[D66] Exxon knew in 1966

[A.OUT]

Exxon knew — and so did coal
By
grist.org
9 min
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This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here 
as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

“Exxon knew.” Thanks to the work of activists and journalists, those two 
words have rocked the politics of climate change in recent years, as 
investigations revealed the extent to which giants like ExxonMobil and 
Shell were aware of the danger of rising greenhouse gas emissions even 
as they undermined the work of scientists.

But the coal industry knew, too — as early as 1966, a newly unearthed 
journal shows.

In August, Chris Cherry, a professor in the Department of Civil and 
Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 
salvaged a large volume from a stack of vintage journals that a fellow 
faculty member was about to toss out. He was drawn to a 1966 copy of the 
industry publication Mining Congress Journal; his father-in-law had been 
in the industry and he thought it might be an interesting memento.

Cherry flipped it open to a passage from James R. Garvey, who was the 
president of Bituminous Coal Research Inc., a now-defunct coal mining 
and processing research organization.

“There is evidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s 
atmosphere is increasing rapidly as a result of the combustion of fossil 
fuels,” wrote Garvey. “If the future rate of increase continues as it is 
at the present, it has been predicted that, because the CO2 envelope 
reduces radiation, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere will 
increase and that vast changes in the climates of the earth will result.”

“Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, 
which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, 
including New York and London,” he continued.

Cherry was floored.

“It pretty well described a version of what we know today as climate 
change,” said Cherry. “Increases in average air temperatures, melting of 
polar ice caps, rising of sea levels. It’s all in there.”

[...]