Image scan of the Earth from the Moon's surface. Caption reads: "The Whole Earth is Watching." Source: Library of Congress

1980s Environmentalism and How the Reagan-Era Shaped the Natural World

04.24.20

This week, environmentalism was in the spotlight, thanks to the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Over the decades, environmentalism has adapted to new challenges, like increasing levels of greenhouse gases and a swinging pendulum when it comes to federal policy. But the 1980s exemplified a notable and often consequential shift in how people – from protestors to the president – approached environmental issues. So on this episode of BackStory, Ed and Brian dig into the 1980s and explore how actions in both federal policy and grassroots movements shaped environmentalism.

Earth Day; Reagan Era; environmentalism

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Segments

Earth Day at 50

On April 22, 1970 millions of people around the world participated in a day of activism to promote better care for the environment. For 50 years, Earth Day has promoted principles like sustainable energy and greenhouse gas reduction, despite highs and lows in environmental federal policy. Denis Hayes is the founder of the Earth Day Network and was the first national organizer of the event in 1970. Ed talks with Hayes about the momentum Earth Day sparked in the 1970s and how things shifted with the Reagan administration in the 1980s.

Music:

Patched In by Blue Dot Sessions
Refraction by Podington Bear

Earth Day; Reagan administration; environmentalism

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Brian Balogh:
Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Ed Ayers:
From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Brian Balogh:
Welcome to Backstory, a show that looks at the history behind the headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers:
And I’m Ed Ayers.

Brian Balogh:
If you’re new to the podcast, each week along with our colleagues Nathan Connolly and Joanne Freeman we explore a different aspect of American history.

Ed Ayers:
And just to note, this show was recorded remotely, as per the realities of making a podcast during COVID-19. Because of that, the audio quality isn’t always the best, but we hope you’ll bear with us nevertheless. Okay, now onto the show.

Ed Ayers:
50 years ago in April 1970, millions of people in the United States took part in a day of activism that quickly spread around the world, or perhaps more appropriately around the Earth.

Speaker 3:
Earth Day demonstrations began in practically every city and town in the United States this morning: the first massive nationwide protest against the pollution of the environment. The outcry took innumerable forms. Some students went to school wearing gas masks. The automobile was banned in parts of some cities, including New York. Miami planned a dead orange parade. Skywriting planes were ordered out to inscribe the word air over Los Angeles. In Jamestown, New York, the Kiwanis Club…

Denis Hayes:
It was amazing. We had aspired to do something that was relatively modest at its beginnings.

Ed Ayers:
This is Dennis Hayes.

Denis Hayes:
I’m the founder of the Earth Day Network.

Ed Ayers:
Dennis was the national organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970, and back then organizing a big event like this looked a lot different. There was no internet or social media to get the word out.

Denis Hayes:
We didn’t have the ability to reach out through Facebook and Twitter or even have email or even have computers for email.

Ed Ayers:
So Dennis and his team turned to other ways to generate some momentum.

Denis Hayes:
We did a lot of what you could call broadcast outreach. We would figure out some way to get a news twist: hold a press conference or hold an event.

Ed Ayers:
But he says the biggest and riskiest thing they did was shell out about half their money for a full page ad in the New York Times.

Denis Hayes:
Across the top of it, it says, “April 22: Earth Day,” and then in bold letters, “A disease has infected our country. It has brought smog to Yosemite, dumped garbage in the Hudson, sprayed DDT in our food, and left our cities in decay. It’s carrier is man.” And then bam, bam, bam, right on through the ad. So this was a pretty anti-establishment, pretty attention-getting thing to say; “This is not a picnic in the park and a tree-planting exercise, picking up litter, though there’s going to be all of those kinds of things as well for the young kids to participate. This is an effort to cause America to change direction.”

Ed Ayers:
And thankfully, all of that work paid off.

Denis Hayes:
So by the time that it came out… and it wasn’t an event like the Vietnam moratorium where you had something like six or eight cities across the country. Earth Day was observed in essentially every city, every town, every village, every crossroads in America. The estimates from the wire services of being in excess of 20 million people, who would make it probably the largest organized event in American history.

Ed Ayers:
And why do you think… given the ferment of all the other things: the civil rights struggle and the women’s struggle and the war in Vietnam… that people were receptive to this new cause? Why was their bandwidth not so crowded that they couldn’t think about something like ecology?

Denis Hayes:
One is that this wasn’t a new cause. It was a new, if you will, packaging. We had the Santa Barbara oil spill the previous year. In cities across the country, there were poor people rising up to try to stop freeways from cutting through intercity neighborhoods, rising concern about lead paint and lead in gasoline, problems with clear cutting, just thing after thing. Air pollution: people in Pittsburgh and Gary, Indiana, and Los Angeles had air that was a lot like the air in Shenzhen and New Delhi today.

Denis Hayes:
All of those things were out there. Groups of people cared about each of them, and what changed was that they had not… prior to Earth Day… much thought that they had anything in common with one another. They were the anti-freeway group. They were the pro-birds group. In fact, I had a memorable interchange with a prominent conservation leader. He asked me, blustery, “What the hell does clean air have to do with birds?” That would’ve been an absurd question that would elicit a chuckle years after Earth Day. We wove all those separate threads together into this new fabric of modern environmentalism.

