Major oil companies, including Shell and the predecessors of energy giants Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP, were warned about the warming effects of fossil fuels as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents show.
The warning, from the head of an industry-founded group known as the Air Pollution Foundation, was revealed by Climate Investigations Center and published on Tuesday by climate website DeSmog. It represents perhaps the first example of big oil being made aware of the potentially serious consequences of its products.
“Every time there is a push for climate action, [we see] fossil fuel companies downplay and deny the harms of burning fossil fuels,” said Rebecca John, a researcher at the Climate Investigations Center who uncovered the historic memos. “Now we have evidence that they were doing this as far back as the 1950s, during these very early efforts to address the sources of pollution.”
The Air Pollution Foundation was founded in 1953 by oil interests in response to public outrage over the smog blanketing Los Angeles County.
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Researchers had identified hydrocarbon pollution from fossil fuel sources such as cars and refineries as the main culprit, and Los Angeles officials had begun proposing pollution controls.
The Air Pollution Foundation, funded primarily by the lobbying group Western States Petroleum Association, publicly claimed to want to help solve the smog crisis, but was created in large part to counter attempts at regulation., the new memos indicate.
It’s a common tactic these days, says Geoffrey Supran, a climate disinformation expert at the University of Miami.
“The Air Pollution Foundation appears to be one of the oil industry’s first and boldest attempts to prop up a front group that exaggerates scientific uncertainty and thus defends ‘business as usual,’” Supran said. “It helped lay the strategic and organizational foundation for the decades of climate denial and delay by big oil.”
The lobbying group, then called the Western Oil and Gas Association, provided the group with $1.3 million in the 1950s — the equivalent of $14 million today — to the Air Pollution Foundation. That funding came from member companies, including Shell and companies later bought by or merged with ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Sunoco and ConocoPhillips, as well as Southern California utility SoCalGas.
The Air Pollution Foundation has hired respected chemical engineer Lauren B Hitchcock as president. And in 1954, the organization – which until then had argued that households burning waste in backyards was to blame – asked Caltech to submit a proposal to determine the main source of smog.
In November 1954, Caltech submitted its proposal, which contained crucial warnings about coal, oil and gas and said that “a changing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere with respect to climate” “could ultimately prove to have significant significance for civilization,” according to a memo previously published by John was revealed. The newly discovered documents show that the Air Pollution Foundation shared the warning with members of the Western Oil and Gas Association in March 1955.
In the mid-1950s, climate researchers began to understand the effects of fossil fuels on planet warming and began discussing their emerging research in the media. But the newly discovered memo from the Air Pollution Foundation represents the earliest known warning message to the oil industry about global warming.
The Air Pollution Foundation’s board of directors, including representatives from SoCalGas and Union Oil, which was later acquired by Chevron, approved funding for the Caltech project. In the following months, foundation chairman Hitchcock advocated for oil refinery pollution controls and then testified in the California Senate in favor of state-funded pollution research.
Hitchcock was reprimanded by industry leaders for these efforts. At a meeting in April 1955, the Western Oil and Gas Association told him he was drawing too much “attention” to refinery pollution and conducting “too broad a research program.” The Air Pollution Foundation intended to “protect” the industry and “publish findings that would be accepted as unbiased,” according to meeting minutes revealed by John.
After this meeting, the foundation made no further reference to the potential climate impact of fossil fuels, as evidenced by publications reviewed by DeSmog.
“The fossil fuel industry is often seen following in the footsteps of the tobacco industry’s playbook of denying science and blocking regulations,” Supran said. “But these documents suggest that big oil companies have been waging public affairs campaigns to downplay the dangers of their products for as long as big tobacco has, beginning with the air pollution in the early to mid-1950s.”
In the following months, many of the foundation’s research projects were scaled back or designed to be carried out in direct collaboration with lobby groups. Hitchcock resigned as president in 1956.
Last year, Oregon’s largest county sued the Western States Petroleum Association for allegedly casting doubt on the climate crisis despite years of knowledge of it.
DeSmog and the Climate Investigations Center previously discovered that the Air Pollution Foundation endorsed the earliest studies of CO2 conducted in 1955 and 1956 by famed climate scientist Charles David Keeling, paving the way for his groundbreaking “Keeling Curve,” which mapped how fossil fuels increase carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Other previous research has found that major fossil fuel companies have spent decades doing their own research into the effects of burning coal, oil and gas. A 2023 study found that Exxon scientists made “breathtakingly” accurate predictions about global warming in the 1970s and 1980s, only to cast doubt on climate science for decades.
The newly unearthed documents come from the Caltech archives, the U.S. National Archives, the University of California San Diego, the State University of New York Buffalo archives and Los Angeles newspapers from the 1950s.
The Western States Petroleum Association and the American Petroleum Institute, the main U.S. lobby group for fossil fuels, did not respond to requests for comment.
