Judging by recent Supreme Court rulings, the world knew little about climate change half a century ago.

In 2007, when the court held that the Clean Air Act of 1970 gave the Environmental Protection Agency flexibility to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, former Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “When Congress adopted these provisions, the study of climate change was in its infancy.” In a dissenting opinion in a 2022 case examining similar questions, Justice Elena Kagan argued that legislators in 1970, when Congress created the law, gave the EPA flexibility to move with the times and address problems (such as climate change) that could not have been foreseen.

Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University, saw those sentiments as a sign of how little people understood the past. “I remember just being embarrassed by it,” she said. True, at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, people were more concerned about the immediate effects of smog than the long-term effects of burning coal and oil on the climate. But Oreskes knew that scientists had been trying to understand how carbon dioxide affected the global climate since the late 1800s. So she set out to write what she thought would be a short paper to set the record straight.

In the process, Oreskes, along with other researchers from Harvard and Duke University, uncovered a lost history. As they combed through troves of historical documents, they discovered that in the years before 1970, many other people were concerned about a warming planet, not just scientists. “We discovered a universe of discussions by scientists, by members of Congress, by members of the executive branch,” Oreskes said, “and the more we looked, the more we found.”

Her paper grew into a 124-page analysis, soon to be published in the journal Ecology Law Quarterly. And it’s just part one of the findings. Oreskes found more than 100 examples of congressional hearings examining carbon dioxide and global warming before the passage of the Clean Air Act, evidence she plans to detail in part two.

The research bolsters arguments that Congress intended to give the EPA broad authority to regulate pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions — an issue that has taken on greater importance, the authors say, in the wake of the 2022 decision in West Virginia v. EPA that limited the agency’s ability to regulate emissions from power plants. The court’s conservative majority relied on a novel argument called the “major questions doctrine,” which requires a very clear statement from Congress to authorize regulations that have “enormous economic and political significance.”

Oreskes’ paper shows that members of Congress, when they were debating the Clean Air Act in 1970, were aware that addressing climate change could have significant economic consequences, such as on energy production and the auto industry. Oreskes hopes the paper will “debunk the myth that has been spread that the Clean Air Act had nothing to do with carbon dioxide” and stimulate conversation among lawyers, judges and legal scholars.

Climate change was already a concern for the federal government by the mid-1960s, the new analysis finds. A 1965 report from the National Science Foundation concluded that the ways in which humans were unintentionally changing the world — through urban development, agriculture and fossil fuels — “were becoming sufficiently important to affect the weather and climate of large areas and eventually the entire planet.”

And the science was well understood by many members of Congress, Oreskes and her colleagues found when they reviewed papers from Edmund Muskie, a Democratic senator from Maine who helped write the Clean Air Act, based at Bates College. The papers show that Muskie was deeply involved in discussions about climate change with scientists, and his staff closely monitored press coverage of the topic. In 1970, Muskie warned his fellow senators that if air pollution was not addressed, it would “threaten irreversible atmospheric and climatic changes.” (The Clean Air Act allows the EPA to regulate air pollutants that endanger public health, particularly their effects on weather and climate.)

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Scientists in the 1960s generally recognized carbon dioxide as a pollutant, albeit a different kind of pollutant than the gases and particulates that contributed to the thick smog that darkened cities in the middle of the day. In 1970, President Richard Nixon’s Task Force on Air Pollution declared in a report that “the greatest consequences of air pollution for the survival of man on earth are its effects on the earth’s climate.”

Oreskes and her team also found documents from the National Air Pollution Control Administration — a federal agency created in 1968 and later merged with the EPA — in a federal records repository near St. Louis. “Almost everyone has forgotten about NAPCA, if they ever knew it existed,” Oreskes said. The agency’s head, John Middleton, testified in congressional hearings prior to the Clean Air Act, discussing carbon dioxide and the potential economic impact of regulation, she said.

Ominous warnings about climate change had also reached the general public. In 1958, Frank Capra, the famous filmmaker, produced an animated film, The Unleashed Goddesswho warned that just a few degrees of temperature rise could raise sea levels, so that tourists in glass-bottom boats would one day see “the sunken towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.” It was shown to nearly 5 million children in classrooms across the country. On The Merv Griffin Show In 1969, Americans were warned that a rapidly warming Earth could melt the polar ice caps. The following year, an article in Sports Illustrated, a magazine ostensibly far removed from environmental concerns, detailed the science of climate change and advised people “not to sign 99-year leases on properties at present sea level.”

The Oreskes article aims to provide the history and context that the court’s main question doctrine seems to require. Despite this flood of historical evidence, Ann Carlson, a UCLA professor of environmental law, said she doubts the Supreme Court will take it into account. “I think if this court continues to show the hostility that it has shown toward environmental regulation, it can find ways to do that regardless of whether there’s evidence that Congress understood carbon dioxide to be a pollutant under the Clean Air Act,” said Carlson, who previously led fuel economy regulations for the Biden administration. The conservative justices have plenty of other arguments they could use to strike down regulations, she explained.

Oreskes acknowledges that it is “an uphill battle with the current court,” but says the document will strengthen the arguments of lawyers seeking to advance climate cases.

Why has so much of this history been overlooked? Oreskes pointed to the “general historical amnesia of Americans.” As the politician Adlai Stevenson once put it, “The trouble with Americans is they haven’t read the minutes of the last meeting.” Even people who work in environmental protection seem to have lost track of what happened, Oreskes said, perhaps because the EPA of the 1970s focused its narrow attention on the acute pollutants that posed an immediate threat to public health — leaving earlier concerns about carbon dioxide to be filed away in the archives.