Ed Ayers:
In the wake of Earth Day success, Dennis’s team planned to turn the protest into policy. In the 1970 midterm election, they pushed to elect more environmentally friendly members of Congress, and once again their work paid off. A few months after Earth Day, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, which was only one of many new laws on the horizon.

Denis Hayes:
The momentum that came out of the election followed by the Clean Air Act just created the context within which relatively rapidly we passed the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and that somewhat anti-environmental president, Richard Nixon, in order to become a player with this new movement that was there with an executive order set up the EPA, appointed Bill Ruckelshaus to be the head of it, and didn’t intervene when Ruckelshaus banned DDT, banned lead paint, and banned lead in gasoline. It was a remarkable period where the pro-environment pendulum of American politics was pulled about as far as we could pull it for about a decade up through the Jimmy Carter Administration.

Ed Ayers:
With this remarkable efflorescence of activity and the Nixon Administration, the EPA, and so forth… and you had the good fortune to be involved in Carter Administration embracing solar energy. Tell me what that felt like as you were beginning it. My understanding is that it didn’t come to the conclusion that you hoped.

Denis Hayes:
The Carter Administration was a time of enormous hopefulness. I was the head of the Federal Solar Energy Research Institute, which is now called the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. At the time I was there, we were spending more money, employing more PhDs, getting more patents in the renewable energy field than pretty much the rest of the world put together. Carter had the goal of getting 20% of the nation’s energy from renewables by the year 2000, and the institute that I headed was charged with coming up with the program to achieve that. So we enlisted a bunch of university scientists and some other national labs and worked for two years on a detailed plan of how you would accomplish that goal, in part by making America vastly more efficient so it’s 20% of a smaller number and then meeting that with renewables. So overall, a feeling of enormous hope.

Ed Ayers:
But in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, Dennis says that hope came to a screeching halt.

Denis Hayes:
On one afternoon, they came to the Solar Energy Research Institute, they fired about one third of my staff, they laid off 100% of our contractors and that was more than a thousand people who were working on renewable energy, often at elite universities, a couple of whom went on to win Nobel Prizes later in their careers, terminated me, and reduced our budget, which then was about a little over 130 million dollars, which back then was real money. That afternoon for me was the bleakest day of my life. That was worse than the death of my parents. This is when I had to address a whole bunch of people, many of whom I had spent real energy persuading to give up tenured professorships and other great jobs to come and join this Manhattan Project for a sustainable future, and suddenly they were given two weeks notice and no severance pay. It was just brutal. I spent most of the next year of my life writing letters of recommendation for wonderful people whose careers had been shattered.

Ed Ayers:
Despite the setbacks, Dennis has continued to advocate for the environment, and this week he celebrated the 50th anniversary of Earth Day alongside millions around the globe. Because of COVID-19, most of the celebrating was done virtually, but Dennis says that some environmental lessons can be learned from the public’s response to our current pandemic.

Denis Hayes:
There’s just no way to solve those things by any one nation if it wanted to act, and maybe we could learn some things from the way that we are addressing some of these human health issues and applying them more broadly to these… in some ways… very much larger environmental threats. There will be in the long run… Unless we get awfully aggressive awfully fast in ways that seem improbable, the death that will come as a consequence of climate change will make the relative harm being done by COVID-19 seem extremely small by comparison. It’s, of course, something that takes place over a longer period of time, but at the fundamental level I think global cooperation… clearly if we can do it in one field we should be able to do it in others.

The Republican Reversal

Jay Turner, an associate professor of environmental studies at Wellesley, says the environment used to be a bipartisan issue. But then in the 1980s, something changed. He tells Brian how and why Republicans started reversing policies on environmental protection during the Reagan era.

Music

Are We Loose Yet by Blue Dot Sessions

Earth Day; Reagan Era; Republican party; environmentalism; partisanship

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian Balogh:
Today on the show, in light of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we’re looking at environmentalism: more specifically, how different people and policies have shaped efforts at protecting the environment.

Ed Ayers:
And just as Dennis Hayes mentioned, a big change in environmentalism happened between the end of the 1970s into the 1980s. It’s a shift that altered the course of environmentalism in American politics for decades after. So on today’s program, we’re going to focus exclusively on how that change played out during the 1980s.

Brian Balogh:
You’ll hear about the birth of the environmental justice movement in a rural county in North Carolina.

Ed Ayers:
And you’ll learn about what led the Reagan Administration to act on one of the biggest environmental issues of the decade. But first we want to bring you back to that shift that Dennis Hayes talked about in the 1980s.

Brian Balogh:
And to do so, I got in touch with Jay Turner. He teaches environmental studies at Wellesley and is a co-author of the Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump. In the book, Jay and his co-author Andrew Isenberg note that the 1970s was seen as the environmental decade. So I asked him, “How then should we see the 1980s?”

