In 2013, the Hess Foundation—the charitable arm of oil and gas company the Hess Corporation—

 to Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health to endow a professorship in the Environmental Health Sciences. The donation came just a year after the company 

 for $850,000 in penalties for violations of the Clean Air Act, agreeing to spend $45 million to install new pollution controls at a refinery in Port Reading, New Jersey—just across the bridge from Staten Island, the southern tip of New York City. More than a decade later, the Leon Hess Professorship persists, endowed to the school’s chair of environmental health. The Hess Foundation has quietly continued its donations to Columbia, giving more than $6.3 million over the past 10 years.

The name “Hess” may not be as recognizable as Exxon and Shell. But the Hess Corporation ranks 67th among 

 whose historic emissions are the most responsible for climate change; according to 

 compiled by the group Carbon Majors, Hess is responsible for .15% of emissions since the Industrial Revolution began. Founded in 1933 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey by Leon Hess, what began as a small oil delivery company eventually grew into a fossil fuel exploration empire, with 

 in the U.S., Southeast Asia, and South America. At the time of its initial donation to Columbia, the president of the Hess Foundation was also CEO of the Hess Corporation. (The Hess Corporation did not respond to a request for comment from Drilled.)

This is the normalcy in which fossil fuel money functions in the U.S. university system. Elite universities have, for decades, accepted millions of dollars from some of the world’s biggest polluters. In turn, associations with these universities have served to burnish these companies’ public image, fund science that’s used as the basis for industry-friendly policy proposals, and—in some cases—advance their perspectives and goals in front of politicians and policymakers as the world increasingly turns away from their products. Journalists have rarely written about routine donations, like the ones made from the Hess Foundation to Columbia; student protesters, until recently, have focused primarily on money flowing from their universities’ endowments to fossil fuel companies via various investments and retirement funds, not the money flowing 

Although there is an established field of research on conflicts of interest in academia, focused largely on the role tobacco, pharmaceutical, and food companies have used research to protect themselves legally and politically, somehow—despite decades of donations and research footed by the industry—we’re just now beginning to understand how much fossil fuel money has shaped academia, and how that money has warped our understanding of both the climate problem and the feasibility of various climate solutions. What does it mean for our increasingly perilous future?

What we know — and what we don’t know

In 2003, The New Economics Foundation, a UK-based think tank, published a 

 on “universities, the oil industry, and climate change.”

Oil companies “have succeeded in 'capturing' the allegiance of some of Britain's leading universities, through sponsoring new buildings, equipment, professorships and research posts,” the report reads. “Many universities, meanwhile, operating in a climate of ever-tighter public funding, are only too eager to please big business. In return for corporate sponsorship and contracts, universities are encouraging oil companies to steer the research agenda, tailoring courses to meet corporate personnel demands and awarding high profile positions to oil executives.”

While the paper focused on fossil fuel influence at UK universities, its tenets applied across the pond as well. Three years before the paper, BP 

 to start a center called the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, to kickstart “global leadership in inventing and implementing strategies for climate change mitigation,” according to co-founder Robert Socolow, then a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. In 2006, MIT founded its Energy Initiative center, with BP again as a founding member: the oil giant 

. None of this was new.  Links between modern fossil fuel companies and higher education have been documented as early as the 1920s.

Kids born the year the New Economics Foundation paper was released are now old enough to be in their last stretch of university education, finishing up their schooling at prestigious institutions in the UK and around the world. And yet, Big Oil still has a chokehold on academia.

The New Economies whitepaper is the first piece of chronological work in a 

 released earlier this month in the journal Wires Climate Change detailing what we know about the presence of Big Oil in academia around the world. The paper finds that while universities are clearly inundated with fossil fuel money, surprisingly little academic scholarship exists assessing the impact of this money. A lack of transparency in higher education, the paper continues, “poses a challenge to empirical research.”

“Our report specifically shines a spotlight on the failure to disclose—to even just provide data on who is funding and how much they are funding, let alone you know what are the terms of these contractual agreements,” says Geoffrey Supran, the Director of the Climate Accountability Lab at the University of Miami and one of the paper’s coauthors. “All the evidence that we have uncovered points to the fact that these relationships are sometimes really problematic in terms of the control that they hand to the fossil fuel funders.”

“All the evidence that we have uncovered points to the fact that these relationships are sometimes really problematic in terms of the control that they hand to the fossil fuel funders.”

The researchers were able to find just 14 peer-reviewed articles dealing with the topic since the early 2000s. In order to supplement their findings, they turned to what they call “gray literature”—non-peer-reviewed reports that included pieces of journalism, studies by civil society organizations, and reports by student groups.

Part of the reason for the imbalance in peer-reviewed literature can be attributed, Supran says, to the relatively new nature of examining the supply-side causes of climate change: the idea that more blame should lie with the producers of oil, rather than the individual consumers. The grassroots, student-led push for universities to divest from fossil fuels over the past decade and a half was a huge boost in helping to highlight how connected campuses were to the fossil fuel industry; that movement has successfully 

 more than 1,600 institutions to divest more than $40 trillion from fossil fuel companies since the 2010s. In recent years, those divestment groups have turned their attention to the other ways oil money finds its way into schools.

The lack of academic findings on this subject is puzzling considering the robust body of academic research examining the funding influence of other industries like chemicals, fast food, and tobacco at universities.

“There has been an awful lot of scholarship proving that conflicts of interest often lead to bias,” Supran says.

And universities, in some cases, have safeguarded against potential bias from their funders. In the early 2000s, a wave of scholarship and activism around tobacco funding prompted universities to debate the ethics of taking money from the industry for public health research. Many high-profile academic institutions, including Harvard’s 

, still have public policies around tobacco research. Big Oil has been investing in university research for far longer, but universities—and academic research—haven’t caught up.

