NATHANIEL RICH:

Well, there's sort of a simple political answer, a very narrow answer I suppose you could make which is that in the first George Bush administration, his chief of staff—former governor of New Hampshire John Sununu who is an engineer, a Ph.D.—was very skeptical about the science of global warming and he suspected that it was being used by a cabal of folks who wanted to suppress growth and economic advancement and all of that, and he managed to win an internal fight within that White House against action. That's that's kind of the most limited possible answer. That piece tells the story of that political conversation.

I think the larger answer has to do with how we as a species try to reckon with vast technological problems that will only affect folks decades or generations from now. Of course, that's not the case anymore. But in the early 80s, that was how the conversation was being constructed. And so I think there's a kind of larger conversation to be had about why we were so unable to tackle this when we had a great opportunity to do so, and then there's the more narrow conversation about the inside politics of the matter.