Editor’s Note: This the second post in a two part series on Climate Denialism in the Archives of Imperial Oil. The blog posts in this series originated in Dr. Anya Zilberstein’s History of the Climate Crisis seminar in the undergraduate History program at Concordia University.

As of this year, at least 29 states, cities, counties, and Indigenous groups in the United States have filed climate lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry.¹ The suits differ in their legal approaches: the charges include fraud, racketeering, climate disinformation, negligence, financial liability, and damages from climate change.² Despite these differences, many of the charges share the basic premise that the American fossil fuel industry manufactured and disseminated climate denial during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As historians like Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have shown, the American fossil fuel industry mounted a disconcertingly effective campaign to muddy public understanding of climate science, and delayed meaningful action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and slow the progress of climate change.³ While these suits are underway in the U.S., and rely largely on American sources of evidence, some have cited documents from the Imperial Oil archival collection at the University of Calgary. Indeed, for decades, the American and Canadian fossil fuel industries shared resources, research, subsidiaries, and think tanks, yet there has been little published historical treatment of industry-fuelled climate denial in Canada. Existing historiography, which shows that the U.S. fossil fuel industry borrowed its disinformation strategies from the U.S. tobacco industry, can be used to establish precedence for lawsuits against Big Oil.⁴ But if historical analysis of climate denial – in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere – were to look beyond the legally actionable similarities to tobacco disinformation campaigns, what else might we find? And what other antecedents might exist for industry-led climate denialism in Canada?

In the years since Oreskes and Conway’s Merchants of Doubt linked the evolution of tobacco disinformation with the rise of climate denial, investigative journalists have publicized Exxon’s awareness of global warming, and the steps that the company took to protect themselves from its consequences, despite publicly claiming it was too soon, and the science too uncertain, for governments to take proactive measures.⁵ Since then, the Imperial Oil archives have been of scholarly and legal interest not only for what they reveal about the Canadian fossil fuel industry, but also – because of Imperial’s position as Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary – for evidence of Exxon’s alleged efforts to create and disseminate climate denial. For instance, in the County of Honolulu’s ongoing suit against oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, the plaintiffs point to comments made by Robert Peterson, former Chairman and CEO of Imperial, in “A Cleaner Canada,” which appeared in the Summer 1998 Imperial Oil Review.⁶ It’s clear why the article would be used as evidence of climate disinformation; it’s an impressively comprehensive time capsule of fossil fuel industry rhetoric in the late 1990s. Peterson claimed that “there is absolutely no agreement among climatologists” that global climate changes were occurring.⁷ Later, he cited this supposed absolute lack of consensus to dispute the causes of climate change, declaring that, even if global warming were real, no climatologists – none – agreed that “man-made factors” could be responsible.⁸ Peterson confidently concluded, “I feel very safe in saying that the view that burning fossil fuels will result in global climate change remains an unproved hypothesis.”⁹ He has not been proven correct. But even in 1998, neither the impact of fossil fuels on atmospheric carbon dioxide, nor the effect of increased carbon dioxide on temperature, was unfounded.¹⁰ In fact, the chairman and CEO of Canada’s largest oil company was denying climate change despite Imperial’s (and Exxon’s) own prior research and internal communications. The fossil fuel industry had long been aware of global climate change, of a worsening greenhouse effect due to fossil fuel combustion, and of an ever-growing scientific consensus for global warming’s existence, causes, and potentially severe environmental and human consequences.¹¹

If you’ve been following any kind of news over the last fifteen years, none of this sounds especially surprising. But if we step back from his most challenging comments, Peterson’s article can point us towards an under-explored element in the history of climate denial. Rather than exclusively dismissing climate change, Peterson also proposed a revisionist history of the Canadian environment in the twentieth century: the “quality” of Canada’s environment, Imperial’s chairman argued, was “improving” – and this improvement was owed to the Canadian fossil fuel industry.¹²

The industrialization of Sarnia created a sprawling history of resource extraction, toxic waste, and emissions, but also of efforts to limit – and normalize – the effects of ever-intensifying pollution.

