Compiled: The Guardian/Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego/Lyndon B Johnson Library
The fossil fuel industry was funding some of the world's most fundamental climate science as early as 1954, according to newly unearthed documents, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called 'Keeling curve' that charted the upward movement of climate change brought. The carbon dioxide level on Earth.
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A coalition of oil and automakers provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today's currency) in December 1954 to finance Keeling's earliest work measuring CO2 levels in the western U.S., the documents show .
Keeling would continue to establish continuous measurement of global CO2 emissions at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This 'Keeling Curve' has tracked the steady increase in atmospheric carbon causing the climate crisis, and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.
Fossil fuel interests supported a group known as the Air Pollution Foundation, which provided funding for Keeling to measure CO2, in addition to a related effort to research the smog that regularly devastated Los Angeles at the time. This is earlier than any previously known climate research funded by oil companies.
In the research proposal for the money - discovered by Rebecca John, a researcher at the Climate Investigations Center, and published by the climate website DeSmog - Keeling's research director, Samuel Epstein, wrote about a new carbon isotope analysis that causes "changes in the atmosphere" from the combustion of coal and petroleum.
"The potential consequences of changing atmospheric CO2 concentrations on climate, the rate of photosynthesis, and the degree of equilibrium with the carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove to be of significant significance for civilization," says Epstein, a researcher at the California Institute. of Technology (or Caltech), wrote to the group in November 1954.
Experts say the documents show that the fossil fuel industry had a close involvement in the creation of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the serious damage climate change will cause, only to then publicly discredit that science for decades. deny and fund continued efforts to delay action on climate change. the climate crisis.
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"They contain evidence that, at least in 1954, the fossil fuel industry was aware of the potential of its products to disrupt Earth's climate on a scale significant to human civilization," said Geoffrey Supran, an expert in Historical Climate Disinformation from the University of Miami.
"These findings are a startling confirmation that big oil has had its finger on the pulse of academic climate science for 70 years - twice my lifetime - and a reminder that it continues to do so today. They make a mockery of the oil industry's denial of basic climate science decades later."
Previous research of public and private data has shown that major oil companies have spent decades doing their own research into the consequences of burning their product, often to an eerily precise degree. heating in the seventies and eighties.
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The newly discovered documents now show that the industry was aware of CO2's potential climate impact as early as 1954 through, remarkably, the work of Keeling, then a 26-year-old Caltech researcher who did formative work measuring the CO2 levels throughout California and United States waters. Pacific. There is no evidence that oil and gas funding has interfered with his research in any way.
The findings of this work would prompt the American scientist to conduct further experiments on Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano, which would provide an ongoing status report of the world's dangerously rising carbon dioxide composition.
Keeling died in 2005, but his groundbreaking work lives on. Currently, the level of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere is 422 parts per million, which is almost a third higher than the first measurement in 1958, and a jump of 50% from pre-industrial levels.
This vital tracking of the primary heat-trapping gas that has pushed Earth's temperatures to higher levels than ever before seen in human civilization was made possible in part through support from the Air Pollution Foundation.
A total of 18 car companies, including Ford, Chrysler and General Motors, donated money to the foundation. Other entities, including banks and retailers, also contributed financing.
In addition, a 1959 memo identifies the American Petroleum Institute (API), the main US oil and gas lobbying body, and the Western Oil and Gas Association, now known as the Western States Petroleum Association, as "major contributors to the funds of the Air Force". Pollution Foundation". It is not clear exactly when API began funding the foundation, but from mid-1955 the foundation had a representative on an investigative committee.
A 1955 Air Pollution Foundation policy statement called the problem of air pollution caused by emissions from cars, trucks and industrial facilities "one of the most serious urban areas in California and elsewhere" and that the issue should be addressed through "diligent and honest fact-finding, through wise and effective action."
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The unearthed documents come from the Caltech archives, the U.S. National Archives, the University of California San Diego and Los Angeles newspapers from the 1950s, and represent what may be the first example of the fossil fuel industry becoming aware of the potentially serious consequences. of its business model.
According to Carroll Muffett, executive director of the Center for International Environmental Law, the oil and gas industry initially focused on research into smog and other direct air pollutants before focusing on the related impacts of climate change.
"You come back to the oil and gas industry again and again, they were ubiquitous in this space," he said. "The industry was not only aware, but deeply aware of the potential climate implications of its products for the next 70 years."
Muffett said the documents further boost efforts in several jurisdictions to hold oil and gas companies legally accountable for the damage caused by the climate crisis.
"These documents talk about CO2 emissions impacting the planet, which means this industry understood extraordinarily early that fossil fuel combustion was profound on a planetary scale," he said.
"There is overwhelming evidence that the oil and gas industry has been misleading the public and regulators about the climate risks of their product for 70 years. It is foolhardy to rely on them to be part of the solutions. We have now entered an era of responsibility."
API and Ralph Keeling, Charles' son who is also a scientist, were contacted for comment on the documents but did not respond.