| This dissertation examines the way in which engineers and technical managers in the U.S. petroleum industry integrated pollution concerns into the general technological front they sought to advance in the period 1921 to 1981. In general, for approximately thirty years following the Oil Pollution Act of 1924, conservationist efforts to increase efficiency and reduce waste succeeded in reducing the proportion of material discharged through leaks, spills, and process wastes experienced during the extraction, transportation, and refining of petroleum. This success reinforced the notion that pollution was simply a symptom of inefficiency and that advances in technology would inevitably reduce pollution-causing discharges to a point below which they represented a nuisance. Despite continued short-term, problems with pollution, the conservationist ideal of efficiency seemed to be the only guiding ethic necessary in the long term.;In the 1950s and 1960s, the scale of the petroleum industry continued to increase as economic incentives to reduce the level of pollution-causing discharges dwindled. When conservationist ideals proved unable to address the new concerns that emerged, discussions of socially defined measures of environmental quality became more relevant, eventually contributing to the formation of the basic legislative and administrative framework on which current environmental regulations are based. However, the pace at which engineers and technical managers in the U.S. petroleum industry integrated the constraints represented by these regulations into their technological front depended on the extent to which they reached consensus with regulators on how to measure, monitor, and enforce the quantity or activity being constrained. |
