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December 17, 2024
As 2024 draws to a close, many people are wondering what to expect from the next Congress and presidential administration on climate change. But sometimes, the best way to look forward is to look back. Co-hosts Daniel Bresette and Alison Davis sit down with Jay Hakes, author of The Presidents and the Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush, for a discussion about the intersection of climate science and political processes in the White House.
Show notes:
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Episode Transcript:
Daniel Bresette: Hello and welcome to the Season 8 finale of The Climate Conversation. I’m Dan Bresette, the president of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute.
Alison Davis: And I'm his co-host, Alison Davis. For today's episode, we'll be discussing a new book, The Presidents and the Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush, with the author, Jay Hakes. This is not only our last podcast of the season and the year, but it's also our first episode since the presidential election. We took a break to focus on EESI’s coverage of the United Nations Climate Summit (or COP29) in Baku Azerbaijan—and by the way, all of our COP29 resources are available on our website at eesi.org—but now, Dan and I are really excited to be back behind the mic for a conversation with our guest about the historical interplay between climate science and political processes in the White House.
Dan: That's right, Alison, this episode is right up our alley at EESI. In addition to The Presidents and the Planet, Jay Hakes has written two other books on the history of U.S. energy and environmental policy. He served as administrator of the U.S. Energy Information Administration under President Clinton, and as the director for research and policy of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill under President Obama. Since then, Jay also spent 13 years directing the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta. Jay, welcome to the show. It's great to meet you today.
Jay Hakes: Great to be with you.
Dan: All right, Jay, so let's dive in. You cover a lot of ground in your book, and you also cover an interesting historical period, right? Your book talks about a time where, you know, I wasn't active in policy or science over the span of your book, I was in elementary school. So I'm really eager to learn a little bit more about this time, which was very formative and set a lot of stuff up for where we are today even. One of the things your book does is it highlights some contradictory approaches between politicians and scientists when it comes to climate change, especially with respect to their decision making, their willingness to make statements of certainty, and the comfort with adversarial or friendly adversarial debate. What do you think are the most effective strategies to reconcile these very different ways of thinking in the formation of climate policy?
Jay: Well, that's a great question. You know, part of it is for politicians, environmental issues and particularly climate are very difficult because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for over 100 years, so it requires a certain long-term perspective, and many people in the political process are having to run every two years. So Roger Revelle, one of the great climate scientists, used to express his sympathy for politicians having to be confronted with this. But there's many factors to it. I mean, scientists keep talking to the public in terms of degrees centigrade, and the public thinks in terms of Fahrenheit. So if you say, “Well, the world's going to get 2.5 degrees centigrade warmer,” that's 4.5 Fahrenheit. Maybe that's why the Europeans and Americans look at it a little differently. And then the scientists use the word “certainty” in a much different way than the public uses the word “certainty.” So there's all these difficulties in communication. And if you look at this historically, as I have sort of going back to the 1950s, you see some of these problems developing and that some of those problems are still with us today.
Dan: What would you say politicians and scientists could learn from each other about how to communicate, sort of the urgency of climate change, but also the potential benefits of the solutions?
Jay: Well, I think there have been scientists over the years like James Hansen and Steven Schneider and others who have realized they're talking to a particular audience, and that is a little bit different than publishing in a scientific journal. So I think there is an obligation on the scientists to do a better job of that. A lot of them have done a good job, but others, you know, they act like this isn't a problem. In the terms of the political officials, I think there's a need to do the homework. You know, like, I point to some people that go out and spend a day at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, elected officials, and really try to get into the nuts and bolts of it, because I think the science is ultimately not all that complicated. And I think if more of them did that, you know, it'd be easier to set policies that are going to work over the long run.
Dan: Well, I'm glad you mentioned the centigrade or Celsius and Fahrenheit conversion, because that's something we actually do, especially in our COP29 coverage. We always list the Fahrenheit equivalent, because I don't think in Celsius either. I think in Fahrenheit. And it's hard to imagine what that feels like. You mentioned a name a moment ago—you mentioned Roger Revelle, and he is one of many people featured in your book, scientists who worked with the White House over the years, and their names are often less familiar than the presidents they're working with. With respect to Roger Revelle, he was an oceanographer, a pretty renowned oceanographer. What can listeners of our podcast learn from his story and his work over the years?
