Documents show industry-backed Air Pollution Foundation uncovered the severe harm climate change would wreak

 

The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve” that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.

A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.

Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This “Keeling curve” has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.

 

The fossil fuel interests backed a group, known as the Air Pollution Foundation, that issued funding to Keeling to measure CO2 alongside a related effort to research the smog that regularly blighted Los Angeles at the time. This is earlier than any previously known climate research funded by oil companies.

 

In the research proposal for the money – uncovered by Rebecca John, a researcher at the Climate Investigations Center, and published by the climate website DeSmog – Keeling’s research director, Samuel Epstein, wrote about a new carbon isotope analysis that could identify “changes in the atmosphere” caused by the burning of coal and petroleum.

 

“The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” Epstein, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology (or Caltech), wrote to the group in November 1954.

 

Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm climate change will wreak, only to then publicly deny this science for decades and fund ongoing efforts to delay action on the climate crisis.

“They contain smoking gun proof that by at least 1954, the fossil fuel industry was on notice about the potential for its products to disrupt Earth’s climate on a scale significant to human civilization,” said Geoffrey Supran, an expert in historic climate disinformation at the University of Miami.

“These findings are a startling confirmation that big oil has had its finger on the pulse of academic climate science for 70 years – for twice my lifetime – and a reminder that it continues to do so to this day. They make a mockery of the oil industry’s denial of basic climate science decades later.”

Previous investigations of public and private records have found that major oil companies spent decades conducting their own research into the consequences of burning their product, often to an uncannily accurate degree – a study last year found that Exxon scientists made “breathtakingly” accurate predictions of global heating in the 1970s and 1980s.

 

The newly discovered documents now show the industry knew of CO2’s potential climate impact as early as 1954 via, strikingly, the work of Keeling, then a 26-year-old Caltech researcher conducting formative work measuring CO2 levels across California and the waters of the Pacific ocean. There is no suggestion that oil and gas funding distorted his research in any way.

The findings of this work would lead the US scientist to further experiments upon the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii that were to provide a continual status report of the world’s dangerously-rising carbon dioxide composition.

 

Keeling died in 2005 but his seminal work lives on. Currently, the Earth’s atmospheric CO2 level is 422 parts per million, which is nearly a third higher than the first reading taken in 1958, and a 50% jump on pre-industrial levels.

 

This essential tracking of the primary heat-trapping gas that has pushed global temperatures to higher than ever previously experienced in human civilization was born, in part, due to the backing of the Air Pollution Foundation.

 

A total of 18 automotive companies, including Ford, Chrysler and General Motors, gave money to the foundation. Other entities, including banks and retailers, also contributed funding.

Separately, a 1959 memo identifies the American Petroleum Institute (API), the US’s leading oil and gas lobbying body, and the Western Oil and Gas Association, now known as the Western States Petroleum Association, as “major contributors to the funds of the Air Pollution Foundation”. It’s not clear exactly when API started funding the foundation but it had a representative on a research committee from mid-1955 onwards.

 

A policy statement of the Air Pollution Foundation from 1955 calls the problem of air pollution, which is caused by the emissions of cars, trucks and industrial facilities, “one of the most serious confronting urban areas in California and elsewhere” and that the issue will be addressed via “diligent and honest fact finding, by wise and effective action”.

The unearthed documents come from the Caltech archives, the US National Archives, the University of California at San Diego and Los Angeles newspapers from the 1950s, and represent what may be the first instance of the fossil fuel industry being informed of the potentially dire consequences of its business model.

The oil and gas industry was initially concerned with research related to smog and other direct air pollutants before branching out into related climate change impacts, according to Carroll Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental Law.

“You just come back to the oil and gas industry again and again, they were omnipresent in this space,” he said. “The industry was not just on notice but deeply aware of the potential climate implications of its products for going on 70 years.”

Muffett said the documents add further impetus to efforts in various jurisdictions to hold oil and gas firms legally liable for the damages caused by the climate crisis.

“These documents talk about CO2 emissions having planetary implications, meaning this industry understood extraordinarily early on that fossil fuel combustion was profound on a planetary scale,” he said.

“There is overwhelming evidence the oil and gas industry has been misleading the public and regulators around the climate risks of their product for 70 years. Trusting them to be part of the solutions is foolhardy. We’ve now moved into an era of accountability.”

API and Ralph Keeling, Charles’s son who is also a scientist, were contacted for comment about the documents but did not respond. 

