Documentary Evidence Demonstrates Oil Industry Was On Notice of Potential Climate Risks by 1957 In 1957, Suess and Roger Revelle, of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, published a landmark paper that belied the longstanding assumption that the oceans would absorb a large majority of artificial carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere.11 Revelle and Suess predicted large increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, especially if fossil fuel combustion continued to increase exponentially.12 They noted that “[w]ithin a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.”13 Two months after the Revelle and Suess paper was published, scientists at Humble Oil (now ExxonMobil) submitted their own study for publication on the same question.14 Significantly, the Humble Oil study acknowledges not only rising levels of atmospheric CO2, but also the evident contribution of fossil fuels to that increase.15 In acknowledged disagreement with Revelle, however, the paper suggests that CO2 would be retained in the oceans much longer before returning to the atmosphere, which would delay by decades or centuries the impact of fossil fuel emissions.16 The Revelle and Suess study did not warn that climate change would definitely devastate the planet, but it did emphatically state that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were likely to increase significantly over the following several decades. Moreover, the report provides definitive evidence that, by1957, at least one oil company – a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, now ExxonMobil – was aware of and actively researching the links between fossil fuel combustion and the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. An internal account of industry-funded research projects from the following year, 1958, indicates that at least one project funded by the American Petroleum Institute was measuring the proportion of atmospheric carbon “of fossil origin,” i.e., the Suess effect.17 Funded under the auspices of the American Petroleum Institute’s Smoke and Fumes Committee, the research into atmospheric carbon was part of a broader research program targeting atmospheric pollutants of concern to the oil industry as a whole. The Petroleum Industry Engaged in Coordinated Research and Communications on Air Pollution Issues from the 1940s onward The petroleum industry has long been highly coordinated, acting through centralized industry associations. The Western Oil and Gas Association (WOGA) – now the Western States Petroleum 11 See Roger Revelle & Hans E. Suess, Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 during the Past Decades, 9 TELLUS 18 (1957), available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.3402/tellusa.v9i1.9075?needAccess=true. 12 Id. 13 Id. at 19. 14 See H. R. Brannon, et al., Radiocarbon Evidence on the Dilution of Atmospheric and Oceanic Carbon by Carbon from Fossil Fuels, 38 TRANSACTIONS AM. GEOPHYSICAL UNION 643 (1957), available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/TR038i005p00643/full. 15 Id. at 643. 16 Id. at 649. 17 See Charles A. Jones, A Review of the Air Pollution Research Program of the Smoke and Fumes Committee of the American Petroleum Institute, 8 J. OF THE AIR POLLUTION CONTROL ASS’N 268, 270 (1958), available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00966665.1958.10467854 (“a recently placed project concerns the collection and analysis of gaseous carbon compounds in the atmosphere to determine the amount of carbon of fossil origin by analysis of carbon 14 in relation to total carbon present”). 5