{"id":27296,"date":"2021-10-28T06:20:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-28T06:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=27296"},"modified":"2021-10-29T22:09:40","modified_gmt":"2021-10-29T22:09:40","slug":"what-big-oil-knew-about-climate-change-in-its-own-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/what-big-oil-knew-about-climate-change-in-its-own-words\/","title":{"rendered":"What Big Oil knew about climate change, in its own words"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Benjamin Franta<\/a>, Stanford University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four years ago, I traveled around America, visiting historical archives. I was looking for documents that might reveal the hidden history of climate change \u2013 and in particular, when the major coal, oil and gas companies became aware of the problem, and what they knew about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I pored over boxes of papers, thousands of pages. I began to recognize typewriter fonts from the 1960s and \u201870s and marveled at the legibility of past penmanship, and got used to squinting when it wasn\u2019t so clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What those papers revealed is now changing our understanding of how climate change became a crisis. The industry\u2019s own words, as my research found<\/a>, show companies knew about the risk long before most of the rest of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Oct. 28, 2021, a Congressional subcommittee questioned executives<\/a> from Exxon, BP, Chevron, Shell and the American Petroleum Institute about industry efforts to downplay the role of fossil fuels in climate change. Exxon CEO Darren Woods told lawmakers that his company\u2019s public statements \u201care and have always been truthful\u201d and that the company \u201cdoes not spread disinformation regarding climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s what corporate documents from the past six decades show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Surprising discoveries<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

At an old gunpowder factory in Delaware \u2013 now a museum and archive \u2013 I found a transcript of a petroleum conference from 1959 called the \u201cEnergy and Man\u201d symposium<\/a>, held at Columbia University in New York. As I flipped through, I saw a speech from a famous scientist, Edward Teller<\/a> (who helped invent the hydrogen bomb), warning the industry executives and others assembled of global warming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhenever you burn conventional fuel,\u201d Teller explained<\/a>, \u201cyou create carbon dioxide. \u2026 Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.\u201d If the world kept using fossil fuels, the ice caps would begin to melt, raising sea levels. Eventually, \u201call the coastal cities would be covered,\u201d he warned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1959 was before the moon landing, before the Beatles\u2019 first single, before Martin Luther King\u2019s \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech, before the first modern aluminum can was ever made. It was decades before I was born. What else was out there?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Wyoming, I found another speech at the university archives in Laramie \u2013 this one from 1965, and from an oil executive himself. That year, at the annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, the main organization for the U.S. oil industry, the group\u2019s president, Frank Ikard, mentioning a report called \u201cRestoring the Quality of Our Environment<\/a>\u201d that had been published just a few days before by President Lyndon Johnson\u2019s team of scientific advisers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe substance of the report,\u201d Ikard told the industry audience<\/a>, \u201cis that there is still time to save the world\u2019s peoples from the catastrophic consequences of pollution, but time is running out.\u201d He continued that \u201cOne of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the earth\u2019s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ikard noted that the report had found that a \u201cnonpolluting means of powering automobiles, buses, and trucks is likely to become a national necessity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Traffic
Transportation is now the leading source of carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S., followed by electricity. David L. Ryan\/The Boston Globe via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As I reviewed my findings back in California, I realized that before San Francisco\u2019s Summer of Love, before Woodstock, the peak of the ’60s counterculture and all that stuff that seemed ancient history to me, the heads of the oil industry had been privately informed by their own leaders that their products would eventually alter the climate of the entire planet, with dangerous consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Secret research revealed the risks ahead<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While I traveled the country, other researchers were hard at work too. And the documents they found were in some ways even more shocking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the late 1970s, the American Petroleum Institute had formed a secret committee called the \u201cCO2 and Climate Task Force<\/a>,\u201d which included representatives of many of the major oil companies, to privately monitor and discuss the latest developments in climate science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1980, the task force invited a scientist from Stanford University, John Laurmann, to brief them on the state of climate science. Today, we have a copy of Laurmann\u2019s presentation<\/a>, which warned that if fossil fuels continued to be used, global warming would be \u201cbarely noticeable\u201d by 2005, but by the 2060s would have \u201cglobally catastrophic effects.\u201d That same year, the American Petroleum Institute called on governments to triple coal production worldwide, insisting there would be no negative consequences<\/a> despite what it knew internally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
