What Big Oil knew about climate change in 1959, In The industry’s own words, as my research found, show companies knew about the risk long before most of the rest of the world. 1959 was before the moon landing, before the Beatles’ first single, before Martin
Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. At 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. 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.
“Whenever you burn conventional fuel,” Teller explained, “you create carbon dioxide. … 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. Eventually, “all the coastal cities would be covered,” he warned.
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/what-big-oil-knew-about-climate-change-1959
ENERGY PA’ITERNS OF THE FUTURE by Edward Teller
1959 – Energy and Man Symposium
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21084422-1959-energy-and-man-symposium
