2/ Oil companies began developing strategies to sow doubt about science that could lead to regulation long before global warming became an issue. For example…
3/ Remember how smoggy it used to be America's major cities? This is #LosAngeles in 1955.
4/ This is biochemist Arie Haagen-Smit.
When he discovered in the early 1950s that oil was the cause of dangerous smog shrouding #LA, the American Petroleum Institute counter-attacked by funding scientists who rebutted his research and disparaged him personally.
5/ The oil industry claimed smog science was too uncertain to justify regulations. 🙄
6/ But soon industry's own researchers would confirm Haagen-Smit’s findings. And then oil companies began campaigns claiming smog controls would cripple the economy.
Industry continues to fight attempts to tighten smog standards for ground-level ozone with considerable success.
7/ Industry's response to smog unfolds like a rough draft of the strategy it deployed 40 years later to deny climate science.
8/ In 1968, the industry's main pollution-control consultants warned that it should pay close attention to carbon dioxide emissions. By the mid-1970s, Exxon began to take carbon pollution seriously.
9/ In 1977, Exxon's senior scientist James Black told top executives carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels would warm the atmosphere and endanger human life. The company launched a rigorous climate research program.
Other fossil fuel companies followed Exxon's lead.
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2/ "I was really stunned when I was up there in July [2017] to hear the fears that are so pervasive in the community that it even impacts the teenagers," said Barbara Trost of @alaskaDEC.
3/ More than three-quarters of Nuiqsut residents still live a traditional subsistence life, off the fish they catch, the whales they harvest and the caribou they hunt.
And they've found themselves on the frontlines of a modern crisis.
1/ Why didn't America act on climate change way back when?
You've read the historical reconstruction in the @NYTmag of the 1980s, the decade when the science was becoming clearer and there was some bipartisan political momentum to act.
3/ Denial of mainstream climate science has developed into a core message of the Republican party, now in control of the White House and Congress. The narrative of how we got here is complicated.