For Oil Industry, Clean Air Fight Was Dress Rehearsal for Climate Denial

Through the Smoke and Fumes Committee, industry blurred the science surrounding air pollution and worked to forestall unwanted regulation.

When the smog plaguing Los Angeles reached distressing levels in the early 1950s, the city hired Arie Haagen-Smit to study the cause. Not only was Haagen-Smit a scientist specializing in airborne microscopic chemicals, he was also angry about the state of the city's air. His work swiftly determined that the culprit was oil.

Following a hunch, Haagen-Smit built an unorthodox laboratory that accurately demonstrated how nitrogen oxide and uncombusted hydrocarbons from tailpipes and refineries react in sunlight to produce smog. His findings unnerved oil companies, which feared onerous regulation would follow. So when another scientist, Harold Johnston, challenged Haagen-Smit's findings, the industry's main consulting group hired him.

"They said terrible things about Haagen-Smit...I was given the job of overthrowing his theory entirely," Johnston recalled in an oral history years later. "I rapidly concluded that Haagen-Smit was a genius!"

That wasn't what the oil industry wanted to hear. It shelved Johnston's work and let his contract lapse. Then it conducted its own research to discredit Haagen-Smit's conclusions and manufacture doubt around the link between oil and smog.

But that link soon became irrefutable and smog became a pressing concern for regulators—first for California officials in the 1950s and 60s, then for the federal government. As Washington  began to pass modern clean air laws in the 1970s, oil companies lobbied against regulation. They argued that federal standards would be so expensive they would harm the economy.

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, as documented in ICN's series Exxon: The Road Not Taken.

Read more at For Oil Industry, Clean Air Fight Was Dress Rehearsal for Climate Denial