American Petroleum Institute (API) is a trade association that represents over 600 corporations who produce, refine, and distribute petroleum. Founded in 1919, the API advocates and lobbies on behalf of the petroleum industry. Based in Washington DC, API is notorious for funding climate change denial groups, including Freedomworks, Americans for Prosperity, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Heartland Institute.
Climate Change:
The American Petroleum Institute’s climate change denial dates back to the 1950’s when the group worked to “downplay the threat of smog to human health in Los Angeles by hiring their own scientists that would disparage leading smog control scientists, while promoting the idea that pollution controls would be too costly.”
The American Petroleum Institute spent over “$750 million on public relations, advertising, and communications.” In 2019, API spent almost $7 million just on lobbying for the oil and gas industry. The company is fighting a growing number of lawsuits, “led by the state of Minnesota, alleging that the trade group was at the heart of a decades-long “disinformation campaign” on behalf of big oil to deny the threat from fossil fuels.”
The API protested against “the Environmental Protection Agency‘s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endangered public health and could be regulated under the Clean Air Act.” Former CEO, Jack Gerard, stated, “the Clean Air Act was created to address local and regional air pollution, not the emission of carbon dioxide and other global greenhouse gases.”
In 1998 the American Petroleum Institute released a Communications Action Plan that stated, “ “victory will be achieved when … citizens ‘understand’ uncertainties in climate science … [and] recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.” In 1998 after the Kyoto Protocol was signed, the API drew up a multimillion-dollar disinformation campaign to ensure that “climate change becomes a non-issue… victory will be achieved when recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the conventional wisdom.”
As part of their campaign, the American Petroleum Institute published a booklet titled, “Two Energy Futures: A National Choice for the 80s,” that cast doubt on the role of carbon dioxide global warming. The booklet misrepresented Carl Sagan’s work on carbon dioxide’s albedo (the ability of surfaces to reflect solar radiation back into space) by stating that carbon dioxide is reflecting solar radiation back into space and causing a cooling effect. The booklet argued against worrying about warming from fossil fuels because C02 has a ‘cooling effect’ and “desertification and deforestation might reduce the planet’s temperature by another 1 degree Celsius by the end of the twenty-first century.”
In 1989, the American Petroleum Institute formed the Global Climate Coalition, an industry front group aimed at protecting fossil fuel interests, which coalesced into a more active campaign of climate change denial in the 1990s, which included attacking climate scientists, muddying the waters on climate science, and promoting climate change deniers.”
In 1979, the API, “prepared a background paper on climate change for members of the task force, predicting that fossil fuels would cause global warming but that the phenomenon would be masked by natural variability and go undetected until around the year 2000.” By 1980, the API was already spreading “false and misleading information about climate change.”
See also:
Chevron
American Natural Gas Association
Climate of Denial