Oil Industry Helped Fund Pivotal Atmospheric Greenhouse Research
The greenhouse theory of climate goes back to the 19th century, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that the theory got a large boost by the research of Charles Keeling.
According to a history from the American Institute of Physicists, Keeling established the monitoring station at the active volcano Mauna Loa in Hawaii to collect an ongoing baseline measurement for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere while working at the Scripps Institution for Oceanography at the University of California and with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Prior to that, measurements were ad hoc, and it could be difficult to tell whether a high recording was a temporary or seasonal fluctuation.
Not only did Keeling’s work show the baseline value, but it also showed the consistent growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide, which Keeling ascribed to man-made fossil fuel consumption. It became the prime evidence of the greenhouse effect.
While Keeling was authoring papers that would put the fossil fuel industry in the crosshairs of environmentalists, Keeling’s employer, the Scripps Institute for Oceanography, was substantially funded by the oil industry.
Annual reports for Scripps going back to 1967 consistently list numerous major oil companies—Chevron, Shell, Occidental, Mobil, Exxon/Standard Oil, Amoco—and the American Petroleum Institute as funders, sometimes under the aegis of “Scripps Industrial Associates” along with other industrial, military, and government funding sources.
Annual reports don’t specify what projects the funding was delegated to. They regularly detail Scripps’ oceanography research on identifying oil deposits in seas as coordinating with oil tankers to take in climate measurements while at sea, while also describing Keeling’s research into carbon dioxide measurement.
Recently revealed records have shown historic research by oil companies like Exxon into the potential effects of the greenhouse effect from fossil fuels and even accurately predicted the change in temperature. Those documents have led to multiple lawsuits accusing Exxon and Chevron of knowingly ignoring the risks of climate change.
In 1988, Shell published a report compiling climate research from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) among other sources and the potential effect on Shell companies, but with the note that so far there had been no CO2-induced effect on global temperature.
After years of collecting research about potential harms of the greenhouse effect, Exxon reversed course in 1989 and began funding science skeptical of it. It has since published over 30 papers in peer reviewed publications.
Shell has not been targeted with a lawsuit like that of Exxon’s for misleading investors about the risks of climate change, but it is being sued for not doing enough to abate climate change.
Debate Over Leaded Gasoline
Right before Keeling published some of his most influential papers on carbon dioxide measurements, the oil industry was in a different set of crosshairs related to leaded gasoline.
Senate hearings in the late 1960s debated whether lead additives to gasoline, also known as tetraethyl lead, and other automotive sources were causing health and environmental damage. Lead was added to gasoline to improve engine performance and prevent knocking—when fuel in the engine combusts at times outside the engine’s stroke cycle, causing a banging sound.
In 1969, automakers would settle a lawsuit by the Justice department accusing them of a conspiracy to prevent the addition of pollution control devices like catalytic converters.
While the Environmental Protection Agency pushed for a complete ban on leaded fuel, the industry pushed back noting that there was no evidence showing the risk of leaded gasoline to “a substantial portion of the general population.”
Eventually leaded gasoline would be phased out as it damages catalytic converters. Although it is still used for other engines besides commuter vehicles, like aircraft, racing cars, and farm engines. Up until recently it was still used in some parts of the world like Algeria, which banned it in 2021.
Leaded Gasoline and Climate
While most of the debate surrounding leaded gasoline was whether it caused brain damage, automotive pollution from that era is likely responsible for a decline in atmospheric temperature.
While measured temperature anomalies have regularly increased throughout the last century and are regularly ascribed to the greenhouse effect, temperatures throughout the 1950s and into the sixties when leaded gasoline was prevalent were effectively flat if not declining.
That change is regularly associated with additional particulate matter in the air blocking solar radiation. Less solar radiation reaching ground level would ostensibly lead to less energy being absorbed. Volcanic eruptions can have the same effect when massive amounts of particulate matter are thrown into the sky, and the same principle is used in geoengineering to limit global warming.
Keeling, Carbon Dioxide, and Smog
Interestingly enough, in Keeling’s 1970 paper “Is Carbon Dioxide from Fossil Fuel Changing Man's Environment?,” he would ascribe the growth of smog in cities to carbon dioxide and included an anecdote about a scientist with asthma who died following a car crash while trying to escape the smog in San Diego.
My judgment of the seriousness of the attack was supported by measurements of atmospheric CO2 at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography which indicate that during the past year La Jolla has sometimes enjoyed levels of contaminated air comparable to severe smog in Los Angeles.
Since the proliferation of catalytic converters, smog has been effectively eliminated in cities worldwide, particularly Los Angeles where the problem was most glaring.
But catalytic converters don’t eliminate carbon dioxide; they add to it. They convert carbon monoxide and nitrogen monoxide into carbon dioxide.