Edward Teller, 1958, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Brad Towle

With Lee Zeldin’s recent appointment to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) came a swift recommendation to rebuke a 2009 study under the Clean Air Act linking health issues to climate change. Zeldin derided the “church of climate anxiety” and reportedly stressed the need to invalidate the findings. “If you pull this (finding) out, everything EPA does on climate goes away,’’ former Trump transition adviser Steven Milloy told the Associated Press (AP). It is a premise that implies the Obama administration ushered in a new theory that human health suffers in a changing climate, and discrediting it can open the door for a financial windfall. “They can no longer deny climate change is happening, so instead, they’re pretending it’s not a threat,” said climate scientist Michael Mann in an interview with the AP. That this study would be politicized is no surprise, but it certainly reeks of a conveniently short memory and deliberate disregard for history. In the late 1950s, a well-known, polarizing figure delivered a warning regarding the impact of fossil fuels and climate change on human well-being, and he chose an unlikely audience for his message.

Edward Teller is best known for his work on the Manhattan Project. The brilliant Hungarian-born scientist has often been portrayed as J. Robert Oppenheimer’s foil, most recently in Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film. After working alongside Oppenheimer, Teller notoriously betrayed him in a McCarthy-era kangaroo court set up to discredit the “father of the atomic bomb” for his affiliation with communists. Oppenheimer had opposed the creation of a bigger bomb, and Teller’s testimony led to his security clearance being revoked days before it was set to expire. Teller, however, was willing to play ball and ultimately went to work assisting the U.S. Government with its atomic program in the 1950s and willingly built bigger bombs. He also promoted nuclear energy as a solution to many issues, including once suggesting that small atomic bombs be dropped into the ocean to disrupt hurricanes. However, his betrayal of Oppenheimer led many in the scientific community to ostracize him, leaving industrialists and the government as his primary audience.

Fast forward to 1959. In the last years of the Eisenhower era, the American Petroleum Institute (API) invited Teller to speak at their 100^th anniversary celebration for a symposium entitled Energy and Man. What they expected from the atomic scientist is unclear, but we now know what they received thanks to PhD student Benjamin Franta, who unearthed a transcript of the event in 2018. When Teller took to the podium to deliver his speech, “Energy Patterns of the Future,” he began by addressing the rising cost and limited supply of fossil fuels, initially citing both as reasons to look to new energy production methods. Before explaining his proposed solution (unsurprisingly, atomic energy), Teller pivoted to another reason to look for alternatives to fossil fuels. “I would first like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for other fuel supplies,” said Teller. “And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere.” Teller proceeded to move beyond a mere discussion of pollution or smog, which he acknowledged as “probably a hazard” and “a nuisance we are all familiar with,” and dissected for his audience the impact burning fossil fuels has on the atmosphere through the increase of carbon dioxide. He described carbon dioxide’s “strange property”: “Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect,” explained Teller. “The result is that the earth will continue to heat up…. It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10% increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.” Yikes. Teller was clearly advocating for atomic energy here, but to have selected that audience to present this warning was as bold as it was prescient.

It is worth noting that Edward Teller was far from a liberal activist. The possible inspiration for 1964’s Dr. Strangelove was undoubtedly a brilliant scientist, and despite being one of the earliest to sound the alarm on climate change, he did not become a crusader for the cause. In 1979, he had a public row with Jane Fonda following the Three Mile Island disaster when she turned her press tour for The China Syndrome into a campaign against nuclear energy. The spat led to Teller suffering a heart attack, which he blamed on Fonda and declared her a greater “danger” than nuclear reactors.

At first glance, it may seem that the API was the wrong crowd for Teller’s warnings, but there are signs they were also concerned. At an annual meeting in 1965, API President Frank Ikard, citing a report by President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee, told his fellow members, “…carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will…cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts.” Ikard stressed the urgency of identifying “alternate nonpolluting means” for motor vehicles, and insisted to do so it would become “a necessity.”

It is no stretch to suggest that the extreme flooding and high heat associated with human-driven climate change predicted by Teller and the API would impact our well-being, but Lee Zeldin will continue to point to the correlation as liberal propaganda. His stance is nothing more than a cynical disregard for climate science and lacks legitimate evidence to support it. Zeldin’s plan also willfully ignores historical conversations and warnings concerning the connection between a warming planet and human health, even when those warnings came from a bomb-building, anti-communist like Edward Teller.