Defense, Denial, and Disinformation: Uncovering the Oil Industry’s Early
Knowledge of Climate Change Starting in the 1950s, the oil industry
designated funds to research the effects of pollution on the environment. For
example, the 1954 American Petroleum Institute (API) article “The Petroleum
Industry Sponsors Air Pollution Research” suggested that smog was the
product of a reaction of ozone and gasses that evaporate from cracked
gasoline. Later, Shell’s 1959 article “The Earth’s Carbon Cycle” affirmed that
burning fossil fuels released 2.5 billion tons of carbon each year at the time
and “might conceivably change the climate.”
