Oil companies are not responsible for climate change!

Oil companies have become the scapegoats for rage against onrushing climate disasters. The combustion products of hydrocarbon energy are largely responsible for climate change, and oil companies have lied about the effect of their product on the climate for as long as there have been oil companies. 

Why do I say “lied?” Earth scientists understood the physics of carbon warming as early as the mid-19th century. They also knew that the planet’s ecosystem absorbed atmospheric carbon by several pathways. What they didn’t know was the tipping point, the point where the CO2 generated exceeds the capacity of the sinks.

Humans have been putting carbon into the atmosphere since they learned to control fire. At first, it was only a little. There weren’t many humans after all. In those days, human-generated carbon—most from burning wood—was likely a small fraction of the carbon produced by volcanoes and lightning-triggered forest fires. 

A few thousand years ago, humans discovered coal. Used for heating and cooking by an expanding population, carbon emissions jumped. Coal was the energy source that powered metallurgy and produced steam for the Industrial Revolution, while also heating homes and cooking meals. Another jump in carbon output. Some people noticed. In the 18th, and 19th centuries, London was infamous for its coal-caused “killer fogs.”

Coal producers did not have to lie about the climate implications of their product. Not until the mid eighteenth century did anyone even suspect such a connection, and not until the mid 19th did earth science have experimental confirmation. Nor did coal producers have to “push” their product. People adopted coal because it was better than wood for all uses, old and new, developed as the centuries marched on. Coal is more “energy dense” than wood, a superior energy source—when it could be obtained—for most uses.

By the time oil came along, earth science was well aware of the causal link between carbon and atmospheric warming. Suppose the oil companies didn’t lie about it? Suppose their executives, all saints, began to preach the danger of too much atmospheric carbon (remember, they didn’t know how much was too much) in 1910? Do you suppose there would have been, between then and now, a significant moderation in the exploding development of technology energized by oil?  

Would the German admiralty have forgone the production of submarines (the first modern ships designed around oil), the British abandon tank production, and everyone eschew airplanes? Would the industrial nations of the world have attended to oil company warnings and artificially limited growth in carbon-linked energy until research had cleared up the “limits” issue decades in the future? Humans shifted away from wood because coal is more energy-dense. Coal energy supported larger populations and, therefore, expanded military and economic power. Oil, when it came along, triggered and sustained a further expansion of energy-intensive technological innovation, all having military implications. Would it ever have been politically possible to restrict the expansion of an oil economy?

What could oil producers have said without lying? They might have honestly said: “We don’t know how much is too much, but given an expansion of carbon-based energy from 1910 onwards, we must eventually reach those limits.” Unfortunately, for various technical reasons, even the most pessimistic earth scientists could only guess at the limits until we began to breach them. Only by observing a failure here and there could we become aware of the real limits. The first breaches likely occurred in the early 1950s. Scientists didn’t begin to notice them until the 1970s. By the 1990s, the limits became quantifiable. We are still refining the numbers today.

In the second half of the 20th Century, the world’s much-expanded population and virtually all of its technology and economy were dependent, directly or indirectly, on oil. The first international agreements aimed at reducing the use of carbon-based energy were signed in the 1990s. By 2015, the combined nations of the world were, every year, pumping twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as they were when those first agreements were struck—see reference to the Wallace-Wells book below.    

There were “climate scientists” in the first half of the twentieth century, and also “climate change deniers” who were not oil executives. These people are still with us today. Others accepted the science, but the excuse was always “we do not know how much is too much.” If oil companies hadn’t lied? There would, I think, have been more and better-funded early research. We might have begun quantifying “too much” in the 1950s rather than in the 1980s. But by 1950, the world was already addicted to oil. 

By the 1950s, there had been two carbon-intensive world wars. International air travel was an established industry, and America—at least—was addicted to cars. In those days, there were no “clean” alternatives (and we can argue about how clean the present alternatives really are). By 1950, it was already economically untenable and politically suicidal to attempt to minimize, let alone abandon, carbon. Had we, in the 1950s and 60s, invested more in solar and wind technology, we might, by the 1990s, have developed renewable, efficient energy and transport technologies at scale. But the same carbon-intensive mining and material processing required to produce the technological inputs for those products would still be necessary, and no military on earth would have abandoned faster fighters, bigger bombers, more powerful tanks, and so on. None of that would have changed.

The economic and social forces driving the doubling of annual atmospheric carbon emissions in 2015—twenty years after the first international agreements to limit them—were equally present in 1975! There might have been some moderation in the growth of atmospheric carbon emissions if we had understood the Earth’s limits thirty years earlier than we did. Still, by that time it was already too late—economically and politically—to do more than produce a small alteration of the present trajectory. 

Oil companies lied about atmospheric carbon to protect their markets. But they didn’t need to lie. The energy density of oil, coupled with the coal-based technological explosion that began in the 19th century, ensured oil’s ready adoption over coal (which took over from wood without any lies by the coal industry). Even if oil companies publicly acknowledged the science already known in their earliest days, it wouldn’t have made much difference to the world’s present addiction to oil. Almost literally everything in our lives, everything we own, or use, in every culture, rests on oil in some part of its lifecycle. The oil companies are not responsible for climate change. We, ourselves, our governments, our culture and economy are responsible. It has been us all along.  

References: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells (2018)

The Geography of Risk by Gilbert Gaul (2019)

The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan (2022)