Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Part 2: Big Oil, Bigger Lies
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- Category: Politics
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What did the fossil fuel industry know about its polluting effect on the environment — and when did it know?
At the end of our first excerpt from Dick Russell’s new book — Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The Men Who are Destroying Life on Earth and What It Means for Our Children — the author quotes Dr. Frank B. Baxter, a University of Southern California professor who said something in 1958 that is worth repeating:
“… man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate through the waste products of his civilization. Due to our release, through factories and automobiles every year, of more than six billion tons of carbon dioxide….our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer. It’s been calculated that a few degrees rise in the earth’s temperature would melt the polar ice caps…”
Well, he was right. But we are no longer “unwittingly” changing the world’s climate. In 1968, scientists warned the American Petroleum Institute that fossil fuel emissions could lead to “melting ice caps, rising seas, and potentially serious environmental damage worldwide.” And in 1977, an Exxon senior scientist warned his colleagues in no uncertain terms that burning fossil fuels could eventually endanger humanity. Two years later, the American Petroleum Institute created a task force to study the alarming environmental impacts of their industry. Members of the joint project included Exxon, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Mobil, Sunoco, Sohio, Gulf Oil, and Standard Oil of California.
They all knew what was happening, and that it was getting dangerously worse.
But there was something they found even more alarming: Public awareness of the danger, and how it could affect profits. Below is a cynical tale about what the oil companies did about this threat to their bottom line.
WhoWhatWhy introduction by Milicent Cranor
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The second of two parts excerpted from Chapter One of Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The Men Who are Destroying Life on Earth and What It Means for Our Children (Hot books, April 2017). To read Part 1, please go here.
Early Warnings
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As early as 1968, the American Petroleum Institute received a report from the Stanford Research Institute concerning “sources, abundance, and fate of atmospheric pollutants.” It concluded that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels were “outstripping the natural CO2 removal processes that keep the atmosphere in equilibrium” and that “significant temperature increase could lead to melting ice caps, rising seas, and potentially serious environmental damage worldwide.”
Industry scientists confirmed that urgent research was required to bring these emissions under control. Clifford Garvin, while CEO at Exxon between 1975 and 1986, decided to install solar panels for heating his swimming pool in the New Jersey suburbs. At the time, President Jimmy Carter did the same on the roof of the White House, while initiating a program aimed at the country getting 20% of its energy from renewable sources by the year 2000.
Both these moves coincided with a 1979 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) study concluding that if man-made carbon dioxide emissions continued to grow, there was “no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible…. a wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late.”
But wait-and-see quickly became the order of the day. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, down came the solar panels from the White House.
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