There may be an interesting discussion to have about this shift in the meaning of “improving” nature, particularly in the longue duree history of North America; there’s something ironic about an industrialist capitalist confidently redefining “improvement” to refer to environmental protection, rather than the transformation of the environment for maximum extraction of commodified natural resources. But, for now, I’d like to focus on a narrower slice of the history that Peterson was revising. In his article, Peterson tried to claim that “the historical record” demonstrated an “improvement” in “air quality, water purity[,] and other important indicators of environmental health.”¹³ Predictably, his evidence of ecological markers of environmental health was spurious, at best: he referred to publications by economic – not scientific – think tanks, and cited a secondhand anecdote of low fish count in the Great Lakes, which he inexplicably concluded was due to the water being “too clean” for aquatic life to thrive.¹⁴ It is perhaps worth noting here that the archives include a useful company glossary, prepared in the 1980s, detailing the causes and consequences of eutrophication.¹⁵ Nevertheless, Peterson argued that the ostensible improvements to the Canadian environment were the fruit of decades of responsible environmental stewardship by an oil company.

So, what if we looked at the historical record of Imperial’s engagement with the Canadian environment since the mid-twentieth century?

First, I want to zero in on a region that was once at the heart of Imperial’s work: Sarnia, Ontario. Imperial was one of several companies operating in Sarnia because of its proximity to the U.S., and to Oil Springs and Petrolia – which were, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the core of Canada’s oil boom.¹⁶ The industrialization of Sarnia created a sprawling history of resource extraction, toxic waste, and emissions, but also of efforts to limit – and normalize – the effects of ever-intensifying pollution. The Imperial Oil collection in the Glenbow Archives offers significant insight into the intensification of pollution in Sarnia in the wake of the Second World War, and how the parallel rise in fears about pollution led to Imperial’s earliest major effort to both understand and address the environmental consequences of fossil fuel activities.

Investigating this mid-century period of worsening pollution and rising environmentalism is critical for understanding the evolution of climate science and climate denial. Though we might associate the emergence of scientific knowledge of climate change with the end of the twentieth century, scholars and journalists have identified 1959 as the earliest known date for the American fossil fuel industry’s awareness of global warming.¹⁷ Prior to 1959, popular environmental concerns had little to do with greenhouse gases. In the early 1950s, conservationists Aldo Leopold, Fairfield Osborn Jr., and William Vogt published bestselling books and made television appearances to raise public concerns about chemical pollutants, especially agricultural pesticides.¹⁸ And in the aftermath of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the use and development of nuclear weaponry, as several historians have argued, led to fears for the health of the “global” environment.¹⁹ Alongside these developments, as Ellen Griffith Spears has observed, the Second World War had concentrated corporate power and intensified industrial activity – to dramatic and devastating effect.²⁰

Tucked in a valley along the Monongahela River, the town of Donora, Pennsylvania, was visited by an unusually stagnant cold front in late October 1948. Smoke, heavy metal particulates, sulfates, and carbon monoxide were among the usual emissions of the town’s industrial steel and chemical plants, and they caused little concern, because they would usually rise above the town, and eventually disperse with the wind – under normal weather conditions.²¹ But the temperature inversion created by the cold front meant that warmer air overhead trapped colder air in the valley below – so the toxic industrial emissions from the plants pooled in Donora, concentrating until visibility grew dim with smog, and the town’s residents began to asphyxiate. Twenty people died, and several thousand were affected by mild to severe respiratory distress and other illnesses.²² A few years later, in 1952, a similarly unusual cold front led to a dramatic spike in coal emissions over London, England, concentrating the smog to catastrophic levels. Present-day estimations suggest that a staggering twelve thousand people died from coal smoke asphyxiation.²³

In the most visible and tragic fashion possible, air pollution from industrial activity had become a public health hazard. In Sarnia, it was commonplace. Scientific innovations had led to the production of oil-based synthetics; hydrocarbons and plastics were creating a new, massive demand for oil.²⁴ In a few short decades, Sarnia had become home not only to Imperial Oil, but also to plants belonging to Dow Chemical of Canada, DuPont of Canada, the Polymer Corporation, Sun Oil, and other manufacturers of synthetic plastics.²⁵ The mass manufacturing of petrochemical products was a coal-powered affair, belching copious amounts of smoke and sulphur dioxide over the area, and the chemical processes themselves emitted chlorine gas.²⁶

