Ford, GM Scientists Knew in 1960s that Emissions Caused Climate Change: Report

October 28, 2020

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by Rachel Frazin (The Hill) Ford and General Motors have known about the effects of vehicular emissions on climate change since as early as the 1960s, E&E News reported Monday.

Scientists at the companies made findings on the human and fossil fuel impacts of climate change in the 1960s and 1970s. At GM, the evidence was presented to at least three top executives, including a former chairman and CEO, according to an investigation by the news outlet.

Still, the companies lobbied for decades against attempts to reduce emissions and did not move their businesses away from vehicles that were fossil fuel intensive during that period.

Asked about the E&E News article, GM spokesman James Cain detailed actions the company is taking to address climate change, from supporting “modernizing” vehicle standards and working to power its manufacturing by 100 percent renewable energy by 2040.

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One researcher at GM was Ruth Annette Gabriel Reck, who told the news outlet that she presented her findings to Roger Bonham Smith, who became chairman and CEO of GM in 1981, and his successor Robert "Bob" Stempel.

"We would sit down and they would look at the papers, and I would explain to them what they were looking at," she said. "They were aware of things that were going on."

Meanwhile, both companies fought against policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

They were part of the Global Climate Coalition, which opposed emissions reductions attempts during the George H.W. Bush administration, according to a list of members published by the Climate Investigations Center.

They also reportedly donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to think tanks that cast doubt on the global warming consensus. READ MORE

Exclusive: GM, Ford knew about climate change 50 years ago (E&E News)

Sierra Club Statement: Major US Automakers Knew About Climate Change 50 Years Ago (Sierra Club)

Excerpt from E&E News: In 1965, a young physicist became one of the first women to join General Motors Research Laboratories in Warren, Mich. Her name was Ruth Annette Gabriel Reck, and she would set the company on a course toward greater scientific understanding of how the greenhouse effect was raising temperatures on Earth.

A Midwesterner, Reck had in 1954 become the youngest person to graduate from Minnesota State University, Mankato, at just 18 years old. After earning a doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Minnesota, she joined GM with plans to continue studying that subject.

But in her first week on the job, Reck met with Marvin Leonard "Murph" Goldberger, a visiting physicist from Princeton University who later would become president of the California Institute of Technology. Goldberger convinced her to study climate change instead.

"He said, 'You will never regret it. It really is an important topic,'" Reck recalled in one of several phone interviews with E&E News.

With the approval of her supervisors, Reck began studying global warming in the late '60s. The first topic she explored was aerosols, or tiny particles that can come from automobiles, power plants and factories.

GM executives were optimistic about the research. They believed it would show aerosols had a significant cooling effect on the atmosphere, canceling out the warming effect of carbon dioxide.

The executives thought aerosols "might actually negate the effects of the CO2 coming off. And so they were positively thinking that maybe the use of fossil fuels by the automobile could be neutral," Reck said.

The findings showed otherwise.

"Of course, that didn't happen at all," she said. "First of all, their lifetime is very short, whereas CO2 is very, very long. ... It didn't play out at all the way they wanted it to happen."

The executives nonetheless allowed Reck to publish her findings in several peer-reviewed scientific journals. In a 1975 paper in Science, she asserted that aerosols caused "heating of the atmosphere near the poles."

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Johnston (James "Jimmy" Johnston, GM's vice president of government relations) told the professors that GM environmental scientists "were very influential in putting the [climate] issues on the agenda," adding that Reck "pushed what was really important, and was one of the more energetic people."

Reck later presented her findings to Roger Bonham Smith, who became chairman and CEO of GM in 1981, and Robert "Bob" Stempel, who succeeded Smith in 1990.

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Meanwhile, at Ford, a Canadian physicist named Gilbert Norman Plass was speeding down a similar path.

After graduating from Harvard University and earning a doctorate in physics from Princeton University, Plass taught physics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He left academia in 1955 and joined Ford's research staff the following year.

Before arriving at Ford, Plass had published a series of eye-grabbing pieces on the climate, including a 1956 article in the magazine American Scientist titled "Carbon Dioxide and the Climate" and a 1956 paper in the journal Tellus titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change."

Both pieces made a bold claim: Humanity was responsible for heating the Earth since 1900 by burning fossil fuels and pumping massive quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere.

At Ford, Plass was based in the Aeronutronic Division in Newport Beach, Calif., which focused on aerospace and defense issues. But he continued to study CO2, using Ford's computers to run early climate models and publishing his findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

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In a "Public Interest Report" in 1989, GM's public relations department portrayed the field of climate science as full of uncertainties.

"The hot dry summer of 1988 in the U.S. brought to the forefront a debate among environmental scientists about whether human activities may cause a significant enough increase in the greenhouse effect to result in global warming," the report said.

"Although the four warmest years of the last century have occurred in the 1980s, most scientists agree that there is no strong evidence for a cause [and] effect relationship between the four warm years and the increased emission of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere," it added.

Asked about the report, Reck said it mischaracterized the certainty of the science.

"There was never any doubt for a minute," she said. "That really misrepresents the truth. The PR people use those kinds of weasel words to misrepresent things."

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Brulle (Robert Brulle, a researcher at Brown University) said GM and Ford "chose to support a campaign to delay or obstruct action on climate change by supporting these conservative think tanks that promulgated scientific misinformation. So what we're learning is it wasn't just the fossil fuel producers, but also the companies whose products were heavily engaged in fossil fuel use that were trying to stop action."

Ford withdrew from the GCC in 1999 following a pressure campaign from environmental groups. GM followed suit in March 2000.

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Reck, the GM scientist, left the automaker in 1992 after she was allegedly told to stop researching environmental issues.

"I always wondered whether they would try to end the research if it showed what they were doing was bad," she said. "Toward the end, they did. But for 27 years they supported it."

Reck went on to become head of the global climate change program at Argonne National Laboratory and a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of California, Davis. Now 88 years old and retired, she rarely leaves her home in Indiana due to concern about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Over the course of four phone interviews with E&E News, Reck expressed shock that severe consequences of global warming, such as the massive wildfires raging in California, have materialized in her lifetime.

"We thought that might happen 800 years from now," she said of the fires. "We had it in the very far future that these things might start to happen from climate change. So it has gone at such an accelerated rate." READ MORE