https://www.chronicle.com/article/fossil-fuel-money-is-warping-climate-research

[image: Illustration of a university buiding with columns turned into
smokestacks, burning money and releasing smoke into the air]
Illustration by Wes Watson, The Chronicle; photos from iStock
Fossil-Fuel Money Is Warping Climate Research Universities must require
full funding disclosure.
The Review | Opinion

By  Craig Callender <https://www.chronicle.com/author/craig-callender>
September 29, 2022

As the effects of climate change become daily more apparent, universities
are busy declaring climate emergencies, divesting their financial assets in
fossil fuel, and pledging to meet ambitious climate goals. At the same
time, however, these institutions are accepting hundreds of millions of
dollars from the fossil-fuel industry. In a grim irony, many of the
scientists and scholars tasked with helping us survive the climate crisis
are funded by companies actively working to delay climate action.

A particularly disturbing instance of this influence is the case of
Wei-Hock (Willie) Soon, the climate change-denying
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24022015/willie-soon-too-much-ice-really-bad-polar-bears/>
Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist who has received more than $1 million in
funding from fossil-fuel companies — as well as untraceable dark money
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05042016/willie-soon-climate-change-contrarian-harvard-smithsonian-donors-trust-dark-money/>
routed though a fund with a history of supporting climate-denial groups. In
2003 Soon authored an article
<https://www.int-res.com/abstracts/cr/v23/n2/p89-110/> concluding that the
20th century is “probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climactic
period.” The article, published by the peer-reviewed journal *Climate
Research*, was the subject of a biting rejoinder from 13 climate
scientists; its publication ultimately led five of the journal’s 10 board
members to resign
<https://www.sgr.org.uk/resources/stormy-times-climate-research>.

Since then, Soon has published numerous other articles casting doubt on the
idea that human activity is driving climate change, often without disclosing
<https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html>
his funding sources. It’s hard not to suspect that fossil-fuel funding
bought specific research outcomes: In a report to one of those funders, he
describes his scientific papers as “deliverables
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1531939-foia-response-willie-soon-2012.html#document/p41/a204316>
.”

Most of the influence, however, is more subtle.

In 2011 the MIT Energy Initiative released a white paper, *The Future of
Natural Gas*, which advocated government investment in natural gas as a
“bridge to a low carbon future.” The authors — one of whom later became
secretary of energy — failed to disclose numerous ties
<https://public-accountability.org/wp-content/uploads/industry_partner_or_industry_puppet.pdf>
to industry. The Energy Institute itself was funded by ExxonMobil, Saudi
Aramco, Shell, Chevron, and other oil and gas companies — including
Schlumberger, which counts among its directors the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology’s president, L. Rafael Reif.

Yet despite these conflicts of interests, the report came to function as an
“independent” confirmation of industry’s message. In 2014, for example, it
was included among supporting documents
<https://www.energyindepth.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/HF-study-titles-and-links.pdf>
compiled by Energy in Depth — a public-relations front for the oil industry
— in a successful bid to persuade Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, to lease
mineral rights for gas drilling. And its ideas also surfaced in President
Barack Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address, which claimed that natural
gas could be a “bridge” to a clean energy future.

A more recent example is the 2022 Supreme Court decision in *West Virginia
v. EPA, *which limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to
restrict greenhouse gases. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion
references an article by Susan Dudley, director of George Washington
University’s Regulatory Studies Center. The center’s funders include
<https://www.citizen.org/article/koch-cog-rsc/> the Koch Brothers, Searle
Freedom Trust, and the ExxonMobil Foundation, all large backers of
climate-change denialism. Nowhere in the article
<https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/daedalus/downloads/Daedalus_Su21_The-Administrative-State.pdf>
is Dudley’s funding disclosed.

Such examples are glimpses into a careful strategy of sowing doubt. In the
late 1990s, the American Petroleum Institute developed a
multimillion-dollar plan to derail government action on climate change by
playing up the notion that the science remained “uncertain.” According to a
1998 memo
<https://www.climatefiles.com/trade-group/american-petroleum-institute/1998-global-climate-science-communications-team-action-plan/>,
the program’s goal was “undercutting the ‘prevailing scientific wisdom’” in
part by providing research funding for projects that would offer “a
complete scientific critique” of the research and conclusions” of the
United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We are now
witnessing the fruits of that project.