Jay Turner:
Yeah. It’s amazing how quickly things can sometimes change, right? You go back and you read 1972 and you read the Republican Party’s platform, they’re emphasizing their commitment to the environment and positioning themselves as leaders and ahead of the Democrats on the issue and really chiding a Democratically-led Congress for not keeping up with the Nixon Administration. Jump ahead a decade the story is completely different. Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail really called into the question and the urgency of environmental issues, described the regulations that had been put into place… many of them put into place by the Nixon Administration… as being prime examples of over-regulation and really calling for a fundamental shift that put the economy ahead of environmental protection as if those two things are entirely at loggerheads.

Brian Balogh:
You’ve coined the phase… it’s the title of your book… the Republican reversal, and certainly you argue that Ronald Reagan marked the beginning of this reversal. Can you expand on what you mean by that Republican reversal?

Jay Turner:
A big piece of it is reminding people that there was this moderate Republican tradition that wasn’t just about Nixon. It was also about lots of folks who were in the US Senate, people like John [Jaffey 00:13:28] from Rhode Island, who were core supporters of laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Today I think most people’s starting point is that the dividing lines on environmental issues are clear with Democrats pushing for reform and protection and Republicans often pushing back against that. The Republican reversal really signals to people that we’re in a very different place than we were when there was so much more bipartisan cooperation and work together on these issues in the late 1960s and the 1970s.

Brian Balogh:
Could you describe some of the deeper economic and structural changes that might’ve led to a shift in the Republican Party?

Jay Turner:
Yeah. Thinking about that jump from Nixon to Reagan, there’s a lot that happens in the 1970s and a lot that happens with the economy and with energy and new concerns both about economic slow down and uncertainty in the oil markets. The conflicts in the Middle East and the changes in the oil industry starting in 1973 and then later in the 1970s, it really started to shake people’s confidence both in the economy but also the abundance of resources and the abundance of energy. Suddenly environmental laws that were very much focused on protecting public health and the environment seemed like impediments to economic growth and limiting access to energy, and that was one of the big points that Reagan emphasized as he came into office: the need to unleash the nation’s energy resources and restart its economy.

Brian Balogh:
It seems like another factor… and you tell me if I’m wrong… was changing attitudes about expertise and science. Particularly within the Republican Party, was there a shift in the way that science was regarded?

Jay Turner:
I think you’re right. There is absolutely a reposition of the Republican Party with respect to science, and it’s a repositioning that gains momentum over time. I think there are elements of it in the Nixon Administration but also a lot of respect for the concern about the warming that scientists were bringing, about issues of air pollution and water pollution and endangered species that informed laws that were rigorous, science-based laws that required scientific review on a periodic basis and put scientific considerations ahead of economic considerations. So in the 1970s the role of scientific expertise was central to these early environmental laws.

Jay Turner:
That begins to fray, and in part it frays in the 1980s with the Reagan Administration, and then kind of the big environmental issue that was always on the front page on the headlines was acid rain: how to reduce emissions from power plants that contributed to acid rain. The Reagan Administration really dragged its feet on that and didn’t take up the warnings that scientists were raising and called them into question. I think that’s one piece of this puzzle, but it’s one that gains much more momentum as we move into the 1990s and on towards present.

Brian Balogh:
Does the Cold War, ideas of American exceptionalism… Does any of that come into this Republican reversal that you talk about?

Jay Turner:
One of the things that Reagan emphasized time and time again was how exceptional this country was and how that exceptionalism really hinged on that notion of abundance, natural resources, and the unlimited potential of the American people and the American economy. He really put that in opposition to environmental laws and the environmental regulations. When I think of why we chose Reagan as the turning point for the Republican reversal, especially in the context of contemporary politics in the Trump Administration, it’s because in many ways Trump is the culmination of the ideas and many of the policy initiatives that Reagan set into motion back in the early 1980s.

Brian Balogh:
So give us some specific examples of the early Reagan Administration’s efforts to either roll back existing regulations or open up opportunities for unregulated mining or drilling for oil.

Jay Turner:
So examples from the start of the Reagan Administration… One area, one priority, for the administration was expanding access to oil, gas, and coal on the public lands, so secretary of the interior, James Watt… I guess one of the political cartoons that I remember from that era is Watt running with a surfboard to a beach and the beach is covered with oil derricks and Watt’s yelling, “Surf’s up!” Those are the kinds of policies that the administration pushed, were ones that would make it easier and expedite development of fossil fuel resources on the public lands. The largest source of coal in the United States has been the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, and it was James Watt and the Reagan Administration that played a key role in enabling the development of those coal fields.

Jay Turner:
Also, we were 10 years into the implementation of the Clean Air Act in the early 1980s, and there was a lot of concern about the requirements for reducing emissions, key pollutants, including lead, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, and the administration pushed back and slowed down the regulatory process, to impose limitations, and to require emitters, which were largely power plants and other major industry, slow down efforts to formalize regulations that would require them to reduce emissions.

Brian Balogh:
How did the public respond? Public opinion polls today suggest there’s still very strong support in general for clean water, clean air.

