In 2013, the Hess Foundation—the charitable arm of oil and gas company the Hess Corporation—gave $500,000 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 settled with the EPA 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 the 100 companies whose historic emissions are the most responsible for climate change; according to research 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 operations 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 onto their campuses from these companies.
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 whitepaper 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 granted Princeton $1.5 million 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 poured $25 million into the project. 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 literature review 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 pressured 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 T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins’s School of Medicine, 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 study 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 published in 2023 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 report 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 website, “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.
On its website, CGEP maintains its research independence, 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 donor rolls 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 used a report 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 testified 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 measure 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 report. Today, the BP logo is prominently displayed on the CMI’s website, while its 2023 Annual Report 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 2023 Annual Report, 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 publicly walked back on 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 memo, 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."
Moving forward—and backward
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 announced 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 published a list of companies subject to this new policy.
Princeton defines 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 exited 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 announced 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.
