COP25 kicks off to face a phenomenon known for over 50 years to the coal industry and the US Presidency

COP25 kicks off to face a phenomenon known for over 50 years to the coal industry and the US Presidency

Today in Madrid starts another important stage of the difficult international negotiation of the UNFCCC designed to stop a climate shift increasingly stronger and threatening.

It’s depressing knowing that the difficulty of finding a solution today it’s strongly related to the delay in facing climate change in a timely manner since the first scientific evidences were circulating.

In fact, both the coal industry and the US Presidency have known the phenomenon for over 50 years. The first had a leading role in a massive action of disinformation while the current US president is the most important political figure opposing the Paris Agreement.

In an article published in August 1966 of the journal “Mining Congress Journal”, James Garvey, the President of Coal Research Inc., wrote: “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”.

Garvey, while describing the phenomenon scientifically non very precise, concluded the paragraph with a worrying tone, highlighting that “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”.

In the following decades Peabody Energy, the biggest private coal company worldwide, financed many political and industrial groups opposing the environmental standards and denying the influence of CO₂ on climate change. A denial pushed to most radical form (“the CO₂ is beneficial”). The year before, in November 1965, a US scientific advisory board informed the President Lyndon Johnson of the ongoing global warming processes due to the combustion of fossil fuels.

“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”, said the report. “The climatic changes that may be produced by the increased CO₂ content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings”.

Now we can’t talk about unawareness of this dangerous geophysical phenomenon anymore, hence every form of denial or inaction can be defined only in one way: conscientious irresponsibility toward the fate of mankind.