-Oliver Milman, The Guardian

 

Russia's Onslaught on Ukraine Continues

 

While the conflict between Israel and Hamas has dominated headlines since October, Russia’s onslaught against Ukraine has continued.

Russia on Tuesday launched a barrage of more than 40 ballistic, cruise, anti-aircraft and guided missiles into Ukraine’s two biggest cities, damaging apartment buildings and killing at least five people. The assault came a day after Moscow shunned any deal backed by Kyiv and its Western allies to end the almost two-year war.

Ukraine’s air defenses were able to intercept at least 21 of the missiles. But the attacks injured at least 20 people in four districts of Kyiv, the capital.

The Pentagon announced its last security assistance for Ukraine on Dec. 27, a $250 million package that included 155 mm rounds, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and other high-demand items drawn from existing U.S. stockpiles.

The U.S. has not been able to provide additional munitions since then because the money for replenishing those stockpiles has run out and Congress has yet to approve more funds.

More than $110 billion in aid for both Ukraine and Israel is stalled over disagreements between Congress and the White House over other policy priorities, including additional security for the U.S.-Mexico border.

Senators are trying for a bipartisan deal that would include nearly $61 billion in aid for Ukraine and make changes in border policy. But Republicans are renewing a push to scale back the amount of assistance for Ukraine, targeting money that would go to Ukraine’s civil sector and arguing that European nations could step in to fund those needs.

“Personally speaking, I’d like to see portions pared down,” Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the second-ranking Republican senator, told reporters Tuesday. “I think the number is really high and there are a lot of things funded in there.”

But even if a deal can be reached in the Senate, the package faces even more opposition in the House, where many Republicans have voted repeatedly against the Ukrainian war effort.

The U.S. has provided Ukraine more than $44.2 billion in security assistance since Russia invaded in February 2022. About $23.6 billion of that was pulled from existing military stockpiles and almost $19 billion was sent in the form of longer-term military contracts, for items that will take months to procure.

So even though funds have run out, some previously purchased weapons will continue to flow in. An additional $1.7 billion has been provided by the U.S. State Department in the form of foreign military financing.

The U.S. and approximately 30 international partners are also continuing to train Ukrainian forces, and to date have trained a total of 118,000 Ukrainians at locations around the world, said Col. Marty O’Donnell, spokesman for U.S. Army Europe and Africa.

The United States has trained approximately 18,000 of those fighters, including approximately 16,300 soldiers in Germany. About 1,500 additional fighters are currently going through training.

—Associated Press writer Stephen Groves contributed to this report.

 

Retrumplicons

 

Overcoming the Obstacles to UN Maintenance of International Peace and Security

 

Although, according to the UN Charter, the United Nations was established to “maintain international peace and security,” it has often fallen short of this goal. Russia’s ongoing military invasion of Ukraine and the more recent Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza provide the latest examples of the world organization’s frequent paralysis in the face of violent international conflict.

The hobbling of the Security Council, the UN agency tasked with enforcing international peace and security, bears the lion’s share of the responsibility for this weakness. Under the rules set forth by the UN Charter, each permanent member of the Security Council has the power to veto Security Council resolutions. And these members have used the veto, thereby blocking UN action.

This built-in weakness was inherited from the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations. In that body, a unanimous vote by all member nations was required for League action. Such unanimity of course, proved nearly impossible to attain, and this fact largely explains the League’s failure and eventual collapse.

The creators of the United Nations, aware of this problem when drafting the new organization’s Charter in 1944-45, limited the number of nations that could veto Security Council resolutions to the five major military powers of the era―the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, China, and France.

Other nations went along with this arrangement because these “great powers” insisted that, without this acceptance of their primacy, they would not support the establishment of the new world organization. The Charter’s only restriction on their use of the veto was a provision that it could not be cast by a party to a dispute―a provision largely ignored after 1952. Fortifying the privileged position of these five permanent Security Council members, the Charter also provided that any change in their status required their approval.

In this fashion, the great powers of the era locked in the ability of any one of them to block a UN Security Council resolution that it opposed. Not surprisingly, they availed themselves of this privilege. By May 2022, Russia (which took the seat previously held by the Soviet Union), had cast its veto in the Security Council on 121 occasions. The United States cast 82 vetoes, Britain 29, China 17, and France 16.

