The following is an extract from Slick: Australia’s Toxic Relationship with Big Oil (UQP) by Royce Kurmelovs. It is in stores July 30.
It was 1972 when the Australian oil and gas industry appears to have first publicly acknowledged the link between burning fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect. In this period those who gathered considered themselves “Men of Science”. They were skilled engineers and scientists who considered themselves equipped with the skills to tackle the world’s problems, so there was no fear in addressing the subject.
Against this backdrop, an internal tug of war was playing out within the industry at the time: “town gas”, made from coal, was being phased out and replaced by so-called “natural gas”, causing conflict between coal and gas producers. Australia ran on coal, but it burned dirty. Gas burned cleaner, but switching over suburban homes required a costly mass retrofit and education campaign. In this context, growing concerns about air pollution and the greenhouse effect benefited the gas producers, who argued that switching from coal to gas would buy the world more time to address the problem.
This appears to have annoyed those working for other fossil fuel producers, including R.S. Sherwin, a petroleum scientist with BP. At the 1972 APEA conference, Sherwin presented a paper titled, “Energy: Major Sources and Consumption”. His main focus was on quantifying the scale of demand for energy between 1972 and the year 2000, but he also used the opportunity to take a swipe at colleagues in the gas industry concerned about air pollution, reminding them that burning gas still produced carbon dioxide. Sherwin specifically mentioned the greenhouse effect, noting it was first described by John Tyndall all the way back in 1861, before emphasising a growing demand for fossil fuels. The situation needed to be watched carefully, he said.
“What is now innocuous may, on a greater scale, soon become damaging,” he warned, ominously, and then called into question the gas industry’s tactics: “Some gross oversimplifications and distortions of emphasis spring to mind. LNG is NOT a pollution-less fuel, since it produces carbon dioxide when burnt.”
Sherwin did not make explicit that he was referring to growing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere caused by burning fossil fuels, but that is the clear implication. He similarly provided no data or referred to any resource to elaborate on his point. He simply accepted there was a relationship between burning fossil fuels and a changing atmosphere.
Then, having issued his rebuke, Sherwin moved on to other matters.
It wasn’t until the following year that a member of the industry went on record directly addressing the question, when a chemist with a special interest in human health, Hanns F. Hartmann, gave a paper at the 1973 APEA conference in Sydney.
Prior to World War II, Hanns Hartmann was a medical student at Vienna University in Austria, but his graduation was interrupted by the invasion of Nazi Germany during the Anschluss. He was on holiday in Italy when his aunt telegrammed advising that, as an ethnic Jew, he should not come back. He fled, landing in the UK before heading for Australia, where he arrived in March 1939 at the age of 23. Though he later trained as a chemist after xenophobic restrictions prevented him from re-enrolling in medicine on his arrival in Australia, Hartmann never lost his interest in the wellbeing of others.
The combination of his training in chemistry and lifelong interest in medicine resulted in an enduring professional focus on the effect of pollution on human health. At the time he addressed the APEA conference, Hartmann had been seconded as an officer of the Environmental Protection Council of Victoria; he was also co-author of a recent book on ecology and a member of the Clean Air Society of Australia and New Zealand (CASANZ). He had in fact organised the CASANZ conference in 1972, just the year before, with the financial support of BP, Esso, Ampol, Shell, General Motors Holden, BHP, Mobil Oil and Alcoa. The greenhouse effect had received top billing at this CASANZ meeting — even as the issue was ignored by the oil and gas industry in their own forums.
There is no way to know how many people turned out for his presentation at the APEA National Conference in 1973, but as the chief technical officer at the Australian Gas Association, Hartmann wasn’t exactly a headliner — that honour was generally reserved for politicians and CEOs. Likewise, the title of his technical paper — “The Role of Gas in Environmental Control” — wasn’t particularly thrilling, and certainly didn’t suggest what he was about to discuss.
With considerable brevity, Hartmann clearly outlined for his industry colleagues the consequences of burning fossil fuels, explaining that carbon dioxide’s atmospheric concentration had risen since the turn of the century from about 290 to 320 parts per million, and what that meant.
“Recent work indicates that perhaps one third of the carbon dioxide deriving from fuel combustion accumulates in the atmosphere (0.7 parts per million per annum), while the remainder probably dissolves in the ocean,” he told them. “Great concern has been expressed over the so-called greenhouse effect, which could cause far-reaching climatic changes. Carbon dioxide, while transparent to shorter-wave solar radiation, absorbs longer-wave infrared radiation reflected into space from the earth’s surface and, therefore, acts like the glass roof of a greenhouse.”
