https://www.ecowatch.com/fossil-fuel-industry-climate-impacts-knowledge.html

F****l F**l Industry Was Aware of Climate Threats as Early as 1954, New Documents Reveal
By: Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
Published: January 31, 2024
Edited by Chris McDermott

Newly discovered documents confirm that the petroleum and automobile industries funded the early climate science of Charles David Keeling at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 1954 to 1956. Keeling became known for the “Keeling Curve,” which demonstrated the upward trajectory of the planet’s carbon dioxide levels.

The documents show that industry leaders were aware of the potential impacts of f****l f**ls on the environment from early on.

Keeling traveled throughout the coastal areas, desert, forests and grasslands of the western United States measuring background levels of carbon, DeSmog said in a detailed report.

A series of experiments atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii led to his famous curve — the foundation of today’s conception of human-caused c*****e c****e.

What the recently uncovered documents reveal is that this early research by Keeling was partially funded by “oil and auto companies” through the Southern California Air Pollution Foundation. The foundation was told of the potential future impacts of carbon dioxide emissions from human sources on people and the climate back in 1954.

The Southern California Air Pollution Foundation had been formed the previous year to address the issue of smog in Los Angeles. Some of the foundation’s donors were Ford, Chrysler, American Motors and General Motors.

The automobile and oil companies gave $13,814 — approximately $158,000 today — toward the funding of Keeling’s work, the documents said, as reported by The Guardian.

An internal memo from the U.S. Public Health Service in 1959 also identified the Western Oil & Gas Association — now the Western States Petroleum Association — and the American Petroleum Institute (API) as “major contributors to the funds of the Air Pollution Foundation,” DeSmog reported.

Beginning in mid-1955, the foundation’s board of trustees was kept abreast of research projects through a “technical advisory committee,” members of which included scientists from Chrysler and the Richfield Oil Corporation — today BP — and a senior API official.

“With the discovery of these Air Pollution Foundation documents, it is now possible to date the earliest sponsorship of climate science by the f****l f**l industry to 1954, approximately a quarter of a century before Exxon’s internal research program of the late 1970s,” DeSmog said. “These new documents provide important evidence that the f****l f**l industry has been intricately connected to climate science from its earliest beginnings — not only as a driver of the greenhouse effect behind c*****e c****e, but also as a contributor to the scientific discoveries that would t***sform our understanding of humanity’s relationship with the Earth and its atmosphere.”