As the Council’s paralysis became apparent, proponents of UN action gravitated toward the UN General Assembly. This UN entity expanded substantially after 1945 as newly independent countries joined the United Nations. Moreover, no veto blocked passage of its resolutions. Therefore, the General Assembly could serve not only as a voice for the world’s nations, but as an alternative source of power.

The first sign of a shift in power from the Security Council to the General Assembly emerged with the General Assembly’s approval of Resolution 377A: “Uniting for Peace.” The catalyst was the Soviet Union’s use of its veto to block the Security Council from authorizing continued military action to end the Korean War. 

Uniting for Peace, adopted on November 3, 1950 by an overwhelming vote in the General Assembly, stated that, “if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security . . . the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to members for collective measures.” To facilitate rapid action, the resolution created the mechanism of the emergency special session.

Between 1951 and 2022, the United Nations drew upon the Uniting for Peace resolution on 13 occasions, with 11 cases taking the form of the emergency special session. In addition to dealing with the Korean War, Uniting for Peace resolutions addressed the Suez confrontation, as well as crises in Hungary, Congo, Afghanistan, Palestine, Namibia, and Ukraine. 

Although, under the umbrella of Uniting for Peace, the General Assembly could have recommended “armed force when necessary” against violators of international peace and security, the Assembly adopted that approach only during the Korean War. On the other occasions, it limited itself to calls for peaceful resolution of international conflict and the imposition of sanctions against aggressors.

These developments had mixed results. In 1956, during the Suez crisis, shortly after the General Assembly held a Uniting for Peace session calling for British and French withdrawal from the canal zone, both countries complied. 

By contrast, in 1980, when a Uniting for Peace session called for an end to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Moscow ignored the UN demand. It could do so thanks to the fact that General Assembly resolutions are mere recommendations and, as such, are not legally binding.

Even so, global crises in recent years have heightened pressure to provide the United Nations with the ability to take effective action. In April 2022, shortly after the Russian government vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for Russia’s unconditional withdrawal from Ukraine, the General Assembly voted that, henceforth a Security Council veto would automatically trigger a meeting of the Assembly within 10 days of the action to cope with the situation.

Meanwhile, numerous nations have been working to restrict the veto in specific situations. In July 2015, the UN Accountability, Coherence, and Transparency Group proposed a Code of Conduct against “genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes” that called upon all Security Council members to avoid voting to reject any credible draft resolution intended to prevent or halt mass atrocities. 

By 2022, the Code had been signed by 121 member nations. France and Mexico have taken the lead in proposing the renunciation of the veto in these situations. These reform initiatives are likely to be addressed at the September 2024 UN Summit of the Future. Clearly, as the history of the United Nations demonstrates, if the world organization is to maintain international peace and security, it must be freed from its current constraints.

Dr. Lawrence Wittner is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press.)

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Source URL: https://portside.org/2024-01-24/overcoming-obstacles-un-maintenance-international-peace-and-security

How Neonics Can Harm Soil Health and Soil Biodiversity

 

Neonicotinoids or “neonics” are the world’s most commonly used insecticides, linked to mass losses of bees and other pollinators, threats to human health, and declines in ecosystem functioning. While neonics’ harms to pollinators are widely known, their damaging impact on the complex network of organisms beneath our feet has generally been overlooked.

This World Soil Day, it’s important to acknowledge the far-reaching effects that neonic pesticides can have on soil health and biodiversity, and the farms and agricultural systems that depend on them.

To understand the impact of neonics on soil biodiversity, it’s important to understand what soil biodiversity is. Beneath our feet is a teeming network of organisms spanning sizes from micrometers to meters, each playing an important role in a complex interactive network that is the basis of healthy soils.

This network includes microscopic creatures such as protozoa and bacteria, more visible creatures such as springtails and earthworms, and larger organisms that only spent part of their time in the soil like ground-dwelling bees. These biological networks are what build soil structure and enable the soil to absorb and hold water, break down plant residues to liberate the nutrients inside for crops, and control pest and disease populations. 

All of these creatures are connected through the soil food web, with predators like protozoa and nematodes preying on smaller organisms such as bacteria and mites. These predators play a vital role in maintaining the soil biodiversity network—ensuring that pest and disease populations stay under control, and releasing nutrients back into the soil. They are also one of the members of the soil food web most at risk from neonics. 

