The story we have now is quite compelling. There was this universe of discussion—it wasn’t just a narrow scientific discussion among a handful of experts. It was an extensive discussion that included many of the most important members of Congress at that time, including Ed Muskie, who was the principal sponsor of the Clean Air Act. It included Alvin Weinberg, the head of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It included the science advisor to President Nixon, Lee DuBridge. Really top-level people were discussing this, both among themselves and in congressional hearings, and, in the case of DuBridge, on television.
McKenzie: Obviously, I know how the Supreme Court changed between those two decisions [Massachusetts and West Virginia]. Has the court doubled down on this claim that climate change research was in its infancy, or was that not a part of the West Virginia decision?
Oreskes: I think what happened in West Virginia is even worse, because they’re making assertions about what Congress did or didn’t intend. The question of congressional intent, of course, is an important, legitimate one, but they’re making assertions without the facts. And in fact, what we can show is that Congress was well aware of carbon dioxide, and they understood it as a pollutant. One of the interesting things we discovered was a discussion about what kind of pollutant it was.
We don’t want to overstate our case; we think it’s strong enough that it doesn’t need to be overstated. But there’s a very interesting discussion about what kind of pollutant CO2 is. Many people said, it is a pollutant, but it’s a different kind of pollutant. It’s not the same as SOx [sulfur dioxide] and NOx [nitrogen oxides], which could kill people, and were killing people in Los Angeles and London, and were understood as acute health threats. They were the main focus of the Clean Air Act.
But they recognized that there were these other pollutants that represented a more long-term threat. What’s very clear from the Congressional discussions and hearings is that they write the Clean Air Act in a capacious way in order to account for the fact that in the next few years, we will understand more about these other pollutants, and they clearly want the EPA administrator to be able to regulate these additional pollutants as well.
One interesting discussion we had among ourselves—we kept coming across things where scientists or regulators said things like, “in due course.” What did they mean by “due course”? That was hard to pin down. But we did find places where it became pretty clear that people who were having this conversation thought, probably within the decade. They did not think that 60 years later, we would still be fighting about this.