Just as a cooperation of scientists, researchers and journalists revealed this historic information, the United States is entering a new era of uncertainty and chaos, which could negate the benefit of new knowledge.
70 years ago they knew
In mid-October, a few weeks before the elections that saw the return of Donald Trump to the White House, the Climate Research Center (CIC) concluded the publication of its findings on the responsibility of oil companies and their representative organizations in no act in time in the face of looming climate change.
A couple of weeks later, the specialized site Desmog published a long note with reliable evidence and a chronological outcome of what happened, based on what was revealed by the CIC. In fact, it was written by Rebeca John, a CIC researcher.
Finally, two days later the British The Guardian picked it up, completing the information and putting it in the historical context. That was November 12th.
What is it about?
In a sentence: the research proves what we suspected. That for 70 years, oil companies have known about the damage that the emissions created by generating plants and automobiles have on the environment. They knew it was causing historic and disastrous climate change for humanity.
They knew it but they denied it. They deny it until now.
They continue to repeat a mantra that has served them for decades to evade criminal responsibility for the misfortune they have been bringing to humanity. They say that “more research is required”. That things are not clear. That we must take into account data that shows the opposite. That there is no need to rush.
Meanwhile, they continue to collect huge profits worth tens of billions of dollars.
Governments: apathy and ignorance
Common sense dictates that a democratic government would use the information to unmask the oil companies once and for all and, at the very least, take them to court to demand that they pay for at least part of the suffering they cause the population.
That is precisely what the California government under Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta did in September 2023: sue Big Oil. This is how they explain it:
“Oil company executives misled the public for decades about how fossil fuels harm our health and destroy our planet, protecting their own profits while passing the bill for damages to taxpayers. “California is suing these big polluters to hold them accountable for their decades of deception, cover-up, and billions of dollars in damage caused to our state.”
Here you can read the text of the lawsuit:
And the United States, with its institutions, law enforcement agencies, government? What are you going to do now?
A lot, if it were logical, democratic, interested in the good of people and the future of our children.
But not much can be expected in that sense from the second Trump administration that is about to take office in a few days. On the contrary. I fear it’s going to be worse. One of the tycoon’s battle cries was “Drill, baby, drill,” referring to bids to drill in Alaska’s natural reserves. His aversion to electric cars is well known. And anyway, there is no meeting of the president-elect without “climate change is a hoax.” A deception.
But these are the data. This is the story.
70 years ago
Chemical engineer Lauren B. Hitchock, president of the Air Pollution Foundation. Credit: APF President’s Report, 1954, SUNY Buffalo University Archives
This month marks 70 years. In 1954, says The Guardian, “scientists were beginning to reliably identify that hydrocarbon pollution came from the consumption of fossil fuels in automobiles.”
Air Pollution Foundation was an organization that was supposedly dedicated to fighting pollution. But in reality it was a front for the oil industry, which paid almost half of its budget, for today’s equivalent of $21 million per year.
Their model has since been repeated ad nauseam by polluting industries and many others: create, or buy, or sponsor, a front group that exaggerated scientific uncertainty to defend the current situation.
Its president, Samuel Hitchcock, was a respected engineer specially selected to give an image of seriousness, neutrality, and scientific rigor.
One day Hitchcock thought better of it and the foundation published a report that contained the explosive warning that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels could have negative, long-term consequences for “civilization.” The research exposed fossil fuels, especially refineries, as a major cause of smog and climate change.
The smog irritated people
By then, the smog was already making life miserable for Angelenos. They had known him since 1943, during World War II. When blankets of noxious smoke began to cover our skies, the Los Angeles Times speculated that it may have been an enemy attack. Thousands of people suffered annoying irritations to their eyes, noses and throats. The black cloud limited our visibility and over time its presence became permanent.
(Left) The Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1943. (Right) Article by AJ Haagen-Smit titled “The Problem of Air Pollution in Los Angeles,” December 1950. Credit: The Los Angeles Times/Caltech Engineering and Science.
The report added to popular discontent and energized civil society. The protests were magnified.
