By Jonathan Ullman
Director, Santa Barbara-Ventura Chapter
[Update: In order to pass the Inflation Reduction Act by one vote, Senator Chuck Schumer let Senator Joe Manchin add billions of dollars to fund Carbon Capture and Hydrogen speculative, faux-green efforts to maintain fossil fuel-use. Solar, wind and batteries also funded in the bill are ready to be scaled up now. Manchin's then-Chief of Staff became the top lobbyist for the Petroleum Institute.]
There has been great discussion of the Inflation Reduction Act and the 40% reduction in greenhouse gases promised. If true, it would be a solid down payment towards continued life on Earth, but we know humans have a mixed record on predicting future events, and legislative products to save the world offer no warranty.
The breakthrough Schumer-Manchin meeting made news just a couple weeks after NASA’s Webb telescope produced stunning photos of how the universe looked a quarter of a billion years ago. They couldn't tell us what the universe looks like now because the speed of light is too slow. These two events made me think about humans limited perception of time, and how a single meeting could drastically alter the future.
I've been binging Apple TV’s “For All Mankind,” a series that envisions what would happen if the Russians landed on the moon first, which almost happened. In the show, that single change leads to a hyper-space race that drastically changes technology and society in the next 50 years, and perhaps the habitability of earth itself.
I recently stumbled upon the proximity of two people in the Bay Area in early 20th century California who with a slight twist of fate and generous extrapolation could have altered the world's climate.
Timing is everything
We’ve all seen the photo of John Muir camping with President Teddy Roosevelt in May of 1903. Muir squeezed in the President’s request to camp at Yosemite before embarking on a planned year-long global tour. Historians can reasonably argue that the s'mores or not meeting of two powerful and well-known people sped the pace of environmental conservation in the 20th Century.
After crossing the world, Muir returned home to Martinez, CA in May of 1904.
Physics rock star comes to America
That summer, Swedish Nobel Prize-winner Svante Arrhenius, one of the world’s most well-renowned physicists, was lecturing just 25 miles away at the University of California’s “Summer School” in Berkeley, its only campus.
Arrhenius was invited to California to talk about his recent theories on antibodies that could save humanity from terrible diseases. There was another breakthrough he had made in the last few years that was probably more important: that mankind was warming the earth’s climate.
Arrhenius' simple math
Arrhenius determined the Earth was warmer than it should be and pinpointed the culprit: humans burning much more coal. But he portrayed it as overall good news. He noted there would not be another ice age thanks to coal burning. He said the extra warmth could provide more food for humans. However, there was one downside, he said. If left at the current rate, "Carbonic Acid," (the term used for CO2) would lead to human extinction in 10,000 years.
Arrhenius didn't foresee how fast greenhouse gases would surge in the next 120 years. He didn’t know that the surge would unleash trapped carbon uncovered by the result of rapid melting of glaciers and sea ice and that would also affect ocean currents and atmospheric jet streams which would then melt more ice in feedback loops.
Nevertheless, by the turn of the 20th century he had developed the math that showed anthropomorphic change was real. His only error was predicting how soon it would become a problem.
Could a Muir-Arrhenius climate meeting have occured in 1904?
Did John Muir know about climate change? Arrhenius’ climate findings were already in newspapers across the US in 1902, so he must have been aware. Did either seek a meeting with the other the summer of ‘04? Did one take place? Both made top-of-the-fold headlines in the San Francisco and Los Angeles area newspapers that summer. They most certainly knew of each other and were aware of their proximity, but there are no digitized newspaper clippings or archival info to suggest a meeting took place. Muir could have travelled to Berkeley, and Arrhenius told the press he wanted to see Yosemite that summer, the park Muir was working hard to protect.
An alternate timeline takes root
Instead of focusing on saving Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy valley, which San Francisco dams as a reservoir in both timelines, Muir starts writing about climate change in his last 10 years on earth in spiritual terms, reaching much wider audiences and spurring massive government-funded research by President Teddy Roosevelt.
Muir directs the Sierra Club before his death to focus on an invisible, all-consuming threat while there is still time.
Teddy Roosevelt Republicans become known as Climate Republicans and by 2000 when Vice President Al Gore wins the presidency by 215 votes, he has a bipartisan majority in Congress and in the states ready to implement the last phase of the Green New Deal started under FDR.
The movies “Inconvenient Truth” and “Don’t Look Up” were never even contemplated. Manchin became neither coal baron nor senator because coal burning was phased out before he was born. And instead of the famous 1903 photo of Roosevelt and Muir at Yosemite, there is an even more famous statue of Muir, Arrhenius and Roosevelt on the Mall in Washington at the signing the 1908 Carbonic Acid World Protection Act.
If only a certain meeting had happened then, we wouldn’t be so anxious waiting for legislation to save the world. In fact, top climate scientists are pressing the UN to examine a wider range of future events, including human extinction. “Climate change: More studies needed on possibility of human extinction” (BBC, Aug. 1, 2022).
According to NASA -- which has great info on Arrhenius, the universe, and time travel -- humans can’t go back in time and change the future. But avoiding past mistakes is itself a form of time travel.
We know the Manchin-Schumer meeting was not be the best-timed meeting to deal with climate change. If Democrats only had a vote or two to spare, Schumer wouldn't even need to meet with him. It's a Hail Mary pass with three seconds on the clock. It's a Cat in the Hat cleanup as the parents pull into the driveway. It simultaneously funds solar, wind and batteries and speculative carbon capture and hydrogen schemes that further dependency on fossil fuels. But it's all we've got. So let's make the future. When's the next meeting?