Jay: Well, my view is, and really one of the reasons I wrote the book, is that when we learn science in school, we learn theories like the Earth revolves around the Sun, the Sun doesn't revolve around the Earth, and we mention that Copernicus and Galileo played a big role in that. So we sort of nailed the science in the 1950s that the emissions of human activities are changing the climate, and the big people in that were particularly Roger Revelle and Charles Dave Keeling. They were colleagues at the Scripps Institution. Keeling is still remembered because the data is often called the Keeling Curve, and so his name is kind of etched in the history books. But Revelle is a little bit more complicated. He publishes a paper in 1955 and says, you know, we scientists have been assuming that a lot of the carbon dioxide is just absorbed in the ocean, and given the chemistry of ocean water, there's a limit to that, and so it's reasonable to believe that it's accumulating in the atmosphere much more than we thought. And then he finds the money for Keeling to actually do the research that documents that. Now that part of Revelle is somewhat known by people who are climate experts, but I have found nobody before my book—you may know somebody—who knew that he advised John Kennedy on three speeches. The first one, he was still at Scripps. The other two, he had been hired as a full-time advisor, a science advisor for the Kennedy Administration. And one of Kennedy's speeches in which he mentions the need to understand the relationship between oceans and atmosphere, because it affects our climate, sitting behind him is Roger Revelle. That had been totally lost to history. Then he met with Lyndon Johnson many times and wrote a major climate report in 1965—that has been somewhat in the records, but deserves a lot more discussion. And then he goes on, I mean, Al Gore was a student of his at Harvard, so that's another connection. And then he starts really pushing for the American Association for the Advancement of Science to make climate change almost their major thrust for a long time. And he's traveling all over the world. I mean, he's traveling to the Vatican and speaking to meetings organized by the Pope. He's talking to developing countries. He continues to be an advisor of Gore and Ed Muskie, who's a big factor in the Senate and getting environmental legislation passed. He was talking to Muskie all the time. So when you find other scientists, you know, who deserve more credit—like Wally Broecker, and Gordon MacDonald is another big name—they first learned about climate change from Revelle. So I think there's a lot of room for a book that focuses a lot on him, and this is not a biography of Revelle, but there certainly is a lot of Revelle in the book.
Alison: Well, if you ever did write a book on Roger Revelle, I certainly would be interested to read that, because I had never heard of him before this, and he's just an amazing figure, and it sounds like he didn't really believe in retirement.
Jay: I felt real sorry for him, because he finally got the Presidential Medal of Science under George Bush, and he had tremendous difficulty attending the ceremony. And at the end—this is a story almost worthy of itself—he got kind of hijacked, some of the climate deniers took advantage of his poor health and made it look like he was being critical of Gore. This happened after it looked like Gore was going to be the vice presidential candidate. So it's, in some ways, kind of a Shakespearean tragedy, but he's revered a lot. I gave a talk on my book a month or two ago at Roger Revelle College, which is part of the University of California San Diego, and even the executives there and the professors and students didn't really know too much about Roger Revelle, and they were very eager to learn, because I agree with you, I think he's a very amazing individual.
Alison: Yeah, just a total powerhouse, and another powerhouse in your book—and actually a figure that I was somewhat surprised to see—is Margaret Thatcher. And most people probably know she was Prime Minister of the UK and a conservative icon during the Reagan Administration. And she catalyzed her nation's transition away from coal, and her efforts down the line eventually led to the closing of the last coal-fired power plant in the UK, which happened just earlier this year. So I'm really curious to hear about how clean energy won over broad political support across the pond, and if there's anything perhaps that U.S. policymakers today could learn from that.
Jay: Yeah, that's another great question. And you know, I sort of ran into surprises as I was doing my research, and the case of Margaret Thatcher—she was a chemistry major in one of the colleges at Oxford. So she said, “As a conservative, I don't like big government, but as a scientist, I have to accept the reality of climate change.” And she would have cabinet meetings that lasted several hours that were devoted solely to the topic of climate change. And when I talked about elected officials going to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, I had her in mind. She went out there—Prime Minister of the United Kingdom goes to our major facility there. And one of the persons that helped brief her said, “At the end of my briefing, I had run out of time, and I had some slides left, and she said, ‘I’m not leaving until I've seen all the slides.’” So that's pretty admirable. And what it does is it means that in Europe, you don't have the divide between it being considered a liberal or conservative issue, it's a science issue. And there may be times when that wears a little thin, but I think she played a major factor in de-politicizing the issue, as I think it should be. And one little factoid, that most people haven't looked at that tells you a lot, was the Rio agreement said that all nations should try to stabilize their greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels. Just taking the carbon part of it, in the United States, our carbon dioxide emissions in the 1990s went up 17%. The United Kingdom went down 11. And I think the reason I emphasize that is there's a lot of agency in climate change. We're not sort of helpless people watching this happen. There are ways to do it, and they are not as painful as some people picture them. So, you know, I sort of consider Thatcher kind of a hero, because I think she created a situation around the world that has helped advance some of the progress that we've made.
