The greenhouse effect is something we would not live without. It keeps Earth temperatures at a level that allows life to bloom on the planet, at least with the right level of carbon dioxides and other gases. With fossil fuels, carbon that was long stored under the surface came back to the atmosphere and created climate change. Ford and GM discovered that in the 1960s, according to E&E News. They would have tried to hide that soon afterward.

The investigation reveals that both automakers were researching the impacts ICE vehicles had on the environment to try to show how beneficial they could be. Probably someone remembered that animal-based transportation made London have a life expectancy of 45 years due to manure dust all over the air, but that backfired spectacularly.

Ruth Annette Gabriel Reck was the scientist behind GM studies. She researched the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere and also published many papers related to her findings. Reck told E&E News that she had no doubt the increase in carbon dioxide was bad because it would disturb "what food we can grow and everything else and the whole balance of the entire Earth-atmosphere system."

Sadly, Reck also appears in a GM document from 1989. The "Public Interest Report" interviewed her and asked her if she thought a heatwave in 1988, with a hot, dry summer, would have been caused by global warming "as many people in the media say."