Jay Turner:
What stands out about the 1980s is, one, how aggressive the Reagan Administration’s policies were in opposition to environmental protection and the people that Reagan appointed to lead this environmental regulatory rollback: people like James Watt and Gorsuch, who was at the EPA, and Watt was at the Department of the Interior. But in the early 1980s there was a tremendous amount of public pushback against the Reagan Administration’s initiatives and there was a lot of concern amongst Republicans about the administration’s direction. I think the Reagan Administration pushed hard on these rollbacks right at the start of the administration and did not actually have a whole lot of success over three, four years in making the kind of fundamental changes that the administration aimed for. By the time that Reagan is looking to get reelected, some of his early appointees have been pushed out of the White House for mismanagement and corruption. The people he brought in halfway through his administration were moderates, and in fact one of them was Bill Ruckelshaus who had led the EPA at the start of the agency under the Nixon Administration.

Jay Turner:
So we saw the Reagan Administration dial back its environmental agenda and moderate it, and it never acted on that big issue of acid rain. That became George W Bush’s key environmental accomplishment. But the Reagan Administration did play a key role in negotiating the Montreal Protocol, which addressed the stratospheric ozone hole and its depletion during his second term.

Birthing the Environmental Justice Movement

In 1982, a line of trucks rolled into Warren County, North Carolina filled with 60,000 tons of soil contaminated with a cancerous chemical called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. The state government of North Carolina had designated Warren Co. as the site of a landfill for the PCB-laden soil, but local residents pushed back. Brian talks with Rev. William Kearney, associate pastor at Coley Springs Baptist Church in Warren Co., about how the protest is Warren Co. blended civil rights with environmental health, in turn sparking the environmental justice movement.

Music:

Come As You Were by Blue Dot Sessions

Delicious by Blue Dot Sessions
Headlights/Mountain Road by Blue Dot Sessions
Partly Sage by Blue Dot Sessions

True Blue Sky by Blue Dot Sessions

North Carolina; environmental justice; environmentalism; structural racism

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Ed Ayers:
That whole ozone hole thing? You’ll hear more about it later in the show. But before that, we wanted to descend from problems high up in the stratosphere to grassroots movement and to an issue embedded in the very ground we walk on.

Ed Ayers:
In the summer of 1978, a trucking company drove across North Carolina secretly dumping a toxic liquid along stretches of rural roads. The contaminants initially came from a transformer repair company who hired the so-called midnight dumpers to get rid of the liquid. In the end, the truck drivers illegally contaminated 240 miles across the state. They spewed 31,000 of oil filled with a cancerous chemical called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCB.

Brian Balogh:
The culprits were eventually thrown in jail but North Carolina’s state government was left with a problem: what do you do with all that soil filled with PCBs? There wasn’t yet a way to detoxify it, so the state decided to dump the contaminated soil in a landfill. But where could they put 60,000 tons of earth? One option was a site in Alabama that had already been approved by the EPA as a landfill for hazardous waste, but the state said moving the soil would be too costly, so instead they built a landfill in their own backyard in rural Warren County. Little did they know this decision would spark an environmental movement.

William Kearney:
There was a strong outcry right off the bat, and every day people came together to protest the siting of the landfill. They felt it was injustice done by the very government that was supposed to protect us to exploit a situation.

Brian Balogh:
Reverend William [Curney 00:24:04] is an associate pastor at Holy Springs Baptist Church in Warren County.

William Kearney:
I grew up in Warren County not too far from where the landfill was sited.

Brian Balogh:
Today, Reverend Curney researches health and wellness in rural communities. He also gives tours in Warren County about its environmental activism and the protest of the PCB landfill.

William Kearney:
Most of the folks who protest, they didn’t want it to happen in anyone else’s community too, so they really wanted to send a message globally that we all have a voice when it comes to social environmental justice issues.

Brian Balogh:
So why did the state government choose Warren County?

William Kearney:
It’s believed because Warren County was considered poor. It was rural and it had a large percentage of African American population, so people felt that because it was mostly a black community considered politically impotent that we were exploited.

Brian Balogh:
As soon as the state government designated Warren County as a site for the landfill, residents and organizations like the NAACP began to sue. They said the landfill would pollute the water and hurt an already shaky local economy, but the state didn’t budge and in 1982 they got the green light from the EPA to start digging. That’s when protestors took to the streets.

Speaker 7:
The protestors were told not to block the trucks. They’re now lying in the streets blocking one truck moving into the landfill. They’re refusing the order to move and they’re being arrested one by one.

Speaker 8:
We will not allow Warren County to become a dump site.

Speaker 9:
The State Highway Patrol began moving in on the marchers as they approached the entrance to the state landfill. The signs and chants of the protestors made clear their opposition to having the toxic chemical buried in their county.

William Kearney:
In September 1982, that first truckload arrived at the landfill. During that day, there were about 400 to 500 protestors. 50 were arrested on that day. Protestors were trying to block the movement of the trucks. Some were lying in the roadway and lots of them were carrying banners and signs. Among those who were arrested were even juveniles, senior citizens, and the protests didn’t stop the siting of the landfill but at least it helped minimize the site and the size of it.

Brian Balogh:
Do you think it helped make that landfill any safer, to the extent that any landfill for PCBs can be safe?

