![]() … Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.” If the world kept using fossil fuels, the ice caps would begin to melt, raising sea levels. ![]() “Whenever you burn conventional fuel,” Teller explained, “you create carbon dioxide. As I flipped through, I saw a speech from a famous scientist, Edward Teller (who helped invent the hydrogen bomb), warning the industry executives and others assembled of global warming. Surprising discoveriesĪt an old gunpowder factory in Delaware – now a museum and archive – I found a transcript of a petroleum conference from 1959 called the “Energy and Man” symposium, held at Columbia University in New York. The industry’s own words, as my research found, show companies knew about the risk long before most of the rest of the world. What those papers revealed is now changing our understanding of how climate change became a crisis. I began to recognize typewriter fonts from the 1960s and ‘70s and marveled at the legibility of past penmanship, and got used to squinting when it wasn’t so clear. I pored over boxes of papers, thousands of pages. I was looking for documents that might reveal the hidden history of climate change – and in particular, when the major coal, oil and gas companies became aware of the problem, and what they knew about it. ![]() Four years ago, I traveled around America, visiting historical archives. ![]()
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