Rafe Pomerance, an environmental activist who uncovered an obscure 1979 EPA report warning that coal combustion could heat the atmosphere, assumed a Paul Revere‑style role in alerting the public and policymakers to climate change, and died on Thursday in Washington. He was 79.
His cause of death was lung cancer, his stepson Benjamin Cooley confirmed.
An activist known on Capitol Hill and within executive‑branch agencies — but relatively unknown elsewhere — Rafe Pomerance emerged as the central figure of a 2018 New York Times Magazine feature, “Losing Earth,” by Nathaniel Rich.
The piece, later expanded into a book and now slated for a film adaptation, chronicled the period from 1979 to 1989 as a missed opportunity when climate change first entered national discourse. Leaders from both parties pledged to avert disaster — until the Bush administration, heavily influenced by fossil‑fuel interests, shut the door.
“I think he was the central figure in bringing climate change to the forefront of politics,” Mr. Rich said in an interview. “He was truly the man behind the scenes from the start and recognized early on that he should not be the messenger himself.”
This is partly because Mr. Pomerance, though described by Mr. Rich as “voluble, energetic and obsessive,” lacked formal training as a scientist or lawyer.
He worked as a lobbyist for the environmental organization Friends of the Earth in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1979, he read an EPA report — largely an afterthought — that warned coal emissions could dangerously warm the planet.
“I was shocked. I thought, ‘This can’t happen!’” Mr. Pomerance recalled in a 2019 interview with *Dædalus*, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He showed the report to a colleague and remarked, “This must be the whole banana.”
The idea that carbon dioxide from coal and petroleum could heat Earth’s atmosphere dates back to 1896. Since the early 1960s, scientists had recorded rising atmospheric carbon levels and published scholarly warnings about melting ice sheets, sea‑level rise, extreme weather, and threatened species.
These warnings failed to capture public, political, or media attention — and even many environmental groups — often concentrating on discrete concerns such as smog or toxic waste.
Mr. Pomerance arranged the first briefings for policymakers by a climate scientist in 1979, accompanying geophysicist Gordon J.F. MacDonald to meetings with Carter administration officials. “We had never heard of climate change,” Mr. Pomerance recalled in the 2019 interview. “We began at zero.”
He also built alliances with media outlets and Washington‑based environmental organizations.
“Rafe was the person who understood climate change and could spot activists,” said Daniel Becker, who founded the Sierra Club’s global‑warming program in 1989 and led it until 2007. “He recruited us, energized us, and gave us the facts needed to tackle the most important issue of our time.”
Another climate scientist Mr. Pomerance introduced to policymakers, James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, became the foremost messenger of the looming threat. Mr. Pomerance recognized that Dr. Hansen, an Iowa native, could translate complex atmospheric science into plain language.
“It was really Rafe who recognized from the start that James Hansen would become a trusted authority,” Mr. Rich said.
Dr. Hansen, who created computer models projecting climate change, frequently testified before hearings chaired by Senator Al Gore of Tennessee and Senator Tim Wirth of Colorado, both Democrats.
In June 1988, amid a year of record‑high global temperatures, Dr. Hansen testified before a Senate panel that global warming was no longer theoretical; it could be detected “with 99 percent confidence” and “is changing our climate now.”
His testimony made front‑page headlines nationwide, including in *The New York Times*, which ran the story under the headline “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.”
During that presidential election year, climate change had become a bipartisan concern. Then‑Vice President George H.W. Bush, campaigning for the presidency, pledged to combat the greenhouse effect with “the White House effect.” His running mate, Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana, declared the greenhouse effect “an important environmental issue.”
Mr. Pomerance, who transitioned from Friends of the Earth to the World Resources Institute, another environmental organization, turned publicity into policy. He advocated a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions, a target that appeared in Senator Tim Wirth’s keynote address at an international climate conference in Toronto in late June 1988 and in the accord adopted by delegates from 46 nations.
After taking office, President Bush appointed climate‑advocates such as EPA Administrator William K. Reilly, but opponents — including White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, who dismissed climate science and warned of economic harm from emission limits — prevailed. The administration’s delegates to the inaugural Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting in 1989 in the Netherlands opposed emission cuts, even a freeze on global emissions.
Mr. Pomerance attended the conference without an official capacity. Decades later, he told *Dædalus* that the outcome was a missed opportunity.
“We sought to secure government commitments to set emission targets over defined time frames,” he said. “That would have marked a substantial step toward a solution. Yet the United States still lacks such a commitment.”
Rafe Pomerance was born on July 19, 1946, in New York City, the third of three children of Josephine (Wertheim) Pomerance and Ralph Pomerance. His father, an architect, designed the Swedish Pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair; his mother was an anti‑nuclear activist who advocated for arms control.
He was the grandson of merchant banker Maurice Wertheim and a great‑grandson of Henry Morgenthau Sr., who served as President Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
Raised in Cos Gob, Connecticut, he played ice hockey on the family’s frozen lake and earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Cornell University in 1968. He participated in anti‑Vietnam War protests and later received conscientious‑objector status.
His environmental activism began with the founding of the National Clean Air Coalition in 1973, which advocated for pollution‑control legislation, including amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1977. He joined Friends of the Earth in 1975 and served as its president from 1980 to 1984. From 1986 to 1993, he held the position of senior associate for climate change and ozone depletion at the World Resources Institute.
During the Clinton administration, starting in 1993, Mr. Pomerance served as deputy assistant secretary of state for environment and development. He acted as a negotiator of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which obligates nations to cut greenhouse‑gas emissions, though the United States ultimately did not ratify the treaty.
Mr. Pomerance married Lenore Markwett, a psychotherapist, in 1975. In addition to his wife and stepson Ben from his wife’s previous marriage, he is survived by two children, Lilah and Ethan Pomerance; a brother, Stephen Pomerance; a sister, Pamela Steiner; and seven grandchildren.
In later years, Mr. Pomerance remained active on climate issues with the organization Arctic 21, a network dedicated to raising awareness about climate threats to polar regions.
He recognized that, more than 40 years after he began raising alarms, Earth continued on a perilous warming trajectory and international agreements had lacked binding mandates to curb rising emissions.
He recognized that a substantial amount of warming was already baked into the atmosphere and became an advocate for geoengineering — technological approaches aimed at extracting carbon from the air, a proposal that remains controversial among environmentalists.
“Shouldn’t I be completely depressed?” he asked in 2019, adding, “Yet I am not.”
One reason was the growing number of people who now understand the climate crisis.
“When I began, nobody had heard of the problem, and few were active,” he said. “We began at zero. Now, virtually everyone worldwide knows about climate change. Is that progress? I hope so.”