A slide from John Laurmann\u2019s presentation to the American Petroleum Institute\u2019s climate change task force in 1980, warning of globally catastrophic effects from continued fossil fuel use.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Exxon had a secretive research program too. In 1981, one of its managers, Roger Cohen, sent an internal memo<\/a> observing that the company\u2019s long-term business plans could \u201cproduce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the earth\u2019s population).\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next year, Exxon completed a comprehensive, 40-page internal report<\/a> on climate change, which predicted almost exactly the amount of global warming we\u2019ve seen, as well as sea level rise, drought and more. According to the front page of the report, it was \u201cgiven wide circulation to Exxon management\u201d but was \u201cnot to be distributed externally.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Exxon did keep it secret: We know of the report\u2019s existence only because investigative journalists<\/a> at Inside Climate News uncovered<\/a> it in 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
A figure from Exxon\u2019s internal climate change report from 1982, predicting how much carbon dioxide would build up from fossil fuels and how much global warming that would cause through the 21st century unless action was taken. Exxon\u2019s projection has been remarkably accurate.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Other oil companies knew the effects their products were having on the planet too. In 1986, the Dutch oil company Shell finished an internal report<\/a> nearly 100 pages long, predicting that global warming from fossil fuels would cause changes that would be \u201cthe greatest in recorded history,\u201d including \u201cdestructive floods,\u201d abandonment of entire countries and even forced migration around the world. That report was stamped \u201cCONFIDENTIAL\u201d and only brought to light<\/a> in 2018 by Jelmer Mommers, a Dutch journalist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In October 2021, I and two French colleagues published another study showing through company documents and interviews how the Paris-based oil major Total was also aware<\/a> of global warming\u2019s catastrophic potential as early as the 1970s. Despite this awareness, we found that Total then worked with Exxon to spread doubt about climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big Oil\u2019s PR pivot<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

These companies had a choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in 1979, Exxon had privately studied options<\/a> for avoiding global warming. It found that with immediate action, if the industry moved away from fossil fuels and instead focused on renewable energy, fossil fuel pollution could start to decline in the 1990s and a major climate crisis could be avoided.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the industry didn\u2019t pursue that path. Instead, colleagues and I recently found that in the late 1980s, Exxon and other oil companies coordinated a global effort<\/a> to dispute climate science, block fossil fuel controls and keep their products flowing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We know about it through internal documents and the words of industry insiders, who are now beginning to share what they saw with the public. We also know that in 1989, the fossil fuel industry created something called the Global Climate Coalition<\/a> \u2013 but it wasn\u2019t an environmental group like the name suggests; instead, it worked to sow doubt<\/a> about climate change and lobbied lawmakers to block clean energy legislation and climate treaties throughout the 1990s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, in 1997, the Global Climate Coalition\u2019s chairman, William O’Keefe, who was also an executive vice president for the American Petroleum Institute, wrote<\/a> in the Washington Post that \u201cClimate scientists don\u2019t say that burning oil, gas and coal is steadily warming the earth,\u201d contradicting what the industry had known for decades<\/a>. The fossil fuel industry also funded think tanks<\/a> and biased studies<\/a> that helped slow progress to a crawl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nhttps:\/\/datawrapper.dwcdn.net\/sk55V\/3\/\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Today, most oil companies shy away from denying climate science outright, but they continue to fight fossil fuel controls<\/a> and promote themselves as clean energy leaders even though they still put the vast majority<\/a> of their investments into fossil fuels. As I write this, climate legislation is again being blocked<\/a> in Congress by a lawmaker with close ties to the fossil fuel industry<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People around the world, meanwhile, are experiencing the effects of global warming: weird weather<\/a>, shifting seasons<\/a>, extreme heat waves<\/a> and even wildfires<\/a> like they\u2019ve never seen before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will the world experience the global catastrophe that the oil companies predicted years before I was born? That depends on what we do now, with our slice of history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article was updated Oct. 28, 2021, with quotes from the hearing.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Benjamin Franta<\/a>, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Stanford University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Benjamin Franta, Stanford University Four years ago, I traveled around America, visiting historical archives. I was looking for documents that might reveal the hidden history of climate change \u2013 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":27297,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,277],"tags":[5936,139,3633,1847,4688,271,4335,1523,2172,9562,209],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27296"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27296"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27304,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27296\/revisions\/27304"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}