Neonics’ negative impacts are particularly pronounced on soil invertebrates, especially soil predators—this includes insects, nematodes and protists—higher up in the food web as well as decomposers such as springtails and earthworms. Organisms lower on the food chain can also be affected. After neonic application, scientists noted a decline in potentially beneficial soil bacteria that are important for plant growth and improve soil fertility, though they also observed an increase in other bacterial populations as they worked to break down the pesticide.

When the entire soil food web is taken into account, neonicotinoid application can impair microbial functioning—including the breakdown of plant residues, and the provision of nitrogen for crop growth—but it’s also clear that more research into neonic impacts on the soil food web is desperately needed. 

Because soil food webs are so complex, they can also be resilient—but it is uncertain to what degree they can continue to absorb the impacts of pesticides before these webs begin to fray. By attacking a key mechanism that keeps pest populations under control—predators—neonicotinoids may reduce healthy soil’s ability to suppress pest and disease populations naturally in the long term, increasing the need for neonic application and keeping farmers running on the pesticide treadmill.

This places neonics at odds with pest management strategies like integrated or sustainable pest management that seek to boost the soil’s ability to suppress pests and diseases on its own. 

If we don’t work to tackle the immediate threats that soil organisms face—such as overapplication of neonic pesticides—we weaken the ability of those soils to respond to more long-term changes such as climate change. And since healthy soils depend on soil biodiversity, we make it harder for farmers to depend on the soil to increase the resilience and long term sustainability of farms.

Luckily, there are steps that can be taken to reduce the impacts of neonics on soil biodiversity. Policies such as the Birds and Bees Act in New York could go a long way by reducing the amount of neonics applied in wasteful seed coatings. Incentivizing sustainable farming practices such as cover cropping and regenerative farming can provide a boost to soil biodiversity.

Soil health depends on soil biodiversity—the complex living network that purifies our water, provides nutrients to crops and supports our farms—and neonics pose a serious threat to several key members of that network. 

-Daniel Raichel, Acting Director, Pollinator Initiative, Wildlife Division, Nature Program & Daniel Rath, Scientist, Agricultural Soil Carbon, Nature Program

 

And Then There Was 2016 and Now 2024

 

Released in America January 20, 1964

 

Obama told a story about America at his first inauguration 15 years ago. These people were there, and they still believe

 

Elizabeth Alexander was in her hotel room in Washington, DC, one frigid winter morning when she was awakened by a strange noise outside her window. She peered outside and saw a sea of people, bundled against the cold, walking in the predawn darkness towards the National Mall.

It was January 20, 2009, and the crowds were on their way to witness the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama, the nation’s first Black president. The sound she heard was their footsteps, marching almost in unison as their numbers grew, which sounded to Alexander like the “growing rumble of thunder or a crashing wave.”

Alexander had a coveted hotel room near the Mall that day because she was a special guest of Obama’s. He had asked Alexander, an author and poet who was then a professor at Yale University, to compose and recite a poem for his inaugural. Upon reaching the inaugural platform, Alexander saw she was sharing the stage with dignitaries such as boxing legend Muhammad Ali, singer Aretha Franklin, author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, civil rights icon John Lewis and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. 

When she stepped to the podium to speak, the temperature was around 30 degrees and the skies were clear and breezy. She began reciting her poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” an exhortation to “Sing the names of the dead who brought us here … who picked the cotton and lettuce.”

And as she gazed out at the crowd of at least a million people gathered before her, Alexander saw something that was as inspiring as any poetic flourish she could conjure for the occasion.

“When I looked out to the sheer infinity of people, it was a crowd to the naked eye without end,” she says today. “It was hugely multicultural. It went across ages, colors. It went across all visual types.”

After finishing her reading, Alexander returned to her seat to watch Obama be sworn in. And then she heard something else after he completed his oath: The sound of some of the most powerful people in America choking back sobs.

Are we a nation of January 20? Or of January 6?

Today marks the 15th anniversary of Obama’s first inauguration. In the sweep of history 15 years is not that long, yet that event feels like it took place in another time, in another America. For a brief moment in that January sun, the US seemed like it had finally fulfilled the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of reaching the “Promised Land.”

Onlookers wept. People in countries as diverse as Russia, Japan, and Kenya cheered as they watched the ceremony on TV. It was a day that Alexander described as one of “euphoria” and “open-mouthed joy.” 