Despite the late start, the growing body of academic literature on Big Oil on campus is already yielding promising results. One bombshell 

 came in 2022, when Columbia economics professor Doug Almond analyzed the sentiment expressed by social media posts, reports, and other texts from three fossil-fuel funded university centers at MIT, Columbia University, and Stanford, finding that these centers were overwhelmingly speaking in favor of natural gas.

When Supran was a student at MIT, he recalls Exxon distributing squeezy stress balls in the shape of oil barrels on campus. Students and faculty, he says, are uniquely positioned to notice little details pointing to where money is coming from that those off-campus may miss.

“You as a student or a professor at your specific university have a unique insight into not just the financial ties, but the non-financial ties,” he says. “You will know about the dollar values of contracts because they're spoken about on campus, but they're not on any official database that the university releases.”

What fossil fuels have bought at Columbia

It’s been uniquely difficult to put a number on just how much money Big Oil gives to schools. An analysis 

 by the groups Data for Progress and Fossil Free Research—the previous iteration of a coalition of student groups now called the Campus Climate Network—found that just six oil and gas companies funneled at least $700 million to two dozen of the top US universities between 2010 and 2020. In that report, the authors cautioned that that figure was definitely an undercount: it focused just on the tax returns made by oil companies’ foundation arms, while also incorporating information on donations to universities independently disclosed by the oil companies themselves in press releases.

Last week, the Campus Climate Network, of which Supran is an advisor

released a group of reports to shed new light on the presence of fossil fuels in U.S. universities. Each student group used different methodology in their calculations—including different timelines and different definitions of what constitutes “fossil fuel funding”—so it’s a little difficult to get a sense of overall numbers. The Campus Climate Network says that the reports uncover more than $100 million in donations from the fossil fuel industry to just six campuses.

The group of students working on Columbia’s 

 found, for instance, at least $43.7 million worth of fossil fuel donations to their school between 2005 and 2024. The Data for Progress report found just $5 million in donations to Columbia. By expanding the list of oil and gas companies and examining public donor lists on annual reports and websites—which include for-profit entities that made donations not traceable on tax returns—the Columbia students were able to shed much more of a light on the presence and influence of oil and gas on their campus.

“We had no idea just how in-depth and just how broad the ties would be,” says Anika Kathuria, a senior at Columbia and one of the co-authors of the report.

“We had no idea just how in-depth and just how broad the ties [to fossil fuels] would be.”

The largest recipient of fossil fuel money on campus, the report found, is the Center for Global Energy Policy, or CGEP. Founded in 2013 by former Obama climate and energy advisor Jason Bordoff, CGEP has risen over the past ten years to become, as Bordoff states on its 

, “a trusted source of energy policy analysis and solutions that are evidence-based and actionable.” Its research and experts are routinely featured in top news media and cited by lawmakers; in the past two years alone, CGEP experts have testified before Congress or state legislatures 10 times.

Its donor list, meanwhile, is a veritable who's-who of fossil fuel money: Occidental Petroleum and natural gas giant Tellurian have made donations of more than $1 million this year, while Aramco, BP, ExxonMobil, Shell and Total have also kicked in significant cash. Representatives from Chevron, Tellurian, Pioneer Natural Resources, and ConocoPhillips serve on CGEP’s Advisory Board. According to the students’ calculations, CGEP has taken at least $15.7 million in fossil fuel money since its founding.

, claiming that it does not advocate for specific viewpoints and “[f]unders are not involved in the writing, editing, or approval of Center’s publications.” Yet none of the experts called to testify before Congress over the past two years have disclosed the substantial fossil fuel money funding that the Center receives.

Curiously, while CGEP was the largest recipient of fossil fuel money at Columbia, the single largest donor the students found was Hess—which gave no money to CGEP. Rather, the Hess Foundation’s $15.5 million in donations have come in a steady stream over the past two decades to Columbia University; to Barnard, its all-womens’ college; and to the Mailman School of Public Health. Columbia did not respond to questions about standards in place to provide clarity around research or other initiatives in the Mailman School that are funded by Hess Foundation money.

The $43.7 million figure is almost certainly an undercount, the Columbia students say. When the data on hand was ambiguous—say, if a company was listed as donating $1,000 or more in a year—the students made sure to use the lower end of the potential range in their calculations. Plus, fossil fuel companies could be making a number of different donations directly to the school that wouldn’t be reflected on any donor rolls. The numbers also don’t account for donations made by powerful individuals associated with the fossil fuel industry: CGEP’s Advisory Board, for instance, includes Arjun Murti, a director at ConocoPhillips, and Pioneer Resources CEO Scott Sheffield. Both are also named on the 

 as having given at least $1 million to CGEP.

The center’s impact on national policy in the U.S. is undeniable. CGEP was one of the fossil-funded university centers examined by Doug Almond—himself a Columbia professor—in his 2022 paper. Almond described how, in 2015, Energy and Natural Resources Committee chairman Richard Shelby 

 by CGEP to argue in favor of lifting the U.S. ban on crude oil exports. A House resolution later cited the same CGEP report, while Bordoff 

 in favor of lifting the ban that same year.

“Congress lifted the ban and the United States became a net oil exporter in 2019,” Almond noted in his paper.

Transparency, disclosure, and all the shades of gray

A few years ago, Craig Callender was recruited to a special academic senate committee at the University of California, San Diego assigned to track the campus’s climate impacts and recommend strategies for mitigating those impacts. They have taken on a range of tasks, from various ways to decarbonize the campus itself to introducing climate curricula for undergrads. Callender, a professor of science ethics, had been mulling over the problem of fossil fuel funding in academia for some years; the rest of the committee was also ready to tackle the issue.

Callender was initially inspired by the University of California’s tobacco research policy, adopted in 2007. While the UC system voted down a ban on tobacco funding in the early 2000s, citing concerns about academic freedom, it did institute a policy that mandates a special review of any money given by Big Tobacco, with the chancellor’s seal of approval needed to move forward.

