The “Carbon Dioxide Problem”: Nixon’s Inner Circle Debates the Climate Crisis

Washington, D.C., April 26, 2024 - High-level officials inside the Nixon administration debated climate change and the impacts of sea-level rise, extreme temperatures, and fossil-fuel consumption as early as 1969, according to declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project.

To celebrate Earth Day, the National Security Archive this week publishes a small collection of records from the Nixon Presidential Library and other sources that shed light on the internal debates Nixon advisors were having about climate change and other environmental issues amid the rise of the American environmental movement of the 1970s. The records published here today include correspondence between Nixon aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan, domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman, and the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Hubert Heffner, among others, and provide new details on what was a first-of-its-kind White House climatic assessment initiated in 1971.

The Climate Change Transparency Project seeks to uncover previously closed and classified documents that illuminate the policy debates and decisions that have guided the United States through more than 40 years of climate change negotiations and global environmental issues. Tracing the arc of the major diplomatic efforts of the 1970s and 1980s—including the most successful environmental treaty to date, the Montreal Protocol—a primary focus of the project is to document U.S. efforts to reach agreement on a treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming.

Combining hundreds of FOIA requests and open-source research, this project uses primary sources to track decades of U.S. debates around climate change and environmental diplomacy inside the White House, State Department, and other agencies—including the EPA, CIA, and the Defense, Commerce, and Treasury departments. This evidence-based approach augments the available scholarship on climate change by revealing how the debates evolved behind-the-scenes—from the establishment of key environmental agencies under Nixon, to the successes of the Montreal Protocol and the failures of the Kyoto Agreement, to the Paris Climate Accords and the present-day partisan discourse.

The Nixon-era documents posted today are a reminder that the policies and rhetoric of U.S. conservatives toward environmental issues have not always been as divisive and vitriolic as in recent years.[1] [2] On the one hand, Nixon was an unlikely environmental reformist, who was often disdainful of environmental activism. But Democrats and Republicans also found much common ground on environmental issues, and key officials in the Nixon White House were free to discuss and debate the origins and impacts of climate change and the implications for government policy without the level of polarization often seen today. As a result, President Nixon left a significant environmental legacy, fostering the passage of important legislation and the establishment of key agencies such as the EPA and CEQ.[3] 

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In his first State of the Union Address in 1970, President Nixon designated the environment as the defining issue of the decade: “The great question of the Seventies is … shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?”[4]

Although Nixon’s political conservatism fueled his election, the United States was entering a new age of environmental awareness during the 1960s and early 1970s. In part galvanized by the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1969, and spurred by the largest-ever oil spill from an offshore rig in Santa Barbara that same year, the public was demanding increased environmental awareness from its leaders.

Recognizing the huge political power of environmentalism, the Nixon administration and Congress initiated many of the most important, and enduring, environmental policies in U.S. history, including:

• The signing of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970
• The signing of the Clean Air Act of 1970
• The signing of the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1969 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973
• Establishing the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in 1969
• Establishing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970
• Establishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1970

By the time he had declared the first-ever Earth Day on April 22, 1970 (an environmental initiative originally proposed by Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) after the Santa Barbara oil spill), President Nixon had signed over ten pieces of major legislation on environmental issues and established key agencies that would become the bedrock of American environmentalism.

Despite his green record as president, Nixon was ambivalent, at best, and often derisive in his personal opinions about environmentalism. In a private meeting with Henry Ford II, Nixon said environmental predictions were “greatly exaggerated” and he blasted environmentalists for wanting humans to “go back and live like a bunch of damned animals.”[5] But his private fulminations about environmentalists did not seem to carry over into policymaking.

Instead, Nixon relied on his closest advisors to manage environmental policy. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of a handful of Democrats to serve in the Nixon administration, were important influences on White House environmental initiatives. According to historian Joan Hoff, Nixon “turned the environmental policies over to Ehrlichman,” telling him to “keep me out of trouble on environmental issues,” while privately continuing to call the environmental movement “crap for clowns.”[6] He would also bring on “forceful environmentalists” William Ruckelshaus and Russell Train to run the EPA and CEQ, respectively, and John C. Whitaker, another key domestic affairs aide who in 1973 was appointed as Under Secretary of the Interior.[7]

Outside of the White House, Democratic senators, including Edmund Muskie (Hubert Humphrey’s running mate) and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, put pressure on Nixon to tighten environmental regulations. Both senators “created problems for the new president,” with Jackson aiming to coordinate the government’s environmental policy through the congressionally proposed CEQ, and Muskie proposing that oil companies be held fully liable for spills. Nixon complained to Ehrlichman about the “onslaught of Democratic proposals,” prompting environmentalists within the administration, like Train and Whitaker, to push Nixon to “act more assertively to claim [the environment] as a Republican issue.”[8]

