Documents show industry-backed Air Pollution Foundation uncovered the severe harm climate change would wreak

The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called ‘Keeling curve’ that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.

A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.

Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This ‘Keeling curve’ has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.

  • silence7@slrpnk.netM
    3·
    11 months ago

    The US has has another election this year. Reelecting Biden, and giving him a Congress that will actually pass meaningful climate legislation is part of what we need.

    The reality is that the kind of change we need won’t be the work of a single Presidential term or session of Congress, or any one nation. Biden did what he could with the congress he had, where the Democrats had a majority in the Senate only by virtue of the Vice President being able to break ties, and even then, a couple Democrats (Manchin, Sinema) being bought off by the oil industry.