By John McFerrin, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy 

Now that we have a new President (Trump, not Shoenfeld), it is a good time to look again at how the arc of history is bending on climate change. More precisely, it is a good time to look again at the analysis of a trend noted by the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy’s former president, Hugh Rogers, in January 2008. 

In his column, Hugh observed: 

Whether or not the president changes his policies to accord with his words in the year he has left in office, the words themselves mark a consensus that makes action inevitable. On this issue, it would seem, we have reached the final stage in the process that the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer defined: “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; and Third, it is accepted as self-evident.” 

The president that Hugh was talking about was George W. Bush. The issue was global warming. 

Hugh’s observation came toward the end of a remarkable change. The idea that global temperatures were changing and that humans were contributing to the change went from being a relatively obscure theory that scientists talked about to a widely accepted idea, one that most people knew about and one that most people accepted as true. 

The transformation is all the more remarkable given that much of it came during the administrations of two Bushes. Upton Sinclair observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” The Bushes were oil men. By the time they reached the White House, they were past the point where their salaries literally came from the oil business. At the same time, that is who they were. They were culturally, if not financially, predisposed to resist the idea that human activity—such as burning the product of the family business—could be harming the planet. 

Their culture may have denied the idea of human influenced climate change, but they embraced the idea anyway. When he was first running for president, the senior Bush declared: “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House effect. As president, I intend to do something about it.” After he was president he said, “We all know that human activities are changing the atmosphere in unexpected and unprecedented ways.” The junior Bush said of global climate change “I take the issue seriously.” As things turned out, Mr. Bush’s actions did not exactly follow his words, but at least the words were still there. 

Following George W. Bush, we had President Obama who did take the issue seriously, both in words and deeds. It appeared that Hugh had read the trend correctly. We had reached a “consensus that makes action inevitable.” 

Then we had an election. For four years we had a president who thought that climate change was a hoax. He took the hopeful arc of history and wrenched it into a giant horseshow. At least on the presidential level, he smacked us all the way back to the first stage of a truth’s acceptance. 

At the beginning of Donald Trump’s first term, there was at least hope that he would pass through the other stages of acceptance. That never happened. He pulled the United States out of the Paris Accord on climate change. He spent his whole term distracted by other things and barely said anything about climate change. When he did address climate change, he did it by taking a step backward. 

This does not mean that nothing happened in four years. States within the United States, other countries, and individuals continued to work to deal with this problem. They just continued to work without any encouragement or assistance from the president. 

Then we got another new president, Joe Biden. He turned us around again, resuming the long march toward solving the problem that the trend Hugh saw would have predicted. He supported getting our energy from clean, renewable sources such as solar and wind. He supported the manufacturing of clean energy equipment in the United States. Because we spent the last four years marching in place or marching backward, we will have to march faster now than we otherwise would have. While it is unfortunate that we had spent four years without any presidential leadership on this issue, we were at least back to bending the arc of history in the direction Hugh foresaw. 

Then there was the 2024 election, or re-election, of Donald Trump. As soon as he got in the driver’s seat, he slammed us in reverse. He eliminated support for renewable energy; he stopped wind farms that were nearly complete; he went all in on fossil fuels. 

It is discouraging that we keep getting presidents (or presidents keep coming back) that insist on going backward on climate change. Just when we are making progress, we get a leader who opposes progress. 

At the same time, we are not hopeless. At the annual Fall Review put on by the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, key-note speaker Mary Anne Hitt said, “We are the architects of our future—not the fossil fuel industry… Momentum is on our side. Transformation that can avert the climate crisis is possible in the next decade. Let’s go make it happen.” 

So, let’s go. President or no president, it is time for us to keep bending the arc of history toward slowing and stopping climate change.