Petroleum & curious decisions: Episode 1/3 (true story)
How long has the oil industry understood climate risks? The American Petroleum Industry has been around for a long time now and a little bit of history shows that oil executives had a lot of information already available to them 50 years ago. This first episode looks at the early knowledge available in the 1950s-1960s in terms of the impacts of burning fossil fuels on the environment.
This comic was done in collaboration with Dr. Benjamin Franta, a researcher at Stanford University investigating the history of fossil fuel producers and climate science. Several of his articles were used as references for this comic series:
- The Guardian, On its 100th birthday in 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about global warming, 2018
- Early oil industry knowledge of CO2 and global warming, 2018
- The Guardian, Shell and Exxon’s secret 1980s climate change warnings, 2018
Other references:
- Report on pollution to the American Petroleum Institute, 1968
- American Petroleum Institute Wikipedia page
- Edward Teller Wikipedia page
- Frank Ikard Wikipedia page
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A fine encapsulation of the story line the oil and gas and coal companies were well aware of and later claimed ignorance of when it threatened their business model. Well done.
where is #3?
Not finished yet… Sorry!