A similar fossil fuel mandate could work, Callender thought—but the concept was quickly rejected. “We were more or less told that that [idea] was dead on arrival,” he says. It’s worth noting that the tobacco mandate was passed before the landmark 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United declared money to be protected speech.

Undeterred, the committee came up with a much simpler proposal: radical transparency. “You can still take as much money as you want from anyone you want, but you would have to disclose it,” Callender summarizes. After three years of campaigning from Callender and his fellow committee members, the measure passed in May with 91% of faculty voting in favor; it now sits before the university’s chancellor for approval.

This measure may sound incredibly intuitive—particularly at a public university, doesn’t the public deserve to know if an industry is paying for academic research or boosting the salary of influential intellectuals? But if the UCSD measure gets passed, it would be one of the most progressive transparency measures around fossil fuel funding in the country.

There are surprisingly few mandates for transparency at academic institutions in the U.S. Even public schools like the University of California system have next to no requirements for professors, researchers, and institutions to disclose what individuals or donors donate; private universities, in turn, can often function like black boxes when it comes to tracing money.

“None of the schools disclose anything apart from what they have to, more or less,” Callender says.

“None of the schools disclose anything apart from what they have to, more or less.”

Callender directs a center housed at UCSD called the Institute for Practical Ethics—and says that if he wanted, he could hide all of his funding from the public view and still be in compliance with rules and regulations at the university.

“If you gave me five minutes on the website, I could scrub all evidence of where we get any funding,” he says. “There's no way you could find out. Had that funding been, like, ExxonMobil or something, and I was writing papers saying the polar bears are doing fine, you would never know that I was taking that money.”

The concept of academic transparency is a broad one—and all transparency is not created equal. The UCSD 

 proposes disclosing all financial (“"grants, contracts, royalties, consulting fees, honoraria, payment for expert testimony, travel support, or any other gift with financial value”) and non-financial relationships (“serving on a board of directors, family interests, and any other relevant relationship”) between researchers and fossil fuel companies in any public communications regarding climate change and its impacts. That’s a much broader mandate than the kind of (relatively recent) disclosure practiced at many universities that take large amounts of oil and gas money.

Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative has never shied away from acknowledging its relationship with BP, for example, which helped found the center in 2000 and has given $27.5 million to the university since 2013, according to the Princeton Campus Climate Network 

. Today, the BP logo is prominently displayed on the CMI’s website, while its 

 includes asides as to why the oil giant supports some of the research CMI faculty are undertaking.

An analysis of more than 200 studies done by Princeton students as part of their Campus Climate Network report found that in some peer-reviewed studies produced by CMI researchers, the connection with BP was clearly stated. Others, however, mentioned that the work was produced with support from CMI, with no mention of BP. CMI did not respond to a request to comment from Drilled on the difference between the different types of disclosures.

Even outside of the research it’s producing, CMI’s public materials may also be pushing the oil company’s agenda. In CMI’s 

, for example, one summary of a research project stated that the work “aligns with bp’s ambition of helping the world get to net-zero.” Earlier that year, BP had 

 its previous net zero commitments amid record-breaking profits. CMI did not respond to questions as to how it squared this contradiction or if BP was involved in any way in putting out the Annual Report.

A memo sent by a BP executive in 2016, uncovered this spring by a joint House and Senate investigation into oil companies, claims that the company funds CMI “in its entirety.” CMI did not answer questions as to whether that was correct or whether or not CMI receives additional funding. CMI also did not answer questions about any public or internal protocols it has in place to ensure that any industry biases are kept out of the work. CMI’s website also states that “faculty leadership solely determines the research priorities and individual projects to support.” But documents uncovered by the House investigation last year show that regardless of how CMI formulates its research, BP has presented its work as an ally to the company.

In 2020, Robert Stout, then head of policy at BP, wrote to his colleagues about how the Democrats’ victory in the elections meant that the company’s “friends” at Princeton could soon be part of the new Biden administration. In the 2016 

, BP executives contrasted BP’s support of the program at Princeton, which was “directly relevant to BP,” with the company’s support of other programs at Harvard and Tufts, where “discussions are directed by the Universities and much less relevant to BP.” The memo recommends decreasing funding for the Harvard and Tufts programs, concluding that BP would demand more access to specific professors at Harvard focusing on climate policy.

There’s a line of defense running through centers like Princeton’s CMI and Columbia’s CGEP that academics who work directly with oil and gas on the climate crisis—and that take their money—can help bring these powerful industries to heel.

“We need everybody to solve the climate problem. We are not going to succeed if we polarize the conversation,” Socolow, CMI’s co-founder, told 

Princeton’s student newspaper last year

. “We need a lot of people coming from many different starting places and that includes industry.” In the same article, a researcher at CMI recalls Socolow pushing BP to make more ambitious targets for methane reductions. (The House documents shed a little light on this side of the relationship as well: in one 2019 email exchange uncovered by the subpoena, Bordoff, the founder of Columbia’s CGEP, pushed back on a draft of a report written by a BP executive that seemed to suggest that lower costs for fossil fuels were a reason to adopt carbon capture and storage strategies.)

But documents uncovered by the House investigation, Princeton students argue, show how even the most rigorous research can later be distorted by an oil sponsor to serve its own interests.

"BP doesn't come in and say, oh, we're going to change the results of this finding,” says Alex Norbrook, a Princeton undergraduate and one of the authors of Princeton’s Campus Climate Network report. “Rather, it's more of— if you're not as synergistic with us, we're going to cut this funding."

Neither Supran, nor Callender, nor even the students at the Campus Climate Network would claim that academics taking fossil fuel money can’t do unbiased research, or that all research done with fossil fuel funds is immediately flawed. But there’s a term for quality research paid for by an industry meant to sway public attention from the real issue at hand: “distraction science,” a phrase 

coined by science historian Robert Proctor

“A lot of the work in [research bias] has shown that even if you are just the most pure researcher in the world, this money can make it such that you're part of a network that distorts the evidential base,” Calendar says.

