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We Saved the Planet Once. Can We Do It Again?

With a new young family, future NDP MP Charlie Angus faced the urgency of the climate crisis in the late ’80s. An excerpt.

A young family poses for a photo.
Charlie Angus with his wife, Brit, and newborn daughter Mariah in 1988. In the late 1980s, responding to the growing climate crisis felt within reach, writes Angus. Photo by Taman Bradette.
Charlie Angus 3 Jan 2025The Tyee

Charlie Angus is a nationally recognized politician, author and musician. He has published nine books, including Cobalt and Children of the Broken Treaty.

[Editor’s note: Charlie Angus’s 'Dangerous Memory,’ out now with House of Anansi Press, blends memoir with reporting to tell the story of the upheavals of the 1980s, and how those upheavals hold hopeful lessons in resistance readers and activists can draw on to face today’s challenges.]

The summer of 1988 was brutally hot in Toronto. The oppressive heat hung over the city streets. My wife, Brit, said our neighbourhood smelled like raw hamburger and urine. We didn’t have air conditioning at our house, just some small fans I’d picked up at the discount department store on Carlaw Avenue. Everything moved slow, but Brit most of all. She was nine months pregnant.

According to the news, 1988 was the hottest summer on record, and six of the previous hottest records were set in the 1980s.

This was no meteorological anomaly. In late June, the U.S. Senate launched special hearings into the greenhouse effect. NASA’s James E. Hansen gave riveting testimony on how the scientific community was certain that manmade carbon dioxide was affecting the planet’s atmosphere. Hansen presented scientific modelling that backed up his troubling claims.

The news that we were in danger of burning our planet landed like a bombshell in Washington.

Democratic Sen. Timothy E. Wirth declared, “The scientific evidence is compelling: the global climate is changing as the Earth’s atmosphere gets warmer. Now, the Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that warming trend and how we are going to cope with the changes that may already be inevitable.”

But in the oil company boardrooms of Houston and Calgary, this was old news. Companies such as Exxon had spent decades quietly amassing cutting-edge climate research on the impacts fossil fuels were having on the planet.

The knowledge dated back to the 1950s, when Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, warned the petroleum lobby that increased oil production would lead to the melting of the ice caps, plunging the world into environmental catastrophe.

By 1968, the American Petroleum Institute was able to plot out the timelines of this seemingly slow-moving disaster. They predicted that “significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000,” which would put in motion the eventual collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf.

A 1982 internal memo warned that time was running out. If steps weren’t taken to lower emissions, the damage to the planet “may not be reversible, and little could be done to correct the situation.”

But the companies didn’t release any of these reports to the public. They used them to protect their own interests. In 1988, Shell received an analysis that backed up the previous studies. It put the countdown clock as beginning in or around the year 2000. The report stated, “Many scientists believe that a real increase in the global temperature will be detectable towards the end of this century…. However, by the time global warming becomes detectable it could be too late.”

Shell suppressed the report but opted to rebuild their offshore oil rigs to withstand a six-foot rise in ocean levels. The oil giant then launched a widespread publicity campaign to undermine the research of climate scientists. The industry spent billions spreading disinformation through bogus studies, paid influencers and false front groups to question the science they knew to be true.

The lie succeeds

In The Petroleum Papers, Geoff Dembicki writes that the “big lie… partially came from Canada,” as oil interests ramped up production in the heavily polluting oilsands north of Fort McMurray.

The lie succeeded spectacularly. At the beginning of the 1990s, 88 per cent of the American public believed that climate change was a serious problem. By the end of the decade, that number had dropped to 28 per cent.

Government research lagged far behind what was known by the oil industry. In the late 1970s, the Carter administration had established a scientific panel to investigate the possible connection between carbon burning and climate instability. The 1979 report Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment confirmed the connection between manmade carbon dioxide and the changing climate. The report stated that the world was on track to see a disastrous rise in global temperatures, from 2 to 3.5 C.

President Carter took the issue seriously. He promoted the development of renewable energy technologies, even going so far as to install solar panels on the roof of the White House. At the beginning of his term, the price of solar energy was $77 per kilowatt hour. By the time he left office, the price had dropped to $25 per kilowatt hour. Those costs are now down to 6 cents per kilowatt hour.

The incoming Reagan administration, however, was not about to do anything to challenge the dominance of Big Oil and King Coal. In a serious setback to the role of the United States in developing renewable technologies, Reagan killed Carter’s tax incentives for solar technology.

The 1988 Senate hearings came at a time of growing global environmental activism. Across the United States, grassroots campaigns backed up by legal action were forcing the cleanup of environmental disaster zones. In 1980, the militant environmental group Earth First! was formed to promote direct action campaigns of “monkey wrenching,” or sabotage, of industrial infrastructure against corporate logging interests.

Civil disobedience also came to the fore in a number of other environmental battles. More than 800 people were arrested and put on trial as a result of the Clayoquot Sound protests in British Columbia, to stop the clearcutting of old-growth forests. In Temagami, Ont., Indigenous activists stepped to the forefront to defend and lay claim to their traditional lands.

In the late 1980s, it was possible to believe that science, activism and government would come together to respond to the growing climate crisis.

The New York Times describes the decade as the time when we could have stopped climate change. There are many reasons why it could have been possible. Following Hansen’s testimony, a global conference was held in Toronto looking to bring about solutions. The Conservative government of Brian Mulroney promised to find a way to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions, and also joined the fight to stop the destruction of North American lakes by industrial pollution. Mulroney pushed the Reagan administration to negotiate a treaty limiting the damaging impacts of acid rain that were being caused by the burning of sulphur dioxide in smelter stacks.

