From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the Daily.

Today, 30 years ago, the United States had a chance to stop climate change.

Almost nothing stood in the way, except human resistance.

What went wrong?

It's Friday, August 31st.

So by the 1950s, scientists had known from a half a century that the use of fossil fuels was warming the atmosphere.

But it was only in that decade that scientists started to worry about what that might mean for human society.

Nathaniel Rich reported this story for the Times magazine.

And there were a number of articles published during that time trying to alert the public about the dangers that we were facing.

Even now, man may be unwittingly changing the world's climate through the waste products of his civilization, due to our release through factories and automobiles every year of more than 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide, which helps air absorb heat from the sun.

Our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer.

And although these articles appeared in places like the Times or Time in Life magazine or on educational programs on Primetime TV,

the few degrees rise in the Earth's temperature would melt the polar ice caps.

Not much attention was really paid to it outside of scientific circles for another couple of decades.

This is brave pomeranians.

But then in 1979,

I can actually remember the moment quite well. I came across a paragraph on the environmental impacts of coal use.

Rafe Pomeranians, this political lobbyist and activist for environmental organization, is sitting in his office on Capitol Hill reading an obscure government report about coal and acid rain when he comes across this paragraph at the end of a chapter.

And that section of the report was devoted to the possibility that coal and other fossil fuels would warm the planet through their emissions of carbon dioxide.

Pomeranians reads all this and is astonished and terrified, but assumes that he must have misread something that he doesn't understand it and he kind of puts it out of his mind.

I said to myself, this can't be. It just seemed like a transformation of the planet in all in that one sentence.

A couple days later, however, he comes across an article that interviews Gordon McDonald's, who's this prominent government scientist, who is warning about the exact same problem.

...