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>it could be argued real work on Climate Change would have begun in 1981 as opposed to where we are now That's a common myth. 70s energy policy was a result of

• alex_young 2y ago
  The Environmental Protection Agency was started by Richard Nixon in 1970. The clean air act was in 1967.
  • yyyk 2y ago
    We were talking about energy policy. It was well known at the time policy was motivated by the oil crisis and environment was a second fiddle: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/17/archives/environmentalists-fear-a-retrenching-by-carter-official.html https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/17/archives/environmentalist... * Aside: EPA and the Clean Air act weren't motivated by Climate Change but by particle pollution concerns.
    • alex_young 2y ago
      OP > …real work on Climate Change would have begun in 1981… I don’t think that’s incorrect even if you ascribe all of the era’s environmental decision making to energy scarcity. Carter still set a goal of 20% renewable energy by 2020, and that still would have made a significant impact. It seems obvious to me that environmental policy was in some part driven by concern for the environment itself, but that doesn’t change the simple statement that things would have been better if we’d followed it.
      • yyyk 2y ago
        * The main practical work the admin did wasn't solar but synthetic fuels cuz the Carter admin believed in peak oil. That's an incredibly polluting technology that didn't happen in our timeline. It's only possibly reasonable if it displaces tarsands, but if it doesn't we end up in the worst scenario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Fuels_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Fuels_Corporation * Aside, significant global warming became scientific consensus only sometime between 1979 and 1989. The global cooling thing above is wrong in that most scientists expected some warming and that it expects too much from science. It does connect to the fact there was real scientific debate at the time and not just denialism, it wasn't clear warming would be that much a problem. This should not be a point against climate science - scientists aren't born with the correct climate model! It took time to get the modeling right, but once they did the predictions were completely accurate.
        • yyyk 2y ago
          It's an interesting question to ponder what could have been done had they knew how big a problem it would be. Imagine going back in time, but lacking any technical knowledge to bring. You also can't do 'I am from the future and this is what you must work on'. All with past tech and past political economy. * I wonder how much investing in solar would have been worth it. The tech was carried over by a huge investment in semiconductors that helped silicone tech on the side. If you go back early you probably end up replicating it and that costs a lot? Or I could be wrong here. * Wind tech was probably doable. You could have iterated over designs, material science was behind but not that much I think. Nuclear was reasonable too. * CFLs were developed in the late 70s. One could have done an early version of banning incandescent lighting. Blue LED lightening weren't invented yet and took a breakthrough. * Probably even more stringent fuel mandates. Electrical vehicles were in the future, you could have brought them forward by a decade or two, but in the 1980s they weren't an alternative, and I don't think in the 90s either? * Of course, the US could have mandated solar water heaters where the climate allows. We can imagine an alternate past where green tech was wind + nuclear, and lightening was CFLs.
        • pfdietz 2y ago
          One thing that happened under Carter was the deregulation of natural gas (the 1978 Natural Gas Policy Act). Before that, wellhead prices were federally regulated. It's difficult to understand now, but natural gas was viewed as something in short supply back then that had to be price controlled. Of course the causation was in the other direction: price controls led to shortage, and once those were removed enormous new sources of gas began to be uncovered, eventually leading to the fracking revolution. Today in the US natural gas is a colossus, having beaten down coal and nuclear.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
• gerdesj 2y ago
  "70s energy policy was a result of the oil crisis, not environment concerns." Quite - the environment was not much of a concern. Bear in mind that lead in petrol was your anti-knock agent and the catalytic convertor didn't exist. I remember really yellow coloured, sickly verges alongside roads and strawberry sellers in laybyes on the A303 ...
  • chasil 2y ago
    In the 1970s, the feared effect was global cooling. I doubt that Carter could have intervened in any case. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
    • epistasis 2y ago
      I'm not sure your article agrees that cooling was the dominant thought in the public sphere: > "While neither scientists nor the public could be sure in the 1970s whether the world was warming or cooling, people were increasingly inclined to believe that global climate was on the move, and in no small way" And it definitely wasn't in the scientific world: > Concern peaked in the early 1970s, though "the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then Seems more likely that if Carter had an opinion it would be the scientific one, and even if he only read mass media on it he wouldn't necessarily think cooling was the dominant trend.