William Kearney:
The state had said that this was a safe site. It had got waivers from EPA to plant it there even though there was concerns about the water table. It was only about 13 feet or so beneath the landfill and that was not up to EPA standards. There was always questions about the safety of the site. As a matter of fact, within a period of time afterwards it began to bubble up and accumulate water, so they had to… 13 feet of water in the site. So there was always concern about the safety of the site and believed that even though it wasn’t safe it was pushed and planted in Warren County because people thought Warren County wouldn’t really push back.

Brian Balogh:
But Warren County did push back, and it wasn’t just local residents who lined the streets, blocking the truckloads of PCB contaminated soil. They were joined by civil rights leaders from across the country hoping to attract national media attention. Part of the group’s message was to show that this landfill was an example of environmental racism. The blending of civil rights, social injustice, and environmental health, all this was new at the time and it helped birth a cause that came to be known as the environmental justice movement. That movement sought to address environmental inequities in mostly low income areas and communities of color.

William Kearney:
Warren County was unique in that we as blacks had always resisted racial injustice, but it brought racial injustice and environmental injustice in the same movement. It highlight the fact that many of our communities… black communities… were being targeted with landfills and other unhealthy businesses, and historically we as black people were so focused on our social justice we didn’t have time or energy for environmental justice. So they merged the two in Warren County and put black faces on the frontline. Everybody had a part to play.

Brian Balogh:
The protestors didn’t stop the landfill from being built in Warren County, but their actions did cement them in environmental history. Ironically, that sometimes goes unrecognized right there in Warren County.

William Kearney:
Many of the everyday people who took part in a bigger protest don’t realize the impact of what we did in Warren County. They still see ourselves as impotent and without a voice. I hope that helping highlight what happened in Warren County… how the movement has made impact around the globe and how other people celebrate the fact that Warren County birthed a movement, but we haven’t seen that yet.

Brian Balogh:
As a way to amplify Warren County’s history, Reverend Curney has been documenting the stories of folks who took part in the protests nearly 40 years ago. Here’s [Terry 00:30:05] Austin Jones telling a part of her story during an interview in 2012. She participated in the protests when she was just a teenager.

Terry Austin Jones:
I was never afraid, even when we would lie out in front of the trucks and they would just stop. We were in rows and they told us, “Don’t say anything. Don’t talk. Don’t be disobedient. Just lie there.” They would come and pick us up and carry us to a bus… I believe they had a big bus… and they took us to jail. One thing though… and I often tell my daughter… they told us that we would not have a criminal record: that we wouldn’t have anything on our background. But some years later when jobs started doing criminal background checks it came up. Vance County called me for a job and they said, “But there’s one thing showing up in your background and they don’t know what it is,” and I said, “In my background? Not me.” That’s what it was. Impeding traffic is the charge. They said, “You should see about getting that expunged.”

Speaker 11:
Expunged, right.

Terry Austin Jones:
But I said, “No, I’m going to leave it there because this was for a cause and…”

Speaker 11:
Good for you.

Terry Austin Jones:
So whenever I interview and somebody asks me what it is I have the opportunity to tell them that I was engaged in the protest for PCB. I never imagined it would be what it is today. I never imagined, ever thought about, an environmental justice movement. We were just reacting on what we thought was the right thing to do.

Brian Balogh:
The protest continued in court battles after the landfill was built. Again and again, residents continued to raise the alarm about the soil’s risk to their health. Meanwhile, the Warren County inspired activists to look at other environmental injustices. In 1987, the United Church of Christ commissioned a report called Toxic Waste and Race. In it, they validated Warren County’s claim of environmental racism and showed a strong correlation between the placement of toxic waste facilities near communities of color across the country. The North Carolina state government promised detoxification of the PCB landfill as soon as the technology became available, but that process was slow going. In the end, it took 20 years for the site to be detoxified.

William Kearney:
And in 2003 is when there was celebration on site to celebrate the detoxification of the site, so there was remediation, but there’s still concerns from our residents about what happened during the period that these toxic chemicals were dumped along the roadway, hauled into Warren County then sited in Warren County, relative to health [inaudible 00:33:19] residents and the health of the environment. There hasn’t been any real, true tracking of the health impacts, environment impacts, so I hope that going forward they’ll be opportunities that we can revisit and begin to assess the health of our community and our people during that period and even now.

Brian Balogh:
What’s the state of trust in government today?

William Kearney:
There’s been period a whole lot of distrust, but I like to say that we are the people and the government represents the people, and that’s why I think Warren County’s story is so powerful: just everyday people stood up against government and the powers that be. Even though the site was still placed in Warren County, it was reduced in size and later remediated with questions. So I say to those who see issues or see concerns, “What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing?” In Warren County we see that just everyday people, if we were to have a single voice around an issue we can make a difference.

William Kearney:
From my perspective, what drives me is I’d like our community to move from this victim mindset to, “We got dumped on, but we birthed a movement. Now let’s move from victim to victor. How do we use our legacy, our history, our movement to empower ourselves? Other people have written about us, talked us. Now we, everyday people, we’ve got to tell our story and own it.”

