Big Oil Studied Climate Danger Earlier Than Imagined, Archives Show

What's the story?

• Newly uncovered documents show that the fossil fuel industry funded foundational climate science as early as 1954, indicating the industry's advance knowledge of climate impacts while publicly denying the science. 
• The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) unearthed the documents from its archives, along with newspapers from the University of California Davis and Los Angeles. Experts say the documents show that the fossil fuel industry played a significant role in the creation of modern climate science and had early knowledge of the severe harm that could occur. 
• This is the earliest public documentation of the fossil fuel industry's knowledge of the consequences of increased greenhouse gas emissions. 

The documents' findings  

• In Dec. 1954, a coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests funded Charles Keeling's work measuring CO2 levels across the western U.S. This research resulted in the famous Keeling curve, a graph representing rising CO2 levels in the Earth's atmosphere - one of the most important scientific discoveries of modern times. 

Photo credit: NASA Earth Observatory

• Keeling went on to establish various measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which continued to track the growing greenhouse gas levels.
• The industry also backed a group known as the Air Pollution Foundation, which issued funding to Keeling to research smog in Los Angeles. Keeling's research director, Samuel Epstein, wrote about a new carbon isotope analysis that could identify alterations in the atmosphere caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Epstein wrote to the group in 1954:

"The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization."

• The Air Pollution Foundation funded research that led to the tracking of CO2, which was backed by Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, and 16 other automotive companies, along with banks and retailers. 
• A 1959 memo also identified the American Petroleum Institute – the U.S.'s leading oil and gas lobbying body – as "major contributors to the funds of the Air Pollution Foundation."

Expert response

• Geoffrey Supran, a historical climate disinformation expert at the University of Miami, said:

"They contain smoking gun proof that by at least 1954, the fossil fuel industry was on notice about the potential for its products to disrupt the Earth's climate on a scale significant to human civilization. These findings are a startling confirmation that big oil has had its finger on the pulse of academic climate science for 70 years – for twice my lifetime – and a reminder that it continues to do so to this day. They make a mockery of the oil industry's denial of basic climate science decades later."

• Carroll Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental Law, said the documents could add further evidence in various jurisdictions to hold the industry liable for climate and environmental damage. He said:

"These documents talk about CO2 emissions having planetary implications, meaning this industry understood extraordinarily early on that fossil fuel combustion was profound on a planetary scale. There is overwhelming evidence the oil and gas industry has been misleading the public and regulators around the climate risks of their product for 70 years. Trusting them to be part of the solutions is foolhardy. We've now moved into an era of accountability."

Should the fossil fuel industry be held accountable?

-Jamie Epstein