Years before Big Oil began sowing doubt about the science of climate change and fighting efforts to cut dangerous emissions, the fossil fuel industry sought to muddle the research around smog, according to an investigation published this week by InsideClimate News.
The revelations—from one of the first news outlets to expose ExxonMobil’s climate deception—are based on hundreds of industry speeches, articles, reports, and oral histories that span the last 70 years, many of them gathered by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) and dozens unearthed by InsideClimate News (ICN) in the Library of Congress and other archives.
According to ICN reporters Neela Banerjee, David Hasemyer, and Lisa Song, these sources suggest that the oil industry’s “response to smog and its fight against clean air standards unfolds like a rough draft of the muscular strategy it deployed 40 years later to deny climate science and the need for an urgent policy response.”
This effort began, they write, in California in the 1940s:
It was through the Smoke and Fumes committee that the oil industry tried to evade responsibility, using science and public skepticism to stymie environmental regulations.
For example, as regulations increasingly sought to minimize the deleterious public health impacts of air pollution—which kills about 200,000 people in the United States each year, according to a 2013 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—the Smoke and Fumes committee attempted to undercut and disparage research that linked oil refineries and auto exhaust with smog.
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