In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered a mostly forgotten address 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 those harmful emissions.

It took nearly 60 years to heed his advice. Along the way, prominent New England lawmakers tried their best to lead the U.S. to act.

Bipartisan cooperation on global warming peaked in the 1980s. In true moderate Republican spirit, Rhode Island Sen. John Chafee led a robust set of hearings featuring the most respected climate scientists of the day. But climate change wasn’t the most pressing environmental problem on the docket; Mainers will remember acid rain topping the priority list. Even amid dire scientific warnings, lawmakers proceeded with caution on climate change – and inadvertently squandered the best opportunity to act.

Fast forward to 1997. International leaders were hoping the Kyoto Protocol could achieve for climate what the Montreal Protocol did for ozone. But manufacturers convinced Sens. Robert Byrd and Chuck Hagel to mount a strong offensive against an overreaching treaty that would compromise U.S. industry. Their infamous Byrd-Hagel resolution passed the Senate 95-0 – and locked in an economic excuse for climate denialism for decades to follow.

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

A throughline in the effort to cap carbon emissions, Lieberman had been a significant player in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which conceived the “cap and trade” mechanism used by the Acid Rain Program to successfully reduce air pollution. But their bill failed twice on the Senate floor and once again in 2008 when Lieberman paired with Sen. John Warner on a similar approach. The success of the failure made it harder for other Republicans to get behind the once-hailed free market policy mechanism.

Perhaps the most crushing heartbreak in climate policy history came in the ultimate failure of the Waxman-Markey bill, named after Chairmen Henry Waxman and now Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, who ushered its close passage through the House of Representatives. But a series of bumbles in the Senate coupled with the already daunting political task for newly elected President Barack Obama to both fix the economy and reform the nation’s health care system closed the slim window of opportunity.

With Republicans taking back the House after the 2010 midterm elections and keeping power for the remainder of Obama’s term – plus the rise of the Tea Party making it harder for GOP lawmakers to cross the aisle to cooperate with Democrats on climate change and other social issues and four unfortunate years of inaction from 2016-2020 – the opportunity for action didn’t rise again until President Joe Biden’s term.

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 climate interest spanned decades, reaching culmination with the hard-fought enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. That the bill even reached his desk was nothing short of miraculous given its ups and downs in an evenly split and deeply divided U.S. Senate coupled with the environmental movement’s dismal track record of their priorities ending up on the cutting room floor after deals were sealed.

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 climate action supporter or denier wins the White House. Maine lobsters are in peril and rising sea level threatens the coastline. While an added 5 degrees to the historic average winter temperature might sound like a good thing when shoveling snow, such warming trends can wreak havoc on our rich ecosystems and spark extreme weather events. Climate change is here; there’s no time to waste on arguing the science. But there is plenty of room for Maine’s leaders to work together to make climate history.