Quite - the environment was not much of a concern.
Bear in mind that lead in petrol was your anti-knock agent and the catalytic convertor didn't exist.
I remember really yellow coloured, sickly verges alongside roads and strawberry sellers in laybyes on the A303 ...
I doubt that Carter could have intervened in any case.
Not really. From your Wikipedia link:
> In the scientific papers which considered climate trends of the 21st century, fewer than 10% were inclined towards future cooling, while most papers predicted future warming.[1] […] By the time the idea of global cooling reached the public press in the mid-1970s temperatures had stopped falling, and there was concern in the climatological community about carbon dioxide's warming effects.[4] In response to such reports, the World Meteorological Organization issued a warning in June 1976 that "a very significant warming of global climate" was probable.[5]
It was a small minority in the scientific community. The concern got blown out of proportion by some cover stories.
This is a common trope but it’s mostly been promoted by fossil fuel lobbyists to pretend climate scientists weren’t right than reality. That alternate history is mostly promulgated by the likes of noted-creationist Duane Gish or general purpose denialists like Stephen Milloy, but it doesn’t hold up when you look at the record.
People had been concerned about global warming since 1896, and scientists had been increasingly concerned before World War II. There were a handful of papers in the early 1970s predicting cooling based on aerosol effects BUT those did not reflect widespread consensus and other researchers at the same time published papers predicting warming, and those papers were considered stronger.
What most of this hangs off of is that Time magazine “Another Ice Age?” article which sounded dramatic but was actually inconclusive about the future. It sold a lot of issues, but it wasn’t exactly a climate science journal.
By the end of the 1970s, consensus had been reached that the earth was warming and most climate science research was focused on how it would happen rather than whether.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...
> "While neither scientists nor the public could be sure in the 1970s whether the world was warming or cooling, people were increasingly inclined to believe that global climate was on the move, and in no small way"
And it definitely wasn't in the scientific world:
> Concern peaked in the early 1970s, though "the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then
Seems more likely that if Carter had an opinion it would be the scientific one, and even if he only read mass media on it he wouldn't necessarily think cooling was the dominant trend.
"That the climate, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, has been getting cooler since about 1950, is well estabt lished—if one ignores the last two winters."
If there was a mix of articles, then there will be a mix of people claiming that they personally saw all one side.
Several others in this thread claim they saw cooling articles in the 90s. I never saw a single cooling article but saw many many warming articles and knew even very conservative Republican families that got worked up about the dangers of global warming.
Anybody citing a single article or their personal experience is degrading the conversation. A single person's recollection is not even evidence when we can compare to an entire historical record.
5 minutes of checking found three issues of Time, one from 1994.
* 24 Jun 1974 https://time.com/archive/6878023/another-ice-age/ (well-known)
* 13 Nov 1972 https://time.com/archive/6844319/science-another-ice-age/ ("refuses to speculate")
* 31 Jan 1994 https://time.com/archive/6724662/the-ice-age-cometh/ ("the greenhouse effect could heat up the planet for a while but then trigger changes that could plunge the earth into a sudden chill.")
* “The Earth’s Cooling Climate,” Science News, November 15, 1969
* “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age,” Washington Post, January 11, 1970.
* “Science: Another Ice Age?” Time Magazine, June 24, 1974.
* “The Ice Age Cometh!” Science News, March 1, 1975.
* “The Cooling World,” Newsweek, April 28, 1975.
* “Scientists Ask Why World Climate is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead,” New York Times, May 21, 1975.
* “In the Grip of a New Ice Age?” International Wildlife July-August, 1975.
* “A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable,” New York Times, September 14, 1975.
* “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit, Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,” Science magazine, December 10, 1976.One can't search for this stuff without coming across lots of both warming and cooling articles. And one finds tons of intentional deception pushing cooling articles. Here's a Reuters article calling out one bit of misinformation pushing cooling articles that were not actually about cooling:
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/time-magazine-front-cover...
My question is why there is such a modern push to decieve about cooling in the mass media? What purpose does it serve for people?
I posted several headlines and links in mass & scientific media promoting the global cooling belief, which corresponds to my recollection of the dominant media.
I recognize my recollection may be flawed. If you have evidence to that effect, please post a similar collection from the time period promoting global warming belief to support your assertion.
My personal belief is that the media over-hypes scientific findings and under-reports uncertainties. We see this today in global warming coverage, as we saw it (or at least, as I recall it) in the 1970s global cooling coverage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling - OK but do bear in mind that fags (cigarettes) were still being advertised as good for your health in the '70s.
Global cooling/warming was not really a feared effect back then - both were merely noted. What really concentrated the mind was the Cold War for the mainstream minded. For the usual bat shit loopy mob, there was the usual alien invasions and that!
I was a UK soldier's brat (my mum was a soldier too when she met dad but "retired" on advice when they married). We spent quite a lot of time in West Germany. I remember seeing Tupolev Bears and Badgers getting "lost" and being given directions by large fireworks with pilots strapped on top with a couple of side winder missiles and a cannon that fires rounds that they might fly into themselves.
