Sixty years ago today, on Thursday August 26th 1965, Carl W. Borgmann stood in front of hundreds of young Americans in Knoxville. Borgmann, who was the director of the Ford Foundation’s Science and Engineering programme, was there to deliver the commencement address for the University of Tennessee. He probably gave it little thought, but he was doing something unprecedented – he was using a commencement address to warn young people about the threat of carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere.
His speech was given the unwieldy title “A Conversation Ethic. Man’s Use of Science: Some Deferred Costs” when it appeared the following year in the Massachusetts Audubon Society magazine. He began by explaining what he would not talk about.
“I would rather not deal today with new discoveries in science – not because they are not exciting, for they are, nor because I don’t feel quite comfortable with some of them, which is certainly true, but because another topic seems more urgent to me. Even as I contemplate what man may know through science, I am impelled to ask what he will do with this knowledge – not only with his new scientific discoveries, but with his older ones too, and his ingenious technologies.”
Borgmann laid out many of the challenges – physical, social and moral – facing the United States and the world. Then, two thirds of the way through the speech he said the following startlingly prescient phrases.
“Now consider the burning of fossil fuels. If everyone does it at the average we now have achieved, there will be whole new sets of problems; in fact, many American communities face them presently. What shall we do with the inevitable wastes of our energy-producing processes, with our ash heaps, with the smog of Los Angeles, with the unnatural warming of our rivers?”
Borgmann asks the students to imagine that technology will burn fuels more cleanly, before presenting them with the central dilemma.
“But even if we could afford devices which allowed for our fuels to be completely burned to water and carbon dioxide, another change in our environment is likely. Carbon dioxide, as it becomes a greater proportion of the atmosphere, behaves somewhat like the glass of a greenhouse. It traps heat from the sun, and climatic change results – not overnight, but slowly and surely. This process appears to be already under way, in fact.”
Borgman followed this with a critique of nuclear power – “The preparation of the fuel and the handling and storage of the radioactive waste ash are not without dangers to man and his future.”
Borgmann was sixty at this point. Born in Missouri he had graduated from the University of Colorado in 1927 before working on the technical staff of the Bell Telephones Laboratories and gaining a master’s degree in chemical engineering and a PhD from Cambridge University. He had worked at the universities of North Carolina, Colorado and Nebraska before becoming President of University of Vermont in 1952.