For more than a decade, students have been begging the university to stop investing in oil and gas companies. In 2019, protesters He stormed the Harvard-Yale football game field. At halftime, Shout out“Hey hey, ho ho! Fossil fuels must go!” Hundreds of schools Now that steps have been taken to divest (including from Harvard and at least some from Yale), many campus climate activists are doing the same. Next Steps: Urge schools to completely sever their ties to fossil fuel funding and reject grants and other funding.
According to New research In a paper published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal WIREs Climate Change, the activists say there is good reason to suspect that oil money can influence academic research. It is the first comprehensive look at the wide-ranging relationship between Big Oil and universities, uncovering hundreds of instances where fossil fuel funding may have created conflicts of interest for researchers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia.
The scale of the impact is enormous, with thousands of partnerships across hundreds of universities, according to Jenny Stevens, a climate justice professor at Maynooth University in Ireland and a co-author of the paper. “We think of universities as being a public good, advancing knowledge for a better future for all of us,” Stevens said. “On the other hand, the scale and scope of the fossil fuel industry’s influence on higher education shows that some of it is being distorted to private-sector benefit and diverted from the public good.”
The problem goes beyond funding university research centers and academic positions. Fossil fuel industry executives sit on school boards, sponsor scholarships and conferences, and try to influence courses and curricula. The study shows that by partnering with universities, oil companies gain credibility, a chance to recruit future employees, and a way to subtly guide the conversation about how to address climate change as a preferred solution.
The full extent of this funding remains unknown, as universities are reluctant to disclose this information. analyze According to data released last year by the think tank Data for Progress, ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell Oil, ConocoPhillips and Koch Industries have donated at least $677 million to 27 U.S. colleges and universities between 2010 and 2020. The top recipients were the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and George Mason University.
There is already evidence that these relationships can sway academic research: reports published in 2009 and 2010 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and Stanford University, all of which received significant funding from oil companies, showed a bias toward natural gas compared to independent research. A study It was revealed in the journal Nature in 2022. Some research contracts allow oil companies to restrict which studies are published and give them control over academic governance boards.
One case described in the new study involved a pipeline company. Enbridge Funding for the University of Calgary’s School of Business (It was called the Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability before its name change in 2014.) Enbridge had the right to stop funding the Canada Research Centre at any time if it was unhappy with it; the company wanted to have a say in the composition of its staff and who would sit on the centre’s board; and it wanted to create opportunities for executives and customers to meet with researchers.
A study by WIREs Climate Change argues that oil companies’ ties to universities are part of a broader effort to delay political action on global warming, a tactic that complements the industry’s history. sow doubt in science And lobbying to block climate-friendly legislation. Fossil fuel funding also directs research toward industry-preferred technological solutions, such as Carbon Capture and StorageAccording to Stevens, it’s about moving away from the oil and gas phase-out.
“Industry research doesn’t necessarily have a direct impact on the integrity of a particular research study,” she said. “It focuses academic research more on a particular kind of response to the climate crisis, which is not innovative at all and actually reinforces the status quo.”
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Funding universities has long been a strategy used by unpopular industries, such as pharmaceutical and junk food companies, to improve their reputations and generate research that makes their products look more favorable. In the late 1970s, a manual for industries seeking to avoid regulation advised them to “cooperate” by hiring faculty or providing “subsidies, etc.” The manual warned that such efforts “should not be so blatant that the professionals themselves lose their objectivity.”
Oil companies have been using this strategy for decades. For example, a 1998 internal memo from the American Petroleum Institute advised building relationships with scientists whose research aligned with the trade group’s positions to build a case against climate change action. Oil company BP has funded Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative for 20 years, investing more than $2 million a year in the program. In May Emails Revealed in Congressional Investigation In 2020, a BP executive was seen celebrating the “Princeton relationship” as “growing and growing synergies (just as we had planned, of course!).”
While anecdotes abound, extracting more funding information from universities can be a Herculean task. Emily Eaton, one of the authors of the new study, said she met resistance when she asked the University of Regina, where she works, to disclose its funders, and eventually Wins lawsuit against Canadian university.
“It’s surprising how much fossil industry funding of universities has been hidden from public view,” said Douglas Almond, a Columbia University economics professor and researcher. How could this money distort academic research?By email.
Efforts to combat the influence of the fossil fuel industry are growing at universities, with nearly 1,000 researchers signed the letter Universities in the U.S. and the U.K. have been asked to stop funding from oil and gas companies. And at least some are responding. In 2022, Princeton “Divestment” from 90 fossil fuel companiesEnded its relationship with ExxonMobil (BP continues to fund some climate work).
“We need more public funding focused on climate research that is in the public interest, not research that is clearly aligned with the interests of the private sector, the mining industry,” Stevens said.
