Burn Notice: We Were Repeatedly Warned About Fossil Fuels - ecoRI News (2024)

We, humans, have long understood the negative implications of burning fossil fuels, and, for a while anyway, considered doing something about it. Then Ronald Reagan was elected president. Government was deemed the enemy, deregulation was embraced, and knowledge was to be feared.

By the 1990s, climate crisis denial had infected a greedy and ignorant segment of the U.S. population. Before Reagan was elected, however, there was a glimmer of hope that we would chose a different and more equitable energy route.

On June 20, 1979, a 32-panel solar array was installed on the roof of the White House. The West Wing panels provided about 75% of the energy needed to heat a thousand gallons of water, used by staff in the kitchen.

President Jimmy Carter, in his State of the Union address that same year, outlined an ambitious plan to put the United States on a path to a cleaner energy future: 20% of energy from renewable sources by 2000. Part of his plan was to go beyond hot water solar collectors and direct government research funds toward the development of photovoltaic cells, the kind that could send power into the grid.

While the panels survived for seven years, well into Reagan’s presidency, Carter’s tax breaks for solar panels were quickly eliminated under the new regime.

By Reagan’s second term, after a first term that empowered polluters and rolled back environmental protections, the fossil fuel industry’s climate change concern had transformed into climate change denial.

We still haven’t recovered our respect for science, or knowledge.

Once in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide persists for decades. Methane, the main component in natural gas, retains heat at least 25 times more effectively than carbon dioxide. These two greenhouse gases, along with nitrous oxide, are superheating the atmosphere, which is having and will have an adverse impact on much of life on Earth, including us.

“Despite the fact that we are protected by a formidable combination of ozone, gravity, solar radiation, magnetic fields, and life-enabling gases, our atmospheric ‘living room’ remains as fragile as a fish bowl — and as easily contaminated,” John Vaillant wrote in his 2023 book Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World. “Earth’s atmosphere may be huge and invisible, but it is also finite as a room: what happens in it stays in it. Unless we send it into deep space by rocket, nothing we make, or emit, ever truly goes away.”

“Fire Weather” is the best book I have read about the human-caused climate crisis. The book’s later chapters examine what we knew about atmospheric carbon dioxide and when. Much of the information below was gleaned from those pages, or at the very least enticed me to look into the people mentioned and the work they did.

It is sickening, both literally and figuratively, how many people we have ignored in our heedless rush to destroy the delicate balance that makes our lives possible.

Two and a half centuries ago, about a decade into the Industrial Revolution, English chemist and natural philosopher Joseph Priestly discovered nine new gases and was experimenting with carbon dioxide. He recognized that the atmosphere was malleable and finite. If it wasn’t a closed system, he believed it was an extremely restricted one.

He wrote about his experiments in a 1772 publication titled Observations on Different Kinds of Air.

In his 1822 book The Analytical Theory of Heat, French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier calculated that the planet was much warmer than it should be if it were dependent only on sunshine and residual heat from Earth’s core. (The book was translated into English in 1878.)

In his book, Vaillant makes the case that Aug. 23, 1856, was the dawn of modern climate science. In upstate New York, Eunice Newton Foote, an artist, inventor, and citizen scientist, “conducted and described what could be called the first modern climate change experiment.”

After filling one sealed glass cylinder with “ordinary air” and another with “carbonic acid gas,” she took readings at room temperature before exposing them to direct sunlight. While both cylinders heated up, the one filled with carbon dioxide grew twice as hot in a matter of minutes.

Her work, despite being presented later that summer at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science — by a male colleague, of course — went unrecognized for 154 years, until a retired petroleum geologist stumbled upon it in 2010.

Since her gender didn’t get the right to vote for another 64 years, the fact Foote was a woman, and a women’s rights campaigner at that, surely wasn’t the reason her work was ignored by the male-dominated world in which she lived. But I digress.

Anyway, three years later, in June 1859, at a meeting of the Royal Institution, Irish physicist John Tyndall presented findings that showed certain gases in the atmosphere had the potential to alter the planet’s climate.