Between the 1950s and the 1990s, the tobacco industry 

poured hundreds of millions of dollars into research

 into the health impacts from forms of indoor air pollution like mold, carpet fumes, and bacteria—everything, that is, but cigarette smoke. This type of distraction can produce sound science on its surface, but “skews the evidential landscape in a big way,” Callender says. “Same thing is probably happening now when we think of how much money is going into carbon capture and storage versus other things. You as the individual researcher could rightly say, yeah, it hasn't affected my outcomes, but you're part of this social network.”

Without more information about what, exactly, fossil fuel companies are paying for—without as much transparency as possible—those on the outside looking in are forced to assume the worst. The lack of a full and clear picture from universities about what, exactly, they take when they take fossil fuel money, and what sorts of strings are attached, makes it almost impossible to move forward.

There are signals of some small movement on some campuses. In July, Columbia 

 that it was forming a faculty committee “to consider questions” about fossil-fuel-funded research.

“Columbia University launched the Committee on Research Funding from Fossil Fuel Companies to address the question of whether the university should receive research funding from fossil fuel companies—and what kind of special scrutiny these companies might warrant,” a Columbia spokesperson said in an email. “The committee looks forward to engaging with the entire University community to answer these critical questions over the next year. Its final report and suggestions will include input from students, faculty, researchers, and other constituents across the University.”

But some universities are backpedaling on transparency. In 2021, Princeton announced it would divest from all publicly-traded oil and gas companies. In a related move, it also vowed to “disassociate” from fossil fuel companies that met a certain set of standards, including those involved in the tar sands and thermal coal industries; the university 

 the act of “disassociation” as “refraining, to the greatest extent possible, from any relationships that involve a financial component with a particular company.” The new policy included not taking research funds from ExxonMobil, which had previously given almost $13 million over the past decade, according to the Campus Climate Network research. BP, which publicly 

 its Canadian tar sands commitments in 2022, did not make the cutoff for disassociation.

Princeton’s administration is “very proud of saying, we don't just divest, we disassociate,” says Norbrook, the Princeton student.

That now may be changing. In early October of this year, two weeks after the Princeton students released their report on fossil fuel funding at the university, the Princeton administration 

 that it would resume taking research money from companies it previously disassociated itself from “if and only if those funds will be used for research projects that aim to produce environmental benefits.” The university said in its announcement that research proposals from polluters would be reviewed by a faculty committee convened by the Dean for Research, with the final decision in the hands of the Dean for Research, the Dean of the Faculty, and the Provost. Princeton did not respond to questions from Drilled about whether or not it would share the research proposals, judgment processes for accepting funds, or even which companies formerly on the dissociation list would be funding new research projects with the larger campus body or the public.

“Going forward, the University will no longer publish the names of companies that meet the dissociation criteria and with which Princeton has had a relationship in the recent past,” the announcement reads. The list of companies that meet the disassociation criteria has been removed from the university’s website.

"The double-think involved in this is incredible,” Norbrook says. He notes that the language of the announcement—that Princeton would accept money from dirty companies for research “aimed toward the amelioration of the environmental harms of carbon emissions”—makes no mention of research that would actually transition the world off fossil fuels.

The new policy is “exactly what fossil fuel companies want,” he says. “They want to keep producing fossil fuels, and they want to say they're doing it in a way that doesn't have environmental impacts."

Full disclosure: Between 2014 and 2016, Molly Taft worked at a PR firm that provided services to Columbia CGEP.

Fossil Fuels Fund Academia. Now What?

 Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. Last week was Climate Week in New York, and I went for the first time, actually.

The main reason I was there was to do a panel with with Bill McKibben and Kendra Pierre Louis, moderated by Genevieve Gunther on the language of climate politics, which is also the subject and title of Genevieve's new book. In it, she looks at the dominant narratives around climate policy and politics and whittles it down to six key words that just keep showing up over and over again. Each chapter is devoted to one of those words and offers a deep dive into how that word and the narrative it's attached to became so dominant, how it's been weaponized to block climate policy, and what kind of messaging you could use to combat it.

I got to sit down with Genevieve after our panel as well and talk about the book, why it's made some people so mad on the internet, and a lot more. After the break, you'll hear her reading from a bit of the book, and then we're going to have that conversation. That's coming up after this quick message.

 Fossil fuel propaganda is spun out of six terms that dominate the language of climate politics: alarmist, cost, growth, India and China, innovation and resilience. Together these terms weave a narrative that goes something like this "yes, climate change is real, but calling it an existential threat is just alarmist. And anyway, phasing out coal, oil, and gas would cost us too much. Human flourishing relies economic growth enabled by fossil fuels, so we need keep using them and with climate change by fostering technological innovation and increasing our resilience. Besides, america should not act unilaterally on the climate crisis while emissions are rising in India and China."

This narrative is designed to foment the incorrect and dangerous belief that the world does not need essentially to stop using fossil fuels, either because climate change won't be that destructive or in some versions of the story because the world can keep using coal, oil, and gas and still halt global heating anyway.

 Yes. Awesome. Okay. I want to have you start by talking a little bit about where the idea from the book came in general and then how you whittled it down to these six key words that I do feel like really capture the essence of the sort of discourse that we're hearing

 so glad to hear Yeah. Yeah, because the book started out being much bigger. It was sprawling. I had like, you know, I don't know, almost almost 27 words that I was thinking about writing about. So definitely much smaller than it was in the beginning. But I conceived of this book in 2017, after the New York Times hired this commentator named Brett Stevens away from the Wall Street journal. favorite voice at the Times.

