Hadrid listeners were back. They took a long break there to work on reporting the next season, and because pandemic parenting makes work hard, this month we'll be releasing a few bonus episodes and next month we'll get into our next narrative season. And it's a long history of the gas industry, including the fracking boom, how that fed into a plastics boom, and the many crazy tactics the industry has used and continues to use to pain itself as
a clean energy solution. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that. Also, a quick update on last season. In the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York just ruled in Stephen Donziger's favor on at least some of the civil contempt charges he was facing. If you don't have any idea what I'm talking about, go back and listen to season five, all about the long Chevron Ecuador case. It's been going on for more than thirty years.
Donziger is still going to trial on criminal contempt charges, and we'll have a longer update on all of that for you soon, but this is a small win for him. Today we're talking to Stanford researcher Ben Fronta, you might remember from season one. Fronta studies the history of science, and we spoke with him last time about how much oil money is funding climate research centers at university campuses
all over the country. Today, I invited him on to share a really big recent discovery that I don't think has gotten nearly enough attention about how early the American Petroleum Institute knew about climate change and importantly started messaging against climate action that started happening in nineteen eighty. According to some new stuff that Fronta has dug up, that's
way earlier than people previously thought. The American Petroleum Institute is, of course, the trade group for the oil and gas industry. It's been around for more than one hundred years and was the brainchild of one of our mad men from season three, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, the longtime publicist for the Rockefellers and Standard Oil. So you know, no big surprise that they were in on climate denial early. That conversation coming up right after this quick break.
So my name is Ben Fronta, and I'm a jdphd student at Stanford University. The PhD part of my life is about the history of climate science. So I do research on the history of climate science in general and what fossil fuel companies knew about climate change.
Awesome, And you recently published something about a policy booklet you found published by the American Petroleum Institute in nineteen eighty Can you explain a little bit about what that is how you found it?
Yeah, absolutely, So I found this while doing archival research at the University of Wyoming that's in Laramie, and it's a policy book published by the American Petroleum Institute, and I believe it is the earliest known climate disinformation from the API. And of course, you know, the API is really the nerve center of the US oil and gas industry, so all the major players of the industry were members of it, including Exxon and Chevron, as well as the European companies like UPNHL.
Right, this was super interesting to me when I was reading it because one of the Exon guys that I interviewed, this guy, Richard Werthemer, said that he, you know, he was at Exon during this time period, I think from like seventy nine to eighty two or eighty three, and he said that that he had suspected that like the big shift in the industry was kind of orchestrated through the API, and that you know, Exon had a lot of power there, but also the API had a lot
of power throughout the industry. So anyway, I don't know, it's just it's interesting to see how they were starting to talk about the issue in nineteen eighty So what was like kind of the big the big finding for you in this what was was there anything surprising?
Well? I was surprised because previously, the conventional wisdom about climate disinformation was that it arose around nineteen eighty nine, and that's when the fossil fuel industry created the Global Climate Coalition and groups like the Martial Institute began pushing out climate disinformation into the public sphere, you know, And this conventional wisdom led to a sort of question in historical circles because you know, as you've talked about on
your podcast, companies like Exxon and the API were doing in house research and monitoring of climate science since at least the late nineteen seventies. So there was this question of were these companies initially supportive of climate science and
then did they move to denial only later? And that question in that narrative, for example, was an important part of the New York Times magazine article Losing Earth, which was very popular, and it largely absolved the fossil fuel industry of climate and action throughout the nineteen eighties.
Yeah, it kind of made it all about human nature, right, that's right, I know.
And so this, this discovery shows that that narrative was mistaken. Now, of course, you know that narrative fit the information that was available at the time, or at least a lot of it. But now we know more, and it turns out that even as the industry was doing climate research internally, it was also promoting this false and misleading information about global warming to the public.
That's super interesting. Maybe I'll have you read a couple of the more I don't know, like some of the lines that really try to convey doubt about the about the science of global warming.