We now know what followed. “Hope and change” gave way to “Make America Great Again.” Racial and political divisions deepened. And on January 6, 2021, an overwhelmingly White crowd displaying symbols of White supremacist groups such as the Confederate flag tried to overturn President Donald Trump’s 2020 electoral loss by storming the US Capitol.

As Americans look back on Obama’s first inaugural, it’s time to ask: Was the hope that so many — on the left and right — felt back then just a mirage, a fleeting glimpse of a flourishing multicultural America that can never be?

Or will the future of America look more like January 6 than January 20?

This is the question CNN put to Alexander and others who attended Obama’s first inauguration. How did they feel then? And looking back, what do they feel now about that day?

The grim backdrop of Obama’s first inauguration

Glance at images of the beaming crowd on the Mall that day, and it’s easy to forget how uncertain the mood was in the country. The Great Recession had devastated the economy. The American auto industry was on the verge of collapse. The US was embroiled in two seemingly unwinnable wars. Countless Americans were losing their homes and jobs. Commentators warned the country was on the brink of another Great Depression.

Yet for many in the crowd, the mood was one of exaltation.

Ed Wolf, then a senior at Rochester Institute of Technology, had come from upstate New York to watch the ceremony. The Metro was packed on the way to the Mall that morning, but he told CNN there was a glow of warmth and good cheer as strangers smiled at one another.

Wolf said he noticed a dramatic shift in the mood of the crowd at one moment in the ceremony. It occurred when the new president took his oath of office, repeating his full name — Barack Hussein Obama — as protocol dictated. That moment seemed to validate the American Dream, the notion that anyone in the US could rise to the top regardless of their race, creed or class — even a man of color with a funny name.

“When he said, ‘Hussein,’ the crowd around me just went wild,“ Wolf said in a recent interview. “It was like he was saying that he was proud of his name and his heritage and who he is. At that moment, you could feel the energy of the crowd.”

Alexander, the poet, recalls another singular moment from that day. She sat on the inauguration platform next to a tall, stately Black man with a square jaw and white hair. He wore the same button that he had worn to the 1963 March on Washington. His name was Clifford L. Alexander Jr. and he was the nation’s first Black secretary of the Army and an advisor to several Democratic presidents.

He was also Alexander’s father. He and her mother had taken Alexander in a baby stroller to the 1963 march when she was just a toddler. She had grown up in DC, and that inauguration day was a homecoming for her. As they sat together onstage, Alexander told him, “Don’t look at me, daddy.”

“Because he would have made me cry,” she said recently with a laugh. “It was like, ‘Look straight ahead, man. We are staying composed for this.’”

At 12:07 pm, Obama walked to the podium. He, too, made a little nod to history. He marveled that “a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served in a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.” The crowd erupted in huge applause.

Obama then told a sweeping story about America’s diversity that evoked his own upbringing as the son of a Black man from Kenya and a White woman from Kansas. He asked people to believe his presence that day was no fluke — it was a quintessential American story.

“For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness,” he said. “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture… and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve.”

That day Obama talked about America’s diversity as a strength. But 15 years later, the question must be asked: How many people in a post-January 6 America still believe that? Today, some see America’s diversity as a weakness instead of a strength

The United States’ de facto motto is E pluribus unum: Out of many, one.

“We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people – our strength — from every country and every corner of the world,” President Ronald Reagan said during a 1989 White House medal ceremony. “And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.”

But there seems to be a growing belief among some Americans that our country’s fabled diversity — its mix of races, ethnicities and immigrants — is in fact a weakness.

Former President Trump recently said that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, said last year, “Our diversity is not our strength. Our strength is what unites us across our diversity.”

In recent years “replacement theory,” a White supremacist belief which insists there is a conspiracy to replace Whites in America with non-White immigrants, has moved into the mainstream.

Thomas Sowell, an economist and prominent Black conservative, has said there’s not “one speck of evidence” that diversity is America’s strength.

“Is diversity our strength? Or anybody’s strength, anywhere in the world?” he wrote in a 2016 essay. “Does Japan’s homogeneous population cause the Japanese to suffer? Have the Balkans been blessed by their heterogeneity — or does the very word ”Balkanization” remind us of centuries of strife, bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities, extending into our own times?”

While many felt euphoric watching Obama get sworn in on that sunny day in 2009, it’s now clear that there was a segment of White Americans who were experiencing another emotion: fear. Some Americans believe fear is a more potent political weapon than hope

There is another question about Obama’s vision of the country that emerges in a post-January 6 America:

Does fear mobilize people more than hope?

