What has been described as the most extensive peer-reviewed study to date of the industry’s influence on academia has show that Fossil fuel companies’ funding of universities’ climate-focused efforts is delaying the green transition.
For the study, which was published in the journal WIREs Climate Change on Thursday, six researchers pored over thousands of academic articles on industries’ funding of research from the past two decades. Just a handful of them focused on oil and gas companies, showing a “worrying lack of attention” to the issue, the analysis says.
But even that small body of research shows a pattern of industry influence: “The academic integrity of higher education is at risk,” they write. During the past two decades, non-profits, campus organizers and a small group of scholars have sounded the alarm about oil companies’ influence in academia, drawing parallels to tobacco, pharmaceuticals and food producers who have also funded scholarship.
Researchers found, from the study that out of roughly 14,000 peer-reviewed articles about conflicts of interest, bias and research funding across all industries from 2003 to 2023, only seven mentioned fossil fuels. When the authors broadened their search to look at book chapters, they found only seven more.
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But even by combing through the small body of existing scholarship, the authors identified hundreds of instances in the US, UK, Canada and Australia where oil and gas interests had poured funding into climate and energy research while sitting on advisory or governing boards, endowing academic posts, sponsoring scholarships, advising curricula or otherwise influencing universities.
“We find that universities are an established yet under-researched vehicle of climate obstruction by the fossil fuel industry,” the authors write.
The analysis found that oil companies have long influenced universities to focus on climate efforts that would enshrine a future for fossil fuels, despite experts’ repeated warnings that the world must stop burning coal, oil and gas to avert the worst climate impacts.
“The science has been telling us that fossil fuel phase-out is the No 1 thing that we need to focus on, but within our universities, there’s very little research on how to do fossil fuel phase-out,” said Jennie Stephens, a climate justice professor at Maynooth University in Ireland and study co-author. “This provides some explanation for why society has been so ineffective and inadequate in our responses to the climate crisis.”
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
