We’ve been ignoring warnings about oil and gas for more than a century

In the 1970s, the environmental movement was still in its infancy. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” had been published in 1962, warning of the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Greenpeace was founded in 1971 to protest U.S. nuclear testing on Amchitka Island. Environmental groups targeted whales and rainforests, but there was little organized protest around climate change. There were occasional warnings from scientists about the long-term impact of fossil fuels. Gordon MacDonald, a geophysicist, had warned the U.S. government as early as 1965, and in 1978 he appeared on “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report,” telling us the earth was warming. He predicted that humans would eventually create an environment that was a weapon of mass destruction. MacDonald was part of an elite science team that advised U.S. president Jimmy Carter, and in the summer of 1978 they met in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to look at climate models. Their consensus was that the earth would warm by three degrees Celsius in the next century, but their report wasn’t publicized, and the generous timeline deflected any immediate concern for politicians.

In Alberta, there were complaints about oil and gas development, but they were mostly local and unorganized — farmers and ranchers who worried their land or water was being contaminated, their voices lost in the din. The seventies in Calgary was a drunken party where the bar never closed.

Warnings about climate change go back as far as 1824, when Joseph Fourier published his theories about the earth’s atmosphere. He studied equations relating to heat transfer and calculated the energy being supplied by the sun. By his calculations, the earth should have been colder than it was. He decided there must be something in the atmosphere that prevented heat from escaping, and that over time the amount of heat held by the atmosphere could conceivably change. “The establishment and progress of human society,” he wrote, “and the action of natural powers, may, in extensive regions, produce remarkable changes in the state of the surface, the distribution of the waters, and the great movements of the air. Such effects, in the course of some centuries, must produce variations in the mean temperature for such places.”

In 1896, Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius created what may have been the first model for climate change. The math was complicated, and it took more than 10,000 calculations to predict how much heat would be trapped if CO2 levels changed. The work took up most of 1895. The following year, he produced a carefully worked-out prediction: If CO2 levels doubled, it would raise the world’s temperature by five to six degrees Celsius, a prediction that is proving to be disturbingly accurate.

Sixteen years later, another distant warning. A March 1912 edition of Popular Mechanics stated: “The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.”

By the 1950s, there were more furnaces, most of them burning oil or gas. By the sixties, a few scientists, including Gordon MacDonald, examined the possible climate outcomes, their timelines now shortened, the consequences no longer centuries away. In 1968, MacDonald published as essay, “How to Wreck the Environment: Anthropogenic Extinction of Life on Earth,” but his doomsday scenario failed to capture the public imagination.

If the public wasn’t listening, the CIA was. In August 1974, it produced a study on “climatological research as it pertains to intelligence problems.” It warned of dramatic changes in weather. “The climate change began in 1960,” the report said, “but no one, including the climatologists, recognized it.” This specific start date wasn’t accurate and likely referred to crop failures in India and the Soviet Union, the most recent evidence. The CIA was focused on the human toll of climate change, specifically the effect on the U.S. There would be mass migration as parts of the world became uninhabitable, which would lead to political unrest and, ultimately, war.

The report was made public in 1977, and concluded with the hope “that the current crisis is severe enough and close enough to home to encourage the interest and planning required to deal with these long-range issues before the problems get too much worse.”

The CIA assumed, with uncharacteristic naïveté, that climate experts and energy producers would work together to deal with this looming existential threat. Instead, they became adversaries.

The oil industry was doing its own research on climate change. At a petroleum conference at Columbia University in 1959 called “Energy and Man,” scientist Edward Teller (one of the inventors of the hydrogen bomb) warned that if nations continued to use oil, eventually the ice caps would start melting and the level of the oceans would begin to rise. The American Petroleum Institute (API), which represents oil and gas interests in the U.S., formed a climate task force in 1979, and the following year Dr. J.A. Laurman described the complexities of climate science and concluded with this grim scenario: “At a 3% per annum growth rate of CO2, a 2.5 C rise brings world economic growth to a halt in about 2025.”

An internal Exxon memo from 1979 said an increase in CO2 concentration will “cause a warming of the Earth’s surface” and the “present trend of fossil fuel consumption will cause dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050. The potential problem is great and urgent.”

The problem was both great and urgent, but it was almost entirely unglimpsed by the public. Like the tobacco industry, oil understood the dangers of its product and started to work to suppress any science that exposed those dangers. The API disbanded the climate task force in 1983, then turned its attention to actively undermining climate science. The environmental unit evolved into a lobbying group.

