TIMES RECORD • November 1, 2021
Four years ago, I traveled around America, visiting historical archives. I was looking for documents that might reveal the hidden history of climate change – and in particular, when the major coal, oil and gas companies became aware of the problem, and what they knew about it. I pored over boxes of papers, thousands of pages. I began to recognize typewriter fonts from the 1960s and ’70s. What those papers revealed is now changing our understanding of how climate change became a crisis. The industry’s own words, as my research found, show companies knew about the risk long before most of the rest of the world.