What was the environmental impact of the booming petroleum industry? It looked minimal from the vantage point of most political observers. The exception was that of the environmentalists who pointed out that the oil would generate airborne acid rain that was damaging to the environment. The question of how to deal with acid rain turned into a formative environmental debate as the underlying question addressed the future of an oil-driven industrialization of Norway. How one viewed the petroleum industry was dependant upon which rationality and whose knowledge one trusted in visioning the best future for the nation and the world. The work of the geologist Ivan Th. Rosenqvist undermined the efforts of the Minister of the Environment Gro Harlem Brundtland to halt European industrial pollution of sulfuric acid, some of which ended up as acid rain in Norway. In the 1970s, his research made him an anti-environmentalist in the eyes of his opponents. Yet he claimed he cared for nature and that his scientific research was in the world’s best interest. His alleged anti-environmentalism should be understood within the context of competing socialist styles of reasoning as well as the disunities of sciences.