OK it was the '70's. Dad's staff car was a Sioux or a Merc. 432s and 434s, Chieftains, Stalwarts, Saracens, Saladins and the rest would rumble around - that was just UK gear. West Germany had Leopards, Luchs (Lynx) and more. Phantoms, Starfighters, Buccaneers, Harriers and all the rest. I remember watching flights of Phantoms (four) lift off from say RAF Wildenrath, put their foot down (afterburner) and scoot off to whatever they had to do. It was quite deafening, and I was in a playground!
"Global cooling" - no, no idea!
I hope I have given you a mild flavour of just how unimportant the environment was generally considered back in the day by the general public. There was quite a lot of other things going on.
Nowadays, the weather rather speaks for itself.
The clean air act was in 1967.
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/17/archives/environmentalist...
* Aside: EPA and the Clean Air act weren't motivated by Climate Change but by particle pollution concerns.
I don’t think that’s incorrect even if you ascribe all of the era’s environmental decision making to energy scarcity.
Carter still set a goal of 20% renewable energy by 2020, and that still would have made a significant impact.
It seems obvious to me that environmental policy was in some part driven by concern for the environment itself, but that doesn’t change the simple statement that things would have been better if we’d followed it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Fuels_Corporation
* Aside, significant global warming became scientific consensus only sometime between 1979 and 1989. The global cooling thing above is wrong in that most scientists expected some warming and that it expects too much from science. It does connect to the fact there was real scientific debate at the time and not just denialism, it wasn't clear warming would be that much a problem.
This should not be a point against climate science - scientists aren't born with the correct climate model! It took time to get the modeling right, but once they did the predictions were completely accurate.
* I wonder how much investing in solar would have been worth it. The tech was carried over by a huge investment in semiconductors that helped silicone tech on the side. If you go back early you probably end up replicating it and that costs a lot? Or I could be wrong here.
* Wind tech was probably doable. You could have iterated over designs, material science was behind but not that much I think. Nuclear was reasonable too.
* CFLs were developed in the late 70s. One could have done an early version of banning incandescent lighting. Blue LED lightening weren't invented yet and took a breakthrough.
* Probably even more stringent fuel mandates. Electrical vehicles were in the future, you could have brought them forward by a decade or two, but in the 1980s they weren't an alternative, and I don't think in the 90s either?
* Of course, the US could have mandated solar water heaters where the climate allows.
We can imagine an alternate past where green tech was wind + nuclear, and lightening was CFLs.
It's difficult to understand now, but natural gas was viewed as something in short supply back then that had to be price controlled. Of course the causation was in the other direction: price controls led to shortage, and once those were removed enormous new sources of gas began to be uncovered, eventually leading to the fracking revolution. Today in the US natural gas is a colossus, having beaten down coal and nuclear.
Btw Carter put solar panels on the white house.
P.S. These weren't solar panels (i.e. electricity generation), but solar water heaters. A very different tech, a useful tech, but not a global warming solution.
Solar electricity has become much, much, cheaper and more efficient since then, and heatpumps have made electric heating much more efficient, so solar hot water doesn't look like it's going to be the future (though new installations do still happen today, despite the advances in solar electric). It wasn't a bad bet at the time though.
I meant it's not a solution in the class of solar panels, where the electricity can be used for nearly anything. Also heater tech isn't very high tech and didn't need much gov support in developing it. Mandating it in law where climate allows may have been useful though.
How did this set back the whole industry? Experience since then, even in France, is that reprocessing is uneconomical. Understand that Carter's executive order was rescinded by Reagan, and yet reprocessing has gone nowhere since then in the US.
The world has converged on the most economical solution to spent fuel: dry cask storage. This is not an ultimate solution, but it forecloses no ultimate solution, and by delaying any such expensive step it minimizes the net present value of the cost of dealing with the waste. In the meantime, the spent fuel gradually cools off, rendering any future ultimate solution easier.
Reprocessing can be seen as a fossilized remnant of an earlier failed vision of where nuclear power was going to go. The vision was that nuclear power plants would be cheap, lots of them would be built, and then uranium would start to run out. Fuel would start getting expensive, so we'd have to move to breeder reactors. Fast breeders burn plutonium, so you want to start them with Pu separated from the earlier thermal reactors (and then continue to fuel them with Pu they themselves produce.)
But this vision never came to pass. Nuclear power plants turned out to be expensive and uranium remained cheap (and enrichment got cheap). Reprocessing ended up unneeded and unwanted. It really did serve as a cover for proliferation, too: Japan now has enough separated reactor grade Pu for about 1000 bombs. It's not as good as weapons grade but it can still serve for weapons if boosting is used to ameliorate premature initiation of the chain reaction.
There's an inversion of cause and effect here. Nuclear didn't fail because we didn't reprocess, we didn't reprocess because nuclear failed. To invert the actual causation is an example of cargo cult thinking.
That's a common myth. 70s energy policy was a result of the oil crisis, not environment concerns.
Sometimes the result was conductive to the environment (e.g. efficiency increases), sometimes it was less so (various US gov research into more polluting alternatives like synthetic oil or shale oil), and sometimes it was just silly (like Carter banning nuclear waste reprocessing which set back that entire industry).