The earth transformed, p.75
The Earth Transformed, page 75
A separate, parallel CIA report looked at the implications in more detail. ‘If climatologists who believe a cooling trend is underway prove to be right’, its authors declared, there would ‘almost certainly be an absolute shortage of food’ around the world, led by drops in output in the Soviet Union and China because of shorter growing seasons, as well as more frequent monsoon failures in South and South-East Asia and in southern China.102 ‘Moreover, in periods when climate change is underway,’ they continued, ‘violent weather – unseasonal frosts, warm spells, large storms, floods, etc. – is thought to be more common.’ All this would have ‘an enormous impact’ not only on the balance between food and population but on ‘the world balance of power’, largely because the US’s geography made its ecologies less vulnerable to climatic change: this was likely to lead to anti-American sentiment on the part of countries which either were already dependent on the US or would become so.103
There was a strong chance of social and political upheaval, said the report’s authors, as ‘rural masses’ became ‘less docile’ under pressure of famine and as the living standards of urban middle classes in sub-Saharan Africa, East Africa and India fell in response to food shortages and sharp price rises.104 In the worst-case scenario, they warned, ‘Massive migration backed by force would become a very live issue. Nuclear blackmail is not inconceivable.’ As far as poor countries were concerned, it was likely that the population ‘problem’ would be solved ‘in the most unpleasant fashion’. This meant mass starvation.105 When George Will of the Washington Post got hold of a copy of this report, he summarised its findings bluntly: if the climate change occurs, he wrote, ‘there will be megadeaths’.106
Some senior figures in the US administration believed that it was possible to leverage agricultural, climatological and economic power into gains. ‘Food is a weapon,’ said Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, and was ‘now one of the principal tools in our negotiating kit’.107 The problem was that, despite having strong cards to play, the US had a weak hand when it came to energy. And this helped determine policy in ways that were far more influential than warnings about climate change, and furthermore went a lot further in encouraging lower consumption of fossil fuels, in promoting investment in renewable and clean sources of power and in provoking discussions about sustainability.
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Ironically, then, the impulse towards lower consumption of fossil fuels came not as a result of warnings from scientists or from intelligence briefings, but as a result of events in October 1973 that took place thousands of kilometres away in the Middle East after a coalition of Arab states launched a surprise attack on Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur – which gave its name to the ensuing war. To apply pressure on the US, the Arab nations that were part of OPEC (the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) cut oil production and then placed an embargo on oil shipments to the United States, as well as on those to other countries that were either supportive of and sympathetic to Israel or were thought to be. The result was a major energy crisis.
Within weeks, the US was facing shortages and what President Nixon in a televised address to the nation on 7 November called ‘a serious national problem’. The United States had ‘grown and prospered in recent years’ by being able to rely on oil imports. The war in the Middle East had changed this, leaving the country facing ‘the most acute shortages since World War II’. As a result, dramatic action was now needed by the American people: in the short run, that meant ‘we must use less energy – that means less heat, less electricity, less gasoline’. In the long run, he went on, ‘it means that we must develop new sources of energy’ to provide for energy independence in the future.108
He spelt out a radical set of measures that would now come into effect. These included nationwide changes for every household. ‘To be sure that there is enough oil to go around for the entire winter, all over the country,’ said Nixon, ‘it will be essential for all of us to live and work in lower temperatures.’ That meant lowering ‘the thermostat in your home by at least 6 degrees’; this had been endorsed by his personal doctor, who had told him that ‘you really are more healthy’ in a cool environment than in a warm one. Offices, factories and ‘commercial establishments’ were required to reduce temperatures by ten degrees – ‘either by lowering the thermostat or curtailing working hours’ if that was the only alternative.109
Sweeping changes were announced across the federal government. Energy consumption was being and would be further cut across ‘every agency and every department in government’; state governors were encouraged to look at plans ‘slightly altering the school year’ (presumably to take advantage of longer hours of daylight during the summer) and at curbing ‘unnecessary lighting’ in communities; initiatives would be introduced to encourage greater use of public transport and car sharing; every government vehicle would have its speed capped at 50 miles per hour (except in emergencies) to conserve fuel; and a national highway speed limit would be set, based on combustion engines’ optimal efficiency, to help save hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil a day. ‘We must all co-operate to change,’ said Nixon.110
The US should be inspired by the recent moon landing, as well as by the technological achievements of the Manhattan Project, the President went on, to develop ‘the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy supplies’. Announcing a new plan, which he christened Project Independence, Nixon pledged that by 1980 it would be possible for America to meet its energy needs from its own resources.111
Concerns about energy availability, rising prices, the environment and dependency on foreign exports with its implications for the economy and for national security all have resonance in today’s world. So too do the promises and commitments by governments to solve problems with deep roots through a series of ambitious announcements that deliver little by way of action. It is true that the energy crisis of the early 1970s left a deep imprint on the United States, the most obvious of which is that the speed limit of 55mph which was signed into law a few weeks after the presidential address remains in place half a century later. Early studies showed that these restrictions cost Americans almost 2 billion hours a year in lost time, but that lower speeds saved lives as well as fuel.112 But few who take to the roads today, in electric vehicles or otherwise, link the speed they are allowed to travel with emergency measures intended to limit energy consumption.