Water pollution had also worsened. In 1946, impelled by complaints and concerns from the American and Canadian governments, the International Joint Commission revisited the boundary waters of the St. Clair River to investigate cross-border pollution.²⁷ Through shared waterways, the waste from Canadian riverside towns was believed to be polluting American ones, and vice-versa, and industrialization appeared to be amplifying the problem.²⁸ The St. Clair River, with the rapid expansion of petrochemical industry on its Canadian shore, drew particular scrutiny. Fed by the southernmost waters of Lake Huron, the St. Clair flows from Sarnia to Walpole Island First Nation, and forms part of the Canadian-American border. It is perhaps unsurprising that at the conclusion of their investigation in 1951, the IJC determined that, in the St. Clair-Detroit River system, there was more than twice as much industrial pollution as municipal waste – and worse, still, the oils and hydrocarbons from industrial wastewater were providing ample fodder for bacteria from municipal sewage, compounding the hazards of bacteriological pollution for all living things in and around the St. Clair.²⁹

It was in this context that, in 1952, Dow Chemical, Polymer, and Imperial joined forces to create the St. Clair River Research Committee. The committee’s aegis was to study and address both air and water pollution in the area – specifically, toxic industrial waste, dispersed in the waters of the St. Clair, and the worryingly smog-like “sour air” hanging over the oil refineries and chemical plants.³⁰ By the time the committee released its first report on “Control of Industrial Pollution in the Sarnia Area,” in 1960, its membership had grown to include a dozen other petrochemical companies along the St. Clair. The 1960 report discussed measures taken by individual member companies to abate their output of air and water pollution – but only after delivering two important messages. The first of these, curiously, was an attempt to historicize pollution:

Pollution problems are not new. It is recorded, for example, that King Edward I prohibited the use of sea coal […] almost 650 years ago, and that air pollution there became so severe that Queen Elizabeth once forbade the use of coal as a fuel while Parliament was in session.”³¹

By drawing on distant historical examples of pollution, the committee neatly superseded the more recent, urgent, and tragic consequences of industrial chemical and fossil fuel emissions. It also laid the groundwork for the committee’s second public service announcement: “Pollution is everyone’s concern.”³² The implications were clear: pollution was a mundane, inescapable aspect of human history, and industrial activity was no guiltier than humanity itself. By suggesting that pollution was inevitable, the committee normalized the deterioration of air and water quality; by proposing that the responsibility for pollution was universally shared, the petrochemical industry absolved itself of its harmful impacts on the environment and risks to public health. Owen Temby and Don Munton have argued that the member companies of the research committee were hardly fulfilling their stated purpose of monitoring local air and water pollution. In the case of air pollution, the committee contracted an external firm to monitor ambient levels of particulates and certain compounds throughout Chemical Valley – without tracking emissions from any of the plants or refineries themselves, and without sharing their data with the public.³³

A few years later, Imperial compiled a “Public Relations Assessment” of air and water pollution in Canada.³⁴ The report, marked “Confidential,” signals one of Imperial’s earliest efforts to craft a public-facing position on environmental issues. It also offers a rhetorical precedent for the fossil fuel industry’s response to climate change, particularly its criticism of climate science. Initially, the report was promisingly factual: the authors discussed the pollutants that contributed to smog, and explicitly identified several of them as known byproducts of fossil fuel combustion and vehicle exhaust.³⁵ They plainly acknowledged that, “The petroleum industry, directly or indirectly, is a major contributor to the key forms of pollution. This fact is well-known by government air pollution control and health officials and is widely documented, albeit not always objectively, in the technical and medical literature.”³⁶

In other words: in the face of a significant, visible, scientifically validated environmental issue, the fossil fuel industry chose to deny that it was an issue at all.

