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.
Asked about the new research, several universities described measures they had taken to mitigate concerns, or pointed to more recent reductions in accepting donations.
The report includes a poll indicating that a majority (67%) of both college-educated and non-college-educated voters agree with the statement: “Colleges and universities studying the impacts of climate change and sustainability should refuse donations from fossil fuel companies so they can remain unbiased in their research.”
The study was created from publicly available data, including tax-form 990s from fossil fuel company foundations, annual reports from both universities and oil companies, and press releases or media coverage about big new donations. It’s an imperfect approach, but it is enough to give the public some hint of how much money fossil fuel companies are investing in research that has a real impact on policy.
“These research projects have real-life implications – for example a lot of the fossil fuel-funded research has re-centered natural gas in the conversation about renewables,” Bella Kumar, lead author of the Data for Progress report, said.
In response to the research, Dan Mogulof, assistant vice-chancellor at Berkeley, sent the Guardian a full accounting of the university’s fossil fuel donations, which he said represent less than 1% of its total research funding.
Stanford spokesperson Mara Vandlik said: “It’s unclear how these numbers were calculated as we do not share this information publicly,” adding that the university has formed a committee to review the question of fossil fuel funding of research.
“We recognize this is an impassioned topic for members in our community and the university is approaching this matter with the seriousness and rigor it deserves,” Vandlik said.
“Our research reports are the work of MIT faculty, staff and students,” the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) said in a statement. “The funders, whether they are foundations or MITEI members, have no control over the content of the reports – no approval or rejection, no opportunity to accept or reject any findings.”
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.
“It was about the benefits of American gas production and LNG to global geopolitical considerations in eastern Europe, and Ukraine specifically,” the report’s lead author Douglas Almond said. “And it got a lot of press attention and I saw it being cited by energy advocacy groups and what was startling to me about that is it was referred to as ‘the Columbia University report,’ and there was no mention of funding.”
The paper was also cited in various congressional hearings about whether or not to lift the US export ban for oil and gas in 2015 (which the federal government did ultimately do).
‘There needs to be full disclosure’
Some schools are taking far more fossil fuel research funding than others, and some are undoubtedly receiving far more fossil fuel research funding than what’s included in the new research published Wednesday, while others may be taking less now than they were last decade.
University of California at Berkeley, for example, is near the top of the list with $108m in fossil fuel research funding from 2010 to 2020, but says it’s now receiving less than $10m a year from fossil fuel companies, which is less than a quarter of a percent of its research funding.
“It’s worth asking why take fossil fuel money at all if they don’t really need it?” Ilana Cohen, co-founder of Fossil Free Research said.
Cohen points to Stanford University’s recently announced Doer School of Sustainability as another example. “Stanford got a $1bn gift for the Doer School from an individual. And yet they’re still very deliberately choosing to maintain relationships with top oil and gas majors. Why?”
Some researchers argue that partnerships with the oil majors help keep their work relevant to the real world. “They provide a lot of guidance and they keep you honest,” George Huber, at the University of Wisconsin, told the Guardian. Huber’s cellulosic biofuels research has received funding from a variety of fossil fuel companies, including ExxonMobil.
“Oftentimes you’ll see professors make statements about energy that are not technically correct and work on technology that can’t be implemented. And the people from industry, they understand what the technology needs to have to be implemented at an industrial scale.”
“You want a sponsor with a vested interest that is paying attention to the data and influencing research directions and informing academics of market needs,” Matthew Posewitz, at the Colorado School of Mines, said. Like Huber, Posewitz received funding from ExxonMobil for his lab, which focuses on algae research. “Academics can sometimes get into things that don’t fulfill any market need. Sponsorships can bridge that information deficit.”
Dan Kammen, professor of energy at University of California at Berkeley and a former adviser to both the US government and the United Nations on climate, worked on the proposal that resulted in one of the largest fossil fuel gifts ever made to any university, BP’s $500m donation to the Energy and Biosciences Institute – a consortium that includes Berkeley, University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab – to study biofuels. He sees schools like Posewitz’s that have a longstanding relationship with the fossil fuel industry as fundamentally different from schools like his that prioritize climate research.
“Places like Colorado School of Mines or University of Texas that actively court and work for the fossil fuel industry are a different story,” he said. But he draws a distinction between accepting fossil fuel money for research directly related to fossil fuel extraction and taking oil company donations for climate research. “It makes no sense to conduct research to expand fossil fuel extraction, but funds from companies committed to make the transition to clean energy should be welcomed,” he said.
Like the Fossil-Free Research campaigners, Kammen said there needs to be immediate improvement to transparency around who’s getting how much funding and from whom. “There needs to be full disclosure not only when you write a paper, but also around the funding of research centers,” he said. “We have clear examples where research agendas were shifted. Everyone will deny it, but the best way is to have the data open.”
In documents subpoenaed as part of the House oversight committee investigation into climate disinformation and published in 2022, BP executives were explicit about what university funding buys them. In one email, Bob Stout, former vice-president and head of regulatory policy and advocacy for BP, wrote: “… [In] addition to the value in informing our understanding of climate science and policy, these relationships [with Princeton, Harvard, Tufts and Columbia] are key parts of our long-term relationship building and outreach to policy makers and influencers in the US and globally.
“We do not always agree on matters of policy, but we do get valuable intel on the evolving perspectives and priorities of the environmental community and are able to tell the story of what we are doing and why in a more personal and compelling way. In return they are able to give us valuable input on our strategies and messaging.”
Even critics of these funding relationships don’t necessarily think the funding itself should go away, just the strings attached to it. “Fossil fuel companies should be paying for climate solutions,” Cohen said. “But they shouldn’t have any direct role in how the production of knowledge relevant to those solutions is coming about.”
• This story was updated on 1 March 2023 to change the donations from fossil-fuel companies to the University of California at Berkeley between 2010 to 2020 from $108m to $154m after further information from the university. A further update was made on 2 March 2023 to clarify Dan Kammen’s role related to a BP grant.
