How Big Oil’s Big Money Is Affecting Climate Research

For more than a decade, students have been pleading with their universities to stop investing in oil and gas companies. In 2019, protesters stormed the Harvard-Yale football game at halftime, shouting, “Hey, hey, ho ho! Fossil fuels have got to go!” Hundreds of schools have already taken steps to divest (including Harvard and, at least in part, Yale), and many campus climate activists are moving on to the next phase: calling on schools to cut ties with fossil fuel money altogether, rejecting grants and other funding.

These activists have reason to suspect that oil money may be influencing scientific research, according to a new study published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal WIREs Climate Change. It’s the first comprehensive look at the extensive ties between Big Oil and universities, revealing 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 the influence is vast, involving thousands of partnerships across 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, developing knowledge for a better future for all of us,” Stephens said. “Whereas I think the scale and scope of the fossil fuel industry’s influence on higher education shows that some of that is being skewed toward private sector interests and away from the public interest.”

The problem goes beyond funding university research centers and academic positions. Fossil-fuel industry executives sit on school boards, sponsor scholarships and conferences, and seek to influence courses and curricula. By forming partnerships with universities, oil companies gain credibility, a chance to recruit future workers and a way to subtly steer the conversation about how to address climate change toward their preferred solutions, the study shows.

While the full scale of this funding remains unknown because universities are reluctant to disclose such information, an analysis by the think tank Data for Progress last year found that Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron, Shell Oil, ConocoPhillips and Koch Industries gave at least $677 million to 27 U.S. universities between 2010 and 2020. The largest identified recipients were the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and George Mason University.

There’s already evidence that such relationships can influence the direction of academic research. Reports published in 2009 and 2010 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and Stanford University—all of which have received significant funding from oil companies—were biased in favor of natural gas compared with independent research, one study published in the journal Nature in 2022 found. Some research contracts allow oil companies to limit the scope of published research and give them control over the governing boards of universities.

One case described in the new study was pipeline company Enbridge’s funding of the University of Calgary’s business school (called the Enbridge Centre 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 unhappy, and the company wanted to have influence over the center’s staffing and board membership, as well as create opportunities for its executives and customers to meet with researchers.

A Climate Change study published in the journal WIRE argues that the relationships that 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 of sowing doubt about science and lobbying to prevent climate-friendly regulations. Fossil fuel funding also tends to tilt research toward industry-favored technological solutions, such as carbon capture and storageand moving away from oil and gas, according to Stephens.

“Industry research doesn’t necessarily directly impact the integrity of specific scientific studies,” she said. “It’s more of a steering of academic research toward certain kinds of responses to the climate crisis that aren’t really transformative at all, and are actually reinforcing 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 presents their products in a more favorable light. In the late 1970s, a handbook for industries seeking to avoid regulation recommended “co-opting” academics, either by hiring them or giving them “fellowships and the like.” It warned that this effort “must not be too flashy, lest the experts themselves admit that they have lost their objectivity.”

Oil companies have been using this strategy for decades. For example, a 1998 internal American Petroleum Institute memo advised building relationships with scientists whose research aligned with the trade group’s positions to build a case against climate action. Oil company BP has funded Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative for two decades, often giving the program more than $2 million a year. In May, an email revealed in a congressional investigation showed that in 2020, a BP executive celebrated the “Princeton relationship” as “becoming increasingly synergistic (of course we planned to!).”

While anecdotal evidence is common, extracting more funding information from universities can take a lot of work. One of the authors of the new study, Emily Eaton, encountered resistance when she asked the University of Regina, where she works, to disclose its funders and ultimately won a lawsuit against the Canadian university.

“It’s surprising to me how much fossil fuel industry funding of universities remains hidden from the public,” Douglas Almond, an economics professor at Columbia University who has studied how that money can distort scientific research, said in an email.

There’s a growing effort to combat the fossil fuel industry’s influence on universities. Nearly 1,000 researchers have signed a letter calling on universities in the U.S. and U.K. to stop accepting funding from oil and gas companies. And at least some universities are responding. In 2022, Princeton voted to “divest” from 90 fossil fuel companies, ending its partnership with Exxon (though BP continues to fund some of its climate work).

“We really need more public funding that focuses on climate research that serves the public good, not research that is clearly aligned with the interests of the private sector, the extractive industry,” Stephens said.

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