediate attention of the moment is on the
Speaker 2: acute pollutants, because they are literally killing people right People
Speaker 2: are going to the emergency room in Los Angeles on
Speaker 2: bad air days, and so understandably, the primary focus of
Speaker 2: discussion is on these acute pollutants, which then lead the
Speaker 2: EPA to create the national ambient air quality standards for
Speaker 2: things like Knox smocks, our snack margery, stuff like that.
Speaker 2: But they also understand that these other things are pollutants too,
Speaker 2: and that they need to be dealt with, but maybe
Speaker 2: not immediately. And so we come across various reports where
Speaker 2: they say things like in the fullness of time, and
Speaker 2: so we have a long discussion in our group of about, well,
Speaker 2: what do they mean by in due course or in
Speaker 2: the fullness of time? And that's actually a really hard
Speaker 2: question to answer. But here's how I've been thinking about it.
Speaker 2: You know, the team thinks that, like Hannah Conway, I
Speaker 2: remember asking this to her specifiction, she said, well, she
Speaker 2: thinks that they thought it meant like within the decade,
Speaker 2: that we were going to deal with these acute threats first,
Speaker 2: but then we would get to these other chronic threats,
Speaker 2: and I think that the scientific community was part of
Speaker 2: that because the scientists themselves recognized that even though they
Speaker 2: were confident that CO two, if it was left unabated,
Speaker 2: would lead to climate change, or would almost certainly, or
Speaker 2: would probably.
Speaker 3: You can put in whatever cameo.
Speaker 2: You want, but there were a lot of details that
Speaker 2: in the nineteen sixties were not well understood. For example,
Speaker 2: you see questions about ocean heat uptake, you see this
Speaker 2: about the biosphere. So these were big scientific questions which
Speaker 2: scientists themselves understood needed to be addressed. So in the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies, that's when we see the growth of climate modeling.
Speaker 2: That's when Suki Minabi begins to build his first climate
Speaker 2: models at the Geophysical Sluid Dynamics, the work from which
Speaker 2: he finally want to know about prize couple years ago.
Speaker 2: So there's this sense in the scientific community that, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: that makes sense, We've got more work to do. And
Speaker 2: so I think that everyone involved in this conversation, both
Speaker 2: the scientists and the legislatures, understood that CO two was
Speaker 2: a threat, understood that it was a serious threat, understood
Speaker 2: that it would have vast economic and political consequences.
Speaker 3: Either way, whether we regulated or.
Speaker 2: We didn't regulate it, it would have vast consequences. But
Speaker 2: they thought, you know, we have a little time to
Speaker 2: work this out. And what they meant by a little
Speaker 2: time was a decade or maybe two. And that actually
Speaker 2: fits with the larger history that I've written about, if
Speaker 2: you think about it. So in the nineteen seventies we
Speaker 2: begin to see the first global conferences on climate change,
Speaker 2: we see the National Academy issues a couple of reports,
Speaker 2: the famous Charny Report, and then in the eighties we
Speaker 2: get the creation of the IPCC and in nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: two the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Speaker 3: So, in fact, the sorting of.
Speaker 2: The science and the move to regulate CO two do
Speaker 2: happened within the one to two decade framework that people anticipated.
Speaker 2: But the giant butt in the story of the giants
Speaker 2: spanner in the works is that in the late eighties,
Speaker 2: as the science starts to come together, that's when the
Speaker 2: fossil fuel industry begins to try.
Speaker 3: To fight it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, one thing I want to ask you about is
Speaker 1: that I don't know we've started hearing from the fossil
Speaker 1: fuel companies in the last ten years maybe a little
Speaker 1: bit less. This's the whole idea of like, well everybody knew,
Speaker 1: so you can't just hold us accountable, right. I'm sure
Speaker 1: that they will find ways to use the stuff in
Speaker 1: here to bolster the argument. So I'm curious what you
Speaker 1: think about that.
Speaker 2: Well, that's exactly the same argument that the tobacco industry used.
Speaker 2: They are once again using the tobacco playbook. And there's
Speaker 2: two important answers to that. Yes, we did know, but
Speaker 2: then we got confused about this because of what the
Speaker 2: fossil fuel industry did. They worked actively to undermine our
Speaker 2: knowledge and understanding. And we may do a follow up
Speaker 2: paper to answer exactly that question. I mean, why was
Speaker 2: all this underst standing lost? You know, why did so
Speaker 2: many Americans say, by the eighties and nineties and even
Speaker 2: into the two thousands, think we didn't really know that
Speaker 2: there was no scientific consensus, all that stuff.
Speaker 3: I've worked on in the past.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the answer to that is fossil fuel industry malfeasance.
Speaker 2: So they are responsible for the fact that we lost
Speaker 2: this knowledge that we actually used to have.
Speaker 3: So that's the first part.
Speaker 2: And then second part is that I'm not a legal scholar,
Speaker 2: but the law is very clear. If you produce a
Speaker 2: product that kills people, the fact that some people knew
Speaker 2: that it may kill people doesn't get you off the right.
Speaker 2: Corporations have legal responsibilities. Just because someone may or may
Speaker 2: not have known about saying doesn't absolve you from legal
Speaker 2: and moral responsibility for the consequences of your actions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's it for this time. We'll be back soon
Speaker 1: with another episode. Don't forget to check out the print
Speaker 1: stories on our website at drilled dot media. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: with various co publishing partners including Rolling Stone and Vox.
Speaker 1: This episode was mixed and mastered by Peter Duff. Our
Speaker 1: theme music is Bird in the Hand by Forenown. Our
Speaker 1: artwork is by Matthew Fleming. You can also check us
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