Oliver Milman
The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the ‘Keeling curve’ that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.
A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 or £125,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.
Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The Keeling curve has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.
The fossil fuel interests backed a group, known as the Air Pollution Foundation, that issued funding to Keeling to measure CO2 alongside a related effort to research the smog that regularly blighted 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 – uncovered 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 could identify “changes in the atmosphere” caused by the burning of coal and petroleum.
Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm the climate crisis would wreak, only to deny this science for decades and fund continuing efforts to delay action.
Geoffrey Supran, an expert in historic climate disinformation at the University of Miami, said of the documents: “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 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 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.”
Previous investigations have found major oil companies spent decades conducting research into the consequences of burning their product, often to an uncannily accurate degree – a study last year found that Exxon scientists made “breathtakingly” accurate predictions of global heating in the 1970s and 1980s.
The newly discovered documents show the industry knew of the potential climate impact of CO2 as early as 1954 via the work of Keeling, then a 26-year-old researcher at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) conducting formative work measuring CO2 levels across California and the waters of the Pacific Ocean. There is no suggestion oil and gas funding distorted his research.
Keeling died in 2005. Currently, the Earth’s atmospheric CO2 level is 422 parts per million, which is nearly a third higher than the first reading taken in 1958, and a 50% jump on preindustrial levels.
This essential tracking of the primary heat-trapping gas that has pushed global temperatures to levels higher than ever experienced in human civilisation was born, in part, from the backing of the Air Pollution Foundation.
Eighteen automotive companies, including Ford, Chrysler and General Motors, gave money to the foundation. Other entities, including banks and retailers, also contributed.
A policy statement of the Air Pollution Foundation from 1955 called the problem of air pollution, which is caused by the emissions of cars, trucks and industrial facilities, “one of the most serious confronting urban areas in California and elsewhere” and said it would be addressed through “diligent and honest fact finding, by wise and effective action”.
The unearthed documents come from the Caltech archives, the US National Archives, the University of California at San Diego and Los Angeles newspapers from the 1950s.
The oil and gas industry was initially concerned with research on smog and other direct air pollutants before branching out into climate crisis impacts, according to Carroll Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). “You just come back to the oil and gas industry again and again, they were omnipresent in this space,” he said. “The industry was not just on notice but deeply aware of the potential climate implications of its products for going on 70 years.”
Muffett said the documents added further impetus to efforts in various jurisdictions to hold oil and gas firms legally liable for the damage caused by the climate crisis.
“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,” he said.
“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.”