As recently as 2015, Peabody Energy argued that carbon dioxide was a “benign gas essential for all life.”

At the heart of big coal’s denial campaign was Fred Palmer, who served as Peabody’s senior vice president of government relations from 2001 to 2015. In 1997, Palmer founded the Greening Earth Society, a now-defunct industry front group that argued that burning fossil fuels was good for the planet. The group was based in the same office as the Western Fuels Association, a consortium of coal suppliers and coal-fired utilities that Palmer also ran. “While the benefits of carbon dioxide are proven, the alleged risks of climate change are contrary to observed data, are based on admitted speculation, and lack adequate scientific basis,” the company wrote in a letter that year to the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

“Every time you turn your car on and you burn fossil fuels and you put CO2 into the air, you’re doing the work of the Lord,” Palmer told a Danish documentary team in 1997. “That’s the ecological system we live in.”

Asked for comment, a Peabody spokesperson told HuffPost: “Peabody recognizes that climate change is occurring and that human activity, including the use of fossil fuels, contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. We also recognize that coal is essential to affordable, reliable energy and will continue to play a significant role in the global energy mix for the foreseeable future. Peabody views technology as vital to advancing global climate change solutions, and the company supports advanced coal technologies to drive continuous improvement toward the ultimate goal of near-zero emissions from coal.”

Palmer, who did not respond to HuffPost‘s request for comment, continues to carry the torch. He now works as an energy policy adviser to The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank whose climate denial is so severe that even Exxon Mobil abandoned funding it and its climate denial efforts a decade ago. In 2011, leaked memos showed that the institute paid contrarian scientists like Craig Idso, founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, $11,600 a month to promote carbon dioxide as beneficial to the environment.

The group sits at the heart of a broader right-wing misinformation network funded in large part by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, both Republican mega-donors who backed President Donald Trump and financed projects such as Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, the data firm considered key to Trump’s 2016 win. Palmer’s daughter, Downey Magallanes, was a top policy adviser at Trump’s Interior Department before joining oil giant BP in September 2018.

All of this was taking place well after climate change had become a commonly understood idea in the scientific community. A 1965 report from President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee was the first from the White House to address climate change (and is likely what precipitated the Mining Congress Journal article). “The climate changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings,” it warned. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to Congress about what was then known as the “greenhouse effect.” And in 1992, the United Nations established the Framework Convention on Climate Change, an international treaty to begin addressing the problem.