Big Oil’s grip on academia

Fossil fuel disinformation researcher Geoffrey Supran discusses the findings of a new report on the industry’s influence over universities’ climate initiatives.

Illustration by Tess Abbot

“Authenticating BP's commitment to low carbon.” That was the role BP’s public relations firm envisioned for Princeton University as a “partner” for the oil giant, as described in an internal 2017 strategy memo, even as the company would go on to increase fossil fuel production in the years to come. BP still sponsors Princeton’s Climate Mitigation Initiative seven years later. 

That episode is just one example of how oil and gas companies have rooted themselves in universities’ climate and energy programs to greenwash their reputations and delay the transition to renewables, according to a study published last week in the peer-reviewed journal WIREs Climate Change. 

Researchers found hundreds of instances of conflicts of interest between the fossil fuel industry and academic institutions across the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and beyond — from companies heavily funding university research to representatives sitting on university boards, sponsoring scholarships, lectures, and academic posts, and advising curricula. Through that influence, the industry has helped steer research and conversations about climate solutions toward a focus on maintaining a role for oil and gas. 

Yet these ties have been a vastly “under-researched vehicle of climate obstruction by the fossil fuel industry,” with only seven out of 14,000 articles about academic conflicts of interest from the past two decades focusing on Big Oil, the first-of-its-kind literature review found.

Geoffrey Supran, one of the study’s authors and an associate professor and director of the Climate Accountability Lab at the University of Miami, testified at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on climate disinformation in May, before lawmakers referred their investigation of oil companies to the Department of Justice. Supran and his colleagues say their research adds heft to legal and political investigations into the industry’s campaigns to obstruct climate action. Now, they call for more scholars to “engage urgently” on the topic of Big Oil’s relationships with universities.

I spoke with Supran about the new findings — and what can be done. Our interview, edited for length and clarity, is below.

---

You started researching this relationship between the fossil fuel industry and universities in 2017 — back then, it felt like the focus was primarily on divestment. Has the conversation around this issue changed since then, and what prompted this report? 

I think that the tide is turning on this topic. At that point, the notion of academics speaking out against oil industry funding felt quite a bit more fringe. There has been a shift of intensity in climate activism worldwide that I think has normalized to some extent these kinds of calls for universities to take action. I’d say it’s partly thanks to the organizing of primarily students, for example at Campus Climate Network, who through petitions and open letters and divestment campaigns diversifying into also these dissociation campaigns, created more breathing room for academics to speak about this topic.

This study is the first in a series of studies that my Lab will be publishing over the coming year on this topic. Those take an increasingly empirical and quantitative approach to addressing this issue. They say that the first step to solving a problem is recognizing that there is one. It felt like an important first step to see what’s already known, in order to prioritize where we should go from here. Planting a flag in the sand in terms of codifying this as an important and formal topic of research, and calling for more research. 

Some institutions, even in response to this study, have claimed that oil industry funders have no control over their research. How is it possible to show that these ties with industry are actually having an impact?

[The impacts have] already been proven when it comes to other industries that produce harmful or deadly products. There’s nothing materially different here: we have a self-interested industry funding to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars academic institutions that are always strapped for cash, and you have humans — scientists — who are vulnerable to conflicts of interest and a potential biasing effect. It’s frankly unscientific for scientific institutions to ignore the conflicts of interest that already exist and to simply swat all these concerns away. 

In 2022 [researchers] statistically proved that oil industry funding had a biasing effect on the sentiment of university center reports about natural gas. I'd like to see a university administrator argue with that. If people can come up with innovative ways to prove those biasing effects that will be really powerful, and in general we should look to the tobacco, pharmaceutical, and food literature for blueprints on how to do these things.

There are also more qualitative ways to demonstrate it — like an oil company touting its funding relationships with a university in order to green its image publicly or in response to accusations of its history of climate malfeasance. That’s happening completely out of the control of the university — it doesn’t matter whether the contractual relationship is benign, it doesn’t change the fact that the relationship is being weaponized by the oil company. This is a complicated topic, but certainly one that requires more scrutiny. 

Right now, energy and climate journals are the Wild West compared to medical journals and public health journals when it comes to disclosing conflicts of interest. A first step that universities could take to help us investigate the potential impacts of these relationships would be to increase its transparency like we talk about in the report. It’s hard to know whether a contract is problematic when the contract is not publicly available, and the funder has not been disclosed on any public website… they’re not making it easy for us to answer that question, but all the current evidence puts the burden of proof on the universities. 

