Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
increasingly concerned about the environmental impacts of atmospheric
change and dubious of the beneficence of Cold War science and tech-
nology. The confluence of these worries forced scientists to rethink the
meaning of atmospheric CO
2
. The vehicle for this reinterpretation was an
airplane: the supersonic transport.
On June 5, 1963, the Kennedy administration announced a large-scale
cooperative program between industry and government to build a com-
mercial passenger aircraft that would travel faster than the speed of sound.
As a bold statement of America's commitment to superiority in aerospace
technology during the Cold War, the American supersonic transport,
or SST, initially found wide support in Congress and among the public.
Over the course of the 1960s, however, Kennedy-era military-industrial
aerospace projects fell out of favor with an increasingly skeptical public,
and support for the SST waned.
1
Critics questioned the wisdom of the
expensive program in light of increased spending on the Vietnam War and
a slowdown in the growth of federal science budgets. Environmentalists,
growing in influence in American politics in the 1960s, argued that the
marginal benefits of the plane could not justify its fuel consumption, its
noise, or the disruptive sonic boom it left in its wake.
Environmentalists' concerns revolved around the threats SSTs posed to
Americans' everyday quality of life— noise pollution and sonic booms—
but as the debate over the plane progressed, scientists also began to ques-
tion its possible impact on the global environment. Researchers began to
study the long-term, large-scale effects of SST operation on the earth's
atmosphere, and soon atmospheric change— including rising atmospheric
CO
2
— emerged as a meaningful new type of global environmental issue.
As it did, atmospheric scientists also emerged as a new voice in environ-
mental politics. The peculiarities of their science-first environmental advo-
cacy would develop into one of the most important themes in the political
history of global warming. The SST controversy thus laid the groundwork
for a new way of understanding CO
2
in the environmentally conscious
historical context of the 1970s.
the multiPle deaths of the sst
To understand the distinctions between mainstream environmental
activism and the science-first form of climate advocacy developed in the