Saving the Ozone Layer

In the mid 1970s, scientists discovered a global problem that was only getting bigger. It turned out there was a hole in the ozone layer caused by CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons, which were commonly found in aerosol items like hairspray, as well as refrigerants and foams. The news alarmed the American public. And by the 1980s, activists called for a global ban on CFCs. The question, though, was what the Reagan administration was willing to do about it.

David Doniger is the Senior Strategic Director for the Climate and Clean Energy Program at the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC). In the 1980s, he was an attorney with the NRDC, fighting for a global phaseout of CFCs. He tells Brian about what environmentalists were up against and how the lessons of saving the ozone layer can apply to the crisis of climate change.

Music

Trod Along by Blue Dot Sessions

Mr. Mole and Son by Blue Dot Sessions

Cases to Rest by Blue Dot Sessions

Astrisx by Blue Dot Sessions

Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear

Partly Sage by Blue Dot Sessions

The Confrontation by Podington Bear

Climate change; Reagan adminsitration; environmentalism; regulation

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Ed Ayers:
For our next story, we’re going to take you to an auto repair shop.

David Doniger:
So I had to get my car repaired and I go to this car repair shop.

Ed Ayers:
That’s David [Donegar 00:35:34]. In the 1980s, he was an attorney with the National Resource Defense Council and he was trying to get federal action on a big issue that was only getting bigger: the ozone hole.

David Doniger:
I call my office and I ask if I have any messages. “Yes, so-and-so is trying to reach you urgently.” I call this person and the person says, “You’re not going to believe what I just heard. I was just in a cabinet meeting with my leadership and Donald Hodel is saying we shouldn’t have an ozone treaty, we should tell people to protect themselves. We should have a personal protection policy.” I said, “What does that mean?” And the person says, “It means wear hats and sunglasses.”

David Doniger:
So I’m in this auto repair shop and asking them in the office, “Can I use your phone again?” I called reporters for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. I tell them the story and they said, “Who can we confirm this with? We can’t go by your say-so.” And out of desperation… because I knew I couldn’t give my source away at EPA… I said, “Call the Interior Department and ask for the secretary and ask if they’ll confirm it.” Half and hour later the reporters call back and say, “You’re not going to believe this: they confirm it! What is your comment?” I did a quick cost-benefit analysis. I said, “The industry says it’ll cost a billion dollars over 10 years to phase these chemicals down, and if you have to buy everybody a hat and two bottles of sunscreen and a pair of sunglasses every year…” and I did the math and it came out to 10 billion dollars.

Ed Ayers:
The chemicals David is referring to are CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons. They were commonly found in everyday aerosol items like hairspray as well as refrigerants and foams. In the 1970s, two scientists discovered that when CFCs were released into the stratosphere the sun split them apart. This caused a reaction that destroyed the ozone layer. It also meant that the sun’s harsh UV rays could shine harder on the Earth’s surface: hence the sunscreen reference.

David Doniger:
So you would end up with a weaker ozone shield high above our heads letting in more dangerous ultraviolet radiation that would cause skin cancer, damage to plants, and many other bad consequences. The first reaction of the industry was denial and that denial phase carried through, really, into the early ’80s.

Ed Ayers:
David says some of his NRDC colleagues helped publicize the findings, and the American public, they were concerned.

David Doniger:
This made TV news. It made all the big papers, because it was one of the first times that we came to a realization that the chemicals we use, the things we’re doing, could really alter the global atmosphere. There was a very strong consumer reaction right away: people saying a collective, “I don’t need hairspray or underarm deodorant that bad, in this form anyway.” Consumers shifted very quickly to roll-ons and pump sprays. Some companies reacted quickly to offer those products but the consumer trend was really sharp and the sales of CFCs for aerosols just plummeted.

Brian Balogh:
Now keep in mind this is the 1970s: the environmental decade. As you heard in our first segment, Ronald Reagan approach environment protection a little… well, let’s just call it… differently. So I asked David how the Reagan Administration of the ’80s tackled the issue of CFCs.

David Doniger:
The very last thing that the Carter Administration did was issue a finding that the CFC use was still going on after the aerosol market more or less dried up. The use for refrigeration, the use for solvents and foams… the leakage from that set of uses was also a threat to the ozone layer. That finding triggered a requirement under the Clean Air Act to follow up with further restrictions. Well, that’s when Reagan came in.

Speaker 13:
ABC News now makes its projection for the presidency. Reagan is our projected winner. Ronald Wilson Reagan of California, a sports announcer, a former actor…

David Doniger:
And in the first three years, the EPA was run by Anne Gorsuch Burford. The other big name from the Interior Department was James Watt.

Brian Balogh:
You might remember Jay Turner talking about Burford earlier in the show. She was forced to resign in 1983 after a scandal over mismanagement. In her place, Reagan brought back William Ruckelshaus, who ran the EPA under Nixon.

David Doniger:
Now, my organization, NRDC, knew that after the Carter Administration had made this finding of endangerment we could sue the agency to force action to be taken. That’s the way the Clean Air Act works. It gives citizens’ groups the authority to go to court to force the agency to do things that are required. But we didn’t want to take that lawsuit in the first few years because we were afraid that the first Reagan EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch, would just revoke the finding of danger. So we waited. When Bill Ruckelshaus came in, we knew him to be a man of honor and principle and science-driven and we knew that he wouldn’t react to a lawsuit by revoking the scientific finding, so that’s when we brought the lawsuit.

