Association (WSPA) – was founded in 1907 and represents petroleum companies in the western United States.18 The American Petroleum Institute (API) was later created in 1919 to represent the American petroleum industry as a whole.19 From the time API was founded, oil companies recognized pollution issues as an area of significant common concern; and by the 1930s, they had focused particularly on the industry’s shared concerns with air pollution and the public hostility and risk of regulation it presented. In the 1940s, Los Angeles grappled with increasingly severe and debilitating smog. In late 1946, executives from the major petroleum companies represented by WOGA established the “Committee on Smoke and Fumes of the Western Oil and Gas Association” to fund research into the causes of air pollution in Southern California.20 The committee was explicitly designed not just to conduct research, but to communicate that research and prevent regulation the industry deemed unnecessary.21 The early history of the Smoke and Fumes Committee, and particularly its engagement on the smog debate in California, offers insight into the context in which early oil industry research into climate change was undertaken. In 1946, the year that the Smoke and Fumes Committee was founded, the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), an ostensibly independent scientific research organization, was founded in connection with Stanford University.22 One written history of SRI indicates that Atholl McBean, director of Standard Oil of California (now Chevron) was the “most important of the founding fathers.”23 In 1947, the Smoke and Fumes Committee hired the newly-created SRI to conduct much of its air pollution research.24 Indeed, in its early years, 74% of SRI’s research “went to petroleum and natural gas people.”25 In 1952, the petroleum industry realized that the problem of smog and air pollution was poised to expand beyond Los Angeles, and the Smoke and Fumes Committee was reformed within API with W. L. Stewart, Jr., of Union Oil Company of California, as its Chairman.26 The same year, Vance Jenkins, Executive Secretary of the Smoke and Fumes Committee, awarded Harold Johnston, an atmospheric chemist, a contract with SRI to review a theory of smog disfavored by the industry.27 By the early 1950s, Arie Haagen-Smit had proposed a theory of smog that pointed to automobiles and gasoline as being responsible for the irritating pollution. Johnston vocally disagreed with Haagen-Smit’s theory and was “given the job of disproving the theory.”28 When Johnston’s work confirmed Haagen-Smit’s theory, his What is WSPA?, WESTERN STATES PETROLEUM ASS’N, https://www.wspa.org/what-is-wspa. About API, AMERICAN PETROLEUM INSTITUTE, http://www.api.org/about#tab_history. 20 See Vance N. Jenkins, The Petroleum Industry Sponsors Air Pollution Research, 3 AIR REPAIR 144, 146 (1954), available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00966665.1954.10467615. 21 See Jones, supra note 17, at 267 (“Through the efforts of the Publications Committee, the dissemination of information has a prominent place in the Smoke and Fumes Committee program.”). 22 See Ann C. Bauer and Harry M. Cleaver, "Minority Report," Campus Report Supplement (Stanford University Relations Office), No. 5 (April 14, 1969), available at http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357L/StanfordMinorityReport.html. 23 Id. 24 See Jenkins, supra note 20, at 146-47. 25 See Bauer & Cleaver, supra note 22. 26 See Jenkins, supra note 20, at 148. 27 Harold S. Johnston, “Atmospheric Chemistry Research at Berkeley” an oral history conducted in 1999 by Sally Smith Hughes, Ph.D., Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2005, at 63, available at http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/johnston_harold.pdf. 28 Id. 18 19 6