6 Fossil Fuel Companies Donated $700 Million To 27 American Universities 2010-2020
Six fossil fuel companies funneled more than $700m in research funding to 27 universities in the US from 2010 to 2020, according to a new study. Such funding at universities that conduct climate research can shift not just research agendas, but also policy in the direction of climate solutions the industry prefers, the report’s authors argue. Those solutions typically include biofuels, carbon capture, and hydrogen, according to the research by the thinktank Data for Progress and the nonprofit group Fossil-Free Research. Oil majors also invest in public policy and economics research that favors deregulation.
“$700m is probably an absolute bare minimum,” Grace Adcox, polling analyst for Data for Progress, said. “There’s so little transparency around these gifts.” The top five schools on the list, include some that champion their climate research, like University of California at Berkeley ($154m), Stanford University ($56.6m) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($40.5m), as well as those with long-standing fossil fuel ties, like George Mason University ($64m), the largest recipient of funding from the Koch Foundation.
These schools have also long been the targets of campus divestment campaigns, with students and faculty urging administrators to pull university funds from fossil fuel companies; Berkeley fully divested in 2020, Stanford and MIT’s resistance to the idea has resulted in a student-led lawsuit.
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Wednesday’s report comes after researchers at Columbia University last year published the first peer-reviewed paper to attempt to quantify those implications. Published in the journal Nature, that paper found that research centers accepting funding from the gas industry were far more likely to embrace fossil gas as a climate solution, and to downplay the role renewable energy sources might play in the energy transition, than their non-fossil-funded counterparts. The team undertook that research, which consisted of analysis of 1,706 reports from 26 universities, in part because of the integral role a study from one of Columbia’s own industry-funded centers had played in debates about climate policy. That study, “American Gas to the Rescue?” came out in 2014.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/01/fossil-fuel-companies-donate-millions-us-universities
