Snake Oil and Gaslight: How the Petroleum Industry Got in Touch with Nature

Abstract

This article seeks to sidestep the dilemma of restricted access to oil company archives through a close examination of a heretofore underutilized source base: the fossil fuel industry’s own trade journals and magazines. These oil and gas industry trade publications have served to envelop their readership in what we would now call an information bubble. Still, it is important to highlight the contradictory tactics that trade industry publications effectively test-marketed in the 1960s and 1970s to nullify a perception of petroleum as hazardous to public health and the natural environment. Most paradoxical was how trade publications reinvented their industry both as not a problem for the natural environment and as the solution to all and any future problems faced by that environment. Unlike any other currently available source base, Big Oil’s trade publications offer insights into the timing and triggering motivations of the industry’s shift to self-representation as stewards of nature, as well as the rapidity and multidimensional comprehensiveness of the industry’s mobilization to develop counternarratives to potential critics. And not least of all, these publications reveal the fantastical lengths to which Big Oil was willing to go in its efforts to preemptively block the research and development of electric vehicles, principally by diverting to the imaginary prospect of a gasoline-powered but nonetheless “smogless” car. This history represents an early and previously unexplored chapter in the evolution of what we have come to recognize as corporate “greenwashing.”

In February 1966, the cover illustration for the leading trade journal Petroleum Management signaled the US oil and gas industry’s arrival at a critical inflection point in its history. The cover illustration depicted a knight in white armor riding a white horse. Over the knight’s helmet was a plume that read “Industry,” and in the knight’s right hand was a lance with a banner that read “API,” or American Petroleum Institute. This was the trade association representing all major fossil fuel corporations whose headquarters were in the nation (even as many of them already had ongoing operations across the globe, from Latin America and the Caribbean to the Middle East and Indonesia). Before the knight a black dragon labeled “Pollution” rose up out of a noxious swamp spewing filth (fig. 1). Should readers miss the intended message, the cover article’s title made its point plainly enough: “API Spearheads Anti-pollution Efforts.”¹ In this way, the API acknowledged the existence of environmental toxins, even while it fostered a fantasy—via the most direct of visual images—of the petroleum industry itself as the industry best equipped to undertake the daunting task of aggressively combatting these scourges.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in petroleum scholarship, including important research into “petroleum culture.”² There are studies of Big Oil’s “organized disinformation” about its role in climate change and its active advancement of a stratagem of “greenwashing” from the 1980s to the present.³ And there is the invaluable research from historian of science Naomi Oreskes and associates that has documented the steady stream of deceptive messaging from the oil industry reaching back to the 1970s.⁴ Nearly all this scholarship has been achieved in the face of restricted access to oil company archives, limitations that have hampered public awareness of how the petroleum industry has historically sought “to produce ignorance, sow doubts on the legitimacy of climate science, struggle against regulations, and maintain legitimacy with the global energy transition.”⁵

This article seeks to sidestep the dilemma of restricted access to oil company archives through a close examination of a heretofore underutilized source base that has long lain hidden in plain sight: the fossil fuel industry’s own trade journals and magazines. Those journals and magazines can best be interpreted as ephemera, having been distributed free of charge to a circumscribed subscriber base comprised almost entirely of industry stakeholders (i.e., petroleum engineers, oil company executives and managers, investors, and their families and friends). As such, these corporate American trade publications promoted—predictably—a vigorous defense of oil and gas industrial production practices, and in this way, their tactics cannot be perceived as especially distinct from the public relations schemes deployed by other corporate entities that have marketed hazardous products (from herbicides to lead to tobacco).⁶ These corporations also persistently argued that their deadly products were, in truth, utterly safe. What, then, can be learned from a reading of petroleum trade publications with respect to this industry’s long-honed techniques of denial, deflection, and preemptive co-optation of public concerns?