Back then, Obama seemingly could have trademarked the word “hope.” One of his books is called “The Audacity of Hope.” A popular memento from his 2008 campaign was the Shepard Fairey portrait of Obama, emblazoned on posters and buttons with the word “hope.” His inaugural speech was full of nods to the concept.

“On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord,” Obama said that day. “On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises.”

A young man who stood just below Obama on the platform got a glimpse of that kind of hope Obama evoked.  Michael Wear was then a faith advisor to Obama’s campaign. Today he is the author of the new book, “The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life.”  

In 2009, though, he was a broke college student who had volunteered for Obama’s campaign after running into him in a hotel lobby. Wear recalls a remarkable moment on the eve of the inauguration that validated Obama’s line in his speech about hoping someday that the “lines of tribe will dissolve.”

At a dinner the night before, Obama honored his 2008 GOP presidential rival, John McCain, opening his remarks by calling McCain a hero. McCain, who had defended Obama’s patriotism and integrity during the campaign when a woman at a Minnesota town hall called him “an Arab,” in turn pledged to help Obama in the work ahead.

“For his success will be our success,” McCain said.

“Could you imagine that happening after any of the elections that we’ve had since Barack Obama has been in office?” Wear said. “Can you imagine this happening after the presidential election that we have coming up now?”

While Obama built his campaign on hope, his successor Donald Trump’s inaugural address is best known for another phrase: “American carnage.” Trump evoked the scourge of poverty, drugs, street gangs and “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones” and said, “this American carnage stops right here and right now.”  

However, to claim this pessimism about America is confined to the right would be simplistic. Recent polls have shown a majority of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. And there are those on the left who now say that hope is for suckers, that racism is built into the DNA of America and that White supremacy is a permanent feature of the country.

One of the most influential writers on the left during the Obama era was Ta-Nehisi Coates. In a memorable 2015 essay, Coates wrote White supremacy will always be a force in America and that writers who write about “hopeful things” are committing to an idealism that’s been disproved by history.

“‘Hope’ struck me an overrated force in human history,” Coates wrote. “‘Fear’ did not.” Others say it’s important to remember history’s moments of joy

Even so, some who were at Obama’s first inauguration say his vision of America is still something worth believing in.

“I’m sure that some people expected too much,” says Wear, the former Obama campaign worker, of Obama’s vision. “That doesn’t mean it was a mirage. The fact of the matter is, that (inauguration) day happened, and millions of people were there. And he (Obama) didn’t just win once, he won twice.”

Wolf, the 2009 college student who is now an engineer in San Francisco, also says he still believes in Obama’s vision of America. One of his closest friends is a Republican who works in the Michigan legislature.

“We have really good debates about what should happen and we disagree on fundamental issues,” Wolf says. “But the one thing we don’t disagree on is that we’re Americans, and we’re working for a better tomorrow.”

When asked which January date —the 20th or the 6th — best represents America’s future, Alexander answered neither.

“History is cyclical but it’s also very specific,” said Alexander, who is now president of the Mellon Foundation, one of the nation’s largest funders of the arts and humanities.

“We’re never going to have a moment again where it’s the first African American president,” she said.

But she said she hasn’t lost faith in her country, which she describes as this “gloriously complicated multicultural place.”

“During the darkness of the Trump years, I would remind myself and my kids that all of the people who voted for Obama — we’re still here,” she said.

Here is another way to remember that historic day in January.

The author Rebecca Solnit once wrote that “action without hope is impossible,” and that remembering victories matter because that memory can become a “navigational tool, an identity, a gift.”

“If people find themselves living in a world in which some hopes are realized and some joys are incandescent and some boundaries between individuals and groups are lowered, even for an hour or a day or several months, that matters, ” she wrote in “Hope in the Dark.”

The Obama campaign signs have long ago been lost or stored away in basements and attics. Few people wear “Hope” buttons anymore. But perhaps the memory of that day 15 years ago will help people navigate the future.

What will that future look like? We will have a better idea on another inauguration day — in January of 2025.

In his inauguration speech Obama said he believed that this country would one day move past the “old hatreds” and that “the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve.”

How many still believe that? For many Americans, the lines of tribe have only gotten deeper.

But for some people who were at Obama’s first inaugural and experienced that “open-mouthed-joy,” the story of America is still being written.

They still believe.

CNN, John Blake is the author of “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”