For more than a decade, students have been pleading with universities to divest from oil and gas companies. In 2019, protesters He stormed into the Harvard vs. Yale football stadium. At halftime, shout“Hey hey, ho ho! Fossil fuels must be phased out!” Hundreds of schools Many universities, including Harvard and, at least in part, Yale, have taken steps to divest, and environmental activists at many universities Next stepsWe call on schools to completely disassociate themselves from fossil fuel funding and refuse grants and other financial support.
According to New Research Activists have reason to suspect that oil money is influencing academic research, according to a paper published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal WIREs Climate Change: The first comprehensive look at the widespread ties between big oil companies and universities, uncovering hundreds of cases where fossil fuel funding may have led to conflicts of interest for researchers in the U.S., Canada, Britain and Australia.
The scale of the impact is large, involving thousands of partnerships across hundreds of universities, according to study co-author Jenny Stevens, a professor of climate justice at Maynooth University in Ireland. “We think of universities as being for the public good, advancing knowledge for a better future for us all,” Stevens said. “But I think the scale and scope of the fossil fuel industry’s influence on higher education shows that some of it is being skewed towards private sector interests and away from the public good.”
The problem goes beyond funding university research centers and academic positions: fossil fuel industry executives sit on university boards, sponsor scholarships and conferences, and seek to influence courses and curricula. Partnerships with universities give oil companies credibility, opportunities to recruit future employees, and a way to subtly steer the discussion about how to address climate change toward the solutions they want, the study finds.
The total amount of this funding is unknown as the university is unwilling to disclose the information. analysis A study published last year by the think tank Data for Progress found that Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron, Shell Oil, ConocoPhillips and Koch Industries donated at least $677 million to 27 U.S. colleges and universities between 2010 and 2020. The biggest donors were the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and George Mason University.
There’s already evidence that such ties can sway academic research: Reports published in 2009 and 2010 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and Stanford universities (all of which received significant funding from oil companies) were biased in favor of natural gas compared with independent studies. A study The paper was found to have been published in the journal Nature in 2022. Some research contracts allow oil companies to limit what research can be published and control academic boards.
One example outlined in the new study is a pipeline company. Enbridge Funds University of Calgary Business School (Before it was renamed in 2014, it was called the Enbridge Corporate Sustainability Centre.) Enbridge had the right to stop funding the Canadian research centre at any time if it was unhappy, it wanted a say in the centre’s staffing and board of directors, and it wanted executives and customers to meet with researchers.
The WIREs Climate Change study argues that the relationships oil companies have forged with universities are part of a broader effort to delay political action on global warming, a tactic that complements the industry’s history. Casting doubt on science Lobbying to block climate-friendly legislation. Fossil fuel funding tends to bias research towards industry-favored technological solutions. Carbon capture and storageStevens said they are moving away from phasing out oil and gas.
“Industry research doesn’t necessarily directly impact the integrity of any particular study,” she said, “but rather it steers academic research towards a particular response to the climate crisis, which is not transformative at all, and instead just reinforces the status quo.”
University divestment activists focus on fossil fuel profits on stolen land
University funding has long been used as a strategy by unpopular industries like pharmaceutical and junk-food companies to boost their reputations and promote research that would make their products look more favorable. In the late 1970s, a manual for industries wanting to avoid regulation recommended “co-opting” academics by hiring them or giving them “grants, etc.” The effort, it warned, “must not be so blatant that the experts themselves should not perceive their objectivity as being lost.”
Oil companies have employed this strategy for decades: a 1998 internal memo from the American Petroleum Institute, for example, advised industry groups to build relationships with scientists whose research aligned with their positions in order to build a position against climate change. Oil company BP has funded Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative for 20 years, pouring more than $2 million into the program each year. Emails discovered during congressional investigation In 2020, BP executives were filmed celebrating their “relationship with Princeton” as being “increasingly synergistic (as planned, of course).”
Anecdotes abound, but getting more information about funding from universities requires significant effort. Emily Eaton, one of the authors of the new study, asked her employer, the University of Regina, to disclose who its funders are, but was met with resistance. Winning lawsuit against Canadian university.
“It’s astonishing that fossil fuel industry funding of universities remains hidden from public view,” said Douglas Almond, an economics professor at Columbia University who has studied fossil fuel industry funding of universities. This funding could distort academic researchvia email.
Efforts to combat the influence of the fossil fuel industry at universities are expanding. About 1,000 researchers Signed the letter U.S. and UK universities have been urged to stop receiving funding from oil and gas companies. At least some have responded. Princeton University will “Exiting” 90 fossil fuel companiesEnded its relationship with Exxon (although BP continues to fund some of Exxon’s climate change efforts).
“When it comes to climate, we need more public funding that focuses on research that is in the public interest, rather than research that is clearly aligned with the interests of the private sector and extractive industries,” Stevens said.