At the time though, Stevens was a pretty inveterate climate denier. Like he was definitely on the more extreme end of the skeptical spectrum, so to speak. Like he called, you know, climate change a religion or climate change science a religion, um, presided over by like, Singularly unattractive hairfans, which I just thought was a really obnoxious thing to say about anybody, right?

 And, you know, his hiring generated a ton of controversy, many climate scientists and activists tried to get the Times to rescind their offer to him because they just thought it was outrageous that someone who, you know, was spreading these overt falsehoods would take a position at the sort of paper of record. But, of course, the Times didn't want to... 

 respond to outside pressure very often or really ever so Stephens took his position and he wrote, arrogantly enough, his first column about climate change. And it was called the column was called a climate of complete certainty And what this piece did was sort of recycle the fossil fuel talking point that had been kind of dominant in the discourse . And that talking point as you know yourself You Was that the science of climate change is too uncertain to motivate or justify the kind of policy moves that we would need to make, or the behavior changes we would need to make in order to halt global heating and resolve the climate crisis because the climate crisis might not even be a thing.

 Now, I had just taken level course in climate science. so while I was reading this column, was like, wait a minute. this man is using the word uncertainty in a kind common sense, colloquial way. He's using the of word to say uncertainty means not enough information or knowing enough come to some sort of decision or judgment. Right. But this is actually the way that climate scientists use the word research. So in...

 or that scientists in general, like this is the language of science in which uncertainty means something very different.

 Exactly. And what it means is the range of outcomes you can project out of a model with confidence. I mean confidence and uncertainty are actually synonyms say the confidence interval or the uncertainty interval. So when scientists would talk about the uncertainty of their research, they were not saying they weren't sure whether their results were correct or that what they were studying was real. What they were saying was there's a range of possible outcomes from bad to really bad that they project confidence. But the problem was that because fossil fuel interests put this sort other meaning of uncertainty out into the public discourse through the mediasphere, anytime a climate scientist in his or her public communications would talk about uncertainty of their research, seem to be confirming that they weren't sure whether climate change was real or not.

What fossil fuel interests had done was appropriate, weaponize, and kind of distort the meaning of the scientific term order kind manipulate scientists into confirming fossil fuel propaganda. So I saw this dynamic uncertainty, I started see everywhere.

 So I like, you know, I got all these folder files because I'm very old school. And I, you know, made files email and I started research into the words that seemed to have salience for me connected climate change. And I was doing sort of database academic style research. I was reading, research in the social sciences, in rhetoric, um, in climate science. But I was also sort of pulling news articles and like press releases and advertisements and tweets and sort of, high and low discourse, um, news media and I was dumping it all into files.

And after about 18 months of this kind of very broad, almost sloppy way of doing research, I noticed that the files for these words were much thicker than the other ones.

 And that in these files were often, um, you know, language that had been produced by policymakers, by scientists themselves in oil and gas advertisements, like all the things that we sort of centered and focused on. What we're going to do to try to resolve this crisis. And I was like, okay, these are the words that dominate the language of climate politics.

And I need to focus the book on these words. So that's what I decided to do.

 And they all kind of relate to each other in this way too, that I think is really interesting to create this, well, I think of it as like a narrowing of climate solutions too, it sort of puts these parameters on how we're allowed to even talk about or think about this issue that's very limiting.

 Well, it's interesting you say that because, you know, for the chapter on growth, it took a long time to write this chapter because, you know, first I had to sort of really get my head around kind of neoclassical resource economics, how standard economists talked about environmental concerns the climate crisis in order to understand you counter voices might be arguing

 And then I read all the degrowth literature. Um, and I sort of first thought to myself, well, am I going to try to talk about the language of growth in in degrowth framework?

What am I going to do here? And then I realized that actually, we can't even have the conversation about degrowth, I don't think, while everybody universally believes that growth itself is a climate solution. Like, as long as you believe that being rich will protect you from climate devastation, why would anyone embrace degrowth? And so I thought, okay, this is what I keep bumping up against as I'm researching this belief that growth itself is a climate solution that will be available to us. even if the planet sort of heats up three degrees or more

 and that will be available to everyone infinitely

 A hundred percent. Exactly. Like growth will never end. So I started digging into this, you know, because as you said, I felt like it was really kind limiting our imagination of how we might need to transform the world in order to halt global heating. Yeah, and I discovered as I say in the chapter that belief growth will just Yeah. no matter what we do to the planet is based on absolutely nothing. It's based on beliefs that have no empirical foundation whatsoever.

 It's almost itself a form of religious faith. So one of these beliefs is that human beings will be able to adapt to climate change no matter how bad it gets. And you know, humans are pretty ingenious. we are adaptable, but in fact, there is no research showing that any country, including developed nations in the global north, have to date adapted to climate change. And It's just going to get harder to do that. And there's something nonlinear about these climate change impacts. So, you know, if you have a seawall, it'll keep the water out until the day that the water gets so high that it won't keep the water out anymore. But none of those complicated risks that we're facing and none this sort of lack of historical evidence that 

 going to be able to adapt to the climate crisis, make it into economic models. In fact, what economists do is the opposite. They look at sort of historical relationships between say heat and GDP growth And try to project those out into the future. And then they adjust their results by using a mathematical variable called adaptation, which allows them to downplay or adjust the dangers that they project. by at the past and... And drawing it out into the future, by using this mathematical variable that they give value to, simply based on the economist's belief in how much we're going to be able to adapt in the future. So at the bottom, it's just about the individual economist's trust that adaptation is possible, and it's something that we're going to do. Not based any kind of empirical data whatsoever. And that's just one of the fantasies or the, the ephemeral beliefs that support, or at least, um, justify this fundamental belief of the entire planet, that growth will just continue even if we ruin our climate system.

 It's so interesting because a lot of the things in here had me also thinking about how a lot of this stuff gets painted in very gendered terms too, or even just science versus humanities kind of language too, where it's like, oh, economists are, , hard science, objective measurement, whatever.