In the decades since, API members and allies have funneled billions of
dollars into academic research. Scholarly articles
<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0160597619879191> as well as
investigative reports from student groups at Cambridge
<http://zerocarbonsoc.soc.srcf.net/inform/dismantling-the-fossil-fuel-university/>,
George Washington
<https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5400da69e4b0cb1fd47c9077/t/61966da8e13bcf5c62c8175e/1637248425327/RSC+Report(1).pdf>,
Harvard
<http://www.divestharvard.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/BeyondTheEndowmentFFDH.pdf>,
Oxford
<https://oxfordunifossilfree.wordpress.com/report-money-people-reputation/>,
Princeton,
<https://truthout.org/articles/the-uss-best-university-fuels-the-climate-crisis-princeton-must-divest/>
and Stanford
<https://stanforddaily.com/2022/05/18/from-the-community-open-letter-doerr-school-of-sustainability-should-cut-ties-with-the-fossil-fuel-industry/>
detail the jaw-dropping sums at stake. The Energy Biosciences Institute,
for example — a research collaboration of three public research
institutions — began with a *half billion*-dollar gift from British
Petroleum.

What does this money buy fossil-fuel companies? A better reputation? Yes. A
chance at intentionally or unintentionally biasing research outcomes? Yes.
But it does much more. In essence, the millions of dollars create a kind of
shadow academic world, one woven inextricably into the university. It
secures favorable white papers, journals, societies, public-policy
comments, courtroom testimony, and front groups that attack what the
industry sees as damaging science.

It also distorts the research landscape. Money follows research but
research also follows money. By pouring millions of dollars into
carbon-capture technology — unproven technology that would remove carbon
dioxide from the air, but which does not demand emissions reductions —
fossil-fuel companies are bending research in their favor. The skewed
landscape helped justify putting more money into carbon capture than
renewables in the recent 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

We’ve seen this strategy before. By the 1950s, tobacco companies knew that
their products were addictive and lethal; the evidence linking smoking to
lung cancer was incontrovertible. They could not beat the science, so they
co-opted it. In what the historian Allan Brandt described
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/> as a “public
relations masterstroke,” the industry argued that more research was
necessary to fully understand cigarettes’ effects — and then poured money
into biomedical research, enlisting the “support and dependence” of
university scientists. The strategy worked. Despite killing an estimated
100 million people in the 20th century, Big Tobacco delayed regulation and
even benefited from public subsidies for decades, reaping billions in
profits.

The vastly larger fossil-fuel industry is now following the same playbook.
This time the stakes are even higher.

There are essentially two ways to try to fix this mess: separation and
sunshine. Separation aims to disentangle fossil-fuel funding from academe
altogether. Sunshine allows industry funding, but requires transparency.

The separation approach is gaining momentum. This year more than 750
academics signed a letter <https://fossilfreeresearch.com/letter/> calling
for a ban on fossil-fuel money for climate research. The push, organized by
the group Fossil Free Research, was widely covered by news
<https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/oil-gas-university-greenwashing/>
organizations
<https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/06/13/science/universities-face-mounting-pressure-stop-taking-fossil-fuel-funds/>
in both the U.S.
<https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-04-03/climate-change-research-funding-fossil-fuels>
and Britain
<https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/mar/21/universities-must-reject-fossil-fuel-cash-for-climate-research-say-academics?>.
Both the University of Cambridge
<https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/24138> and Brown
University
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/10KH47cM1eygwFIYCHjTPVmfpjVHPg-C1/view>
are discussing different ways of cutting ties.

While I enthusiastically support disentangling academe from fossil-fuel
influence, imposing a ban is challenging. Two decades ago, a number of
colleges explored adopting outright bans on tobacco funding for medical
research — but only about a dozen managed to do so. Faculty members at many
institutions argued that restricting funding violated their academic
freedom, and in 2003 the American Association of University Professors
agreed. In 2007 a University of California Academic Senate committee voted
43 to 4 against a tobacco ban, citing alleged “grave issues of academic
freedom.”

Bans are also tricky to write and police. Industry partnerships are vital
to universities, so one needs to identify the target very clearly. What is
“the fossil fuel industry”? Is a company that derived 15 percent of its
profits in 2020 a “fossil fuel company”? The group No Fossil Fuel Money
maintains a list of roughly 14,000 fossil-fuel companies. Slightly
different criteria lead to very different results.

