presentation to the SRI board of directors was postponed, and his consultancy with SRI was terminated.29
In 1954, when Vance Jenkins later recounted the history of industry sponsored air pollution research, he
neglected to mention Johnston’s confirmation of Haagen-Smit’s theory and declared “[t]he work at
Stanford Research Institute has shown that there are a number of apparent errors both in this theory and in
its interpretation to account for the various phenomena associated with smog.” 30
By 1958, the Smoke and Fumes Committee was funding research at a number of additional institutes,
including the Armour Research Foundation, the Franklin Institute, and Truesdail Laboratories.31 In 1965,
the Smoke and Fumes Committee was merged with other API committees and working groups to form
the Committee for Air and Water Conservation (CAWC) of the American Petroleum Institute.32 The
CAWC consisted of “representatives from 20 API member companies,” while “major oil industry
associations also send liaison representatives to CAWC meetings.”33
The industry undertook coordinated research into many subjects relevant to the causes and
impacts of climate change
When the major petroleum companies started expanding their operations offshore into the Gulf of Mexico
in the 1940s, they realized that hurricanes posed a significant challenge to the safe and reliable operation
of offshore oil rigs. In 1947, Humble Oil (later Exxon) contracted with A. H. Glenn, a meteorological
consultant, to develop wave and weather forecasting techniques.34 In a paper from 1951, Glenn notes that
“the oil industry is several years ahead of the other American industries in applying meteorology and
oceanography.”35 He further comments that even the government’s own services in the space are too
broad for industry needs and typically trail industry’s own science by years.36
In 1956, API initiated a research program that would last until 1962 to investigate the causes of, and
conditions preceding, hurricane formation.37 The chairman of the program, Mercer Parks of Humble Oil,
wrote a retrospective account of the project in 1963 where he outlined the advances made in the ability to
predict hurricane formation based on current weather conditions.38 Another paper by M. M. Patterson, of
Shell Development Company, describes a then-ongoing eighteen-month project to collect ocean data from
newly installed Shell oil platforms “for the development and calibration of environmental forecasting
theories.”39 This joint project included participation from several major petroleum companies, including
Shell Development Company, Esso Production Research Company (now ExxonMobil), Mobil Research
29
Id.
See Jenkins, supra note 20, at 147.
31
See Jones, supra note 17, 269-70.
32
See ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH: A STATUS REPORT, AMERICAN PETROLEUM INSTITUTE 6 (1972), available at
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED066339.pdf.
33
Id.
34
See A. H. Glenn, Forecasting for the Offshore Oil Boom, 2 WEATHERWISE 6 (1949), available at
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00431672.1949.9925186?journalCode=vwws20.
35
See A. H. Glenn, Economic Consideration of Certain Weather and Oceanographic Problems Arising in the
Petroleum Industry 7 (1951), available at https://www.onepetro.org/conference-paper/SPE-152-G.
36
Id.
37
See Herbert Riehl & Mercer H. Parks, Hurricane Formation in the Gulf of Mexico (1963), available at
https://www.onepetro.org/conference-paper/API-63-101.
38
See id.
39
See M. M. Patterson, An Ocean Data Gathering Program for the Gulf of Mexico (1969), available at
https://www.onepetro.org/conference-paper/SPE-2638-MS.
30
7