Almost a half-century ago, in 1979, when he was a lobbyist with Friends of the Earth, Rafe Pomerance was plowing through an EPA report on coal liquefaction. On page 66, federal scientists were warning that surging emissions of carbon dioxide, caused mostly by burning fossil fuels, could cause a “significant and damaging” increase in Earth’s temperature.
“This was so much more profound than the issues I’d been working on,” Rafe told The Washington Post in 1989. “I remember thinking: What right does this generation have to warm up the Earth?”
Rafe spent the rest of his life trying to avert catastrophic warming, leading the push for the first congressional hearings on the issue and helping negotiate the Kyoto Protocol, a landmark United Nations treaty to curb global greenhouse gas emissions.
On May 21, this Paul Revere of the effort to raise awareness of climate change–and to combat it–died of lung cancer. He was 79.
Just a few days after Rafe read the coal report, a colleague showed him a newspaper article about a speech by geophysicist Gordon J.F. MacDonald. In his speech, McDonald highlighted the likely effects of carbon-fueled warming: devastating storms, widespread drought, and enough ice sheet melt to submerge major coastal cities.
Rafe tracked down MacDonald’s phone number and asked for a meeting, Sarah Kaplan reported in The Post. Over the course of several hours, as MacDonald patiently explained the greenhouse effect, which researchers had been studying since the 19th century, Rafe became increasingly appalled that no one beyond a siloed group of scientists seemed to know about the issue. Rafe began to arrange meetings between MacDonald and an array of government officials.
Another climate scientist who Rafe introduced to policymakers, James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute, became the most prominent messenger of the impending threat. Rafe saw that Dr. Hansen, an Iowa native, had a knack for translating complex atmospheric science into plain English. “It was really Rafe from the beginning who understood James Hansen would be someone who’d be a trusted authority,” explained Nathaniel Rich, who wrote a whole-issue article in The New York Times Magazine in 2018 headlined “Losing Earth.”
In June 1988, during a year of record global heat, Dr. Hansen testified to a Senate panel that global warming was no longer theoretical; it could be detected “with 99 percent confidence” and “is changing our climate now.” His testimony was front-page news across the country.
“Rafe also understood that it was also important to build leadership on Capitol Hill,” said our co-founder and board chair George T. Frampton Jr., a former chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). George noted that Rafe and Tom Lovejoy, a Smithsonian Institution ecologist, began to recruit lawmakers. The early champions were Democratic Congressmen Tim Wirth (CO) and Al Gore (TN), both of whom went on to become senators, and Republican Senator John Heinz (PA).
Rich’s article, later expanded in a book and now in production as a movie, portrayed the decade from 1979 to 1989 as a lost opportunity, when climate change first became a national issue. Both Republican and Democratic leaders pledged to avert disaster — before the window was slammed shut by the administration of President George H.W. Bush, under the sway of the fossil fuel industries, according to a New York Times obituary by Trip Gabriel.
“I think he’s the central figure in the emergence of climate change as a political issue,” Rich told Gabriel. “He was really the man behind the scenes all through, and he understood at a very early stage intuitively that he shouldn’t himself be the messenger.”
Rafe proposed that nations reduce carbon emissions by 20 percent. It was a hard target, which found its way into the keynote speech by Wirth at an international climate conference in Toronto in June 1988.
Rafe played a vital role in the 1997 adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s first binding treaty requiring industrialized nations to cut planet-warming pollution. “Rafe knew his science very well, and he was not righteous about it,” Wirth said. “His was a very applied kind of advocacy — not just, ‘You ought to do this,’ but, ‘This is how we might do it.’ Not just that it should be done, but this is how we can get it done.”
Unfortunately, the United States did not ratify this landmark treaty. Before the Kyoto Protocol was even finalized, the U.S. Senate adopted a unanimous resolution of disapproval.
Rafe worked for a number of environmental groups, often in leadership positions. He founded the National Clean Air Coalition in 1973, served as president of Friends of the Earth from 1980 to 1984, and also worked at the World Resources Institute, Arctic 21, Clean Air Cool Planet, American Rivers and the League of Conservation Voters. He founded the Climate Policy Center in 1999 after serving under President Bill Clinton as deputy assistant secretary of state for environment and development.
Rafe once told Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, that his family motivated his unrelenting activism. Whenever he felt frustrated by the slow pace of progress or daunted by the enormity of the task ahead, he wore a bracelet that one of his granddaughters made for him. “I use that to remind myself that I have to be outspoken,” he explained. “Unless there’s some strategic reason not to speak out, I don’t hold back, because this is about her.”