Overview:
In the 1990s, even as they denied the reality of climate change, oil company executives were quietly funding research that favored climate fixes that would protect their businesses.
They poured billions of dollars into the nation’s top universities, building what we now think of as the most prestigious and advanced climate research centers in the world.
With their work bolstered by fossil fuel money and burnished by the reputations of their schools, scientists published papers that legitimized the climate change solutions the industry preferred.
Those solutions steered the conversation away from breaking our dependence on oil and gas, and instead justified an approach of pollute now, clean up later.
Many of those solutions just don’t work at the scale that is needed. But magical thinking about silver-bullet technologies has now been baked into the models that inform global policy.
It may be too late to undo the damage.
An investigation by Drilled and ProPublica has found that fossil fuel companies have been funding climate research at prestigious U.S. universities for more than 30 years. Their support has helped amplify the work of scientists who promote the idea that we can stop the climate crisis without breaking our dependence on oil, gas and coal.
The research produced by those schools in turn shaped global climate models, as well as the policy and technology solutions adopted by governments around the world.
Ultimately, it fostered a misperception that climate change could be solved without dramatically curtailing fossil fuels — a notion that has delayed emissions cuts by decades.
Corporate funders sponsored entire centers, paid the salaries of researchers, kept offices on campus and in some cases had veto power over projects.
Companies maintain they are supporting innovation and needed science. Universities say that with safeguards, sponsorship enhances research programs while preserving academic independence.
Still, the impact of funding constitutes a pattern that Benjamin Franta, an associate professor of climate litigation at University of Oxford, called the “colonization of academia.”