But climate activists don't understand that or certain technologies. It's like, oh, well, you just don't understand the engineering behind it or whatever. I've had this experience of digging into an economic model and realizing that it's just based on, yeah, one person's assumptions or beliefs or whatever.

And being like, no, I must be wrong. It can't be that. You know, I must not be understanding the numbers or whatever. And like...

 I had that experience too, but let me be clear. Every single chapter in this book. Yeah. chapters on economics were read by some of the, Most respected climate economists working today and the chapter that I wrote on innovation, which turned out in climate discourse to be, code for carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture and sequestration. So CDR and CCS. So in that chapter I had. not only one of the most prominent scientists who's working on CDR read this chapter But I had two other climate scientists read this chapter. So I also thought is this possible like it it as flimsy as I think it is? Exactly. in fact It is. And it's hard to tell because very often when we encounter these things in our public discourse, it's through news media articles or sort of treatments that are decontextualized or just sort of touch on one thing. But they marshal these like ideological beliefs that I try to sort of disabuse in the book. And it only becomes clear how this ideology is very often based no information like in the growth case or false information like in the CDR case.

 So once you compile all the information and put it together, it becomes easier to show how a lot of the beliefs that we hold about growth and technological innovation are influenced or shaped by fossil fuel propaganda themselves.

 Yes, totally. One of the very compelling things about this book is that you see it. You're just like, Oh, thank That's

 like how that has shaped. Um, okay. I want to ask you about the Breakthrough Institute cause they, they've been very mad about your book and also, you mentioned them in the book and they have been, quite, adamant proponents of some of these ideas and particularly in the vein of kind of castigating climate people for not thinking about growth in the right way or innovation in the right way.

But anyway, I wanted to ask you about just kind of your thoughts on how much they have shaped the public discourse and how they have been able to do that.

 I mean, i, you know, I got the climate movement, as I said, in 2017. so I perceive them as people who are instrumental in shaping the discourse. I do see them kind of, um, exemplifying a a kind of centrist position, center position climate crisis, which is why they're very with many centrist journalists, and leaders because they put the of imprimatur of environmentalism on this centrist position. Right. And the problem with this position, in my view, is not that it's, you know, advocating for developing new technologies. Clearly, we will need that. Like, I am a proponent of lab grown meat, To me, it is not that they are pushing for nuclear. I actually also think that nuclear energy would be an excellent alternative thing to bring into our energy mix, maybe for thermal heat things that are harder to produce with solar or wind, for example.

You know, like 8 million people a year die from fossil fuel pollution, right? And the number of people, that we can trace, of course, who have died from nuclear accidents is probably a lot smaller than that. So if you want to just judge two different forms of energy based on the number of people it kills historically, then obviously nuclear wins, right? problem with the Breakthrough Institute is they promote expanding fossil fuels.

That is my problem with them because this is to me, the belief, the false belief that is really preventing our politics, our, business leaders, even our, climate advocacy from Solving problem or even really knowing there is this idea we can do We can develop clean energy and we can support expanding fossil fuel extract extraction. We can have more evermore. more and gas and ever more clean energy. And somehow we're gonna deal with climate change anyway. So this is the false belief that is not just coming from fossil fuel interests on the right. It's also coming these center left groups, which give a permission structure for these fossil fuel interests to seem legitimate and not like the murderous monsters they really are. And so the Breakthrough Institute argues for increased fossil fuel production. They say that coal plants in the global south, quote, save lives.

Let's be clear, it's electricity that saves

that electricity does not need to be generated by coal, which is killing. Millions of people a year, mostly in the global south. And for them, they justify their argument for increasing fossil fuel production, not by even saying that with CDR, um, which is something that they, support.

It's a position that they support, and they platform people who do make that argument. But really, the reason they say we can to expand our fossil fuel production and consumption is that climate change will never be that bad, right?

It's never gonna be worse than I think Nordhaus called it a case of planetary right? Um, that you can just sort of manage with with what he calls, you know, medicine, which what he means is adaptation or whatever. Now, climate scientists like Joelle Gerges, the Australian climate scientist, who's one of the lead authors of the last IPCC report. She figures climate change as a cancer, as a disease in our planetary body has been established and is now getting worse and that we have to cure cut out. Before it metastasizes out of control. but Nordhaus and the Breakthrough Institute are very often um, on the opposite side of that. They would call her an alarmist, and they would claim that actually, People who think that climate change is like a cancer or will be very dangerous as the planet continues to heat up are emotional, hysterical, very often women in the climate movement people who aren't serious.

 And their kind of, um, lukewarmer position that, Oh, climate change isn't going to be that bad is actually somehow the serious position. But what I try to argue in the book is that in fact, it is. a dishonest position. It misrepresents what the science says is happening to our planet and will happen if not phase out fossil fuels, bring our emissions down to real zero , and halt global heating. So it's not a realism, it's actually a falsehood that they are advancing

 it's fantasy. Yeah. Yeah. I do find it really interesting that Nordhaus in particular takes these really strong stances on science when he has no scientific background. You know, He was a PR guy forever and then

 I know. I love that he was a that he's a PR guy.

 Yeah. And then started the breakthrough and like, you know, now kind of does PR for their ideas.

 Right? Right. Exactly. But like, um, I mean, I just say that. They've been coming after me for couple of weeks now, at the point we are recording this. They've been coming after for a couple of weeks now. And first he tried to suggest that I didn't have the credentials to write this book.

 And then I thought, wait a minute, I'm go look at his academic credentials. I have a Ph. D. in English literature from UC Berkeley, and he has a B. A. in history

 from UC Berkeley. So I don't understand how he's, you know, just on that metric, more credentialed to talk about the climate crisis than I am.