Brian Balogh:
By this time, though, David says public interest in the issue was waning. People weren’t necessarily thinking about what chemicals went into their refrigerators.

David Doniger:
What happened is I got a call one day soon after we filed the lawsuit from someone in the agency: a career staffer. He said, “You don’t know me,” and it’s true I didn’t know who he was. I’m thinking, “Who is this guy?” He said, “If you push this lawsuit, you’re going to win, but then you’ll get the wrong answer. You’ll be able to force a decision from the agency but you’ll get the wrong answer. I need two years to beef up the science of the alternatives, the science of the effects.” It was a very grandiose plan. “I’ll do this in a series of workshops with industry and with you and we will rebuild the support for action on this.”

Brian Balogh:
And he wasn’t named Deepthroat, was he?

David Doniger:
No. His name was John Hoffman, but he was one of the most influential people at EPA. So we agreed to a settlement agreement that gave the agency two years to work on these studies and the outreach and engagement.

David Doniger:
I remember a meeting in Vienna, Virginia, where representatives of the DuPont Company, which was the biggest maker of CFCs, came into that meeting and they said, “We want to show you, in all earnestness and honesty, that there are no alternatives.” One by one they said, “We have this one and that one and these would work, but they’re more expensive than the CFCs, so there’s no answer.” A light bulb went off in my head. I said to them, “You mean if the supply of the CFCs was restricted so that their price went up, these other chemicals would be competitive?” And they all looked a little dumbfounded. I’m still not quite sure whether I was being set up to reach that conclusion or whether they had never thought of it themselves, but it was the right answer.

David Doniger:
In 1986, at one of these conferences that EPA had organized, they made me one of two keynote speakers, the other one being from the industry. The guy from the industry spoke first. He said, “We have concluded that we need to limit how much more of these chemicals we make.” And I gave a presentation in which I said, “We need to phase these chemicals out, and if we were really following the science we’d do it right away, but I realize that there’s a need for a transition. I propose that we phase them out completely over a 10 year period.”

David Doniger:
By that time there was a new EPA administrator named Lee Thomas who was in the Ruckelshaus mold. He was a straight shooter. He decided that a 95% phase out over 10 years should be the US policy going into a new set of international negotiations about these chemicals. It was at about that time that the ozone hole was discovered. The ozone hole is the name for a huge drop in the levels of ozone in the stratosphere over Antarctica that shows up at the end of the long southern winter, which ends in September, and the sunlight peaks up over the horizon and suddenly the ozone levels plummet.

David Doniger:
How is this discovered? Well, there was a research station on Antarctica with a device that looked up and measured the ozone concentration from the group up, and for a couple of years they found these anomalous low readings in September when the sun came up and they didn’t know what to make of it, so they waited until the next year to make sure it happened again. Finally, they published the results in Nature Magazine. Then it turned out that folks at NASA have a satellite that’s been circulating over the whole world, but including Antarctica, and they had 10 years or more of records of ozone layer concentrations. They went back into their files and sure enough they found evidence that this ozone hole had happened in the late 1970s and was growing, growing, growing.

Brian Balogh:
I don’t need to tell you that the only penguins we have here in the United States are in zoos and I guess Batman comics. What happens at the South Pole can seem like a world away from the hustle and bustle of Washington DC. But the fact is the ozone hole required a global solution.

David Doniger:
There was awareness that this was an international global problem, so there was an effort to get negotiations going among countries. Mostly it was between the industrial countries, because the developing countries at that time didn’t make these chemicals. So mostly it was between the US, the Europeans, the Scandinavians, the Canadians, and the Japanese were the other major manufacturers. The US, Japan, Europe were the manufacturers and the other developed countries were concerned about this.

Brian Balogh:
With so many players it’s not surprising that it was a struggle to develop an international agreement to limit the use of CFCs. David says the 1985 discovery of the ozone hole gave negotiators a boost. It helped set the stage for what many people see as one of the biggest environmental success stories of the 20th century: the Montreal Protocol.

David Doniger:
It was really dramatic. What they got in Montreal was a 50% phase down over 10 years. My initial reaction… It’s great. There’s an agreement. But my initial reaction was, “This isn’t going to do the job.” A few weeks later, I said to the same guy, John Hoffman, “I’m concerned that this is a halfway measure and we’re going to get stuck here.” He said, “You’re wrong, David. In three years we will be back at the negotiating table and we will ramp this up to a full phase out.” And he turned out to be right: that the momentum was building to do more.

Brian Balogh:
Now, EPA aside, I can’t imagine Ronald Reagan taking the lead on what really required international leadership. Did he?

David Doniger:
This is an interesting part of the story. Lee Thomas, the head of the EPA, and George Shultz, who was the secretary of state, worked together on this. They both took this problem very seriously and they worked this negotiating position through… I referred to it earlier, where Lee Thomas said, “Our position should be a 95% phase out over 10 years.” Shultz and Thomas got this adopted as the US negotiating policy, largely because the other agencies didn’t care or weren’t paying attention. Then the industry became alarmed. Again, I told you they were willing to limit how fast things grew… and some of them were willing to put a freeze on the production… but they weren’t ready to sign up for a full phase out. So they went shopping in the Reagan Administration for some other agency to raise issues, and they found their champion in Donald Hodel.