Sure, so the America Petroleum Institute, and I think this is also significant. It acknowledged in this document that CO two was a pollutant. It says when coal or any other fossil fuel is burned, carbon dioxide emissions occur. In itself, carbon dioxide is harmless. Nature itself is a major source. However, some scientists believe that large concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can in time cause climatic changes, specifically higher
temperatures worldwide, the quote unquote greenhouse effect. You know, even there, you.
See some of these scientists believe, believe good one, good one, api.
Exactly, but it goes on and it says other scientists are more sanguine or optimistic about the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Some scientists, including doctor Carl Sagan Cornell University astronomer, see a cooling phenomenon as counteracting the
greenhouse effect. So when I saw that, I was very interested, because, of course Carl Stagen is very famous astronomer and a public communicator about science, and he actually wrote about his worry comes deep concern about global warming in books like Cosmos, which I think was also from around nineteen eighty, and in that book he wrote, the service environment of Venus is a warning something disastrous can happen to a planet
rather like our own. The carbon dioxide content of the Earth's atmosphere is increasing dramatically, and the possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect suggests that we have to be careful. Even a one or two degree rise in the global temperature can have catastrophic consequences.
Wow. So that is the same exact year, nineteen eighty and it is not at all how the API is presenting it. Still not at all. Wow.
So you know, that's one example of the of the misleading presentation about climate science that was given by the API to the public. And that's sort of a that's a classic technique portraying the scientific community as being more split, more divided on the issue than it actually is, and that of course became a staple of climate denial and deflecting attention away from fossil fuels for decades to come.
That's super super interesting. What is this World Coal Study that you mentioned in this in this article.
Yeah, so this is another another technique of climate it denial, and really something that the fossil fuel industry does fairly regularly is to point to studies that look like they're done independently by by scientists, by third parties, that apparently support the position of the industry. And in this booklet
we have the exact same phenomenon. So the API pointed to something here called the World Coal Study, which was actually largely funded and even carried out by representatives of fossil fuel groups, but it was organized by a professor at MIT, so it looked credible from the outside.
And MIT always taken that sweet spot money.
Yes, and that study which that study came out in nineteen eighty two or nineteen eighty as well. So that study also came out in nineteen eighty and it called for a tripling of worldwide coal production by the year two thousand, and it simply asserted that this would have no serious consequences for human health or for the environment. Wow, which is a rather laughable conclusion.
This was like around the same time that people were trying to make the argument that CO two emissions would grow more plants on the planet too.
That's right, This is about when that argument arose. And I want to just note that this World Coal study, even though we might think that its conclusions really make no sense, it was actually quite influential. So the director of that study, that was MIT business professor Carol Wilson.
He lobbied the Carter administration and with using the study WOW to double coal production by nineteen ninety the which was actually adopted and it became official G seven policy that the G seven countries are the United States, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Canada. That became official G seven policy in nineteen eighty one.
Wow. Wow, I love this quote from him that you have too, where he's describing his year as having spent the last year peddling coal all over the.
What a glorious year that was.
Wow. That's yeah, that's really that's really interesting. Can you talk a little bit about this industry wide task force that API had created sort of the year before as well. I know that Nila Banerji wrote about that a few years back, but just to kind of orient people in this time period again.
That's right. So you know, this nineteen eighty document shows what the API was telling the public about climate change, and we can compare that to the internal memos that the API had at the time. And one of the most important groups in the API related to climate change was this task Force on CO two and Climate And really what this was was a group to monitor climate science and developments, and it had representatives on it from the major oil companies who were members of the API,
from BP, from Exxon and so on. And one of the bombshell documents that we have so far is the meeting minutes of a presentation given to that task force by a researcher from Stanford University about climate change. And this was from around the same time, so this presentation was from nineteen eighty and during this presentation the person presenting his name was John Lawerman. He was an engineer
from Stanford University. He talked about the likely impacts of fossil fuels if they continued to be developed as they were, and one of the slides says one of the slides says, a one degree rise would happen by two thousand and five, but it would be barely noticeable. A two and a half degree rise would happen by twenty thirty eight, and that would have major economic consequences and would be strongly
regionally dependent on where you were in the world. And then a five degree rise would happen by twenty sixty seven, and that would have globally catastrophic effects. And you know, of course we have already seen about a one degree rise, so this is fairly on track. But this shows that by nineteen eighty the API had actually been directly warned that business as usual would would create these globally catastrophic
effects within the twenty first century. And yet in this policy book, the API is telling the public we need to expand fossil fuel production of all kinds oil, gas, and coal, because at that time, the oil industry wanted a lot of coal production and order to produce synthetic fuels, which is liquid fuel made out of coal, and it knew that this would lead to a huge amount of CO two being put into the atmosphere, and yet it told the public that this would be safe, and this
is essentially the opposite of what the group had just been warned about that very year.
