In the summer of 1988, the United States experienced the worst heat waves and droughts since the Dust Bowl. Ominous images of burning forests, withering fields and sweltering cities filled the American press and elicited nervous suspicion: was this the work of the so-called greenhouse effect? Had the danger of which some scientists warned already arrived?
It was amid this tense national atmosphere climatologist James Hansen intervened with his testimony to the Senate, in which he forthrightly asserted that “we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.” The suspicions were sound: “It is already happening now.” Describing the extreme summer as a taste of things to come, the report in the New York Times also noted that the testifying scientists “said that planning must begin now for a sharp reduction in the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide.” Planning for a sharp reduction? The very notion injected panic in fossil capital.
With signs of trouble ahead multiplying, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, was established in 1988, the United Nations began preparations for a concerted response and awareness of the problem spread across what was still referred to as “the free world” There was no time to lose.
In 1989, several urgent counter-initiatives were launched: Exxon formulated an internal plan for how to drive home “the uncertainty in scientific conclusions
— source salon.com | Andreas Malm – The Zetkin Collective | May 15, 2021