US Government Knew The Risks Of Warming In The 1970s Through DOE Advisory Council
A series of newly discovered documents clarify the extent to which the U.S. government, its advisory committees and the fossil fuel industry have understood for decades the impact carbon dioxide emissions would have on the planet.
The documents obtained by Climate Liability News show how much the National Petroleum Council (NPC), an oil and natural gas advisory committee to the Secretary of Energy, knew about climate change as far back as the 1970s. A series of reports illuminate the findings of government-contracted research that outlined the dangers associated with increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. They also shed light on how this advisory group to the federal government understood the fossil fuel industry’s contributions to climate change, and unveil the strategies it used to downplay the industry’s role.
“These documents reaffirm that, to one extent or another, the fossil fuel industry as a whole has known for decades about the basics of climate change and its implications. But rather than warning the public and taking action, many of them turned around and orchestrated anti-science, anti-policy denial campaigns dwarfing even those of Big Tobacco,” said Geoffrey Supran, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard who has extensively studied those denial campaigns.
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The National Petroleum Council (NPC) membership lists include now-former chairmen, presidents and chief executives of at least eight oil companies including Texaco, Marathon Oil, Conoco and Phillips, which have since merged, and Occidental Petroleum Corporation. The documents show that the knowledge was widespread in the industry, and not just limited to individual companies like ExxonMobil and Shell, whose internal files have been uncovered in a series of journalistic investigations that show their longtime understanding of the risks of climate change. That the knowledge was widespread could affect the dozens of climate liability suits that have been filed against the industry by various communities around the country.
Proof that organizations like NPC knew that fossil fuels largely caused climate change could be enough to hold individual oil companies liable in court, said Benjamin Franta, a postdoctoral candidate at Stanford University whose research focuses on the history of the fossil fuel industry. “Industries are held to the expert in the field so they can be liable for things even if they don’t know about it,” Franta said. “Anything climate scientists were saying in the field, that’s the expert knowledge that fossil fuel companies had a duty to know about it.”
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/03/19/us-government-knew-climate-risks-1970s-national-petroleum-council
