News & Analysis
November 13, 2024
Big Oil companies were warned about the climate dangers of fossil fuels as early as 1954, according to new evidence that could boost efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable in court. The unearthed documents, first reported on by DeSmog, are one of the earliest examples of the oil and gas industry’s knowledge that the pollution from their products could result in a climate crisis.
Following public concern about smog blanketing Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s, the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) — then known as the Western Oil and Gas Association — created and funded a research front group called the Air Pollution Foundation, which in turn funded a Caltech study about the sources of Los Angeles’s air pollution. The $1.3 million in funding — equivalent to about $14 million in 2024 dollars — came from WSPA’s members including Shell and gas companies later bought by or merged with ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Sunoco, and ConocoPhillips.
The 1954 Caltech study determined that “a changing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate” may “ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” citing coal, oil, and gas as CO2 sources. WSPA and its members were formally alerted to the study findings in March 1955, archival documents show.
At first, the Air Pollution Foundation’s leadership seemed to heed the study’s warning, with the foundation’s president advocating for pollution controls on oil refineries and testifying in favor of state-funded pollution research in the California Senate. However, in meeting minutes from April 1955, WSPA members admonished the foundation’s president, telling him he was drawing too much “attention” to fossil fuel’s role in climate pollution, that the foundation’s research should be more “protective” of the oil industry, and that WSPA “did not want the Foundation concerning itself with refinery stack gases.”
Going forward, the Air Pollution Foundation and WSPA — along with its members — publicly downplayed the harms of fossil fuels as part of the industry’s decades-long climate disinformation campaign. In future reports, the foundation described CO2 emissions as “innocuous” and, in 1958, an executive from WSPA-member Shell described CO2 as “harmless” at a national air pollution conference.
While this new evidence establishes an earlier start date for Big Oil’s deception campaign, it uncovers behavior that we’ve seen time and time again. The fossil fuel industry has spent millions to learn about the role of their products in the climate crisis and spent millions more to hide that information and lie to the public to protect the industry and its enormous profits.
“The fossil fuel industry is often seen as having followed in the footsteps of the tobacco industry’s playbook for denying science and blocking regulation,” climate disinformation expert Geoffrey Supran told The Guardian. “But these documents suggest that big oil has been running public affairs campaigns to downplay the dangers of its products just as long as big tobacco, starting with air pollution in the early-to-mid-1950s.”
Communities throughout the U.S. are demanding accountability in the courts over Big Oil’s deception. Multnomah County, Oregon, has named WSPA as a defendant in its ongoing lawsuit against Big Oil companies for fueling the deadly 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome. This new evidence raises the possibility of whether WSPA could be named in additional lawsuits, such as those filed in California, where WSPA is headquartered.
