Most people, in considering the relevance of history to their lives, are likely familiar with George Santayana’s aphorism from his 1905 book, The Life of Reason: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” By studying documents and primary sources, historians and others can discover what people in the past knew and, in hindsight, the consequences their action or inaction on their knowledge have in the present. This is particularly important for making powerful institutions, and the people who run them, accountable for their actions. Indeed, ignoring, omitting or distorting the past, despite the availability of primary sources proving that it caused a current problem, is what historians call “ahistorical.”
The Stanford president’s recent report on the Committee on Funding for Energy Research and Education, which Humanities and Sciences Dean Debra Satz and former Stanford Law School Dean Paul Brest presented to the Stanford community on Sept. 23, epitomizes the meaning of ahistorical. It fails to address the publicly available documentation irrefutably proving that the fossil fuel industry knew its core business model posed an existential risk to a livable climate as far back as the late 1950s. It fails to address the well-documented ways in which the fossil fuel industry’s massive public relations campaigns — following the playbook of the tobacco industry — deliberately and consistently distorted and undermined climate science and in fact continues to do so through the present. It fails to address, most egregiously, the way this industry has long attacked not only climate science but also the science determining the lethality of air pollution from burning fossil fuels. For example, a 2021 Harvard School of Public Health Study concluded that fossil fuel pollution caused 1/5 of all premature deaths worldwide – nearly 9 million people — in 2018. To put that staggering figure into perspective, no armed conflicts today, even those that have been judged genocidal in intent or impact, have killed so many people year after year.
Ignoring this inconvenient history, the report asserts: “In the past, fossil fuel energy has spurred economic growth, lifted communities and nations out of poverty and enabled the quality of life many of us enjoy. And even today, it provides much-needed means for economic prosperity and growth.” It provides no further qualification or context, and in the process, raises far more questions than answers. How do you define prosperity, and therefore, who prospered? Did the millions of enslaved Black people and then sharecroppers under Jim Crow prosper? Their forced labor was indispensable to the cotton textile industry, primarily powered by fossil fuels for decades after 1850. Did Native Americans prosper? Along with their physical and cultural genocide, their lands were forcibly seized for commercial uses indispensable to industrialization.
Did all the peoples of the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America – most of the global population – prosper? Their colonization underpinned Euro-American industrialization for centuries, in turn preventing many of them from industrializing or even de-industrializing them. And even if industrialization eventually made many more people “prosperous” by the late twentieth century, mainly in Western Europe, North America and East Asia, was it thanks to a dirty energy source that must be extracted from the ground at an enormous environmental and social cost? Or was it thanks to working people everywhere organizing and demanding a fair share of industry profits through often protracted and bloody struggles? And don’t stark class, racial and gender disparities in the distribution of fossil-fueled growth remain?
The other assumption the report makes is that fossil fuels were inevitable for industrialization in the first place, which overlooks historical contingency. For example, were it not for the choices that influential people made, might waterpower have continued as the primary and cheaper energy source over more expensive coal-fired steam for British and New England textile mills after 1850? Might electrified transportation in the United States have remained competitive with internal combustion engine cars, given that battery-powered cars comprised 1/3 of the early U.S. market until Henry Ford’s mass-produced Model T, which he chose to make gas-powered over a potentially viable battery alternative in the 1900s and 1910s?
Not only does the report fail to address any of these questions, but for a brief mention in the anonymous comments section critical of Stanford’s “Industrial Affiliates Program,” it also wholly ignores environmental justice. This is perplexing, for the Doerr School has committed to establishing a center for environmental justice after absorbing the pre-existing, flourishing Environmental Justice minor and its associated programming.
The Doerr School’s website states, “We recognize the critical importance of ensuring that all people have equal access to the benefits of a clean and healthy environment.” Nothing in the past and present plans of the fossil fuel industry, which is hellbent on protecting its unsustainable business model indefinitely, is compatible with this statement.
Returning to the claim that fossil fuels provide the much-needed means for “growth and prosperity,” the report does not mention that most governmental and international GDP statistics do not account for the environmental costs of choosing these means. Instead, this choice results in euphemistically called “externalities,” which the fossil fuel industry has never paid for. This extreme environmental injustice is literally and figuratively fueling the growing and impressive wave of lawsuits against the industry and governments who do their bidding worldwide — a process that has only begun and has already notched several significant victories.
In short, the report reduces the complex historical origins and processes of the existential global climate crisis to a simple and highly subjective economic cost-benefit calculation, wherein the benefits of fossil fuel use are assumed to have outweighed the costs in the past. Although the report acknowledges that renewable energy is now cost-competitive at scale with, and gradually displacing, fossil fuels, it does not mention that this remarkable economic and technological breakthrough has happened despite the fossil fuel industry’s historical and ongoing lobbying and PR campaigns against government policies that have enabled this transition. In other words, as the available historical documentation demonstrates, the industry has long delayed this energy transition to protect its core business model, callously indifferent to the enormous unaccounted-for climate and public health costs it has wrought.
If the committee had genuinely engaged with this substantial historical evidence, it would have refuted the argument that Stanford’s dissociating and divesting from the fossil fuel industry constitutes taking a social and political stance, which it is barred from doing. History reveals the opposite: by continuing to associate with and invest in this rogue industry, Stanford is not only showing the world that it cannot remember the past and is therefore condemned to repeat it, but also taking a radical social and political stance against the current and future well-being and freedom of all living beings on Earth, including Stanford’s students, staff and faculty.
Mikael Wolfe is an associate professor of history at Stanford University.