Rafe Pomerance, Environmental Lobbyist Focused on Climate, Dies at 79

Rafe Pomerance died Thursday in a Washington hospital. He was 79. His stepson, Benjamin Cooley, said the cause was lung cancer. Pomerance read a 1979 Environmental Protection Agency report that stated coal emissions could warm the planet to a significant and damaging degree. He then worked to alert members of Congress and executive branch agencies to the findings.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Pomerance served as a lobbyist for the environmental group Friends of the Earth. He was not a scientist or lawyer. Nathaniel Rich wrote in a 2018 New York Times Magazine article that Pomerance was the central figure in the emergence of climate change as a political issue during that period.

The 2018 article, later expanded into a book, described the decade from 1979 to 1989 as a period when both Republican and Democratic leaders pledged to address the issue. Rich stated that Pomerance preferred not to be the public messenger. Rich described Pomerance as voluble, energetic and obsessive in an interview with The New York Times.