Here’s How the Fossil Fuel Industry Infiltrates and Influences Higher Education

For decades, oil and gas companies have donated tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to colleges and universities, sat on governing boards, sponsored scholarships and built pro-fossil fuel programming and curriculum — resulting in real or apparent conflicts of interest for universities and their researchers.published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal WIREs Climate Change.

The researchers cite BP’s sponsorship of Princeton University’s Climate Mitigation Initiative and Shell’s funding of the Shell Enhanced Learning Fund at University of Alberta in Canada as examples of the various and ongoing ways fossil fuel companies strategically invest in higher education. Such influence at universities has gone on for decades, the researchers note. They pointed to a 1978 manual for industries that advised “co-opting” academics and “identifying the leading experts in each relevant field and hiring them as consultants or advisors, or giving them research grants and the like … it must not be too blatant, for the experts themselves must not recognize that they have lost their objectivity.

The authors determined that non-governmental organizations, students and faculty have been raising the alarm on fossil fuel industry ties to academia for at least 20 years but that the research on the impact of those ties is lacking. The researchers call for additional research into fossil fuel–university partnerships in other countries, such as ExxonMobil’s partnerships with universities in China, Qatar and the Netherlands.

In recent years, environmentalists and students have pressured universities to halt investing in fossil fuel interests and businesses responsible for climate change. Harvard University announced in 2021 it would pull its $42 billion endowment from the fossil fuel industry. In late 2023, Canada’s McGill UniversityThere has been less scrutiny on the money flowing the other direction, from the fossil fuel industry to universities, the study’s authors argue.

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