In the process, Oreskes, along with other researchers at Harvard and Duke University, uncovered a lost history. As they searched troves of historical documents, they found plenty of other people were concerned about a warming planet, not just scientists, in the years before 1970. “We discovered a universe of discussions by scientists, by members of Congress, by members of the executive branch,” Oreskes said, “and the more we looked, the more we found.”
Her paper ballooned into an 124-page analysis, soon to be published in the journal Ecology Law Quarterly. And it’s only part one of the findings. Oreskes has found more than 100 examples of congressional hearings that examined CO2 and the greenhouse effect prior to the adoption of the Clean Air Act, evidence she plans to spell out in part two.
The research adds weight to arguments that Congress intended to give the EPA a broad authority to regulate pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions — a matter that has become more important, the authors say, in the aftermath of the West Virginia v. EPA decision in 2022 that limited the agency’s ability to regulate power plant emissions. The court’s conservative majority invoked a new argument called the “major questions doctrine,” requiring a very clear statement from Congress to authorize regulations that have “vast economic and political significance.”
Oreskes’ paper demonstrates that members of Congress, when discussing the Clean Air Act in 1970, were aware that addressing climate change could have significant economic consequences, for energy production and the automotive industry, for example. Oreskes hopes the paper will “put the lie to the myth that has been propagated that the Clean Air Act had nothing to do with carbon dioxide” and spur conversation among lawyers, judges, and legal scholars.
By the mid-1960s, climate change was already becoming a matter of concern to the federal government, the new analysis shows. A 1965 report from the National Science Foundation found that the ways humans were inadvertently changing the world — through urban development, agriculture, and fossil fuels — were “becoming of sufficient consequence to affect the weather and climate of large areas and ultimately the entire planet.”