Alison: Continuing on the topic of bipartisanship, the Montreal Protocol inspired swift bipartisan action to protect people from harmful ultraviolet radiation coming through the hole in the ozone layer. And this was also during the Reagan Administration. Why has the response to climate change been overall so much slower and more contentious than the response to ozone depletion?
Jay: Well, if you go back to the mid-1960s when the Johnson Administration did this big science study on pollution in general—we didn't have the Clean Air Act, we didn't have baseline measurements—so a lot of the initial emphasis was on the pollution that we could see, you know, smog and tires dumped near the interstate. So we sort of got that solved, or part of itself with the Clean Air Act. And then you have the Montreal Protocol, which, as you say, was dealt with relatively fast. I mean, after the research—in some ways it was even before the research was solidified—they acted. And I would say there's maybe three factors. One is that a weakening of the ozone layer causes skin cancer, and it's a little bit easier to explain to the public when you have something that causes skin cancer that they ought to do something about. Also, the economic impact was in the billions of dollars, and the economic impact of climate change is trillions of dollars. We can argue about how much. And third, the companies—well, I'm going to have four factors. The third factor was the companies didn't really oppose it, that were going to be regulated, because they felt they could develop alternatives. On the politics, when Reagan was having to act on this, and it was a close call in his administration—his chief of staff was Howard Baker, and his Secretary of State was Secretary George Shultz, who was a big deal in the Republican Party, and he used all the muscle he had to advance U.S. participation and strong action on ozone. And then when you get to the Bush Administration, a lot of his staff are really kind of on the edge of climate deniers. So it's important to look at who's advising the president, what's going on, what the dynamics of it are. But after, there was all this optimism, after the Montreal Protocol, man, we proved we could do an international agreement on a pretty controversial issue, the next step will be climate change. And for a whole host of reasons, the climate change action lagged for quite a while.
Alison: Yeah, you mentioned, just now, George H. W. Bush, and he's actually where you chose to conclude the book, right around the time of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or the UNFCCC. And hopefully most of our listeners who've subscribed to COP Dispatch are familiar with the UNFCCC. But I'm curious about the decision to end the book there, and I'd love to hear a bit about how U.S. engagement with the UNFCCC, especially their annual summit, has evolved since then.
Jay: I would say that originally, when I started the book, I was going to start with Kennedy and end with Clinton, which would take me to the end of the 20th century, which would have been sort of a good place to stop. It would have covered the Kyoto Treaty. But I had, you know, 120,000 words to write the book—that's sort of common for publishers these days—and it seemed to me that if I didn't go back and write about what happened in the 1950s, it might be a good while before somebody went in and wrote about it. So I made that my priority, figuring I could write another book, or what I did was I wrote a fairly lengthy concluding chapter where I followed some of the scientists beyond the Bush Administration and even got as far as the Inflation Reduction Act. So that's sort of the story. There's one other thing, when you look at it from the standpoint of a historian, we are sort of dependent on what's open in the records. And I would take my hat off to the Bush 41 Presidential Library and the late President Bush. He left orders to open up everything. So I have access to all sorts of very sensitive memos, handwriting in the margins, and I didn't have that at Clinton yet. It takes a while to process papers and whatever. So when I was comparing the presidents, I wanted to be sort of comparing apples to apples, and if I moved into a presidency where I would be more reliant on press reports—I didn't want to do that, because what I found with previous presidents was there was a lot more to the story than you would find in in just the press coverage.
Dan: So Jay, that brings us to today. We're recording this—we're less than 30 days away from the 119th Congress being seated. We're like six, seven weeks away from Inauguration Day. This is the first podcast, like Alison said, that we've done since the election. Things are going to be different in Washington very shortly. We've talked about, you know, comings and goings of presidents. We've talked about, you know, administrations taking different approaches. Based on all the scholarship that you've done over this time period, and all of the things that you've seen, all of the stories that you've uncovered that maybe weren't previously as appreciated as they should be, do you have any advice for the next set of policymakers that will be coming to Washington shortly about sort of how they should approach these topics, how they should listen to scientists, how they should balance different considerations? Are there any lessons from your scholarship, from your history lesson of your book that you would like policymakers in a couple weeks to take heed of?
