Gus Speth recently had a letter to the editor printed in the New York Times. Read it below (and linked here).
To the Editor:
On May 30 of this year, carbon dioxide levels at the measuring site atop Mauna Loa, in Hawaii, reached 420 parts per million, or 50 percent above the preindustrial level. Forty years have passed since The Times carried an article warning of the grave risks of allowing carbon dioxide to exceed that level.
The study covered in your article was issued by the Carter administration, in one of its last acts. It was widely appreciated four decades ago that climate protection required strong government action. Those of us working on the issue even knew enough to hazard a guess at an upper limit that should not be exceeded (though we were too lenient, later work would reveal).
We have now had decades of gross dereliction of civic responsibility by the federal government, and greenhouse gases continue steadily to build in the atmosphere. We Americans are faced today with a great test of whether we care enough for our children to finally act. We will be late but at least not absent.
James Gustave Speth
Strafford, Vt.
The writer was chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality in the Carter administration and is the author of the forthcoming book “They Knew: The U.S. Federal Government’s 50-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis.”
