Digging Into the Past – and Future – of the Clean Air Act of 1970

As climate change accelerates, many ask: why did we not act sooner? In her work as a HGHI-Salata Burke Climate and Health Fellow, Dr. Colleen Lanier-Christensen will probe the historical record of the landmark Clean Air Act of 1970 for answers.

“The conventional explanation of U.S. inaction has been that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lacked the legal authority to regulate CO₂ emissions under the Clean Air Act of 1970,” said Lanier-Christensen. “But this is false. In a collaborative project with a team at Harvard and Duke, led by Professor Naomi Oreskes, we have shown that the authors of the Clean Air Act considered CO₂ to be an air pollutant and recognized its potential to impact climate.”

So what happened?

Lanier-Christensen hypothesizes that a disciplinary divide between “health” and “welfare” effects of pollution may have inhibited EPA’s willingness to act.

“Most climate science in the 1970s-1980s focused on environmental effects like sea level rise, droughts, and crop failures,” said Lanier Christensen. “These were clearly understood as threatening welfare, for example, if coastal real estate had to be abandoned or if food prices increased. But they were not generally understood as affecting health, in part because of disciplinary and conceptual frameworks that separated ‘the environment’—understood mostly in terms of non-human ecosystems—and ‘health’— understood primarily as human mortality and morbidity.”

According to Lanier-Christensen, this framework missed a third category of effects, including the health effects of climate- induced flooding, heat waves, and threats to the food supply. Today these effects – referred to by Lanier-Christensen as “background effects” are increasingly understood – but regulation remains inadequate.

As a Burke Climate and Health Fellow, Lanier-Christensen intends to expand on previous work, producing a definitive historical analysis of contemporary understandings of global climate change when Congress passed the Clean Air act of 1970 .

These are not just questions of historical significance, intended to help explain past inaction. How Congress understood climate change when passing this landmark legislation has important implications for current-day climate litigation.

“Evidence about this history will be highly relevant to legal claims pertaining to the EPA’s ability to tackle climate change, providing historical accounting for policymakers and the judiciary tasked with crafting and interpreting effective climate policies,” said Lanier-Christensen.

Photo credit: Jon Ratner via the Harvard Gazette

In February 2023, the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, in partnership with the Harvard Global Health Institute, announced the Burke Climate and Health Fellowship: a 2-year fellowship program for eligible research fellows, post-doctoral scholars, and early career faculty pursuing scholarly research at the intersection of climate change and global health. The Burke Climate and Health Fellowship is made possible through the generous support of Harvard alumna Katherine States Burke, AB’79, and her husband, T. Robert Burke, who established the Burke Fund to help launch and advance the careers of promising early career researchers in global health.