Decades of Deception: California Sues Oil Majors on Climate Lies

It’s not the first climate lawsuit. Could it finally be one that is consequential?
Reminder: it took decades of failed lawsuits against the tobacco industry before health advocates finally won big.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported yet more evidence of fossil fuel industry lies and deception
Just a few weeks ago, young people in Montana won a judgement against that state on evidence of fossil fuel wrong doing, which might have been the first crack in the wall.
The stakes in this fight are far, far larger, and could be of enormous financial and social consequence.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has been highly visible and vocal in support of this effort.

Associated Press:

The state of California filed a lawsuit against some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, claiming they deceived the public about the risks of fossil fuels now faulted for climate change-related storms and wildfires that caused billions of dollars in damage, officials said Saturday.

The civil lawsuit filed in state Superior Court in San Francisco also seeks creation of a fund — financed by the companies — to pay for recovery efforts following devastating storms and fires. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement the companies named in the lawsuit — Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP — should be held accountable.

“For more than 50 years, Big Oil has been lying to us — covering up the fact that they’ve long known how dangerous the fossil fuels they produce are for our planet,” Newsom said. “California taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill for billions of dollars in damages — wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heat waves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells.”
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Readers of this blog of course are well aware of the fossil industry’s long history of deception on the issue. One resource that is now available is researcher Ben Franta’s PhD thesis deeply examining the history and roots of that deceit. It opens with a surprising story of the earliest glimmers of awareness at an industry gathering in the late 1950s. Those who have seen the Oppenheimer movie may recognize physicist Edward Teller, who makes an appearance.

Ben Franta – BIG CARBON’S STRATEGIC RESPONSE TO GLOBAL WARMING, 1950-2020:

It was a brisk November day in New York City.7 The year: 1959. Robert Dunlop, 50 years old and photographed later as clean-shaven, hair carefully parted, his earnest face sporting horn-rimmed glasses, passed under the Ionian columns of Columbia University’s iconic Low Library. He was a guest of honor for a grand occasion: the centennial of the American oil industry.

Over 300 government officials, economists, historians, scientists, and industry executives were present for the Energy and Man symposium – organized by the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Columbia Graduate School of Business – and Dunlop was to address the entire assembly on the “prime mover” of the last century – energy – and its major source: oil. As President of the Sun Oil Company, he knew the business well, and as a director of the American Petroleum Institute – the industry’s largest and oldest trade association in the land of Uncle Sam – he was responsible for representing the interests of all those many oilmen gathered around him.

Four others joined Dunlop at the podium that day, one of whom had made the journey from California – and Hungary before that. The nuclear weapons physicist Edward Teller had, by 1959, been ostracized within the scientific community for betraying his colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer, but he retained the embrace of industry and government. Teller’s task that November fourth was to address the crowd on “energy patterns of the future,” and his words carried an unexpected warning:

Ladies and gentlemen, I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. [….] But I would […] like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies. And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. [….] Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. [….] The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it?

Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect [….] It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.

How, precisely, Mr. Dunlop and the rest of the audience reacted is unknown, but it’s hard to imagine this being welcome news. After his talk, Teller was asked to “summarize briefly the danger from increased carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere in this century.” The physicist, as if considering a numerical estimation problem, responded:

At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the radiation leaving the earth. Our planet will get a little warmer. It is hard to say whether it will be 2 degrees Fahrenheit or only one or 5.

But when the temperature does rise by a few degrees over the whole globe, there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise. Well, I don’t know whether they will cover the Empire State Building or not, but anyone can calculate it by looking at the map and noting that the icecaps over Greenland and over Antarctica are perhaps five thousand feet thick.

Teller’s estimate was prescient: by his accounting, the global atmospheric CO2 concentration in 1990 would be around 360 parts per million, close to the actual concentration that year of 354 parts per million. And so, at its hundredth birthday party, American oil was warned of its civilization-destroying potential. Talk about a buzzkill.

What spurred Teller’s warning? In his speech, he referenced measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, presumably referring to ongoing research by scientist Charles Keeling. Keeling’s key measurements would not be published until the following year, 1960, but Teller appears to have been aware of the work in progress. Given rising greenhouse gas concentrations, the question was not whether global warming would occur, but how much – and how soon.