Jay: I would love to do that. I would say, one, don't get distracted by the certainty argument, because nature is so complex that we're always going to—no matter how powerful AI gets—there's going to be parts of nature that we don't understand, and therefore there will be uncertainty. So what do we know? You know, we know that carbon dioxide traps heat. We know that it's accumulating in the atmosphere and it's changing world temperatures. We know that it's leading to sea level rise. We know it's leading to storms that are more violent, and we also know it has a dehydrating effect when you get away from the oceans. So those are pretty incontrovertible. But if someone doesn't want to accept the science, we can still talk because, in the book, I track technologies. To me, there's four parts to the puzzle: there's what the scientists are saying, how the politicians react, how the economists are doing their cost-benefit analysis—which I've been quite critical of how they did it on climate change, they were creating conditions in their analysis that I think were not helpful—and then fourth is technology. So in the 50s, we go back and Bell Labs finds that instead of using vacuum tubes in solar cells, PV solar cells, you could use transistors with silicone. So that's an advance. Then Carter ends up making this a pedal-to-the-metal thing investing in solar, and we're still benefiting from that today. And so support for energy technologies has sort of come and gone, but it's always been there. So I would argue today that we are probably, you know, a decade or two ahead of where we would have been otherwise, if you didn't have Carter's push for more solar. And if we'd had a consistent push for solar over that whole time, we could be another couple decades ahead of where we are. So where are we? We can go to someone in Congress and say, “Look, we used to insist on certainty because we thought this was going to be really expensive to deal with climate change. We now have solar and wind energy and batteries that are progressing as we speak.” So in terms of solar cost, MIT did a study a few years ago and showed that over a 40-year period, the cost of PV power had gone down 99%. And I always say, “That's not a typo,” because people will think, “Well, that can't be true.” But it is true, and it's continued to come down since then. And I noticed a week or two ago, Southern Company announced a 65-megawatt solar farm and plans to do more, and now Duke is following suit. I hope others do, too. It's not a sacrifice we're making. Natural gas has advantages over coal because you can turn them on and off easily in a matter of some minutes. A battery can respond to something on the grid in 0.2 seconds. So with these solar farms, not only are you allowing us to use intermittent energy more economically and efficiently, we're improving the reliability of the grid. We should have been doing this anyway. And batteries now are, a lot of people are working on batteries. And it kind of reminds me of days I used to go over to Georgia Tech, when I lived near it, and watch all these scientists work on PV cells. That's going to show dramatic improvement. So we have the tools there, and we're not making the grid less reliable, we're not making energy more expensive, we're making it cheaper, and we're making it more reliable. So hopefully there will be some people who can't quite cross the river on the climate science side, but want a stronger grid that saves customers money, and you can put together the kind of coalition to do what we need to do.
Dan: Thank you, Jay, for joining us today and talking to Alison and me about your book. The book is called The Presidents and the Planet. Congratulations on getting it written. I know it took a while, labor of love, but it's really cool, and I think our listeners should check it out. Because I think it does put a spotlight on a really, maybe underappreciated but very formative time in the development of climate and environmental and energy policy. So thank you, Jay. Great to have you join us today.
Jay: Pleasure to be here.
Dan: Well, Alison Jay was a great guest. Super interesting to talk to. It's always great to go out with a podcast season on a high note, but we've had a really great run, learned a lot from talking to all of the guests that you've invited on, and it's been really great. With Jay, I think the idea of going back to a time period like that, and really studying it, I think it's really valuable. You never know what you're going to turn up. And I was thinking about this more generally, especially like, political history, right? There are times—and I guess this applies generally to climate as well—but there are times where I think maybe more is known. You know, the 1992 to present I feel like is more widely appreciated for when things happen and for what's happened. But you know, going back and looking at the decades he looked at and uncovering the roles of people like Roger Revelle, who maybe aren't getting the attention, but who did really interesting things. I think his book is a great contribution to people's understanding of how science policy and climate science and climate policy have evolved, you know, over the decades. EESI was around for part the last couple years of the time frame of his book. But you know, it's been great to have a chance to meet him today and learn a little bit about this, like I said, kind of underappreciated time in science policy and history.
Alison: Yeah, I had a lot of fun finding a couple EESI connections in the book. Although he didn't mention us directly, he did name Phil Sharp, who is one of our board members, and Claudine Schneider, who was one of our founders and she was also a long time board member. Both of them served in Congress. So it was a lot of fun to read about their impact on climate policy when they were on the Hill, and it was also just fun to read about all these unsung heroes from the scientific community. But I haven't really looked at policy from that perspective before. It's great to think about all the momentum that has gained over the years since the Eisenhower Administration. It's been a little bit overwhelming to try to think about what the future is going to look like with the new Congressional makeup, new administration, but I think that it really helped to kind of see the different patterns over time for how this has gone in the past. And it makes me feel a little bit more secure that there's some momentum that is just not going to be stopped. If you want to learn more about EESI’s work on climate policy, head to our website at eesi.org. Also, follow us on social media @eesionline for all of our recent updates. The Climate Conversation is published as a supplement to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Go to eesi.org/signup to subscribe. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next year!
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