In the most extensive analysis of its kind, new research suggests that fossil fuel influence is widespread across universities in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
Oil and gas companies have poured funding into campuses for decades. But scientists, journalists and students are only just starting to uncover the true extent of these financial ties—and how potential conflicts of interest in higher education could hinder efforts to combat climate change, the study’s authors say.
“It’s a really troubling lack of transparency that kind of has created this situation where people have been trying to pull back the curtain on some of this, but struggling because a lot of this data just is not in the public domain,” study co-author Geoffrey Supran, an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami, told me. “We observe that fossil fuel companies have embedded themselves widely within universities.”
In the past few years, student activists have increasingly pushed their universities to divest from oil and gas on campus and in investment portfolios. Now, this movement is trickling into the university research community amid a growing push to increase transparency of fossil fuel funding sources—and potentially cut ties altogether.
Fossil Fuel Funding: Supran has firsthand experience with fossil fuel money permeating the research space. The first year of his doctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was funded by an oil company.
“They took us to fancy Italian banquets, they gave us free stationery with their logos on, they funded the first year of my Ph.D. And so my only association with them was positive,” Supran said. He explained that this type of treatment could result in reciprocity bias, which is when someone may feel the expectation to return favors after receiving gifts or incentives.
“It wasn’t until I started to pay more attention to the oil industry’s political machinations that I started to open my eyes,” he said.
MIT did not respond to a request for comment about how the university mitigates this type of bias.
Supran noted that “conflicts of interest are not necessarily implied bias.” However, a 2022 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change found university research centers funded by fossil fuel companies were more supportive of natural gas than those that are not.
The new study finds a dearth of research investigating other potential ways that fossil fuel funding can influence climate research. As part of their work, the scientists parsed through around 14,000 peer-reviewed articles about conflicts of interest, bias and research funding across all industries. Just seven discussed fossil fuels.
But their own analysis of literature, news reports and other sources revealed hundreds of instances of fossil fuel ties on campuses—from industry representatives sitting on governing research boards to fossil fuel-sponsored scholarships, internships and field trips for students. Some experts argue that these types of university partnerships could help fossil fuel companies “greenwash” their image.
In other cases, oil and gas companies could have outsize control over what types of climate research occurs, such as ExxonMobil’s influence on carbon capture projects at Louisiana State University, which The Guardian and The Lens reported on in April.
In March, my colleague Phil McKenna wrote about a new climate change initiative at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and some of his sources noted their concern that the school could seek future funding from fossil fuel companies, as it has before with other projects. MIT’s Energy Initiative, a separate research center dedicated to developing low-carbon solutions, has raised more than $1 billion for energy research since 2006, approximately 45 percent from oil and gas companies, a spokesperson for the MIT Energy Initiative told Inside Climate News.
Other fields have faced similar scrutiny from the public for industry ties, particularly in the biomedical and tobacco sectors.
Shining Light on Financial Ties: With greenhouse gas emissions continuing to rise, students across many campuses are demanding that their universities drop all direct investments in fossil fuels. Since this movement began, more than 200 educational institutions have pledged to divest, including New York University and Dartmouth College.
Now, there is a call to action from experts in the climate space to impose policies that ban fossil fuel influence on university research, which University of California, San Diego’s Craig Callender calls “divestment 2.0.”
“Before, it was divesting the portfolio of the university. Now it’s looking at all these entanglements throughout the university and wanting to disassociate in this way as well,” Callender, who studies ethics and philosophy in science and was not involved in the new research, told me. “This [new study] proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that this knowledge institution is being weaponized against the public good.”
In 2022, Callender wrote an op-ed for The Chronicle of Higher Education about how fossil-fuel funding is influencing university research articles in favor of oil and gas. Academic studies are often cited in efforts to enact energy policies in government. More than 750 academics signed a letter in 2022 pushing for a ban on fossil-fuel funding for climate research.
However, pulling this funding could have widespread consequences for the universities that rely on it. Over the past decade, state governments have invested significantly less money on research at public colleges and universities than in the past, forcing many institutions to find the money elsewhere. Instead of a full-scale ban, some schools, such as UC San Diego, are pursuing policies that require public disclosure of all external funding, including from oil and gas.
However, Supran said these efforts aren’t happening fast enough.
“We also have observed a kind of worrying delay that has occurred between when civil society initially began to raise the alarm about this problem in the early 2000s until when scholars, and especially university leaders, have begun to pay attention to this issue,” he said.
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Kiley Price is a reporter at Inside Climate News, with a particular interest in wildlife, ocean health, food systems and climate change. She writes ICN’s “Today’s Climate” newsletter, which covers the most pressing environmental news each week.
She earned her master’s degree in science journalism at New York University, and her bachelor’s degree in biology at Wake Forest University. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, Scientific American and more. She is a former Pulitzer Reporting Fellow, during which she spent a month in Thailand covering the intersection between Buddhism and the country’s environmental movement.