To address that question, I focus particular attention on the second half of the 1960s, a moment when the oil industry strenuously began to endorse new positions toward environmental issues. Until 1965, petroleum trade journals maintained that the state of the environment was not its industry’s remit at all. Instead, the consumers of petroleum products (like gasoline) bore responsibility for how they used—or misused—those products.⁷ After the mid-1960s, however, petroleum trade journals quite overtly adopted fresh—albeit contradictory—tactics intended to nullify the perception that petroleum posed dangers to the natural environment. One gambit involved advancing a set of narratives replete with the sort of misinformation that we have come to know and understand in recent years as gaslighting. A second ploy pursued by petroleum industry publications may be defined not so much by blatant denial or distortion but rather by a nascent “techno-optimism,” that is, by an “instrumental faith in the miraculous power of low-emission and carbon-capture technologies that tenders salvation without forsaking fossil fuels or regulating energy markets.”⁸ Petroleum was sold as snake oil to solve petroleum’s problems. In a paradoxical but highly revealing sense, then, these twinned and seemingly incompatible storylines crafted after 1965 by petroleum trade journals and their corporate enablers sought simultaneously to reinvent their industry both as not a problem for the natural environment and as the solution to all and any future problems faced by that environment.

Industry trade journals can help us chart in granular detail how the “business thought” of the US-based and internationally operative oil and gas industry pivoted after the mid-1960s.⁹ A close examination of these largely internal sources challenges a conclusion that petroleum managers were “proud people who believed that they were taming nature for the good of humankind” or that “environmentalism, at first seen as a threat from the fringes of society, became a central component of businesses’ competitive strategy.”¹⁰ Further, reading oil and gas trade periodicals from the second half of the 1960s encourages us to reconsider and reperiodize an extant perspective that, after the publication of Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, it took “industrial players” who were committed to “countering the rise, consolidation, and political power of the environmental movement” in the United States “at least ten years to formulate a strategy of response.”¹¹ The semipublic archive of trade journals reveals that the formulation of a PR strategy of response happened almost overnight in late 1965. What the oil and gas trade publications disclose are the timing and triggering motivations of the industry’s shift to self-representation as stewards of nature, as well as the rapidity and multidimensional comprehensiveness of the industry’s mobilization to develop counternarratives to potential critics. And not least of all, these publications divulge the fantastical lengths to which Big Oil was willing to go in its efforts to preemptively block the research and development of an electric vehicle, principally by diverting to the imaginary prospect of a gasoline-powered but nonetheless “smogless” car.

Creating the Knowledge to Fill People’s Minds

Long before 1965, the API had been telling Americans how to feel about oil. “Petroleum Is Progressive” became an early slogan of the Oil Industry Information Committee (OIIC), an API entity established in the late 1940s specifically to shape public sentiment toward petroleum.¹² At the same time, the API expressed a concern that Americans’ attitudes toward the oil industry had to be closely tracked; as early as 1946, the API sponsored an opinion survey that determined that most Americans had no particular perspective whatsoever toward the oil industry, and advised that this “opinion vacuum” represented “at once your opportunity and vulnerability.” A summary of the survey’s findings concluded: “Those minds that now present an opinion vacuum on facts and ideas of major importance to the future welfare of the oil industry can be swayed to either friendly or hostile attitude depending on which plausible story they hear first.”¹³ This gave the industry its opening.

By the early 1950s, OIIC chairman George H. Freyermuth referred back to these findings: “There is a great vacuum represented by men’s minds. We can’t let others fill the vacuum. We have got to create the knowledge to fill people’s minds.”¹⁴ The OIIC commenced a series of well-funded campaigns to “fill the vacuum” with industry-approved “knowledge.” It set a target of ensuring that pro-petroleum materials be distributed free of charge to an estimated ten million high school students in social studies and earth science classrooms.¹⁵ Documentary film too became a cornerstone of OIIC efforts to prop up Big Oil’s public image.¹⁶ The goal of these cultural efforts was to manipulate public opinion without seeming to be doing exactly that. “The American public likes to feel it is making up its own mind on the basis of objective facts,” the trade publication Oil and Gas Journal candidly wrote in 1960. “The fact that it seldom makes up its mind without being prompted to do so in one direction or the other is beside the point. It makes decisions on the basis of what it thinks is objective evidence.”¹⁷

