A Clear and Present Danger

• Author: James Gustave Speth
• Position: Was a member and then chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality from 1977-81. He helped to found both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute and served as administrator of the UN Development Program and dean of the Yale School of the Environment
• Pages: 34-41

34 | THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, November/December 2021.

Copyright © 2021, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

BOOK EXCER PT

A Clear

and Present

Danger

During the Carter presidency, the

scientic community was increasing the

alarm about climate change resulting

om emissions of carbon dioxide. e

seeds planted by the administration

to stimulate eciency and renewables

could have yielded a smooth transition

toward sustainable energy and climate

security. is is the stor y of how that

didn’t happen

James Gustave Speth

was a member a nd then chair

of the White House Council

on Environmen tal Quality from

1977-81. He helped to fou nd

both the Nat ural Resources

Defense Coun cil and the World

Resources Ins titute and served

as administ rator of the UN

Development P rogram and

dean of the Yale Sch ool of the

Environment.

I

HAVE been retained pro bono by Plaintis

to provide expert testimony regarding the

historical knowledge of the U.S. federal

government (including Defendants) of cli-

mate change, climate science, and alterna-

tive pathways to power the nation’s energy

system other than fossil fuels. I will also

testify about the decisions made by the U.S. federal gov-

ernment to devise and pursue energy policies and, in

particular, to maintain a fossil-fuel-based energy system.

By the end of the Carter administration in Janu-

ary 1981, more than four decades ago, it was already

very clear that:

• Defendants knew the basic science of climate

change and knew that the continued burning of high

levels of fossil fuels would lead to climate danger; and

• Defendants knew of pathways recommended

by experts within government and others to transi-

tion away from fossil fuels, including through con-

servation, eciency, and solar and other renewables.

Notwithstanding this, Defendants continued

from the Carter years to the present to plan for, sup-

port, invest in, permit, and otherwise foster a nation-

al fossil-fuel-based energy system. . . .

For the year 1976, the year President Carter was

elected, the United States relied on fossil fuels for 91

percent of primary energy consumption. In 2019,

three years into President Trump’s term, the United

States was still overwhelmingly dependent on fossil

fuels—80 percent. During this 43-year period, the

seeds planted during the Carter administration re-

garding eciency and renewable energy could have

yielded a smooth transition toward an outstanding

U.S. climate performance and global leadership in

climate action. Instead, those years saw only negli-

gible action to actually reduce U.S. fossil emissions

and only modest actions to promote alternatives,

with the result that U.S. CO2 emissions from energy

consumption have gone up, not down, climbing by

about 16 percent from 1975 to 2019.

Defendants’ actions on the national energy system

over the past several decades are, in my view, the great-

est dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of

the Republic. And it is worse today than ever. is

shocking historical conduct, government malfeasance

on a grand scale, has left current and future genera-

tions enormously vulnerable to substantial danger.

———

Before taking up in detail the issues of the federal

government’s knowledge of both the climate danger