One of the challenges, of course, was the power of the fossil-fuel lobby in the US which made moves towards cleaner energy difficult to achieve, as well as the resistance of voters to any increase in taxation to fund long-term programmes. The problems were epitomised during the presidency of Jimmy Carter (1976–80). ‘The choices facing the members of Congress are not easy,’ he said, when announcing his National Energy Plan in November 1977 in a nationwide address. ‘With every passing month,’ he said, ‘our energy problems have grown worse. This summer we used more oil and gasoline than ever before in history,’ with reliance on imports increasing rather than decreasing. This created inflationary pressures that were out of the hands of the US government, said Carter, who quoted his Secretary of Defense, Harold Brown, as saying that ‘The present deficiency of assured energy sources is the single surest threat…to our security and to that of our allies.’ This was one reason why it was essential to create the new Department of Energy to oversee and co-ordinate responses to an extremely serious challenge.113
We need to ‘cut back on consumption’, said Carter, ‘shift away from oil and gas to other sources of energy’ and ‘encourage production of energy here in the United States’. While supporting domestic fossil-fuel producers, he went on, the government would use tax incentives and penalties ‘to hasten the shift from oil and gas to coal, to wind and solar power, to geothermal, methane, and other energy sources’. This was difficult, the President acknowledged, because America was facing ‘long-range, future challenges’, and politicians were elected for only short periods in office. Nevertheless, he concluded, ‘I hope that, perhaps a hundred years from now, the change to inexhaustible energy sources will have been made.’114
Carter was not the first to suggest investment in research and development in clean energy. At the start of the 1970s, Nixon had introduced measures in Congress that included plans to improve energy efficiency as well as investment in technologies that enabled moves to cleaner fuels, including solar power, geothermal sources and hydrogen-based fusion reactors.115 The money made available, however, was derisory and never likely to open up resources that were commercially viable. Carter, on the other hand, spoke with the zeal of an evangelist. ‘The world has not prepared for the future,’ he had said in a televised address to the nation soon after taking office. While advocating a boost in coal usage, he also set out ambitious goals to insulate homes and new buildings, and to develop and expand solar energy. These were all necessary, he said, ‘to protect our jobs, our environment, our standard of living, and our future’. It was simple: ‘We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren.’116
Not enough people agreed with him. Part of the problem lay in geopolitical turbulence in the late 1970s which saw OPEC hiking oil prices once again by 50 per cent in 1979, threatening to tip global economies – including in the US – into recession. Matters were made worse by Carter’s tin-eared response. ‘In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,’ he said in July 1979, chastising voters who were due to vote in presidential elections just a few months later. There was ‘a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools’, he added. ‘It is the truth and it is a warning.’ Personal greed was the problem. ‘Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.’117 These admonitions went down badly, with Carter’s popularity plunging to unprecedented levels. This was capitalised on by Ronald Reagan, whose defence of the ‘common sense and common decency of ordinary men and women, working out their lives in their own way’, fell on fertile ground and swept him into the White House.118
Looking back now, it is hard to see how the opportunities to engage with energy shifts were missed. In the summer of 1979, for example, Carter had announced a billion-dollar funding package for solar and other renewables while showing off new solar panels that had been fitted to the White House roof. ‘In the year 2000, this solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy,’ he said. ‘A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.’119
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Rather than a world of clean, renewable energy, the pathway of the following decades was one that led to an extraordinary rise in energy consumption, fossil-fuel burning, carbon emissions and pollutants – propelled above all by rising and intensive international trade and globalisation. Ironically, one of the catalysts for this lay in the compromising of the US presidential system; and another in weather-modification programmes that had been developed during the Vietnam War.