Yeah, that's interesting, especially interesting given that, you know, the API has been named in Minnesota's climate fraud lawsuit. So it'll be interesting to see how some of this stuff, you know, plays into that and also what else they might find when I guess it's if, but when they get to discovery in that case, Yeah, that.
Will be very interesting. Yeah. When I see this, this false, misleading information coming from the API nineteen eighty, it tells me that at that time the industry wasn't just paying close attention to climate science through its internal task force, but it was also actively intervening to prevent climate from being fully considered in public policy, even at that time, and that suggests that this sort of approach of denial and deception was the first instinct, if you want to
think about it that way, of the petroleum industry as the climate policy grew in the public eye. So you know, even in the early eighties, from the very earliest days of climate as a policy matter, the industry was already poisoning the well, if you want to use that phrase. And this means there may not have been a time when climate policy discussion were free from the influence of
disinformation from the industry. It might have always been corrupted if disinformation was being put out there this early.
Yeah, I do feel like it's really important to understand sort of how the public's understanding and politicians understanding of climate science was shaped in those early years when you know, oil companies were doing some research.
You know, if we think about this, you know, this is nineteen eighty and that might seem like a long time ago, and in some ways it is a long time ago. But because energy infrastructure lasts for so long, the things that happened in nineteen eighty still have direct impacts today energy decisions, like if you build a refinery or a coal plant or pipeline that's going to last
for sometimes fifty years or more. This sort of disinformation from nineteen eighty and of course ever since then, has actual, real material effects on how much global warming we experience now and in the future, and therefore how much damage occurs. So even though this is in the past, decades in the past, in a very real sense, it is causing us harm today. And you know, that's just that's I think,
you know, an unfortunate aspect of it. But it's also why it's so important that we figure out what happened us we can correct it totally.
Yeah, because well it's so it's frustrating to see the same thing get repeated in so many ways now, you know, or even I was talking to someone earlier today who is like, Wow, all of a sudden, it seems like disinformation is such a big thing, And I'm like, it's not all of a sudden, though, it's been That's like, because because this whole machine has been built for like one hundred years, right, that's right, we need to understand that.
And I my big soapbox recently is that I really think the media needs to take a hard look at itself and its role in all of this stuff and ways that it can inoculate itself and the public against more of it.
That's absolutely right, Yeah, because you know, as you've talked about it in your podcast, some of these techniques of mass manipulation, you know, are very old and they're commonly used between different industries. Techniques like the third party technique where you you know, falsely ascribe essentially your own position to a group that looks like it's independent from you, but it's actually not. You know, that's just one example.
But but these sort of pr techniques, they're very common, and it's amazing how how common they are once you learn about them, and you know, you have a whole season about that, and it's one of the best resources about that topic. But I think it would be you know, amazing for for the media to develop a closer familiarity with all that.
That's it for this time. Big thanks to Ben Fronta for joining us. I will drop links in the show notes to his research on this subject and the documents that he was able to find. Come back next next week we'll be talking about a new report that had the oil and gas guys all up in arms. It found that, surprise, all those jobs that the fracking industry was supposed to deliver never really materialized. Come back for that and we'll see you too. Drilled is an original
production of Critical Frequency. It's reported and produced by me Amy Westervelt. Our music is composed by b Beeman, David Whited, and Martin Wissenberg. You can find us online at drillednews dot com, where you'll find transcripts and related documents for podcast episodes, as well as more climate accountability reporting. You can follow us on Twitter at we are Drilled, and you can follow me at Amy Westervelt. Big thank you to our Patreon subscribers. You are the ones making this
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