For more than a decade, students have been begging their universities to stop investing in oil and gas companies. In 2019, protesters stormed the field of a Harvard-Yale football game at break time, shout“Hey hey, ho ho! Fossil fuels have to go!” Hundreds of schools have now taken steps to opt out (including Harvard and, at least in part, Yale), and many campus climate activists are moving to the next phase: calling on schools to completely end their ties to fossil fuel money, rejecting grants and other funding.
According to a new study Published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal WIREs Climate Change, these activists have good reason to suspect that oil money can influence academic research. It is the first comprehensive look at the extensive ties between Big Oil and universities, uncovering hundreds of cases where fossil fuel funding may have led to conflicts of interest for researchers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.
The scale of influence is vast, involving thousands of partnerships at hundreds of universities, according to Jennie Stephens, a co-author of the paper and 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,” Stephens said. “While I think the scale and scope of the influence of the fossil fuel industry on higher education shows that some of it is being distorted towards private sector interests, and away from the public interest.”
The problem extends beyond the funding of university research centers and academic posts. Executives from the fossil fuel industry sit on school boards, sponsor scholarships and conferences, and seek to influence courses and curricula. By partnering with universities, oil companies gain credibility, chances to recruit future employees, and a way to subtly steer the conversation about how to address climate change toward their preferred solutions, the study shows.
Although the full extent of this funding remains unknown, as universities are reluctant to disclose that information, analysis of the think tank Data for Progress found last year that Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron, Shell Oil, ConocoPhillips and Koch Industries donated at least $677 million to 27 American universities from 2010 to 2020. The largest recipients identified were the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and George Mason University.
There is already evidence that such relationships can sway the direction of academic studies. Reports published in 2009 and 2010 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and Stanford University – all of which received significant funding from oil companies – were biased in favor of natural gas compared to independent research, one study published in the journal Nature in 2022 found. Some research contracts allow oil companies to limit what research is published and give them control over academic governing boards.
One case detailed in the new study was the pipeline company Enbridge’s funding of the University of Calgary’s business school (called the Enbridge Center for Corporate Sustainability before it was renamed in 2014). Enbridge had the right to stop funding the Canadian research center at any time if it was dissatisfied, and the company sought to have a say in staffing and who sat on the center’s board, as well as creating opportunities for its managers and customers to with researchers.
The study in WIRE’s Climate Change makes the case that the relationships oil companies have forged with universities are part of a broader effort to delay political action on global warming, a tactic the industry’s history of cast doubt on the science and lobbying to prevent climate-friendly legislation. Fossil fuel funding also tends to shift research towards the industry’s preferred technological solutions, such as carbon capture and storageand away from the phasing out of oil and gas, according to Stephens.
“The industry research does not necessarily have a direct impact on the integrity of specific research studies,” she said. “It’s more about orienting academic research towards certain kinds of responses to the climate crisis, which really aren’t transformative at all, and it actually reinforces the status quo.”
Funding universities has long been a strategy for unpopular industries, such as pharmaceuticals and junk food companies, to improve their reputations and help generate research that casts their products in a more favorable light. In the late 1970s, a manual for industries hoping to avoid regulation advised “co-opting” academics, either by hiring them or giving them “grants and the like”. It warned that the effort “must not be too blatant, because the experts themselves must not admit that they have lost their objectivity.”
Oil companies have been using the strategy for decades. An internal memo from the American Petroleum Institute in 1998, for example, advised building relationships with scientists whose research aligns with the trade group’s position to build a case against climate action. The oil company BP has funded Princeton University’s carbon mitigation initiative for two decades, often bringing more than $2 million into the program each year. In May, an email uncovered in a congressional investigation showed a BP executive in 2020 celebrating the “Princeton relationship” as “becoming increasingly synergistic (as, of course, we planned!).”
While anecdotes abound, it can take intense effort to seek out more funding information from universities. One of the authors of the new study, Emily Eaton, faced resistance when she asked the University of Regina, where she works, to disclose its funders, and eventually wins a lawsuit against the Canadian university.
“It’s surprising to me how fossil industry funding of universities remains shrouded from the public eye,” said Douglas Almond, a professor of economics at Columbia University who studied. how this money can distort academic researchin an email.
There are growing efforts to fight the fossil fuel industry’s influence at universities. Almost 1,000 researchers have signed a letter asking universities in the US and UK to stop accepting funding from oil and gas companies. And at least some universities are responding. In 2022, Princeton voted “dissociate” from 90 fossil fuel companiesending a relationship with Exxon (although BP continues to fund some of its climate work).
“We really need more public funding that focuses on research for the public interest when it comes to climate, not research that is clearly aligned with the interests of a private sector, extractive industry,” Stephens said.