Yet profits for Big Oil still lagged. All the “educational” programming and aesthetically appealing short films in the world made little difference if petroleum sales stayed stagnant. There remained a concern that “oil is still in the public’s doghouse, still the easy target of political demagogs [sic], still faced with persecuting investigation and restrictive legislation.”¹⁸ As late as 1958, the mood at the annual API meeting remained so gloomy it “could have been shoveled with a pitchfork,” as an industry report later reflected.¹⁹ The API responded to sluggish sales by inaugurating a so-called “expand the demand” initiative. A centerpiece of the initiative was “a travel-promotion campaign” intended to spur Americans to hop in their vehicles and embark on long “pleasure” drives. Several petroleum companies collectively decided to distribute “almost a million Civil War maps during this year’s centennial celebration,” that is, the centennial in 1961 of the formation of the slaveholding Confederacy.²⁰

In discussions of all these PR practices, petroleum trade publications paid negligible attention to the possible ecological damages done by burning fossil fuels. A corporate history of Humble Oil published in the late 1950s had not deemed efforts by the major petroleum manufacturer to curb pollutants worthy of a single mention.²¹ A mammoth API-sponsored history of petroleum engineering made reference to industry efforts to stem pollution solely in the context of their “resultant high costs.”²² Indeed, so low had the abatement of pollutants ranked as a concern before 1965 that a definitive history of the oil and gas industry cited “air and water” solely in the context of the “free air and water” service stations offered “as a means of attracting customers.”²³ Despite increased public and political attention to the health risks of a toxic environment, leading to passage of a slew of new statutes (e.g., the Clean Air Act of 1963, the Water Quality Act of 1965, the Clean Water Restoration Act of 1965), Big Oil remained insistent that it needed to take mere baby steps to confront these issues—if even that.

As of early 1965, an annual assessment conducted by the trade journal Petro/Chem Engineering, and discussed and distributed widely across the petroleum industry, found that top management still considered the effects on the environment of burning fossil fuels not its problem to solve. Esso president H. G. Mangelsdorf said exactly that: “Certainly the industry could not assume responsibility for what the customer does with his products.” A Sun Oil executive agreed: “I do not believe industry necessarily should assume more responsibility in helping control pollution resulting from customer use of industry’s product.” While some petroleum executives conceded that their industry “must accept certain responsibilities to educate users,” they remained mostly “convinced that they should not be responsible for what a product does once it is in someone else’s hands.”²⁴

A Last-Minute Revision

Two events in quick succession provoked what amounted to a tectonic realignment in the American petroleum industry’s stance toward the environmental harms caused by petroleum products. These events occurred in the space of a single week in November 1965. The first event was the release on November 5 of Restoring the Quality of Our Environment, an intensive three-hundred-page environmental study commissioned by the Johnson White House and researched and written by the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), which was composed of four dozen scientists, physicians, and engineers serving on eleven subpanels. Soon after Restoring the Quality of Our Environment appeared, it quickly vanished. Key regional newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Constitution, and the Boston Globe, neglected entirely to mention its publication. Even the White House wanted little to do with the report. Given that the Texan president had been “obedient” to Big Oil since his days as Senate majority leader in the late 1950s, this should not have come as a surprise.²⁵ Yet, and although the PSAC report demonstrably failed in its bid to jolt broader public awareness in its moment, the chapter on atmospheric carbon dioxide has come in the twenty-first century to be recognized as the first time scientists officially alerted the US government “that increased greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels could cause climate change.”²⁶

