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