Amid various environmental initiatives, Nixon’s advisors believed that global warming, specifically, was a “subject that the Administration ought to get involved with.” Seven months before the first Earth Day, Moynihan wrote to Ehrlichman warning of the potential dangers “of the carbon dioxide problem,” mentioning topics that persist in the discussion about climate change impacts today. These included extreme temperatures and sea-level rise, which he said would mean: “Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter.” Moynihan said that the “burning of fossil fuels” was one of the main causes of increased atmospheric “instability” and pressed for the creation of a worldwide system to monitor carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, something that would not become part of the public conversation on climate change for decades. (Document 1) At the end of the memo, Moynihan attached a 1965 report by the Environmental Pollution Panel of President Lyndon Johnon’s Science Advisory committee, which summarized the risks of rising carbon pollution. (Document 2)[9]

Several months later, Hubert Heffner, Deputy Director of the Nixon administration’s Office of Science and Technology, responded to Moynihan, acknowledging that atmospheric temperature rise was an issue that should be looked at. “The more I get into this, the more I find two classes of doom-sayers, with, of course, the silent majority in between,” he wrote. “One group says we will turn into snow-tripping mastodons because of the atmospheric dust and the other says we will have to grow gills to survive the increased ocean level due to temperature rise.” (Document 3)

Within the White House Office of Science and Technology, under the authority of Office Director Edward E. David, a sub-initiative was proposed to evaluate the impacts of “climate change caused by man and nature” and to create additional global baseline monitoring stations to “assess current and future impacts of natural climatic changes, provide alerts to potential catastrophic trends, and gain new environmental insight and understanding.” (Document 4) Similar to Moynihan’s first memo to Ehrlichman, the newly published sub-initiative outlined several topics that have particular relevance to today’s climatic discourse, including the linkage of land and air travel to air pollution and climate change to potential natural disasters. The authors observed that the benefits of one of the proposed “remote sensing” initiatives were “immense but not quantifiable since the element contributes to ensuring man’s survival.”

David would go on to join the oil and gas industry, serving as President of Exxon Research and Engineering (ER&E) from 1977 to 1986, during which time Exxon launched its own research into the release of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion and the effects of these emissions on global climate. In 1979, David signed off on an Exxon project that used one of its oil tankers to track atmospheric and oceanic carbon dioxide samples and he also oversaw the company’s general climate modeling.[10] Oddly enough, David would later become a climate change denier and was one of 16 co-authors of a 2012 Wall Street Journal op-ed claiming that there was “no need to panic about global warming.”[11]

The Nixon administration’s domestic commitment to environmental progress gave credibility to U.S. leadership on the international stage, playing what CEQ Chairman Russell Train later characterized as “an active role on environmental issues in the principal multilateral institutions.”[12] Moynihan and Ehrlichman saw an opportunity for the United States to lead the global movement in combatting environmental problems, a vision outlined by Moynihan in a proposed policy directive for the Secretary of State. (Document 5) In it, Moynihan advocated for concentrating U.S. international efforts within three major organizations: NATO (which he proposes in Document 1), the United Nations, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). According to a memorandum from Acting Secretary of State U. Alexis Johnson to President Nixon later that month (Document 6), Nixon approved the policy toward the “Major International Organizations Dealing with the Environment.”

While Train has noted that Nixon and principal foreign policy advisor Henry Kissinger never “assigned any significance to environmental concerns in any of their later foreign policy writings,” Nixon was still closely involved with the international environmental agenda, including efforts ahead of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden.[13] The administration also pushed the OECD to adopt a “polluter pays” principle, a concept designed to promote free market mechanisms in addressing pollution. On the 20th anniversary of NATO in 1970, Nixon proposed that the alliance undertake a new non-military dimension that would become the Committee on the Challenges of a Modern Society (CCMS). (Document 7) The CCMS addressed various pollution problems and environmental management issues, as well as automobile safety and disaster relief.[14]

One of the most notable international environmental efforts, however, was the U.S.-USSR environmental agreement signed by Nixon at the Moscow Summit in June 1972. (Document 8) The agreement covered air pollution modeling, pesticides, conservation, preservation, and earthquake predictions. According to Train’s account of the agreement, “as many as 700 scientists and other environmental professionals participated annually in the exchange program,” making it one of “the most comprehensive, bilateral, and environmental agreement[s] ever attempted.”[15]

Today, Nixon’s environmental achievements tend to be overshadowed by discussions of his overall record as President. However, the documents posted below demonstrate that the administration’s environmental agenda began to answer the call from American environmentalists and established credibility on the international stage as the United States became a world leader in environmental protection programs. Bipartisan support for environmental issues in the Senate undoubtedly played a major role in the success of the administration’s legislative agenda, and Nixon’s personal disdain for environmentalism and environmentalists at times seemed in marked contrast to his administration’s overall efforts. Despite this, his time in office marked a moment when environmental issues were at the forefront of the political agenda and could be discussed without the virulent discourse of today’s climate debates.