US oil company ran 1977 article predicting climate crisis could cause starvation

The corporate predecessor to America’s largest refiner of oil, Marathon Petroleum, explained in a company periodical nearly 50 years ago that global temperature rise potentially linked to “industrial expansion” could one day cause “widespread starvation and other social and economic calamities”.

This decades-old description of climate breakdown is from a 1977 issue of the magazine Marathon World and is attributed in the article by an unnamed author to several experts including a scientist working for a top US agency.

“Although climatologists disagree on the underlying reasons, many see a future climate of greater variability, bringing with it areas of extreme drought,” said the magazine, previously published by Marathon Oil Company, which later split into Marathon Petroleum as well as the exploration and production company Marathon Oil.

Marathon Petroleum is among several oil and gas companies – including Exxon, Shell and BP – currently being sued by the city of Honolulu for allegedly engaging in a coordinated communications effort “to conceal and deny their own knowledge” of catastrophic climate impacts caused by burning their products.

That lawsuit alleges that Marathon knew of the dangers of global temperature rise long before the general public due to its membership in the American Petroleum Institute, which began studying the link between fossil fuels and global heating decades ago.

This newly surfaced article shows the company was undertaking efforts on its own to stay up to date on the latest climate science and the threats a more volatile climate could pose to humankind.

Entitled “World Weather Watch”, the article summarizes the debate, quoting J Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), a federal US government scientist who during the 1970s warned that industrial carbon dioxide emissions could melt the polar ice caps and pose threats to human civilization.

“The climate is not going to get better, only worse. Over the long haul, we are going to have to brace ourselves for the prospect of a lot of poor harvests,” Mitchell said in the piece. Marathon World cited research from Mitchell and other climate scientists showing that “industrial expansion during the last century may be affecting the weather through carbon dioxide pollution”.

The magazine article suggests potential implications for the company from a more extreme climate. While it is unclear how widely the article was seen inside the company it names senior Marathon Oil figures, including its then vice-president for corporate planning and assistant to the president James H Brannigan, who says the oil industry uses weather forecasting techniques to predict consumer demand for fuel.

It also quotes George M Susich, an international drilling coordinator with Marathon, who talks about the company’s exposure to hazardous weather in the Celtic Sea, saying “you become sensitive to pending weather conditions and take precautionary steps before a storm hits”. Neither person references global temperature rise directly in the article, which has a sub headline that says “climate detectives find intriguing clues but weather remains a mystery”.

“No matter the reason for climate changes, the economic impact can be tremendous,” the Marathon World article says. It references scientific research suggesting that “the circulation patterns of the atmosphere have changed, keeping summer monsoons away from regions such as the Sahel in Africa, currently an area suffering extreme drought.”

Given these enormous risks, the company periodical explains, “many climatologists feel it is imperative to apply present scientific technology so that predictions of Earth’s changeable environment might prevent widespread starvation and other social and economic calamities.”

Though warnings like this were becoming more widespread in the scientific literature of the time, it would be more than a decade before global heating gained mainstream attention in 1988 following Nasa scientist James Hansen’s testimony to Congress and the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“I’m not surprised that Marathon would have documents that shed light on its awareness” of climate change, said Bryant Sewell, senior research analyst at the shareholder advocacy group Majority Action. “Whether it’s Marathon, Exxon or electric utilities, we have seen a longstanding strategy from these companies of climate denial, disinformation and delay.”

Marathon Petroleum was spun off from Marathon Oil as a standalone refining company in 2011. It didn’t respond to questions from the Guardian. Nor did Marathon Oil, which was recently acquired by ConocoPhillips.

Marathon Petroleum currently operates the largest refining system in the US, including more than 6,000 gas stations across the country. Last year it reported a net income of nearly $10bn. The company has a previously obstructed federal climate action, including reportedly working quietly with a network of conservative policy groups under President Donald Trump to fight against federal fuel economy standards that would lessen the greenhouse gases released by cars and trucks.

The company received a near failing grade from the non-profit research and advocacy group InfluenceMap, which ranks companies on whether they are making good faith efforts to support climate policy. “Marathon Petroleum’s engagement on US climate change policy is largely negative,” it concluded.

That’s been echoed by several US Democratic senators including Sheldon Whitehouse, who in 2020 co-wrote an open letter accusing the company of being “one of the leading forces in Washington opposing efforts to limit carbon pollution and fight climate change”.

Marathon Petroleum has so far largely avoided the historical scrutiny given to companies like Exxon and Shell, which privately studied catastrophic climate risks starting in the 1970s and then led public relations and advertising campaigns to undermine the science.

Marathon’s 1977 article appeared during a year of turbulent weather – a record cold winter followed by a scorching hot summer. In scientific journals researchers debated the causes and implications of these extremes.

In addition to acknowledging that humankind’s carbon emissions could be a major factor, the article also cited competing explanations, including a now-discredited theory that climate shifts could be caused by fluctuations in the sun’s intensity, or that it could be affected by changes in the Earth’s orbit, which scientists have now ruled out as a credible explanation for recent decades of unprecedented warming.

The current Honolulu lawsuit alleges that Marathon contributed to climate obstruction by belonging to industry associations that spent decades trying to convince the public that science linking coal, oil and gas to climate change was shaky and unreliable.

“Pestilence, starvation, drought. To know one’s product may bring that about, and bury the evidence, is unspeakable,” Timmons Roberts, a professor of environment and sociology at Brown University, who’s an expert in climate disinformation, wrote in an email to the Guardian after viewing the 1977 article.

Marathon and other companies named in the litigation are currently petitioning the US supreme court to throw out the case.