The report was not entirely ignored when it was first published. On November 8, when the ink on the PSAC report was barely dry, Frank N. Ikard delivered his presidential address during the first general session at the 45th Annual Meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, held in Chicago. Ikard let it be known that his talk had undergone “a last-minute revision.”²⁷ Ikard, who had resigned from the House of Representatives in 1961 to join the API and had a keener political sense than most of the businessmen he addressed that day, urged the several thousand assembled API members to read the PSAC report, and to read it closely. After running through a discussion of tariffs and taxation, Ikard said that the just-published PSAC report, “without question, overshadows all others in the demands it will make on us.” He added that “the massive report of the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee” would surely unleash a wave of “emotionalism,” and that these passions “we can expect to see intensified.” Most memorably, Ikard acknowledged a key finding in the PSAC report: “The report further states, and I quote: ‘. . . the pollution from internal combustion engines is so serious, and is growing so fast, that an alternative nonpolluting means of powering automobiles, buses, and trucks is likely to become a national necessity.’” Consequently, Ikard emphasized that the American Petroleum Institute had to forcefully reframe the evolving narrative over fossil fuels, and could not allow that narrative to be directed by anyone whose judgment had “become obscured by rash statements and fanciful notions.” The “job ahead of us” was unambiguous, Ikard intoned: “It takes no crystal ball to see that our involvement in government matters will intensify in the years ahead.”²⁸

Ikard’s API speech has been interpreted as proof that the petroleum industry fully understood that the burning of fossil fuels would inevitably result in a steady rise in global atmospheric temperature.²⁹ That it is. Still, there are aspects to what happened next in terms of the API and the petroleum industry’s responses to the PSAC report that have not been previously documented.

First, and already at the same API annual meeting, the trade group’s board of directors voted to set up a new committee “to handle all API activities relating to air and water conditions.” The newly inaugurated Committee for Air and Water Conservation (CAWC) began with a budget of $1.8 million, plus $1.5 million “for accelerated research efforts” and another $350,000 for full-time staffing.³⁰ There was to be an additional “minimum” expenditure of $3 million set aside for the CAWC over a three-year period.³¹ The CAWC left nothing to chance; there were no appointments to the committee from outside the API’s inner circle. Every member on the CAWC served concurrently as legal counsel, medical director, production manager, senior executive, technical advisor, or public relations director for a major petroleum corporation.

Second, and within a month, there were announcements from across the petroleum industry that “executives who are knowledgeable in both pollution control and public relations work” had been reassigned to brand-new managerial positions “defined as ‘coordinator of air and water conservation.’”³² As H. H. Meredith Jr., the new coordinator of air and water conservation for Humble Oil, stated, the task ahead for petroleum manufacturers was both to “use our abilities to discourage rash and hasty moves by our public servants when the facts are not yet known” and—however awkward a construction this was—to “take part in studies or research to find the real culprit in any air quality problem.”³³ In little more than a year after the publication of the PSAC report, then, the number of petroleum company personnel who were coordinating the public relations of “pollution control” and ensuring, for instance, “that waters used for processing by their plants and the atmosphere at and near those facilities will be maintained as fresh and pure for others as modern technology can keep it” had gone from nearly none to a stunning 160.³⁴

Third, the API moved its Department of Statistics along with its annual budget of five hundred thousand dollars from New York to Washington. Once settled in the nation’s capital, and in a truly brazen turn of phrase, it was reported that the Department of Statistics would helpfully produce “‘Facts’ by the Barrelful.” Remarkably, and in an echo of the 1950s industry sentiment that knowledge should be “created” to fill people’s minds, the word facts appeared, tellingly, and seemingly without embarrassment, inside scare quotes.³⁵

Fourth, the petroleum industry hastily revised its own history to foreground that the API had been actively engaged almost from its founding in 1919 in pursuing the mitigation of pollution. In the same Petroleum Management issue with the “Industry” white knight on its cover, there were claims that in 1926, “a few years after API was organized by the nation’s oil companies,” the trade group had already conducted “a survey of water pollution abatement practices.” Now it was announced as well that the API had established back in 1929 a Committee on Disposal of Refinery Wastes “to develop methods for preventing air and water pollutants.” It was additionally noted that in 1953 an Air and Water Conservation Committee had been founded to address “the causes and methods for control of objectionable atmospheric pollution resulting from the production, transportation, manufacture, sale, and use of petroleum and its products.”³⁶ Controlling the narrative of the present moment meant mastering the narrative of the past.