“Not always objectively” is an interesting turn of phrase. The public relations team were not conducting a literature review or peer review of the available science on the health and environmental risks of air pollution. This report was, ostensibly, an assessment of the public’s view of the industry they represented. Here was the state of a real, ongoing issue, directly related to the petroleum industry, which Imperial might have chosen to address in a multitude of ways. But their sly dig at the objectivity of public health concerns about pollution was swiftly reinforced: the public relations team claimed that the scientifically-established link between air pollution and the petroleum industry lacked meaningful data and rationality.³⁷ Imperial had established a rhetorical response that would echo through the decades to come: the science of pollution and emissions was mistaken, lacked consensus, and more research was needed.

In other words: in the face of a significant, visible, scientifically validated environmental issue, the fossil fuel industry chose to deny that it was an issue at all.

It may be plausible to attribute Robert Peterson’s climate denialism to the U.S. fossil fuel industry and its allies. Certainly, the evolution of fossil fuel public relations is entangled with the U.S. tobacco industry. But by paying attention to the petrochemical industry’s earliest responses to air and water pollution, particularly in the Sarnia region during the postwar period, we can find intriguing rhetorical parallels.

The rhetoric of mainstream environmental discourse, meanwhile, has evolved significantly over the past half-century. “Climate change” has supplanted “pollution” in our vocabularies. But the Imperial Oil archival collection allows us to see how pollution was dismissed, downplayed, and denied long before the industry sought to question climate change. Whether their rhetoric developed wholly independently of Exxon or the U.S. tobacco industry remains to be seen, but one thing, above all else, is clear: more Canadian environmental historical analysis of our local fossil fuel industry is needed, and there has never been a more urgent time to conduct it.

Feature Image: Imperial Oil refinery in Sarnia, Ontario (1897). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Imperial built its refineries far outside of residential areas, evading municipal regulations meant to control air and water pollution. Source: “Imperial Oil refinery, Sarnia, Ontario.”, 1897, (CU1554873) by Unknown. Courtesy of Glenbow Library and Archives Collection, Libraries and Cultural Resources Digital Collections, University of Calgary. https://digitalcollections.ucalgary.ca/CS.aspx?VP3=DamView&DocRID=2R3BF1BEGPXL&RW=1440&RH=787.