How has the influence of other industries like tobacco and pharmaceuticals over academia been addressed, if it has, and what does that tell us about addressing the fossil fuel conflicts of interest?

When it comes to funding by tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, medical professionals and academic leaders have for decades recognized those conflicts of interest. There was a period during which lots of studies were conducted to measure the effects of those conflicts of interest, and there does actually appear to be a response to the evidence that these ties are causing bias. Part of the reason we’re pursuing all this research is to establish a similar academic evidence basis on which action can be taken. Activism also usually plays a central role, and amongst those studies a number of scholars were quite passionately calling for policy measures to be implemented. 

It’s basically reinventing the wheel at this point — we should not have to publish the literally tens of thousands of academic papers that were published concerning tobacco and pharmaceutical funding in order to arrive at the same conclusion — the climate crisis doesn’t give us time for that. In part we wrote this literature review to make the point that there’s plenty of precedent for taking action in these kinds of situations. But our forthcoming work does make clearer and clearer the vast extent of the fossil fuel industry’s ties to academia, and hopefully that will help to make the case further.  

In one of our forthcoming studies, we identify different approaches that could be applied from the past to fossil fuel industry induced conflicts of interest. They broadly range all the way from recognizing the problem to managing the conflict. You can have things like conflict of interest training for scientists. You can have more enforced disclosure policies. Should universities have more stringent conditions on which funders they are willing to do business with, or should they have stricter policies on the conditions that they permit in the contracts? We found cases of sponsorship contracts where oil companies get to decide which projects get funded. That seems like overreach by the oil industry into how scholarship is being done. There are a bunch of these measures and they've all been taken when it comes to junk food, pharmaceuticals, tobacco and so on. In general, none of them have been applied to fossil fuel funding yet.

Are there particular types of schools that are most likely to be influenced by the fossil fuel industry? 

I can only answer this qualitatively for now, but some of our ongoing research as well as anecdotal insights from the literature review suggest that there are a couple of different types of universities that are targeted by the oil industry. One type is the East and West Coast academic elites, the Ivy Leagues and so on that have an international influence on climate policy and carry a heavy weight that the companies can leverage through association to green their image. Then you have heartland state universities, often more local, often in the backyard of the oil companies themselves. And there the strategy appears to be twofold — again, legitimize themselves and build social license in their backyard communities, and foster a talent pool from which to recruit. So exactly how this dynamic plays out, our ongoing research is still examining. 

We’re still seeing Democrats — including President Biden and Vice President Harris — using “all of the above” energy framing, saying we can both continue producing fossil fuels while supporting a renewable energy transition, even while international scientific bodies say we have to stop using fossil fuels to avoid the most catastrophic climate impacts. Do you think the industry’s role at universities helped inform that narrative and make it a politically popular one? 

Yeah, absolutely. The “all of the above” [framing] was an explicit strategy of BP — they developed that narrative years before politicians like Obama picked it up. They ran ads with pictures of natural gas next to renewables, conflating them. The fact that a few years later you had the oil industry also funding the MIT Energy Initiative’s “The Future of Natural Gas” report that was framing natural gas as “a bridge to a low carbon future” — all these different talking points were paired together in the Obama administration’s rhetoric on climate and energy. 

I think you see the fingerprints of industry-funded research all over these common tropes and that’s exactly the kind of thing I was talking about in terms of potentially being able to trace ties from early funded research to ultimate policy implications. All the industry-funded research over the last few decades that normalized [carbon capture and storage] and “negative emissions” technologies that helped legitimize delayed action and over-reliance on these false solutions.

In the study you encourage universities to avoid becoming pawns for the oil and gas industry. What about students and academics — what can they do to guard against this influence?

The very simple answer is speak out. And one can do so in many ways — one is to get involved in the Campus Climate Network. Student led organizing, whether that be getting involved in the international organization or in setting up your own local university campaign. For the record, I should mention that I'm on the advisory board of CCN. 

Scholars, students, and faculty, as members of the university, have unique firsthand insight at the grassroots level into what’s going on at their institution. And that information is powerful, especially when it’s pooled with similar insights from their peers at different universities around the country and around the world. So another answer to your question would be to get in touch with me and my colleagues or CCN because we are setting up frameworks to gather this information and build up the evidentiary basis that universities seem to need to take action on this.

The much more individual way is to educate themselves as scientists about the science of conflicts of interest and have their eyes open. It takes a while for the silly questions to be asked and answered over and over, and then action can begin.

---