During the late 1970s and early 1980s, despite growing political, scientific, and popular concern about the prospect of melting glaciers, sea-level rise, and more generally, climate-induced societal instability, American high-level science advisers and administrators, scientific committees, national and international scientific organizations, and officials within the Carter administration engineered a politics of restrained management of climate risk. Adopting a strategy of restraint appeared optimal not because of a pervasive disinterest in or ignorance of the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change. Rather, this administrative decision was rooted in widespread skepticism of the public’s ability to regulate their panic given popular dissemination of alarming scenarios of the future. Their concerns were not epistemic; they were sociopolitical. Broad-based appeals to moderation directly informed both scientists and the administration’s eventual decision in 1980 to minimize executive involvement. Despite some environmentalists’ and scientists’ calls for a more proactive position aligned with their ethical perspectives about the future implications of climate change, these linguistic cues of moderation became powerful heuristics that helped shape and anchor assessments of climate risk, calibrate scientists’ advice to policy makers, and regulate public apprehension about climate risk. Ultimately, officials within and outside the science community concluded that the likely short-term costs incurred from immediate action to curb fossil fuel emissions were greater than the social and political costs incurred from maintaining what was considered to be a tempered approach to climate governance in the near-term.

During the late 1970s, some members of the United States Congress introduced seminal legislation to ameliorate what they believed to be the economic costs of climatic change. Concerned that American society had become too sensitive to the stresses of even minor climatic fluctuations as manifest in recent weather-related crises, many felt that congressional legislation was necessary to foster greater cooperation between various groups—state climatologists; agricultural researchers; local, state, and federal policy makers; private and public industries. The hope was that greater coordination of the nation’s economic and scientific resources would stimulate a more flexible and resilient society, while allowing the implementation of a more service-driven approach to climate governance. Despite congressional urgency, however, the Carter Administration—specifically the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy—challenged congressional efforts on the grounds that accommodating user needs was both scientifically unjustified and politically irresponsible. Relying heavily on what officials perceived to be the collective judgment of federal science administrators and agency heads, the Administration favored instead a more research-oriented climate program committed to improving the reliability of climate prediction and more effectively coordinating a national response. Even after President Carter reluctantly signed the National Climate Program Act in September 1978, the Administration nonetheless persisted in its effort to stifle the implementation of a service-oriented program.