With Al Gore on Capitol Hill schooling U.S. Representatives on the basics of the climate system, and a week after MIT issued its Future of Coal" report, I thought I would post this little bit of history.

General Electric is and has always been in the energy business. The company's "Eco-imagination" media campaign is one index of how far this international giant is ahead of the U.S. government on 21st century thinking and new energy technology. Here's one example: GE is working with BP to build two electricity plants, in Scotland and in California, that would demonstrate "carbon sequestration" technology. There's a lot of discussion about carbon sequestration and storage-capturing carbon dioxide before it is emitted to the atmosphere and pumping it underground or, less likely, under the ocean.

Here is the first sentence of a report on global warming and carbon sequestration delivered to the CEO of General Electric: "The problem of CO2 control in the atmosphere is tackled by proposing a kind of 'fuel cycle' for fossil fuels where CO2 is partially or totally collected at certain transformation points and properly disposed of."

The Italian physicist, Cesare Marchetti, author of the report, "On Geoengineering and the CO2 Problem," continues:

"The problem of climatological effects of CO2 has recently attracted much attention, but the related question of how much fossil fuel we can still burn without burning our fingers is yet open. It may turn out that buring fossils 'a gogo' will have no really important consequences at least for our generation; yet reports on the subject, following the spirit of the time perhaps, tend to be more and more pessimistic."

Marchetti did not write the study for Jeffrey Immelt, who was anointed GE's chairman and CEO four days before 9/11. Nor did he write it for Jack Welch, GE's chief between 1981 and 2001. He wrote it for Welch's predecessor, Reginald Jones, in 1977.

Ocean-storage has declined in popularity, though it has some prominent supporters. Engineers today favor pumping emissions from power plants underground, into aquifers and spent oil fields.

I'm watching legislators ask Al Gore questions about climate change and remediation that could have been just as easily asked--and most of them just as easily answered--in 1977. I can't help but wonder if historians a generation or two hence will ask themselves, What took so long?