I’m guessing it was 1971 when I learned about greenhouse gases. It was sometime in my first year of high school, although the freshman class was housed in the building of the junior high school that was next to the high school due to space constraints brought on by the baby boom.
Brad Hollis and I partnered up for a student project, although I now couldn’t tell you what class the project was for, although it is likely that it was for Ninth Grade Social Studies or even some sort of elective class of the sort that was just becoming part of the style of public-school curricula back then. I can tell you that the project was a documentary about pollution, and the timing seems right considering that the original Earth Day was April 22, 1970.
I was the sort of kid who took things seriously and I was already caught up—in a tangential way, anyway—with the Vietnam War protests, in large part, no doubt, mimicking my older brother, who was then a newly-minted college guy getting involved in protests on the UMASS campus. Still, if you suspect the veracity of my seriousness, I can further cite the fact that during the summer before my sophomore year I helped start an alternative student newspaper in the underground style of the times. The name of the newspaper was Student Voice and the political party I also helped found (and which was the ostensible publisher of said newspaper) was called Progressive Student Party, or PSP. That’s how earnest a young fellow I was.
The Vietnam War was big, student rights were big, and the environment was big.
I don’t remember that much about the documentary Brad and I made about pollution and greenhouse gases, and I doubt it was all of ten minutes long. I do remember that we got to use the school library’s newly acquired Sony black and white video camera and may have been the first to do so, since the device was brand new and had only recently come on to the market and may have been the Sony DV-2400 Portapak released in 1967 or the model that followed that one. What I do remember is our excitement in checking out this equipment and the anxiety this caused the librarian. I also remember the smell of new electronics, which to this day I associate with the phrase “long-chain polymers” and the odor of ozone.
Writing this post led me down memory lane… and to Wikipedia, where I read this:
The first portapak system, the Sony DV-2400 Video Rover, was a two-piece set consisting of a black-and-white composite video video camera and a separate record-only helical scan ½″ video tape recorder (VTR) unit. It required a Sony CV series VTR (such as the CV-2000) to play back the video. Following Sony’s introduction of the Video Rover, numerous other manufacturers sold their own versions of Portapak technology. Although it was light enough for a single person to carry and use, it was usually operated by a crew of two: one carrying and controlling the camera, and one carrying and operating the VTR.
Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has nothing on Brad and my little school video project.
My recollection of this documentary otherwise remains fuzzy regarding the sort of video images we shot, but I’m pretty sure there were pans of roadside litter and some footage of the Charles River. The clearest image I have is the one of my family’s 1967 Ford Country Squire’s tailpipe with its attendant exhaust. I know there was narration about greenhouse gases and their potential for doom, even if I can’t be sure if Brad or I narrated or if we took turns.
When you read accounts about the history of climate change you most likely see the origin story about its public awareness tied to James Hansen, as summarized in the opening paragraph of a Daily Comment piece in The New Yorker, titled: “Listening to James Hansen on Climate Change, Thirty Years Ago and Now,” by Elizabeth Kolbert, published on June 20, 2018, which reads as follows:
On June 23, 1988—a blisteringly hot day in Washington, D.C.—James Hansen told a Senate committee that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.” At the time, Hansen was the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and though his testimony was certainly not the first official warning about the “greenhouse effect”—a report to President Lyndon Johnson, in 1965, predicted “measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate” in the decades to follow—it was the first to receive national news coverage. The Times ran the story at the top of the front page, with a graph showing a long-term rise in average global temperatures.
As Kolbert points out, the Hansen testimony was hardly the first identification of the greenhouse gases relationship to global warming and we now know that the fossil fuel industry had been internally preparing such research and analyses at least as far back as the 1970s. Back then, greenhouse gases and their effects on the environment was common enough knowledge among environmentalists, and common enough knowledge to have a couple of high school freshmen in 1970 or 1971 make an overly-earnest (and.no doubt overly naïve) documentary on pollution that covered the prospect of greenhouse gases and global warming as an environmental threat.
According to my calculations, the afore-mentioned student documentary was made fifty-three years ago. I’ve never stopped thinking about environmental issues, although such attention has ebbed and flowed over the years depending on the demands of my career and family. But being busy wasn’t enough to block, over this half-century and more, the growing amount of news of pollution, ozone depletion, greenhouse gases, and global warming.
My involvement with environmentalism over this time has inclined toward energy efficiency in the built environment and the technologies of clean energy and energy storage (blame the older brother for this too, with his life-long fixation on flywheel energy storage technology). In the first decade of this century I inadvisably tried to start a business that applied digital measurement capture, CAD, CAM, and emerging building material and building science to deep energy retrofits as a way to reduce costs for re-cladding existing homes and buildings, and when I say the effort was “inadvisable,” I refer to a favorite joke of mine, which is: “Who knew that you needed capital to start a business?”
This effort, which I called Retrosheath, is now becoming more real at the hands of others. Back in 2009, I had like so many others pursuing climate change amelioration high hopes that the Obama Administration’s proposed Energy Bill would provide a good development environment, but if you recall, that bill went nowhere in the face of the 2008 financial industry bailout and a contrary GOP Congress. Despite my successful grant of a provisional patent and my uniformly unsuccessful applications for research grants from the likes of NYSERDA and DOE and the Retrosheath Powerpoint presentations that still float somewhere in the omniscient digital cloud, the result of my early efforts is little more that the occasional citation as tracked by Academia.com, but otherwise nothing other than coincidental to today’s developments.
It turns out that waiting for technologies to develop on their own makes the better business plan. These days solar power installers use drones to capture roof measurements needed to design and install PV panel systems. There are now many choices of high-insulation recladding materials and a growing common knowledge of these materials. Building science has had another decade or so to identify and address the specific issues raised by re-enveloping a building with air-sealing and insulation cladding. Further advances and ubiquity in CAD and CAM support planning and design, while also boosting effective material manufacture. Although the pieces aren’t yet put together as a system designed for the general building trades, with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the market conditions may finally be right to efficiently tackle the reduction in building sector’s significant contribution to global warming.
Me? I’m going to stick to my writing.