Shortly after, Samuel Epstein, associate professor of geochemistry at CalTech, wrote that “Increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations due to the burning of fossil fuels could affect the Earth’s climate.”
But it wasn’t enough.
Revenge of the magnates
The publication drove the oil tycoons out of their minds, and they summoned Hitchcock to a secret meeting and reminded him who was financing his organization. They pressured him to change course. They weakened his position. They published reports that said the opposite.
By every means at their disposal they sabotaged efforts to protect the population, prevented debates, prevented new regulations, fought against anything that threatened their profits.
The oilmen blamed Hitchcock for his support for pollution control. They blamed him for having “drawn attention” to the pollution caused by the refineries. They revealed to him that the role of the Air Pollution Foundation was to “lead research into the oil industry” and, as it enjoyed prestige, to publish positive findings “that would be accepted as impartial.”
Ten consecutive days of smog sparked massive civic protests in Los Angeles in October 1954. Credit: The Los Angeles Times, October 21, 1954/The Daily News, October 21, 1954
The term of fake news that we know so well today could have been applied back then to what they did. Faced with the gray skies, the toxic fumes, the high numbers of asthma patients, and heart ailments that filled the hospitals on certain days, those responsible for the impending catastrophe responded that what we were seeing did not exist.
They called science “unproven speculation.” Of each report they said it was, “an interesting assumption that has apparently been exploited… as a means of obtaining favorable publicity for their efforts at the expense of bad publicity for the oil industry.”
They were General Petroleum and Humble Oil (today ExxonMobil); Richfield Oil (BP); Shell; Southern California Edison; Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas); Sunray Oil (Sunoco); Tidewater (ConocoPhillips); and Standard Oil of California, Texas Company, Union Oil, and Western Gulf (all now Chevron).
Its representative organization, the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA), then known as the Western Oil and Gas Association (WOGA), did its best to suppress the findings.
The WSPA did not stop at that but promoted another front organization, the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), dedicated to publishing research aimed at minimizing or denying the harmful impacts of burning fossil fuels.
The following year, the APF came out against clean air regulations, emphasizing the high cost of pollution control.
Later, it published a new report declaring that CO2 was “harmless.”
George Davidson, vice president of the Standard Oil Company of California (Chevron), understood that sulfur dioxide (SO2) from refineries was “really beneficial to plants and people” in the quantities currently emitted.
Hitchcock resigned in September 1956. The APF was dissolved at the end of 1960 without pain or glory.
Lost opportunity
Despite the discontent of the population and the smog that was spreading through the sky, public opinion was not powerful enough to impose change. The elected authorities did not lend themselves to this. History could have changed. It wasn’t like that.
The Los Angeles smog infamy became the testing ground for the climate deception playbook that Big Oil innovated and then took to the entire world.
The opportunity to stop the cycle of environmental pollution in the bud was lost. At that historical moment, governments could have taken preventive measures that would have changed the course of human history.
Why didn’t they do it? Perhaps it would have been unpopular and would have frustrated their re-election to the position they then held. Or they would have lost donors. Or they weren’t sure about anything. In large part it was due to the pressure exerted by the oil companies to sow doubts, convince or buy those who could do something and continue doing their thing.
In this process the free press failed. With our obsession with not appearing partisan but neutral and triangulating their position to be in the middle, the newspapers became part of the problem. “Business, industrial and civic leaders, churchmen and officials join the effort,” reads a headline in the Los Angeles Times of November 7, 1953. The “effort” it mentions was an organization that demanded more proof than existed that the smog was a result of burning oil and not burning garbage.
The conclusion published by Hitchckok was the first, but was added to the research carried out by Harvard scientists and published in the prestigious journal Science in January 2023, which demonstrated that ExxonMobil modeled and predicted global warming with “surprising skill and precision.” starting in the 1970s. And the same thing: in the following 50 years, they continued to sow doubts about the crisis.
The climate situation, as everyone already knows, is serious. The disasters that experts predicted as something that would happen in an uncertain future are already happening.
The oil industry knew, 70 years ago, the nature of the greenhouse effect, and that if it continued to pollute the atmosphere, climate change would occur, which was later detailed and which we are suffering today with no solution in sight.