And I'm talking about the rhetoric that leads to political beliefs, which is literally something I've been studying since I went to graduate school, because that was what I was studying in the English Renaissance too. Like, it's not a different topic for me. It's just a different domain into which I'm bringing my expertise. But it's interesting because other ways, so, so once I sort of like disabused him of that strategy.

Then they started to suggest that somehow I wasn't a serious scholar because there were some, you know, sloppy errors in the footnotes. Um, they found what I would claim are two errors among 300 in three chapters.

The book has 600 footnotes and it's been peer reviewed and extensively fact checked and every single book in the world will have one or two details that are are wrong,

What they're doing is they're trying to come after me to suggest that I'm not serious I'm all vibes. I don't have research credentials, because they don't want to engage with my arguments they have never defended their position on supporting fossil fuel use.

They have never explained why they believe that economic growth will just continue indefinitely and shield the wealthy from climate devastation. They have never engaged any of the arguments that I make in the book and defended them. They have only come after me with these ad hominem attacks because they know they don't have a position from which to argue. In fact, Nordhaus on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it these days-- he got mad at me because I quoted him as having said that the agenda to phase out fossil fuels was impossible. And so I said, Okay, does that mean right here that you're gonna say that it is possible to phase out fossil fuels and he he sputtered and fulminated But then reiterated that the climate movement's agenda to phase out fossil fuels in the next decade is impossible And then I like tweeted a screenshot of my book which is quoting him saying that exact thing and I was like, what? Dude, what is your problem?

 Their problem is, is that they're scared of what I say in the book because I honestly think, and not to be arrogant about this, but I think this is the first book that ties what we think of as traditional climate denial on the right to these centrist democratic positions showing that actually the reason our climate politics is blocked is not that it's polarized, even though that's a problem, too, but because it's weirdly unified on this belief that we don't need to phase out fossil fuels when we absolutely do.

 Yes, I have been seeing this in the last couple of years, you know, increasingly, this weird hesitancy to just say, yeah, we need to phase out fossil fuels and almost a shift towards acting like that's a radical stance

 Well, there's comms, I mean, it's a, I'm not saying it's an easy problem. Because there is comms research that shows that people don't like it when you tell them they can't use something they're already using, right?

So that, I mean, it's, it's a fiercely challenging problem to communicate that we do need to phase out fossil fuels. I don't want to downplay that. And so I think people shy away from saying it because it does seem like like tricky or radical. Um, and it has radical implications for our whole world. economic system for sure. but if you believe that climate change is real, if you understand what the science is saying about what's going to happen to our climate system and our, the links between our planet and our economy, if the planet just keeps heating up, and if you understand that the planet will keep heating up until emissions. get to net zero or real zero, then, you know, every scientist will tell you that we need to stop using coal, oil, and gas. It's really not up for debate anymore.

 Including like, you know, the IEA, the IPCC, like it's,

 So this is what I quote in the, this is what I quote, In the introduction to the book In 2023, in synthesis report, IPCC said that we already have enough fossil fuel infrastructure. Because that infrastructure is projected to emit the total carbon budget for two degrees Celsius, which means that we actually have to like strand some that infrastructure, strand some of those assets, because the total carbon budget has to include like agriculture right and wildfires and other things. So people, so to me, you can say yes climate change is bad, yes I believe in climate change until the cows come home.

But if you are denying that fact, you are a climate denier. I mean, just think about being an alcoholic. Right. You're drinking a lot of booze. Your liver is about to croak and your doctor says to you, you're an alcoholic, you have to stop drinking. And you say, okay, yeah, I'm an alcoholic, but I'm not going to stop drinking.

Like we all know that that person is still in denial. If you say climate change is real, I want to help stop it, but I'm going to ignore the fact that we already have too many fossil fuels to halt global heating at a relatively safe level. I'm sorry. You are a climate denier.

 I want to talk about the innovation chapter in more detail because we've been doing this series too on like on CDR and carbon capture and we'll eventually get to like hydrogen and biofuels and all that stuff too.

 Yeah, exactly, exactly. But it is like, um, I find it interesting how the industry and then like people who are kind of carrying water for them do really. mess with the building blocks of information in this way of like because I feel like there's been um there has been like this real focus on on disinformation, which I almost see as like The end result of all of this stuff, right?

You know, it's like yeah, like that's what we end up with but like that gets built by very strategic investments in particular types of research or white papers from thought leaders or whatever it is, you know, it's like it gets built in that way. So, um, I'm curious how you honed in on CDR and, um, CCS as like the things that you wanted to focus on in that chapter.

 Yeah. I really, didn't set out to focus on those two technologies in particular, at all. I was just like, why are people talking about innovation in this way? Why are people talking about innovation as a independent climate solution? What does this word mean? That's so vague. And usually when you drill down, this was often in sort of, you know, climate journalism or, um, even just political journalism or business journalism. and you would drill down and it would be about these that would either capture or remove emissions. And then I started to see Exxon Mobil and other oil and gas companies use the word innovation in their advertising and on their websites and whatever, and then drilling down into that. I was like, Oh, for them, innovation also means carbon capture.

And, yeah, to some degree, also carbon dioxide removal. I was like, wow, this word is actually code in climate discourse for CCS and CDR. And it's interesting because I don't think it is anymore because I think that oil and gas companies were really Greenwashing themselves with very thick paint right after the IPCC report on 1.5 in 2018 and the rise of the global climate movement, blah, blah, blah, blah. They all came out with net zero, um, targets. They, you know, and they

 but partly because of all of this rhetoric that

 We can... it's fine because we can decarbonize oil and gas

 Exactly. Thank you. That's exactly the point. So what happened was around this question of innovation, oil and gas companies started to claim that they were going to turn themselves into carbon management companies. they were going to be able to either capture the emissions of their products, or they going be able decarbonize their products, decarbonize oil by removing the emissions, carbon from the atmosphere after their products have been used and combusted.

