Twenty years before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called for climate science to be put on trial, an official from the powerful pro-business lobby group crafted what would prove to be a prescient message on global warming.
Harvey Alter, who ran the Chamber's resources policy department at the time, said in 1989 there was "broad consensus" that human-made climate change would likely have a disastrous impact on coastal communities and farmers. Alter warned of rising sea levels and the litany of changes that would accompany a hotter planet.
"Wetlands will flood, salt water will infuse fresh water supplies, and there will be changes in the distribution of tree and crop species and agricultural productivity," Alter said.
The presentation — found in the archives of Delaware's Hagley Museum and Library — also outlined dire climate predictions for New Orleans and other cities, states and countries. It was included in a paper on the Chamber's history of climate obstruction in the 1990s and 2000s, which was published yesterday by the Climate and Development Lab, a think tank hosted by Brown University.
The document and paper shed new light on how drastically the powerful trade association has shifted on climate policy over the years — from acknowledging the problem to climate denial to now rhetorically supporting climate action. And they raise fresh questions about how durable the Chamber's latest reversal will be, according to Cole Triedman, the report's lead author and Brown University undergraduate who unearthed the eye-opening presentation.
"Over the course of these two decades that I investigated, the Chamber proved to have a set of messages that seemed to fit every situation in a way that was ultimately effective" at blocking climate action, Triedman said in an interview. The century-old lobbying juggernaut claims to represent "companies of all sizes across every sector" of the United States economy in the halls of power, but its board of directors has long been stacked with fossil fuel company executives who have the most to lose from potential climate action.
Alter's presentation was intended for a "Symposium on Industrial Development and Climate Change," hosted by the International Environmental Bureau, a precursor organization of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which was at the time a division of the International Chamber of Commerce.
The event was set to take place in Washington, less than a year after former NASA scientist James Hansen warned lawmakers that "the greenhouse effect is here."
Alter noted that while there were still uncertainties about climate science, "the controversy is how much change can be expected, when it will happen, and where its effects will be most evident," the document shows. He had a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Cincinnati and died last year at age 87, according to an online obituary.
Alter went on to predict that rising oceans would "flood now habitable lands in some countries, such as Bangladesh," and force wealthier nations to build levees and dikes "at considerable cost to avoid major displacements of people and their economic bases."
"These same actions will affect wetlands and it may not be possible [to] protect both coastal and wetland areas," he said. Alter specifically warned of risks to the freshwater supplies of Miami and New Orleans as well as the Netherlands.
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"Global warming will affect snowfall patterns, hence melt, and affect water supplies," he added, singling out the danger such changes could pose to California. The state's "water supplies are from snow melt and if snow is reduced to rain, or melts quickly during the winter, water supplies in the summer will be less than now."
Alter was less certain about climate change's impact on farmers, but the trends he rightly identified were concerning.
"Grain production will move north and productivity may fall because of differing soil types," he said. "Global warming could expand the range of livestock diseases and pests."
Alter's message appears to have had little impact within the Chamber, at least initially. By 1991, with George H.W. Bush in the White House and Congress debating proposals to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the Chamber had begun promoting doubt about climate science.
"While possible global warming is a cause for concern, genuine scientific disputes remain as to the existence, causes, and potential consequences of global climate change," the association said in a legislative briefing book for executives, which Triedman also found in the Hagley archives. The Chamber said it opposed mandating "energy-based policy solely on the global warming theory, especially where environmental and economic impacts are unknown."
Since then, the Chamber's stance on climate change has yo-yoed, seemingly in response to the political landscape of Washington.
In September 2008, a Chamber program unveiled an energy blueprint that said, "We must address the impact of our growing energy consumption on the environment and climate." It included calls for the creation of a "federal multiagency Climate Change Adaptation Program" as well as national and international clean energy lending bodies.
The Chamber's energy plan was released while former Arizona Sen. John McCain was campaigning for president on a Republican platform that included implementing a cap-and-trade system to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases.
But the following year, when President Obama's EPA was preparing to regulate carbon dioxide as an air pollutant, a top Chamber official called for putting climate science on trial. The public backlash prompted by that request led tech giant Apple Inc. and the electric utility companies Exelon Corp., Pacific Gas and Electric Co., and PNM Resources Inc. to all publicly renounced their involvement with the association (E&E News PM, Oct. 5, 2009).
J. Timmons Roberts, a Brown environmental studies professor who assisted Triedman with his report, said Alter's 32-year-old presentation puts the Chamber's subsequent actions in a troubling new light. Rachel Wetts, a sociology professor at the university, also helped with the paper.
"Given how far the Chamber veered into climate denial and consistent efforts to undermine any significant climate policy in the United States, the 1989 presentation to the International Chamber is very revealing," Roberts said in an email. "They knew the seriousness of the issue, and chose to mobilize the American business community against the action we needed to have taken."
The Chamber began its latest swing toward climate action in 2019, when Democrats seeking the party's presidential nomination competed for the boldest climate policies. Since that change, however, the association has continued to discreetly support regulations and lawsuits that would make it harder to address the problem (Climatewire, April 21).
The Chamber didn't comment directly on the report, but touted its recent climate efforts.
"We're proud of the work we're doing across the broad Chamber membership to bring meaningful, achievable solutions to the global climate challenge," Matt Letourneau, a spokesperson for the association, said in a statement. "The business community is at the leading edge of innovation and investment in the technology necessary to reduce emissions, and will be an important voice in the international and domestic policy dialogue."
Triedman and his Brown advisers remain unconvinced.
While the Chamber's new messaging "is encouraging for climate action advocates, the findings of this analysis suggest caution and a heightened level of scrutiny," their paper concluded. "The challenge that the Chamber poses to climate action in 2021 has once again changed form, rather than disappeared."
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June 30, 2021 at 08:30PM
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BUSINESS: U.S. Chamber official warned of climate danger in 1989 - E&E News
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