“When the heat is absorbed by the planet, it is so changed in quality that the rays emanating from the planet cannot get with the same freedom back into space,” he told those gathered. “Thus the atmosphere admits of the entrance of solar heat, but checks its exit; and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.”

By end of the 19th century, Swedish geologist Arvid Hogbom wrote: “This quantity of [CO2], which is supplied to the atmosphere chiefly by modern industry, may be regarded as completely compensating the quantity of [CO2] that is consumed in the formation of limestone.”

As Vaillant noted, Hogbom had essentially determined that industrial carbon dioxide emissions were replacing any CO2 being removed by natural processes, such as carbon sequestration by trees and the oceans.

At the beginning of the 20th century, when coal was the dominant energy source — as it would be until the 1960s — Swedish meteorologist Nils Ekholm noted that the “atmosphere may act like a glass of a green-house, letting through the light rays of the sun relatively easily, and absorbing a great part to the dark rays emitted from the ground, and it thereby may raise the mean temperature of the earth’s surface.”

Seven years later, in 1908, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius published Worlds in the Making: The Evolution of the Universe. It was the first popular science book to examine the possibility of anthropogenic warming. It expanded on the work done by others as far back as the 1770s.

Arrhenius wrote: “The enormous combustion of coal by our industrial establishments suffices to increase the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air to a perceptible degree.”

Like others before them, Ekholm and Arrhenius understood that increased industrial emissions would have an impact on the climate. It has been warming and changing ever since.

By the 1930s, English steam engineer and inventor Guy Callendar became the first to track and graph the planet’s warming climate. The amateur meteorologist analyzed a hundred years of temperature records from 200 weather stations around the world. His results were published in 1938, about the time the car was taking over transportation.

In his paper The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Climate, Callendar wrote: “Few of those familiar with the natural heat exchanges of the atmosphere, which go into the making of our climates and weather, would be prepared to admit that the activities of man could have any influence upon phenomena of so vast a scale.”

He had hoped his paper would show that such influence was possible and actually occurring. That was 86 years ago.

In the 1950s the work of Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass on what would three decades later be commonly called “climate change” was reported on by The Washington Post and New York Times, among other newspapers. A Time magazine article reported that “In the hungry fires of industry, modern man burns nearly 2 billion tons of coal and oil each year. Along with the smoke and soot of commerce, his furnaces belch some 6 billion tons of unseen carbon dioxide into the already tainted air. … This spreading envelope of gas around the earth serves as a great greenhouse.”

In June 1953, one of the most popular magazines of the day, Life, published a 20-page article headlined “The Canopy of Air.” The story addressed the link between warming temperatures, glacial retreat, and the burning of fossil fuels.

In 1956, Plass’ work was featured in American Scientist. He noted “that very small changes in the average temperature can have appreciable influence on the climate.”

In that article, titled Carbon Dioxide and the Climate, Plass wrote, “In the last fifty years virtually all known glaciers in both hemispheres have been retreating. There can be no doubt that this will become an increasingly serious problem as the level of industrial activity increases.”

That same year oceanographer Roger Revelle testified before a House subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee.

“Human beings during the next few decades may, almost in spite of themselves, be doing something that will have a major effect on the climate of the earth,” he told the members. “I refer to the combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas by our worldwide civilization, which adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.”

He also warned that if “all of this carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere, it will certainly affect the climate of the earth, and this may be a very large effect.”

By the late 1950s, the potential for carbon-driven climate change/global warming was part of public school curriculum. Today, spiteful governors and state legislatures have scrubbed the terms from government documents and prohibited it from being taught in school. They have also banned books that address issues they don’t agree with and/or understand.

In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson’s science advisory committee shared some knowledge, releasing a report titled Restoring the Quality of Our Environment. It concluded that “Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment.”

“Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years. The CO2 produced by this combustion is being injected into the atmosphere; about half of it remains there. The estimated recoverable reserves of fossil fuels are sufficient to produce nearly a 200% increase in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere.”

A year later, the president of the Bituminous Coal Research Inc. issued a warning in the August issue of the Mining Congress Journal, writing:

“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. 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 ice caps, which in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London.”