Notes

1. “Big Oil Accountability Lawsuits,” Center for Climate Integrity, accessed September 8, 2024, https://climateintegrity.org/lawsuits.
2. Idem.
3. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2010), https://openlibrary.org/books/OL28466135M. See also: Geoffrey Supran, Stefan Rahmstorf, and Naomi Oreskes, “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Global Warming Projections,” Science 379, no. 6628 (2023), https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063.
4. See, for instance: Written testimony submitted to the U.S. Senate Committee On The Budget Hearing on Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change, 118th Cong. (2024) (statement by Geoffrey Supran, PhD., Associate Professor, Environmental Science and Policy, and Director, Climate Accountability Lab, University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science), https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/mrgeoffreysupranphdtestimonysenatebudgetcommittee.pdf
5. For Inside Climate News’ Pulitzer-nominated reporting on Exxon and climate denial, see: Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song, and David Hasemyer, “Exxon : The Road Not Taken,” Inside Climate News (2015), https://insideclimatenews.org/project/exxon-the-road-not-taken/.
6. City and County of Honolulu and Honolulu Water Supply v. Sunoco LP; Aloha Petroleum, Ltd.; Aloha Petroleum LLC; Exxon Mobil Corp.; Exxonmobil Oil Corporation; Royal Dutch Shell; Shell Oil Company; Shell Oil Products Company LLC; Chevron Corp; Chevron USA Inc.; BHP Group Limited; BHP Group PLC; Bhp Hawaii Inc.; BP PLC; BP America Inc.; Marathon Petroleum Corp.; Conocophillips; Conocophillips Company; Phillips 66; Phillips 66 Company (Circuit Court of the First Circuit, State of Hawai‘i March 22, 2021), archived on Center for Climate Integrity, https://climateintegrity.org/uploads/media/Honolulu_Amended_Complaint_03222021.pdf.
7. Robert B. Peterson, “A Cleaner Canada,” Imperial Oil Review (1998), Climate Investigations Center Collection, 29, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6555577-1998-Robert-PetersonA-Cleaner-Canada-Imperial.
8. Idem.
9. Idem.
10. Oreskes and Conway, Merchants, 140-143,151-153.
11. Geoffrey Supran, Stefan Rahmstorf, and Naomi Oreskes, “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Global Warming Projections,” Science 379, no. 6628 (2023), https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063.
12. Peterson, A Cleaner Canada, 26.
13. Idem.
14. Ibid, 26-28.
15. Evan C. Birchard, Environmental Protection Department, Imperial Oil Limited: Pollution Course (1980), Climate Investigations Center Collection, 33-35, 58, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5689905-Environmental-Pollution-Course.
16. Graham D. Taylor, Imperial Standard : Imperial Oil, Exxon, and the Canadian Oil Industry from 1880 (University of Calgary Press, 2019), 22-25, 54.
17. Supran, Written testimony, 2.
18. Ellen Griffith Spears, Rethinking the American Environmental Movement Post-1945 (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020), 59-61.
19. See, for instance: Spears, American Environmental Movement, 70-72; also Joseph Masco, “Chapter Two : Bad Weather: On Planetary Crisis,” The Theater of Operations : National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Duke University Press, 2014), 77-112.
20. Spears, American Environmental Movement, 56-57.
21. Ibid, 57-59, and Jacobs, Elizabeth T, Jefferey L Burgess, and Mark B Abbott, “The Donora Smog Revisited: 70 Years after the Event That Inspired the Clean Air Act,” American Journal of Public Health 108, no. S2 (2018): S85–S88, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2017.304219.
22. Idem.
23. J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration : An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Harvard University Press, 2016), 22-23, https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674970731; Michelle L. Bell and Devra Lee Davis, “Reassessment of the Lethal London Fog of 1952: Novel Indicators of Acute and Chronic Consequences of Acute Exposure to Air Pollution,” Environmental Health Perspectives 109 (2001): 389–94, https://doi.org/10.2307/3434786; Devra Lee Davis, When Smoke Ran like Water : Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle against Pollution (Basic Books, 2002), 47-50, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.30885.
24. Spears, American Environmental Movement, 56-57.
25. Owen Temby and Don Munton, “The International Joint Commission and Air Pollution: A Tale of Two Cases,” in The First Century of the International Joint Commission, ed. Daniel Macfarlane and Murray Clamen (University of Calgary Press, 2020), 328, https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=6018180.
26. Idem.
27. The original letter from American and Canadian officials to the IJC names the St. Clair River as its cause for concern for boundary water pollution; the IJC expanded its investigation to include the larger network of Great Lakes boundary waters. Jennifer Read, “Origin of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement: Concepts and Structures,” in The First Century of the International Joint Commission, ed. Daniel Macfarlane and Murray Clamen (University of Calgary Press, 2020), 354-355, https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=6018180.
28. Ibid, 353-354.
29. Report of the International Joint Commission, United States and Canada, on the Pollution of Boundary Waters (1951), International Joint Commission Library, 17, https://www.ijc.org/en/report-ijc-us-canada-pollution-boundary-waters.
30. St. Clair River Research Committee, Control of Industrial Pollution in the Sarnia Area: Industrial Progress Report (1960), Climate Investigations Center Collection, 6, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5015327-Control-of-Industrial-Pollution-in-the-Sarnia.
31. SCRRC, Industrial Pollution, 2.
32. Idem.
33. Temby and Munton, “Air Pollution,” 328-329.
34. Frank T. LeBart, Air/Water Pollution in Canada: A Public Relations Assessment, Toronto, 1967. Climate Investigations Center Collection. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5015291-1967-Air-Water-Pollution-in-Canada-a-Public.
35. Ibid, 2-4.
36. Ibid, 8.
37. Idem.

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Rosanna Cyr

Rosanna Cyr is a student in the department of History at Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal). Her research investigates the evolution of climate denial in Canada, particularly within the context of the emerging environmental movement.

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• Pollution and Public Relations: Finding Precedents of Canadian Climate Denial in the Imperial Oil Archives - November 1, 2024