Fifth, P. N. “Nick” Gammelgard was appointed to direct the CAWC. An engineer by training, Gammelgard was a past president of the National Petroleum Refiners Association and had been senior vice president of Pure Oil Company before its acquisition by Union Oil Company of California in 1965. As CAWC director, Gammelgard gave frequent testimony to the US Congress on behalf of the API. In 1966 Gammelgard announced to Senator Edmund Muskie “that the question of lead in the atmosphere is not now a concern from the public health point of view” and that, “in our view, lead from gasoline exhausts is not at this time an air pollution problem.”³⁷ (Let us pause to reflect on the audacity of Gammelgard’s statement, given that the PSAC report found that “in persons heavily exposed to automobile exhausts, the body levels [of lead] approach the concentrations known to have deleterious effects,”³⁸ and also that the API had sought only the prior year to destroy the career of Clair Patterson, a geochemist at Caltech, after Patterson published an article that concluded that leaded gasoline posed a significant public health risk.)³⁹ In 1967 Gammelgard mused in a petroleum trade magazine on the meaning of the word clean, as in “the question of how clean the air should be,” and pondered as well whether a demand that air be “clean” was akin to a demand that water be “pure,” even though “the water we drink is in no sense ‘pure,’” having been thoroughly “cleansed and treated” to bring down “undesirable elements” to “levels that are consistent with health and well-being.”⁴⁰ That same year, Gammelgard said in testimony to Congress that because “we all breathe this air” that he would be “the last person in the world, knowing what I know about air pollution, that would try to do a snow job on something I thought was either damaging to myself or my family.”⁴¹

The Rosy Glow of Profits

In the course of 1965, petroleum trade journals had begun more steadily to express exasperation that their industry was being unfairly singled out as responsible for a deteriorating environment. “Make no mistake about the situation,” wrote Petroleum Management in March of that year, “the attack is a broad one, aimed at all industrial processes, as well as the more obvious sources like automobile, truck and bus emissions.” The trade journal reserved special scorn for politicians: “If they can claim that they have eased the housewife’s clothes-washing chores by cleaning up the air, they have gained votes.”⁴² (It was hardly exceptional for the oil crowd to announce distrust of elected officials, about whom it preferred bitterly to joke—as did the trade journal Pipeline Engineer—that a good definition for “politician” was “one who shakes your hand before election and your confidence after.”)⁴³Oil and Gas Journal sarcastically intoned that since “the whole population seems to be scared stiff about air pollution,” maybe “they ought to make a law against burning anything.” The trade journal seethed: “The oil industry has been accused of a lot of things, and now it’s about to be condemned as a mass poisoner.”⁴⁴

Leaving aside the histrionics, the indignation made good financial sense. Although it was getting battered in the court of public opinion, the petroleum industry’s bottom line had never looked better. Rapid escalation of the Vietnam War meant military procurements for oil were up 300 percent between March and July of 1965 alone.⁴⁵ Demand from the military for jet fuel was running especially high.⁴⁶ There was excellent news on the gasoline front; more powerful engines for new car models in 1966 meant “bigger appetites for better fuel” and “more frequent stops at the service station.”⁴⁷ What oilmen were experiencing at that moment, in short, was “the great acceleration” in petroleum consumption, as oil replaced coal as the nation’s principal energy source.⁴⁸ Moreover, US petroleum companies’ global business was going exceptionally well, and not only in Latin America and the Middle East.⁴⁹ By late summer, Oil and Gas Journal neatly encapsulated the industry’s upbeat mood: “The rosy glow of profits has returned.”⁵⁰ There had never been so much money to be made in oil.

Rapid growth brought heightened risks and greater public scrutiny. In August 1965, Life magazine editorialized: “A grim mixture of soot, smoke from factories, incinerators and heating plants, the gaseous by-products of industry and the exhaust fumes of cars and trucks is making an ugly mess out of most of the air Americans breathe.”⁵¹ Satirist Tom Lehrer sang: “Just go out for a breath of air / And you’ll be ready for Medicare. / The city streets are really quite a thrill, / If the hoods don’t get you, the monoxide will.”⁵² A negative perception of petroleum products, and especially gasoline, was already looming by the time Ikard gave his November 1965 speech.