Had we known of the dangers back then, what would we have done? Forty-five years after the Exxon memo, armed with a thousand dire facts and fatal predictions, faced with rising seas and the red, apocalyptic skies of wildfires, we have done relatively little. We would have done less back then. But perhaps the debate might have started sooner, and more progress could have been made. Part of the problem with predictions of doom is how the human brain processes distant threats, which is not very effectively. Our brains are designed for short-term survival, but we don’t process long-term threats, neither as individuals nor as a society. We are hard-wired to ignore climate change. Concern for the future of the planet was mirrored in our boomer psyches. Live for the moment was the hipster philosophy. We heard warnings about alcohol, drugs, sex, and the damage Jimi Hendrix was doing to our eardrums. But we were young, and our hearts were strong.

In the seventies, there were no unions in the oilfields and little meaningful environmental oversight. There had been accidents — collapsing derricks, blow-ins, hydrochloric acid from fracking leaking into waterways, dozens of fingers lost to the spinning chain — though for the most part it all happened offstage, in remote areas. But in 1982, Amoco Canada had a major sour gas well blow-in near Lodgepole, a hamlet in the middle of the province, that caught the media’s attention. For sixty-eight days, it released 200 million cubic feet of poisonous hydrogen sulphide sour gas per day, along with other toxins.

Hydrogen sulphide gas has the distinctive smell of rotten eggs, is carcinogenic, and is lethal in significant doses. It is heavier than air, and hugs the ground rather than rising. It rapidly attacks the organs, and in high doses can induce convulsions and coma and, finally, death. The gas killed two people, sixteen were hospitalized, and thousands became sick. The gas caught fire, producing a plume of flame that shot up hundreds of feet, releasing other toxins into central Alberta then drifting into Saskatchewan on the westerly winds. People and livestock were evacuated.

Both Amoco and the government denied any responsibility and downplayed the environmental impact and the effect on human and animal health. In that unsettling lacuna, the Pembina Area Sour Gas Exposures Committee was formed, which forced a public inquiry. Out of that came a series of recommendations regarding drilling activity, many of which were adopted (though some have since been rescinded). The initial committee morphed into the Pembina Institute for Appropriate Development, and became an early environmental watchdog for the Alberta oil and gas industry.

The year of the Lodgepole crisis was also the year the boom ended. It had lasted almost a decade. There was a broad civic sense that it couldn’t last, that a Calvinist judgment was coming. All that reckless wealth. Oil was $35 a barrel ($122 adjusted for inflation), a stratospheric price, and house prices moved in lockstep. The wealth, of which I had no real share, was leveraged, untrustworthy. That year I went to a Halloween party at a house south of town with my statuesque girlfriend. We went as Rock Hudson and Doris Day in the movie “Pillow Talk”; I was Doris, she was Rock. The underlying fin de siècle feeling was heightened by a fierce blizzard that arrived near midnight. We left at 2 a.m. and drove north then skidded off the road. We were pulled out of the snowbank by kind locals in a truck with a winch. Standing in that blizzard at 2:30 a.m. wearing a baby doll nightgown and a blond wig, my pink princess telephone dangling, my ancient Volvo slowly pulled out of the snow, I sensed it was the logical end of something.

The price of oil collapsed, and many of those who had come for the boom went back east, to the Maritimes or Ontario. I moved east as well. For years, Calgary’s vacancy rate had approached zero, and now landlords were offering free trips to Las Vegas to anyone who signed a one-year lease. There was 25 million square feet of vacant downtown office space. Those highrises that had looked like progress now looked like abandoned toys. By March 1984, there were 250 house foreclosures per month. The classified pages of the Calgary Herald were filled with houses, trucks, and furniture for sale. Bumper stickers appeared — “Please, Lord, send me another oil boom and I promise not to piss this one away.” But we did, of course; such is the nature of booms. The city became more introspective, more humane. Oil was still an economic force, but it was a background hum, a distant factory.

With the Lodgepole blow-in, the essential duality of oil was established in Alberta: at once economic engine and destroyer of worlds. This was the beginning of a war that was complex and Sisyphean and wouldn’t gain much traction for several years, a war fought with science, celebrity, misinformation, and political cudgels. Sometimes the war was fought within ourselves, at once hostage and junior partner. It rages still.