spheric pollution resulting from the
production, manufacture, transportation, sale, and use of petroleum and its
products.16
This express recognition that the use
of its products constitutes a major
part of the oil industry’s impact (and
responsibility) is significant given
the industry’s decades-long (and
ongoing) campaigns to shift that
responsibility away from oil companies and onto individual consumers. Despite the Smoke and Fumes
Committee’s then active research
into the accumulation of atmospheric CO2 from fossil fuels, Jones
makes no reference to that research
in his presentation. The only reference to CO2 emissions characterizes
them as “harmless.”17
At a high level symposium on Energy and Man convened by API the
following year, renowned physicist
Edward Teller directly challenged
that characterization. Calling attendees attention to the link between fossil fuels and rising atmospheric levels of CO2, as well as the
resulting “greenhouse effect” from
rising CO2, Teller warned that “a
temperature rise corresponding to a
10 percent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the
coastal cities would be covered…
this chemical contamination is more
serious than most people tend to believe.”18 At the time, API was chaired
by Shell Oil President HMS Burns.
By the end of the 1950s, therefore,
Shell was demonstrably on notice
that atmospheric contamination by
CO2 from fossil fuels was an environmental issue of potentially significant concern to the industry and
to the planet. In the decade that followed, warnings to Shell from both
A Crack in the Shell
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within and outside the company
would become increasingly explicit,
detailed, and urgent.
In 1962, Marion King Hubbert,
Chief Geology Consultant at Shell
and former director of its research
labs, produced a book- length report
on the earth’s Energy Resources for a
committee of the National Academy of Sciences.19 The report, which
draws heavily upon a 1956 analysis
Hubbert prepared for the American
Petroleum Institute,20 demonstrates
Shells’ profound understanding of
the earth’s energy balance, including
the differences in the reflection of
long- and short-wave solar radiation
back into space, the role of global
atmospheric temperatures in driving global weather, and the intrinsic
and delicate natural balance between
the heat energy absorbed by plants
through photosynthesis with the
equivalent energy released by plant
matter through natural decay.21
Hubbert produced detailed discussions of both past and predicted future growth in the production and
use of the earth’s energy resources,
with a heavy focus on the production and use of coal, oil, and natural gas, both through conventional
development and through future
extreme energy sources such as oil
shale and tar sands.22 Hubbert then
briefly reviewed progress and viability of other energy sources, including
solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower. 23 In so doing, he explicitly
acknowledged the potential risk that
humanity’s growing use of fossil fuels could result in dramatic changes
to the earth’s climate:
There is evidence that the greatly increasing use of the fossil fuels, whose
material contents after combustion are
principally H2O and CO2, is seriously
contaminating the earth’s atmosphere
with CO2. Analyses indicate that the
CO2 content of the atmosphere since
EXHIBIT 2
Excerpt from Hubbert’s 1962 report Energy Resources
M. King Hubbert, Energy Resources: A Report to the Committee on Natural Resources of the
National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council 96 (1962).
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Center for International Environmental Law