With that, Hartmann had explained what the greenhouse effect was, how it worked, the role of the oceans as a carbon sink, the limits of knowledge at the time and the disconnect between what the empirical evidence appeared to show and what the theory of the greenhouse effect predicted should happen. He was, however, wrong about some specifics. Contrary to what Hartmann claimed, oceans and land-based ecosystems, when combined, absorbed roughly two-thirds of all CO2. There were other technical errors, too, but it is unclear whether these were just poor writing, the work of an enthusiastic amateur or the product of a developing scientific field that had yet to benefit from the invention of satellites. What is key, is that Hartmann clearly acknowledged the connection between burning fossil fuels and growing CO2 concentrations, and the potential for the resulting pollution to act like sleeping under a warm blanket in summer.
Hartmann concluded this section of his presentation with a qualification: although the consequences of this process “over the long-term” were then unknown, he said, “a close watch must be kept on long-term trends”.
At this point, the paper devolved into a discussion of the role car tailpipe emissions played in creating smog above Los Angeles, Sydney and Melbourne, leading into an argument in favour of gas as “practically free from air pollution if its combustion is properly regulated”.
It was, however, a remarkable summary that demonstrates the extent to which Hartmann was across the early research into the greenhouse effect. Not only was he able to put solid numbers to the problem, but he referred in his footnotes to industry documents published in journals and presented at symposiums — including a collection of papers delivered at a symposium in Dallas, Texas, in 1968, titled Global Effects of Environment Pollution. Edited by a young Fred Singer — who would go on to become the godfather of climate denial after being denied a promotion while working for the US Environmental Protection Agency — this tome contained early works by big names in climate science of the era. It also included a report by Robinson and Robbins, the same Stanford Research Institute scientists who had warned the American Petroleum Institute about the risk burning fossil fuels posed to the climate.
Though it is not a clear smoking gun — Hartmann was not engaged in original research, and the papers he cited did not include the critical Robinson and Robbins report — his work demonstrates that information was being shared between Australian industry figures and their counterparts overseas. Hartmann had delivered his paper at the APEA conference a full three years before the Australian Academy of Science would get around to publishing its own report on the issue, observing that human activities “could have an appreciable effect on the climate within decades”.
Sherwin and Hartmann’s APEA conference papers show the extent to which the Australian oil and gas industry already understood the danger posed by fossil fuel combustion at the dawn of the 1970s. Written by a petroleum scientist working for BP and the Australian Gas Association’s chief technical officer, they are clear evidence not only that the industry understood the link between burning fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect, but also that it was publicly discussing responses to the problem.
Others, however, were already pioneering an early form of climate denial. At the very same conference at which Hartmann spoke, a presentation by Sir Willis Connolly, former president of the World Energy Conference (WEC), coolly dismissed carbon dioxide as a problem.
Connolly, who had been involved in setting up Victoria’s power grid and belonged to a brown-coal industry fraternity known as the “Barbarians”, reported that an internal committee within WEC had investigated pollution issues. This committee, he said, had not bothered to consider the risks posed by carbon dioxide — “the major product of fuel combustion” — because it was “not generally recognised as an air pollutant”.
When I showed all these documents to Dr Marc Hudson, an energy transitions scholar and climate historian from the University of Sussex, he was not surprised. By about 1969, the potential risks of burning fossil fuels were understood. Out in the broader scientific community, work was already underway to pin down the specifics. The CSIRO had started to investigate the phenomenon, thanks to the foresight of a few particularly motivated scientists. Independent measurements of CO2 had first been recorded in Rutherglen, Victoria, in 1971. APEA’s counterparts in the broader mining industry had also started to talk about the greenhouse effect, and the issue was even beginning to seep into public consciousness. Soylent Green screened in 1973, the first film to depict a climate-shocked future.
What makes Hartmann and Sherwin’s presentations so important, Hudson said, is that they are a historical anchor point, pinpointing the moment at which global warming “pops up in the oil industry’s own publications and materials”. They provide evidence of awareness among the members of Australia’s oil and gas industry that there were risks associated with their commercial activities — and of how little their talking points have changed over time.
“This is not five months ago, or five years ago, but more than five decades,” Hudson said. “One of the problems with thinking about climate policy is getting stuck in a perpetual present, too focused on the minutiae of who said what to whom at some recent roundtable or lobbying meeting.
“The next crucial step is knowing and being able to show how the oil and gas industry has been successfully influencing policy.”