Both obstacles can be overcome. But since fossil-fuel influence dwarfs
tobacco influence, we should expect that bans on fossil-fuel funding will
be correspondingly harder to adopt. So we must also pursue the path of
sunshine, making industry funding transparent.

Right now, research funding is mostly hidden. We owe it to the public to
open the curtain. Universities should require researchers to disclose
publicly all funding sources from the past five years for all their
research products. They should name both the funder and amount; nothing
more, nothing less. Research products include articles, government
comments, publications, presentations, newspaper op-eds, white papers, news
releases, courtroom testimony, and more — wherever a researcher can be
reasonably understood to be speaking as an expert.

This straightforward approach sidesteps the dreaded slippery-slope
reaction: Why target fossil fuels? What about other misbehaving industries
— and who decides what counts as misbehaving anyway?

Public comments to the EPA on fancy university letterhead would carry
disclosure of fossil-fuel ties; so would the white paper peddled by
industry; so would the article read by the judge.

There is an important point here. Big-tech companies are also pouring money
into universities. Google provides financial support, often undisclosed, to
researchers whose work dovetails with the company’s positions on regulation
and consumer privacy. Monsanto-funded
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048733321000925>
studies of the weedkiller glyphosate have shaped EPA policy
<https://theintercept.com/2015/11/03/epa-used-monsanto-funded-research/>.
The Chinese telecom company Huawei’s funding of U.S. researchers has raised
concerns about foreign government influence; several elite American
universities have banned
<https://www.latimes.com/business/la-na-pol-universities-ban-huawei-funding-donations-20190321-story.html>
such support. Even my little field, philosophy
<https://thebaffler.com/salvos/academe-on-the-auction-block-johnson>, is
infiltrated by Koch funding
<https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-new-hire-a-koch-grant-and-a-department-in-crisis>.
The beauty of my proposal is that we don’t single anyone out and no one
decides who is misbehaving — everyone discloses everything.

Focusing on public disclosure also avoids the academic-freedom issues that
dogged universities attempting to ban tobacco money. Researchers can
continue to pursue whatever questions they please, with no restrictions on
funding. In fact, by protecting research independence, transparency
enhances our academic freedom — as the AAUP recognized in a 2014 report
<https://www.aaup.org/file/Academy-Industry%252520Relationships_0.pdf>.

Many people are surprised that public disclosure isn’t already mandatory.
In fact, I’m not aware of a single university in the U.S. that insists on
publicly disclosing all research funding. Due to scandals in biomedicine,
many journals, conferences, and external funders in that field now demand
public disclosure. Some universities police financial conflicts of
interest, such as owning stock in the company funding you. A handful of
institutions even make these financial conflicts public. But university
rules are entirely reactive, which creates a byzantine maze of regulations.
Nowhere is all funding transparent.

Implementation would be straightforward. Almost all universities in the
U.S. already demand that employees internally disclose external funding;
that is part of running a grant through a university. Universities simply
need to take that private spreadsheet and make it a public registry,
perhaps modeled on the 2010 Sunshine Act, which mandates that doctors
publicly report gifts and payments from the medical industry. With a few
tweaks to ethics rules, a university can make public disclosure an expected
practice.

Faculty members at Harvard called for
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r_G47pETTmImr1oIVTCwDJd59spcGbLH/view>
climate-funding transparency in 2019, and my own institution, the
University of California at San Diego, is discussing a similar proposal
<https://senate.ucsd.edu/current-affairs/issues-under-review/disclosure-of-fossil-fuel-industry-funding/>.
If adopted by colleges and universities worldwide, such measures would
allow scholars, policy makers, and the public to identify previously
invisible conflicts of interest. Public comments to the EPA on fancy
university letterhead would carry disclosure of fossil-fuel ties; so would
the white paper peddled by industry; so would the article read by the
judge. The world created by the tobacco strategy would come out of the
shadows, and we could more readily identify the distortions in the research
landscape caused by the weight of fossil-fuel support.
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Craig Callender <https://www.chronicle.com/author/craig-callender>
Craig Callender is a professor of philosophy and co-director of the
Institute for Practical Ethics at the University of California at San
Diego, where he also serves on the university’s Committee on Campus Climate
Change.