Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Second, in these hearings, Gore helped to publicly establish CO
2
-
induced climate change as an important issue associated with the ongo-
ing debate over energy.
44
“If we take CO
2
seriously,” Lester Lave of the
Brookings Institution told the
New York Times
in 1981, “we would change
drastically the energy policy we are pursuing.”
45
The 1981 hearings failed
to save the DOE's CO
2
program from the budgetary meat-ax, but the press
picked up the relationship between CO
2
and energy and ran with it. “The
threat of an overload of carbon dioxide, changing the planet's climate,
is perhaps not immediate,” read a
Washington Post
article. “But it would
impose an absolute limit on fuel consumption, making the oil crisis and
dislocations of the past seem trivial.”
46
Since the late 1970s, Gordon Mac-
Donald had argued that CO
2
should be incorporated into energy research.
In the 1980s, Gore and his Democratic colleagues ensured that CO
2
had a
place in energy politics.
Finally, in part because of the focus on energy, Gore's hearings all but
demanded that American environmental organizations enter the public
discussion about global warming. “There is of course no way that research-
ing CO
2
build-up cannot call into question the current Administration's
energy policy,” wrote Anthony Scoville in the Friends of the Earth news-
letter. “The Administration is cutting funding into CO
2
research so that it
can justify its deliberate ignorance of the issues at hand.”
47
Rafe Pomerance
outlined the organization's new position on what he called “one of the
most serious and irreversible environmental problems yet faced by man” in
testimony submitted to Gore's 1982 CO
2
hearings: “Climate change must
now be included as part of energy and economic innovation policy. Faced
with the possible threat of global warming it is irresponsible to decimate
programs for energy conservation and solar energy as the Reagan Admin-
istration is doing.”
48
The Environmental Defense Fund, though it did not participate in the
hearings, soon decided that the issue was sufficiently important to hire
Harvard atmospheric physicist Michael Oppenheimer as a senior scien-
tist.
49
The NRDC continued to incorporate CO
2
into its international
policy positions, and Gus Speth's new organization, the World Resources
Institute, made climate change one of its foundational priorities. It would
take until the second half of the decade for environmentalists to coordi-
nate their efforts on CO
2
and climate, but Gore's hearings ensured that
when global warming finally began to stick as a mainstream issue in the