So, you know, usually I don't start with the research. Usually I start with the rhetoric. But I started this chapter with the research into how challenging it's going to be. Well, first, the historical account of the fact that most, I mean, if not all carbon capture projects, which is, you know, the technology that captures emissions at the source, most, if not all carbon capture products, to date have failed.

 a very large scale. They have captured nothing close to their targets. And very often they've had to build an additional fossil fuel plant to power the technology, which if you do a full life cycle assessment, they're actually carbon additive and not carbon neutral. neutral.

 That's right. There's really good research from Mark Jacobson on that in particular.

 So insofar as you use methane gas as a kind of, you know, firm generation instead of batteries or something else, you might want to slap CCS on that, but it would be very challenging to do it in a way that would actually be carbon neutral and it would be much, much more expensive, even potentially than building out a system of redundancy and lots of storage. or a nuclear or something else. So, and even if the economics pencil out better for CCS, CCS just doesn't work. So that's really what you need to come back to.

 And. The technology has been around for a really long time. Like exactly. It's it doesn't mean it's impossible that it will improve at some point, whatever. But yeah, there are a lot of plans being made with the assumption that CCS will somehow magically start to work better than it ever has.

 You know what's so interesting? So the rhetoric And I'll get to CDR in a minute. But the rhetoric about CCS from oil and gas companies and from advocates um, trade advocates, is that CCS is a proven technology, right? That's what they say. Because it's been around for so long, right? And it's a proven technology. They've been using it for decades. This is great. And so now, The EPA has come up with a new regulation saying that by a certain date fossil fuel power plants need to have CCS

 And then in their public comments, they're all like, but it doesn't work. You can't hold us to this. It's

 So the climate guy at the Cato Institute requested a review copy of my book because he said he wanted to write a review about it. I don't know if he's actually going to write a

Transcription

Guenther digs into six key rhetorical devices that are being used to slow or block climate action. For an academic book, it's made some folks on the Internet awfully mad. In this episode we talk about why, what went into her research, and what it tells us about the coming months.

Genevieve Guenther on the Language of Climate Politics

La Lucha En La Jungla

Information Pollution

Denial to Delay

The Real Free Speech Threat

By Danielle Mackey and Fernando Silva. Jennifer Ávila also contributed reporting to this piece, which was reported in collaboration with

Photos by Fernando Destephen, courtesy Contracorriente.

Honduran environmentalist Juan López had a priestly calm. His steady gaze and his way of speaking, polite but direct, were notable whether he was philosophizing with friends or leading a protest. Although he knew well the threats associated with fighting for the environment in Honduras, he was 

 about the fact that he had no intention of becoming a martyr.

López was recognized internationally for his work to protect the water and territory of Guapinol, a community in the Bajo Agúan valley. For more than a decade, Guapinol’s environment and social fabric have been threatened by an iron ore mine, Inversiones Los Pinares, owned by Lenir Pérez, one of Honduras’ most powerful businessmen. López, who was also a municipal alderman and was 

 in his local Catholic Church, helped lead the movement to stop the mine and was branded a criminal in the process.

On a Saturday evening in mid-September, López became the sixth environmentalist killed while defending Guapinol since 2019. As he left church, a masked man on a motorcycle rolled up, raised a gun, and assassinated him. It bore the hallmarks of a hired hit.

On October 4, the Honduran police and public prosecutor 

 that they had arrested López’s alleged assassin and 

 that they are still working to identify the intellectual author of the crime. Community members have 

 an impartial investigation. They have reason for concern: So far, no one has been prosecuted for the wave of killings of Guapinol land defenders.

Immediately after López’s murder, the Municipal Committee for the Defense of Common and Public Goods (Comité Municipal de Defensa de los Bienes Comunes y Públicos de Tocoa), a local environmentalist group of which López was a member, pointed out two men whose interests López’s activism had challenged: businessman Lenir Pérez, and Adán Fúnez, the mayor of Tocoa, the municipality where the village of Guapinol is located.

Just a few days before he was killed, López publicly 

 that Mayor Fúnez step down after journalists with Insight Crime 

 to organized crime. In undercover footage that shook the nation, the mayor and the brother-in-law of Honduran president Xiomara Castro were caught meeting with members of a drug cartel called the Cachiros to negotiate bribes for Castro’s 2013 campaign as well as for her husband, former Honduran president Manuel “Mel” Zelaya. Fúnez responded to the video by denying ever receiving the money, and President Castro condemned “any type of negotiation between drug traffickers and politicians.”  Fúnez has also denied any part in López’s death. He did not respond to a request for comment for this story, nor did Zelaya.

Fossil Fuels Fund Academia. Now What?

Records Show U.S. Steel Giant Nucor Retained Ties to a Honduran Mine as Assassinations of Opponents Mounted

In Australia, a New Way to Avoid Decommissioning Oil Fields: Call Them Carbon Capture Projects

[Podcast] New Research Is Clear: Fossil Fuel-Funded University Research Is Warping Policy

Documents, Whistleblowers, and Public Comments Are Clear: Oil Companies Know Carbon Capture Is Not a Climate Solution

La Lucha En La Jungla

Information Pollution

Denial to Delay

The Real Free Speech Threat

Genevieve Guenther on the Language of Climate Politics

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world

Fossil Fuels Fund Academia. Now What?

Records Show U.S. Steel Giant Nucor Retained Ties to a Honduran Mine as Assassinations of Opponents Mounted

In Australia, a New Way to Avoid Decommissioning Oil Fields: Call Them Carbon Capture Projects

[Podcast] New Research Is Clear: Fossil Fuel-Funded University Research Is Warping Policy

Documents, Whistleblowers, and Public Comments Are Clear: Oil Companies Know Carbon Capture Is Not a Climate Solution

La Lucha En La Jungla

Information Pollution

Denial to Delay

The Real Free Speech Threat

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Genevieve Guenther on the Language of Climate Politics

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world