To judge by recent Supreme Court decisions, the world didn’t know much about climate change a half century ago.
In 2007, when the court ruled that the Clean Air Act of 1970 gave the Environmental Protection Agency the flexibility to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, former Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “When Congress enacted these provisions, the study of climate change was in its infancy.” Writing a dissent in a 2022 case looking at similar questions, Justice Elena Kagan argued that back in 1970 when Congress created the act, legislators gave the EPA the flexibility to keep up with the times, tackling problems (i.e., climate change) that couldn’t be anticipated.
Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, saw those opinions as a sign of how little people understood about the past. “I remember just being mortified by that,” she said. To be sure, at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, people were more worried about the immediate effects of smog than the long-term, climate-altering consequences of burning coal and oil. But Oreskes kne... Read more
