In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a largely forgotten speech to Congress in which he detailed how “a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels” would affect future generations. He encouraged actions to reduce these harmful emissions.

It took almost 60 years to heed his advice. Along the way, prominent New England lawmakers did their best to get the US to act.

Bipartisan cooperation on global warming reached its peak in the 1980s. In true moderate Republican spirit, Rhode Island Senator John Chafee conducted a robust set of hearings involving the most respected scientists of the day. But climate change was not the most pressing environmental issue on the docket; Mainers will remember that acid rain is high on the priority list. Even amid dire scientific warnings, lawmakers have proceeded cautiously on climate change and inadvertently squandered the best opportunity to act.

Fast forward to 1997. International leaders hoped the Kyoto Protocol could do for the climate what the Montreal Protocol did for ozone. But the manufacturers persuaded Senators Robert Byrd and Chuck Hagel to launch a strong offensive against a treaty that would compromise American industry. Their infamous Byrd-Hagel resolution passed the Senate 95-0 – and stuck in an economic excuse for climate denial for decades to come.

Even as partisan fissures deepened, new climate heroes emerged. Maverick Sen. John McCain embraced the issue after being asked for his climate plan while preparing in New Hampshire for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000. He didn’t have one and sought to remedy that shortcoming by using his position on the Senate Commerce to host a series of hearings and meetings. To make the effort bipartisan — and therefore sustainable — he partnered with another New Englander, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Together, they pursued climate action with great perseverance.

A bottom line in the effort to limit carbon emissions, Lieberman was a major player in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which designed the “cap and trade” mechanism used by the Acid Rain Program to successfully reduce air pollution . But the bill failed twice in the Senate and again in 2008, when Lieberman partnered with Sen. John Warner on a similar approach. The failure’s success made it harder for other Republicans to get behind the once-hailed machinery of free-market politics.

Perhaps the most crushing pain in the history of climate policy came in the ultimate failure of the Waxman-Markey bill, named after Presidents Henry Waxman and now Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, which narrowly ushered its way through the House of Representatives. But a series of mishaps in the Senate, along with the already daunting political task for President-elect Barack Obama to both fix the economy and reform the nation’s health care system, have closed the slim window of opportunity.

With Republicans taking back the House after the 2010 midterm elections and holding onto power for the rest of Obama’s term — plus the rise of the Tea Party — they’re making it harder for GOP lawmakers to cross the aisle to cooperate with Democrats on climate change and other social issues, and four miserable years of inaction from 2016-2020 – the opportunity to act did not arise until the term of President Joe Biden.

Talk about coming full circle. One of the first lawmakers to push a climate change bill, a “plan to make a plan” passed in 1987, Biden’s interest spanned decades, culminating in the hard-fought passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. That the bill even made it to his desk was nothing short of miraculous, given its ups and downs in an evenly divided and deeply divided US Senate, along with the environmental movement’s dismal record on their priorities, which made it to the cutting room after the deals were done.

The rich history of past bipartisan cooperation on climate change should be used as inspiration for the Maine delegation to protect and/or build on Biden’s recent successes, the approach depending on whether a proponent or denier of climate action wins the House White. Maine lobsters are at risk and rising sea levels threaten the coast. While 5 degrees above the historical average winter temperature might sound like a good thing when you’re shoveling snow, such warming trends can wreak havoc on our rich ecosystems and cause extreme weather events. Climate change is here; there is no time to waste arguing science. But there’s plenty of room for Maine’s leaders to work together to make climate history.

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