      • bluGill 2y ago
        Mass media was clearly on th side of cooling and anyone trying to argue anything else looks like an idiot to anyone with a memory. And mass media had plenty of science people to quote. (this is of course different from what science showed but almost nobody knows that - what we see on the media is reality)
        • acdha 2y ago
          This is untrue unless “mass media” means “one issue each of Time and Newsweek quoting Reid Bryson”.
• NewJazz 2y ago
  There are serious proliferation concerns surrounding nuclear waste reprocessing. Btw Carter put solar panels on the white house.
  • yyyk 2y ago
    Which didn't justify the ban. Other countries didn't follow suit, main effect was hurting US nuclear industry and increasing pollution. P.S. These weren't solar panels (i.e. electricity generation), but solar water heaters. A very different tech, a useful tech, but not a global warming solution.
    • aeronaut80 2y ago
      Solar water heaters reduce the fossil fuel that would be used to heat the water, reducing CO2 emissions very slightly, and therefore can be part of the climate change solution.
      • yyyk 2y ago
        This is perfectly true, but as you say a small effect. Even in countries like Cyprus and Israel where nearly every home has a solar water heater and the climate is very conductive it saves something like 1-3% of electricity consumption I recall? I meant it's not a solution in the class of solar panels, where the electricity can be used for nearly anything. Also heater tech isn't very high tech and didn't need much gov support in developing it. Mandating it in law where climate allows may have been useful though.
    • gpm 2y ago
      A huge percentage of energy is used for household heating, solar water heaters were definitely a potential contributor to solving global warming (and other concerns of the day like air pollution, acid rain (solved!), peak oil (not a problem as it turns out), or just reducing oil dependency in general). Solar electricity has become much, much, cheaper and more efficient since then, and heatpumps have made electric heating much more efficient, so solar hot water doesn't look like it's going to be the future (though new installations do still happen today, despite the advances in solar electric). It wasn't a bad bet at the time though.
• pfdietz 2y ago
  > (like Carter banning nuclear waste reprocessing which set back that entire industry) How did this set back the whole industry? Experience since then, even in France, is that reprocessing is uneconomical. Understand that Carter's executive order was rescinded by Reagan, and yet reprocessing has gone nowhere since then in the US.
  • yyyk 2y ago
    Because the waste issue became a problem for every new commercial project, and well, waste is rather unfortunate by itself. Reprocessing remained in France and UK, so it mustn't have been that uneconomical - I guess that the investment/approvals required to open a new site were too much.
    • pfdietz 2y ago
      It wasn't that uneconomical because the back end of the fuel cycle is a relatively small part of the cost of nuclear power. So France and, for a time, the UK could continue to operate their white elephants. But other countries that were using their reprocessing services gradually fell away -- the separated plutonium has negative value. Even if the reprocessing were free, it would be cheaper to make fresh fuel from newly enriched uranium than to make MOX fuel with plutonium. The world has converged on the most economical solution to spent fuel: dry cask storage. This is not an ultimate solution, but it forecloses no ultimate solution, and by delaying any such expensive step it minimizes the net present value of the cost of dealing with the waste. In the meantime, the spent fuel gradually cools off, rendering any future ultimate solution easier. Reprocessing can be seen as a fossilized remnant of an earlier failed vision of where nuclear power was going to go. The vision was that nuclear power plants would be cheap, lots of them would be built, and then uranium would start to run out. Fuel would start getting expensive, so we'd have to move to breeder reactors. Fast breeders burn plutonium, so you want to start them with Pu separated from the earlier thermal reactors (and then continue to fuel them with Pu they themselves produce.) But this vision never came to pass. Nuclear power plants turned out to be expensive and uranium remained cheap (and enrichment got cheap). Reprocessing ended up unneeded and unwanted. It really did serve as a cover for proliferation, too: Japan now has enough separated reactor grade Pu for about 1000 bombs. It's not as good as weapons grade but it can still serve for weapons if boosting is used to ameliorate premature initiation of the chain reaction. There's an inversion of cause and effect here. Nuclear didn't fail because we didn't reprocess, we didn't reprocess because nuclear failed. To invert the actual causation is an example of cargo cult thinking.