Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
by energy-related crises.
71
Though his policies largely failed to protect
the American economy from oil price shocks in the short term, Carter's
newly formed DOE began to tackle significant environmental issues in
its energy research.
72
The Keeling Curve soon began to show up in the
nation's energy portfolio.
In 1977, the DOE's Office of Health and Environmental Research began
a collaborative study with the AAAS on the climatic effects of an increase
in atmospheric CO
2
. This study of CO
2
— actually a series of interdisciplin-
ary conferences beginning with a workshop in Annapolis, Maryland, in
the spring of 1979— provided the AAAS Committee on Climate with a
national-level example of the kind of conference they hoped to sponsor at
an international level. The effort had ample funding, widespread participa-
tion from the scientific community, and the promise of a direct conduit to
policymaking within an important executive agency.
If there was a tinge of regret in program director David Slade's early
assessment of the DOE-AAAS study, it was that the climate issue failed
to attract many representatives from the environmental community. To
many environmentalists, the DOE— the agency that managed the nation's
nuclear energy and had a hand in many of its dams and coal-fired power
plants— was the enemy.
73
Slade invited environmental groups, but they did
not come.
74
With the exception of Thomas Kimball of the National Wild-
life Federation, who officially supported the National Climate Program Act
in a letter to Congress, environmental groups ranked the study of climate
change a low priority and remained aloof from the climate debate into
the early 1980s.
75
Even so, from where Slade sat, the prospect of turning
climate science into responsible energy policy under Jimmy Carter looked
pretty good.
toP-doWn, science-first
Environmentalists' tepid initial response to the issue of climate change
underscored larger philosophical differences between professional envi-
ronmentalists and politically active scientists over both the tactics and
priorities of environmental protection. In the 1970s, American environ-
mentalists thought primarily in terms of “protection,” and their institu-
tions reflected this defensive mind-set. Beginning in the early 1970s with
the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense
