SMOKE AND FUMES 23 B OX 3 Prior Petroleum Industry Pollution Events Reveal a Pattern of Denial and Obfuscation © realworkhard/Pixabay Oil industry executives and their allies have repeatedly dismissed allegations that the industry misled the public on climate change and climate science as baseless conspiracy theories. As the foregoing discussion demonstrates, however, the available documentary evidence tells a different story, suggesting a clear pattern of investigation, concealment, and obfuscation on the part of major companies and industry groups. Oil industry engagement in similar patterns of conduct—discovery, investigation, concealment, obfuscation— often spanning decades, has been extensively documented across an array of public health and environmental issues, including lead,189 smog,190 vinyl chloride,191 and benzene,192 among others. The documented history of industry engagement on these issues, including efforts to suppress or undermine relevant science, the targeting of scientists for personal and professional attack, and the use of advertising, editorials, and other tools to encourage consumer skepticism about the need for action, is relevant to assessing the industry’s potential conduct on climate change in light of the available evidence. The complex and long-hidden history of the oil industry’s engagement with the tobacco industry provides additional insight into these recurring patterns of conduct. This history and relevant documentation, drawn from the 16 million industry documents of The Tobacco Archive, are discussed extensively elsewhere.193 The example of the industries’ intersection in the work of Theodor Sterling is instructive. From the 1960s into the 1980s, Dr. Theodor Sterling was among the scientists most heavily relied upon and heavily valued by the tobacco industry.194 Sterling was not a medical doctor but a mathematician and computer scientist, whose work focused on issues of study design and epidemiological proof. More specifically, Sterling argued that it was nearly impossible to prove through epidemiological data that a particular pollutant was the cause of a specific disease. Sterling’s value to the industry lay not in his expertise in identifying the causes of cancer, therefore, but in his arguments that these causes were nearly impossible to prove in most cases—that no matter the amount of data or modeling, there was always room for uncertainty and doubt. Sterling pioneered these strategies in the early 1960s, while working on questions of lead exposure, including on behalf of Ethyl Corporation, a joint venture co-owned by General Motors and Standard Oil of New Jersey (now ExxonMobil).195 In 1968, Sterling prepared a report on the “Feasibility” and appropriate mechanisms for reviewing public health research related to smoking and resolving the competing views of public health and tobacco industry experts on these issues.196 He recommended to that the industry advocate for “a permanent commission…for the purpose of establishing a consensus on the results of various studies and what they mean.”197 Industry records indicate that Sterling’s recommendation arose in large part due to the contributions of Robert Eckardt, a member of the study advisory committee and Medical Director of Esso Research (now ExxonMobil).198 Eckardt was a member of the petroleum industry’s Air Pollution Research Advisory Committee (APRAC), upon which the recommended commission was based.199 Later, a 1975 cigarette industry document would recount how the petroleum industry used the APRAC, an ostensibly neutral body with government participation, to “launder” research that made its products seem safe when they were not.200 While the behavior of the petroleum industry in relation to lead, smog, vinyl chloride, and benzene does not directly implicate its liability for climate change, it does reveal a pattern. We know that Theodor Sterling, whose academic work supported the cigarette industry through three decades, worked with oil industry interests on questions of lead pollution, doing research that would be used to defend lead in gasoline. We also know that when Sterling made recommendations after a feasibility study for the cigarette companies, he based those recommendations on a model developed by petroleum companies—a model the cigarette companies would later acknowledge as effective in legitimizing shoddy, industry-favoring research. We also know, directly, that the Smoke and Fumes Committee of the American Petroleum Institute was designed deliberately to affect regulation, and that we have one personal account of the methods by which the industry would use seemingly independent research institutes to produce favorable science. It should not be surprising that the cigarette industry also contracted extensively with Stanford Research Institute.201