In 1977, Marathon Petroleum Published A Long, Detailed Article On What FF Emissions Could Do To Earth's Climate

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”.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/18/us-oil-marathon-petroleum-climate-change