Birth on a scorching summer night

As young, soon-to-be parents during that scorching summer of 1988, Brit and I weren’t paying much attention to reports of the emerging climate crisis. Our focus was on bringing a new life into our family, and that meant figuring out how to raise a child in Angelus House, a community living home Brit and I had started in our early 20s to house runaways, drug addicts, refugees and folks coming out of prison.

Our first daughter, Mariah, was born at Angelus House on the brutally hot evening of July 16, 1988. She was attended by two midwives. The house was on a little dead-end street across the road from a booze can run by Shirley, a woman from somewhere far south of the Mason-Dixon line. She once told me that she had done time for shooting a man in Detroit. The windows were open, and we could hear the sound of men arguing on the street below. At one point, Brit gave out a sharp cry and the arguing on the street suddenly stopped.

She gave out another loud cry, and Shirley shouted, “Don’t you worry, honey! I’m coming to help.”

A vintage group photo featuring mostly adults, but a couple infants and a small child.
Angelus Catholic Worker House friends and volunteers. Photo submitted.

Shirley came storming into our house with the intention of delivering the baby. Fortunately, this was the moment that Mariah chose to come into the world.

I looked out the window and saw Shirley walking back to the men sitting silently on the sidewalk waiting. She told them everything was going to be all right. Soon after, their drinking, arguing and fighting resumed — just another Saturday night in South Riverdale.

Since 1988, the record for the hottest summer ever has been broken multiple times; the eight years leading up to 2021 were the eight hottest ever recorded. Then 2023 blew all those previous records away.

By 2024, climate scientists were warning that global temperatures were “off the charts.” This relentless rise in heat has caused unprecedented wildfires, drought and storms.

The steady rise of temperatures matches closely the predictions made in the report to Exxon and Shell executives 40 years ago.

But there is concern that the crisis is moving faster than anticipated. The oil lobby predicted the collapse of the ice shelves would be noticeable sometime after 2000. They were off by five years. In 1995, environmental researchers were shocked when, over the course of a few days, 4,200 square kilometres of the Larsen Ice Shelf collapsed. Then the Wilkins Ice Shelf collapsed. In 2002, the Larsen B shelf disintegrated.

In March 2022, temperatures in the Antarctic hit 70 F above normal and an ice region the size of Los Angeles collapsed. This put serious stress on the remaining parts of the Larsen C shelf. It is feared that a disappearance of the western Antarctica ice fields could raise sea levels 20 feet, creating an irreversible disaster for life on the planet.

Forty years ago, the fossil fuel companies knew they were burning the planet and lied about it. And even as we confront the undeniable effects of climate change, Canada’s oil industry continues to promote a sense of urgency in doubling down on oil production.

More than five billion people have been born since the record-breaking summer of 1988. Since then, the planet has transitioned into a new and frightening, unstable geological epoch.

In Fire Weather, John Vaillant writes: “By almost any measure, anyone born after 1990 is finding themselves in a new geological era, navigating a world fundamentally different from the one baby boomers and gen-Xers inherited. The chances of anyone alive today experiencing a year as relatively cool as 1996 are effectively nil.”

I grew up thinking that geological time was measured in millions of years, yet an exceptional and terrifying planetary shift happened on my watch, and I barely noticed.

But: the success of the Montreal Protocol

But there are dangerous memories from the 1980s that we can use to save the planet today.

In 1987, representatives of 55 countries gathered in Montreal to address the damage chlorofluorocarbons, commonly referred to as CFCs, were causing to the Earth’s fragile ozone layer, which protects us from deadly radiation from the sun.

The chemical companies that produced CFCs were purposely undermining the science. And, like the climate crisis, deterioration of the ozone layer was happening much faster than expected. The United States announced they wouldn’t be bound by the agreement, and environmental activists denounced the agreement as weak.

Yet the Montreal Protocol succeeded, proving that the global community could come together to address human-caused threats to the planet.

Even though the original agreement had only 24 signatories, the treaty contained two major provisions that ensured its success. The first key factor was that it committed participants to annual meetings to discuss objectives and benchmarks. This ongoing process led to eventual ratification by 197 nations. The second and crucial factor was that the Montreal Protocol legislated a cap on CFC production that included a commitment to work toward a total phase-out.

As it stands now, the oil industry in Canada, backed by right-wing provincial governments, is not only fighting vigorously to oppose an emissions cap but also looking to dramatically increase production.

Recent studies by NASA have shown that if the Montreal Protocol had failed, life would be unlivable on the planet today. I think of the incredible life of my first-born daughter, who came into the world as this agreement was going into effect. If it had not been signed and acted on, she would not be here today. Nor would any of us.

We saved the planet once. Can we do it again?

In 2023, the International Energy Agency reported that thanks to huge investments in clean energy technology, we may be witnessing “the beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era.

There is a global shift toward renewable energy and EV technology. But will the promised investments by government and industry be enough?

Clearly not.

And this is where another lesson from the 1980s could make the difference.

Mass protest marches against the nuclear threat during that era put enormous pressure on politicians to find a solution.

Activism now can force governments and industries to halt the expansion of fossil fuel production and start making more dramatic investments in a renewable non-carbon future. Yes, the window is narrow and the odds against success appear high. But they are as high as they were in Montreal almost four decades ago. This is a dangerous memory that must be shared, because despite it being such a close call, the fragile ozone layer continues to heal.

We can do the same to cool a burning planet.


Excerpted from ‘Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed’ by Charlie Angus. Copyright 2024. Published by House of Anansi Press. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.  [Tyee]

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