Brian Balogh:
If you need a refresher, Donald Hodel was the secretary of the interior who David referred to earlier: you know, the just wear sunglasses guy. It turned out, though, that Reagan took sun damage pretty seriously. He’d had experience with skin cancer, and some historians think that experience motivated Reagan to prioritize the issue. I asked David he thinks Reagan weighed in on the issue personally.

David Doniger:
I don’t know. I think that he may well have signaled that he got it; he understood this problem. So anyway, he backed Shultz. There was another little incident that I’ll report, that at one point there was a cabinet meeting about this presided over by Ed Meese, who was the attorney general and very close to Reagan. This is where our lawsuit came in, because he said that he was in favor of pursing the international treaty. Why? Because if we didn’t have a treaty, the NRDC would win this lawsuit and would force very severe restrictions on US companies and then the European and Japanese companies would have an advantage. So he favored a treaty in order to have everybody…

Brian Balogh:
On the same playing field.

David Doniger:
The same playing field, exactly right.

Brian Balogh:
You’ll recall the Montreal Protocol only went some of the way toward a full phase out of CFCs. David’s colleagues insisted it was only a matter of time until science proved the connection between CFCs and the ozone hole. That discovery was already happened and it was made in Antarctica in 1986 by a team led by Susan Solomon, who was a researcher with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

David Doniger:
Immediately, we had the basis to come back and force further action, so we actually brought another lawsuit saying that the halfway measure wasn’t enough. We replayed the same dynamics where the US, under the tail end of Reagan and during the Bush Administration, would still have the same interest in having a global solution.

Brian Balogh:
These efforts resulted in new changes to the Montreal Protocol, which has been revised several times. According to a 2013 New York Times article, if the Montreal Protocol had not halted production of CFCs the planet would be warming at an even faster rate. So I asked David what he’s learned about fighting climate change from his effort to stop the spread of the ozone hole.

David Doniger:
I think the story tells you that we can solve global environmental threats like climate change. It also tells you that the resistance of the industry in question is very powerful and the fossil fuel industries are much bigger than the chemical companies that made these refrigerants. They learned some important lessons about obstruction from the Montreal experience. They learned that, from their point of view, the chemicals industry gave in too easy. They learned some obstructive techniques that they have applied with great effect in the climate treaty negotiation. They were in the process during the Reagan Administration but even more so in the years since of taking over the Republican Party so that one whole party is opposed to environmental protection, especially climate protection. In the ’70s that wasn’t so. The outcry was bipartisan. But what’s happened is a symptom of our broader political realignment where people have sorted themselves into partisan camps as individuals and then politicians have sorted themselves into partisan camps. Funding from the oil and coal and gas industries, but primarily oil and gas, for right wing political causes is very strong and they invested heavily in denialism and confusion.

Brian Balogh:
So if you were to offer one optimistic lesson to take away from the saga of CFCs, what would that be?

David Doniger:
Maybe I’d say two things. One is the industry cried wolf that the economy would come to a halt, you wouldn’t be able to keep food cold, you wouldn’t be able to keep medicines cold in the distribution chain, the economy would fall apart if anything was done to these precious CFCs. And it turned out that when they turned the corner on this they could develop the substitutes. Most people don’t know that there’s a different chemical in their air conditioners and so on than there was 40 years ago. In fact, there have been two or three generations of chemicals and we’re going through another generation of refrigerants right now. It doesn’t even show up in the price of products. It doesn’t show up in the way they work. And the same thing is true about the innovations we need to solve climate change in terms of that electric cars work really well. You see this in electricity too. Most people don’t know where their electricity comes from, but the cheapest sources of electricity now are renewables, and the most expensive thing to do would be to build a new coal plant. It just isn’t happening any more.

David Doniger:
But it’s not enough to rely on the markets alone. You need government to step in. The reason we have a Clean Air Act is that the marketplace doesn’t take not of the health damage and the environmental damage that air pollutants cause. You need to have limits, pollution standards, phase downs of these chemicals in order to make the marketplace work properly to innovate and replace them with safer alternatives. We know that can work.

David Doniger:
The other thing I would say is the best time to have dealt with climate change would be about 40 years ago, but the second best time is now. People are now seeing the impacts. The percentage of people who get it… that the climate change problem is real and it’s caused by carbon pollution and by industrial chemicals like CFCs and HFCs… They get it, and the support for pollution control measures is very high. One we get through the current administration, I think we’re on the cusp of a renewed attack on the pollution that’s driving climate change.

Brian Balogh:
David Donegar is the senior strategic director for the climate and clean energy program at the National Resource Defense Council.

Brian Balogh:
That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. Send us an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackStory Radio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Brian Balogh:
BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 14:
Brian Balogh is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is a professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is a professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew [Windham 00:59:39] for Virginia Humanities.