Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
he flew off the handle. Meese reportedly had a three-by-five card with
Hayes's name and picture printed on it, and he carried it in his front pocket
until Hayes was finally fired— or was asked to resign— for “not being a team
player” in the summer of 1981.
15
the “reagan antienvironmental revolution”
Well-orchestrated retaliation aside, Hayes's fall from government grace
typified scientists' and environmentalists' experiences throughout the fed-
eral government in the early 1980s. For climate science, the most important
changes occurred in the Department of Energy, where the appointments
radiated outward from James Edwards. Initially, the Reagan administra-
tion explored dismantling the DOE altogether, eliminating a wide variety
of its programs and rolling what would be left of its core, an agency called
the Energy Research and Technology Administration, into either Com-
merce or Interior.
16
Reagan's aides eventually preserved the DOE as a single
cabinet-level entity, but the administration cut its budget by more than a
billion dollars.
17
The administration's DOE budget request for fiscal year
1983 was an 87 percent reduction from what Carter had requested for fiscal
year 1981.
18
These budget cuts severely curtailed the research of the DOE's
Office of Health and Environmental Research, including David Slade's
joint DOE-AAAS climate research program.
19
By itself, the DOE-AAAS project was small potatoes, but the broader
DOE funding cuts made waves throughout the federal research structure.
DOE operated a number of national laboratories— Lawrence Livermore,
SERI, and Oak Ridge, for example— and researchers at these laboratories
scrambled to replace DOE money with funding from the Department of
Defense ($3.8 billion richer in R&D dollars under Reagan), the National
Science Foundation, and the private sector. For climate research in particu-
lar, this put exceptional strain on the NSF, which already funded the quasi-
governmental National Center for Atmospheric Research and a number of
university-based climate projects. Worse still for climate scientists, the Rea-
gan administration ultimately controlled most of these resources too, and
what little new money the NSF could make available for climate research
began to go to projects investigating the direct impacts of rising atmospheric
CO
2
on crops and managed forests— studies that in isolation made CO
2
buildup look a little less threatening and possibly even beneficial.20
20