Leading Madison Avenue advertising firms stepped up to assist the oil and gas industry in wrapping a new mantle of social responsibility around its shoulders. In spring 1966, the trade journal Petroleum Management published a Texaco ad that championed the construction of a pipeline in the Pacific Northwest, even as it declared the company’s “character as a corporate citizen,” and announced how “over the years, the Company has developed a concern for nature that by now is second nature.”⁵³ A complementary strategy was to profile each citizen’s personal responsibility. By 1968, Shell Oil put out a two-page color ad that depicted a middle-aged man opening his car door to empty an ashtray full of cigarette butts onto the street (fig. 2). The ad’s headline inquired: “What have you done to your country lately?” Then the ad’s text read: “Every once in a while, make a deposit in a waste can at your Shell station. It’s a great way to save. The landscape.”⁵⁴ The next year, and incredibly, the Shell ad won first place in Saturday Review’s annual Advertising Award competition; the ad was especially hailed as “so evocative and pertinent,” and “as truly in the public interest, but with powerful references to company and product.”⁵⁵

Industry ads that profiled a commitment to nature were test-marketed in their own trade journals. In spring 1969, Petro/Chem Engineer ran a Texaco ad with a photograph of a cyclone that closed with this statement: “Whenever some new idea for preserving the natural environment comes along, we give it a whirl.”⁵⁶ A second Texaco ad in the summer of 1969 appeared in Petroleum Engineer, depicting an identical landscape twice, with the first labeled “Before” and the second labeled “After.” Appearing a handful of months after a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, the Texaco ad stated not only that pipeline “leaks and breaks are rare indeed” but that after “restoration” and cleanup “you’d never know it was there.” The ad’s final paragraph read: “Our pipelines are out of sight, out of mind. Except ours.”⁵⁷ Only later did the industry place advertisements that foregrounded natural settings in more mainstream venues; a striking photograph of a pristine ocean shore figured centrally, beginning in mid-1970, in a two-page color Esso ad that showed two young children holding hands near the water’s edge. “What kind of world will we leave them?” was the boldface question, under which the ad’s text read: “We intend to do what one company can do to improve the quality of life on this planet. It will be a long and difficult battle for all of us. But this is a battle we must win.”⁵⁸ When Humble Oil had famously recommended in 1964 that motorists “Put a Tiger in Your Tank,” the intent had been to conjure a consumer empowered by the burning of gasoline.⁵⁹ Yet it became far more customary within a period of only a few years for ads directed at a wider public to emphasize a treacly appeal that had much more to do with the future of the planet than with its present, while obscuring from view actual petroleum products.

This mix and match of advertisements that placed a concern for nature at the center of their imagery, and that were intended first for industry insiders and only subsequently for a more general reading public, is an especially intriguing aspect of petroleum trade publications. Studies of corporate tactics designed to temper and forestall criticism have tended to examine how advertising campaigns sought to deceive the general public.⁶⁰ Why, then, bother to preach to the petroleum choir? Amid the emergence of a counterculture and New Left for whom “the question of Nature could no longer be separated from the question of society,” the oil and gas industry opted to refashion itself into a dedicated custodian of the natural world.⁶¹

Though more than a concern for nature absorbed these trade journals’ attention. Racial inequity, too, emerged as a social ill the petroleum industry declared itself eager to help solve—another multifunctional tactic of co-optation and distraction. In 1969, Petroleum Today introduced readers to Walter Nichols, a Black gas station owner in Richmond, Virginia, who “doesn’t feel that his being a Negro causes him any trouble.” Nichols said: “Of course, this is a Negro neighborhood and about 60 percent of my customers are black. But many of the people passing through who stop here are white. They seem to care more about the service they get than the color of the skin of the people who provide it.” Nichols worked a sixteen-hour day most every day, but he said that all that hard work was paying off. “I’m not getting rich,” Nichols said, “but I’m not sorry that I invested my savings and cashed some stocks and savings bonds to get into this.”⁶² That same year, eleven major oil companies announced plans to “more than double in the next five years the number of service stations owned by Negroes and other racial minorities.”⁶³ By the early 1970s, Exxon targeted ads directly to African American magazines, including one ad of three Black men down on their knees with parts of a car engine spread out before them. Dripping with paternalism, the ad’s bold text read: “They’re learning how to take an engine apart. And how to put their future together.”⁶⁴

Who’s Afraid of an Electric Car?

