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Climate Change And How It's Shaping Oil & Gas Today

Writer's picture: Hornet BlogsHornet Blogs

Updated: Jan 19

Written By: Jonathan G. Browning

 

Here’s a revised version of the text with corrected grammar and typos:

It was not until the mid-1950s that the dangers of climate change began to raise alarms within oil companies. This was anticipated.


In 2015, a series of investigations by the media revealed that from 1977 to 1987, oil companies had concluded that global warming was a real threat, based on their scientific studies.


Later, these companies began spending millions of dollars on public relations and lobbying efforts to persuade politicians and the general public that global warming either did not exist or, if it did, was a natural phenomenon and not caused by the oil industry.


In 2016, environmental regulation researchers updated and republished an older document that dated back to 1968. The document had been submitted to the American Petroleum Institute, warning of the risks posed by excessive carbon dioxide production to the planet.

However, demand for oil is rapidly growing, and the energy industry, both in the U.S. and globally, is planning hefty multi-trillion-dollar investments to meet it.


Now, new documents are highlighting the need for further investigation. In 1954, geochemist Harrison Brown and his peers at the prestigious California Institute of Technology presented a report to the American Petroleum Institute (API) on "The Determination of Variations and Causes of Carbon Isotope Composition in Nature." In other words, these researchers confirmed what others had begun to suspect: the planet had recently experienced a sharp rise in carbon dioxide production in the atmosphere and water after fuel levels had remained stable for thousands of years.


Over the next four years, API would fund research projects to develop more accurate methods to calculate carbon dioxide production. In 1959, physicist Edward Teller, one of the fathers of the hydrogen bomb, addressed leaders of the oil industry, warning them against actions that increased the risk of carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere. He predicted that temperatures and water levels would rise concurrently by the end of the century.


These warnings and reports were a significant development for climatology. A key date in this history is 1960, when scientist Charles Keeling published his findings in the journal Tellus about measurements taken in Antarctica over three years. He reported that the concentration of carbon dioxide was increasing at a rate consistent with the global combustion of fossil fuels. Atmospheric science today refers to the slow rise in carbon dioxide levels since the start of the industrial age as the "Keeling Curve."

It was these public warnings and findings that prompted U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 to issue a report cautioning about the dangers of global warming caused by human activity.


Regardless of how much big oil companies emphasize their climate mitigation activities in investor relations, they cannot change the fundamental reality that their primary products—hydrocarbons—are driving climate change.

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