A treasure trove of thousands of documents relating to US military activities in South-East Asia had been handed over to the press by Daniel Ellsberg, a disillusioned researcher who had been involved in compiling a history of the US role in Indo-China from the end of the Second World War to the late 1960s. Known as the Pentagon Papers, these began to appear in print in a series of scoops and revelations in the New York Times and Washington Post that had readers riveted – and outraged by the number and range of covert operations that had been authorised, and by the disclosure that the administration of Lyndon Johnson had systematically lied ‘not only to the public but also to Congress’.120
Stories began to appear in the summer of 1971 and continued unabated after the Supreme Court ruled that efforts by the US government to block publication violated the First Amendment of the Constitution and could not be justified in law.121 One of the most striking revelations was about long-term efforts to manipulate the weather in South-East Asia during the Vietnam War. A report that had appeared even before the Pentagon Papers were released had alleged that ‘Air Force rainmakers’ had ‘succeeded in turning the weather against the North Vietnamese’ in a hush-hush project codenamed Intermediary Compatriot that had begun in 1967 and had increased rainfall over jungle road networks during the wet seasons.122
This report had caused alarm in some quarters in Washington, not least within the Senate Subcommittee on Oceans and International Environment, which demanded a response from the Secretary of Defense, who first declined to reply on the grounds that it would threaten national security and then testified in the Senate that no weather modification had been attempted, stating that ‘we have never engaged in that type of activity over North Vietnam’.123
It was highly embarrassing, therefore, when a detailed account of precisely that activity appeared in the summer of 1972 in a lengthy exposé in which the journalist Seymour Hersh set out how, where and why a concerted programme had been developed. As one official with detailed knowledge of the operation explained, ‘We were trying to arrange the weather pattern to suit our convenience.’124 This was a reference to the Project POPEYE, the new codename chosen for INTERMEDIARY COMPATRIOT after the latter’s moniker had been revealed despite being classified.125
As it later emerged, the objective of POPEYE was ‘to produce sufficient rainfall’ along communication lines in North Vietnam and southern Laos by seeding clouds with iodine to ‘interdict or at least interfere with truck traffic’ and, in so doing, to interrupt supplies. Initial experiments were conducted in Laos without the knowledge of Lao authorities and in conditions of utmost secrecy, ‘unknown to other than a severely limited number of U.S. officials’. During this test phase, ‘more than 50 cloud seeding experiments were conducted’. The results were described by the Department of Defense as ‘outstandingly successful’, with more than 80 per cent of the clouds that were seeded producing rain soon afterwards, with sufficient downpours ‘to have contributed substantially to rendering vehicular routes…inoperable’. One US Special Forces camp in Vietnam was ‘inundated with nine inches of rain in four hours’, seemingly taking servicemen by surprise.126
The results were very promising, early reports claimed, and provided strong evidence that the techniques could have a significant impact on enemy movements, supplies and communications; this could be enhanced by bombing bridges and river crossings to create bottlenecks. There were potential side-effects, however. For one thing, ‘the proposed program would drastically change the weather patterns over the next few months’, according to the request presented to the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, ‘to inaugurate operations at once’. For another, as the memorandum conceded, ‘There would be some hypothetical effect of an adverse nature in Thailand where…normal rainfall might be somewhat diminished,’ although this was not worth worrying about; changes to precipitation levels and timings were nonetheless likely to have ‘appreciable consequences outside the target areas’. There were risks to confidentiality, such as ‘planned weather experiments in India’, the possibility of a US seeding aircraft being downed or of leaks in the press. This was why the proposal to move forward was dependent on the authorisation of the President.127
As it later emerged in Senate hearings, POPEYE was intended ‘to deny the enemy the use of roads by: softening road services, causing landslides along roadways, washing out river crossings [and] maintaining saturated soil conditions beyond the normal time span’.128 Over the five years between its inception and its termination two days after Hersh’s revelations, more than 2,500 sorties were flown by US aircraft with target priorities set by intelligence-gathering officers based at Tan Son Nhut in South Vietnam, at a cost of around $3.6 million per year.129 Aircraft whose roles ‘were not dedicated exclusively to the cloudseeding missions’ over Laos and northern Cambodia were operated out of Thailand, whose government was neither asked for approval nor informed of the purpose and nature of these sorties.130
These disclosures were the tip of the iceberg. In Senate hearings in April 1972, it emerged that the US had been involved in weather interventions in the Philippines three years earlier and had been in discussion with that country’s government about ‘potential hurricane modification’. US Navy personnel had selected, seeded and ‘kept alive’ rainclouds off Okinawa in 1971 to help with drought alleviation. Discussions had been held ‘informally’ with Canada about cloud-seeding over the Great Lakes and with the British about ‘hurricane work’ in the Bahamas.131
In addition to this there was Project GROMET, a top-secret plan to try to mitigate drought in India in 1966–7 in which President Johnson had taken a personal, even obsessive interest, examining weekly rainfall maps so closely that he knew ‘exactly where the rain fell and where it failed to fall’. On this occasion, the US consulted with the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, whose government gave approval, even though it took steps to ensure that American involvement and the initiatives were not made public. As it turned out, the interventions were not successful and, with the arrival of abundant monsoon rains in the summer of 1967, not needed.132