Dreams of the future appeared in yet another way. In 1967, industry trade journals abruptly announced that petroleum research laboratories were in the process of developing a nonpolluting automobile. These statements asserted that a car running on fossil fuels that did no harm to the environment could be manufactured. It was not yet a reality, but according to one journal, “progress to date offers hope that within a reasonable time” there would be “basic changes in engine design” that would “eliminate automotive air pollution by improving the internal combustion engine.”⁶⁵ To further the goal of a pollution-free vehicle, Esso established a joint venture with the car manufacturer Chrysler. Ford Motor Company in collaboration with Mobil Oil likewise announced intentions to research and manufacture a gasoline-powered but “pollution-free” vehicle. Called the Inter-Industry Emission Control (IIEC) Program, the Ford/Mobil initiative came to be heralded as the most ambitious private sector research enterprise of its kind; the plan was for the IIEC to “continue for at least three years unless its goals are reached earlier.”⁶⁶ Soon thereafter, Pipeline Engineer announced that five major petroleum corporations, including Atlantic Richfield and Standard Oil of Ohio, had joined the IIEC Program. The expectation was that mechanical engineers would figure out a technological means—and soon—by which a gas turbine engine would have emissions that were “essentially nil.”⁶⁷

A fantasy that the near-future would have everyone on the planet driving gasoline-powered automobiles that released close to zero hydrocarbons became a significant talking point for oil industry journals. The Lamp, an Esso trade journal, in 1967 published an analysis of its laboratory research on the internal combustion vehicle that declared that it was “reasonable to predict that by 1975 automobiles will be manufactured that emit only 10 per cent of the hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide produced by an uncontrolled car of recent vintage.”⁶⁸ By 1968, Esso was running full-page color ads in a number of popular magazines, including National Geographic, that portrayed vintage Ford Model A automobiles on a quiet suburban street. The astonishing text read: “By 1978, cars will be less of a smog problem than they were in 1928,” promising furthermore that “by the early eighties, the unburned gasoline exuded by each car will be less than half an ounce a day. Little more than you need to fill a cigarette lighter.”⁶⁹ In congressional testimony late in 1969, Herbert L. Misch, vice president of engineering at Ford, reiterated that “as a matter of policy, Ford Motor Company is committed to work for a cleaner atmosphere,” and that Ford planned “for the near-term and far-term” to develop a gasoline-powered automobile with a “90 to 97 percent emission reduction from the levels of pre-control vehicles.”⁷⁰ The next year, a “‘Smog Cutter’ vehicle” with environmentally safe emissions made news.⁷¹ Also in 1970, the IIEC Program determined that Ford would have a “smog-free” vehicle ready for production by 1978.⁷²

Most distressing for the petroleum industry was evidently the prospect that the near future might see the roads filled with electric vehicles. Writing in Petroleum Today, Gammelgard predicted that “it will be close to ten years before a practical electric car can be mass-produced and marketed. By that time, scientists expect, emissions from internal combustion engines will have long since been controlled.”⁷³ An Esso advertisement in Pipeline Engineer also threw ice water on the concept of an electric car. The ad displayed a stark photograph of a crowded highway above an italicized quotation from Esso president J. K. Jamieson: “The technical problems involved in effectively eliminating pollution from today’s automobiles through modification of the gasoline and of the engine are far less formidable than the technical problems of electric car development.”⁷⁴ The industry pushed hard to defeat all and any efforts to funnel federal funding into the development of electric vehicles on the argument that such vehicles would be a redundancy—if they could ever be made to work at all.