In 1967, the American Petroleum Institute (API), now a propagandist organization for the fossil fuel industry, actually commissioned a report about the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. Its authors, Stanford University scientists, noted levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and fine particulate matter are rising quickly, and their most likely source is the burning of fossil fuels. They said the cumulative impact on the Earth’s climate and on human and planetary health is all but certain to be negative and potentially disastrous.

Exxon then partnered with API to create a research team to study the impacts of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere. The fossil fuel giant also invested millions of dollars studying the issue.

A decade later, the multinational corporation was keenly aware of climate change, according to a 2015 investigation by Inside Climate News called Exxon: The Road Not Taken. Exxon has since spent millions spreading climate denial while simultaneously contributing the fourth-largest amount of carbon emissions of any investor-owned company in the world.

Inside Climate News reported that in July 1977 senior scientist James Black delivered an urgent message about the issue.

“In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” Black told Exxon’s management committee, according to Inside Climate News.

Black later noted that doubling greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would increase global temperatures by 2 or 3 degrees. He also warned that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”

Projections created internally by the industry’s megacorporation beginning in the late 1970s on the impact of fossil fuels on the climate were extremely accurate, even surpassing those of some academic and governmental scientists, according to a 2023 analysis published in Science by a team of Harvard University-led researchers.

In 1979, the inaugural World Climate Conference was held, in Switzerland. The event’s objective was to “foresee and prevent potential man-made changes in climate that might be adverse to the well-being of humanity.”

We continue to hold world summits, conventions, and conferences to address the climate crisis. It’s all performative. It’s all talk. Wealthy nations, like the United States, are more concerned about the well-being of wealthy special interests.

Three years after the first World Climate Conference, in October 1982, at a talk titled Inventing the Future: Energy and the CO2 Greenhouse Effect, Exxon’s president of research and engineering spoke about the need for an active transition away from fossil fuels.

It was one of the last times the fossil fuel industry told the truth, at least publicly.

In 1988, National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist James Hansen testified in front of Congress about the climate crisis. He noted that the present temperature is the highest in the period of record. He said the rate of warming in the past 25 years is the highest on record. He said the four warmest years have all been in the 1980s.

Those temperature records have since been obliterated. In fact, we keep breaking heat records, and degrading the planetary system that allows us to be. But all the fossil fuel CEOs care about is gold and silver.

“Altogether the evidence that the earth is warming by an amount which is too large to be a chance fluctuation and the similarity of the warming to that expected from the greenhouse effect represents a very strong case,” Hansen said 36 years ago. “In my opinion, that the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

We knew and we were warned, repeatedly. Had we, say, took the initiative to wean ourselves off fossil fuels when Carter had solar panels installed on the White House, we would be in a better and healthier situation right now. Such a conscientious move would have reduced asthma-causing pollution, decreased greenhouse gas emissions, significantly mitigated the climate crisis, and created a more diverse energy mix that couldn’t hold us hostage as easily.

For instance, we would have reached this point much sooner than 2020, when a longtime ally of the fossil fuel industry, the International Energy Agency, in its World Energy Outlook for that year, noted solar “is now the cheapest source of electricity in history.”

We could have accomplished all that and more without losing jobs or crashing the economy. Instead, we trashed the atmosphere that makes our life possible, all to make a select few wealthy.

I’ll give Vaillant the final word when it comes the impact human activities, most notably the incessant burning of fossil fuels, has had on this blue sphere.

“The consequences of burning millions of years of accumulated fossil energy in a period of decades will be ongoing and dramatic. The effects will influence everything that matters in more ways than we can imagine for the foreseeable future and probably far longer. In light of this, it is almost unbearable to consider that our reckoning with industrial CO2 is only in its infancy, and that future generations will bear this burden far more heavily than we do now. … The willful and ongoing failure to act on climate science is unforgivable.”

Note: “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World” was given to me by my sister-in-law, Alissa Detz, as a birthday present.

Frank Carini can be reached at [emailprotected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.