A petroleum trade journal in 1967 punned on the title of Edward Albee’s play for an article title, “Who’s Afraid of an Electric Car?” Yet the question was hardly rhetorical, and the answer was clear: “Not the oil industry. . . . Many think emissions from internal-combustion engines will be eliminated before a modern electric car could be developed.”⁷⁵ Still, the oil and gas community felt a profound need to repeat—and repeat—that “electric cars haven’t a chance,” as Petro/Chem Engineer wrote.⁷⁶ Citing congressional testimony from Sun Oil president Robert G. Dunlop, the trade journal effused over “the rapid strides being made by auto and oil companies in perfecting the internal combustion engine from an air conservation standpoint,” and added, hardly incidentally, “that it would be better to stimulate all industrial efforts to eliminate automotive pollution rather than to dedicate federal monies to the promotion of a single possible solution.” Like Gammelgard, Dunlop predicted that “smogless cars with gasoline engines will be built before an electric vehicle can be developed.”⁷⁷ So too Pipeline and Gas Journal forecast the pointlessness of shifting research efforts to the development of an electric car since “an alternate power source for contemporary vehicles might not be necessary for air conservation reasons by 1980 because automobiles by then will be low pollution vehicles.”⁷⁸

Conclusion: Toward Petrofuturism

From the perspective of the present, the Petroleum Management cover illustration with which I opened this article lands somewhere in the limbo land between horrendous and ludicrous. Yet it is critical to remember that the cover would have been seen by only the staunchest of oil industry loyalists whose investments—both affective and economic—were sunk deep in that industry’s future fortunes. Not just anyone scored a subscription to Petroleum Management; quite the opposite would have been closer to the truth. Thus, oil and gas industry trade journals served to envelop their readership in what we would now call an information bubble. At the same time, the 1966 cover of Petroleum Management may also be interpreted as signaling a distinct disregard for epidemiological research that, among other things, was already then beginning to assert a causal link between exposure to the hydrocarbon emissions from motor vehicles and poor health outcomes.⁷⁹ People were getting sick due to the burning of fossil fuels; the drumbeat of petroleum trade journals ignored, redirected, reinvented, and fantasized. The tactic worked—until it didn’t. Or perhaps it is still working.

Have oil corporations ended their (unofficial) policy of indifference to the adverse public health effects of ceaseless fossil fuel combustion? ExxonMobil is the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company, and it proudly proclaims that its operations extend across six continents.⁸⁰ In 2022, ExxonMobil, under intense pressure from activist investors elected to the company’s board of directors, announced its “ambition” to achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions “within 28 years.” The company said it would develop fuels from recycled carbon. It would modify its production practices. It would electrify its operations. ExxonMobil chief executive Darren Woods declared that his corporation would soon have “road maps to reduce emissions and realize this net-zero future.” However, that the Exxon plan expressly neglects to include emissions “which result from the combustion of fuels by drivers and other customers, as well as other companies along Exxon’s supply chain,” the emissions known as “Scope 3,” literally means that fully 90 percent or more of the company’s greenhouse gases will remain unchecked.⁸¹

The petroleum industry has never wavered from a defiant and/or self-consoling view that it has humanity’s back and that there should always be a future for petroleum. Additionally, if industry trade journals of the 1960s and early 1970s are to be believed, that future for oil and gas has long been envisioned as environmentally friendly. No theoretician of history, API president Frank Ikard, in a 1970 Petroleum Today essay tellingly titled “The Present Doesn’t Live Here Any More,” declared that his industry was “giving special priority to research aimed at finding additional ways to cut down automotive emissions as fast as possible and at the lowest possible cost to motorists.” Ikard further observed, in a turn of phrase that sounded practically New Age yet was anything but, that “catching up with the present isn’t enough—because it’s already the past before you can do anything about it.”⁸² Historical time might not forever be on the side of petroleum, Ikard appeared to recognize, but if that was true, then Big Oil would simply have to bend historical time—and reality—to its will, essentially making things up as it went along. The petroleum industry in this way began during the late 1960s in its own trade publications to project a horizon of expectation that, like any horizon, only slipped further away into the distance as Big Oil sought steadily through several ensuing decades to approach it.⁸³

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dagmar Herzog, the anonymous reviewers, and the Environmental Humanities editorial collective for their invaluable commentary and insight.

Notes

References