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When it comes to the insidious techniques that the industry is using to undermine climate negotiations and delay progress, there are many. Here, we discuss the way fossil fuel giants control the narrative of ‘climate science’ through funding prestigious universities while simultaneously suppressing climate activism.
Here we are, in the final knockings of the 28th Conference of the Parties. Are we due to repeat the mistakes of the past, or is there hope of halting climate change in its tracks?
The culmination of a fortnight’s worth of deliberations has resulted in a de-facto international agreement to phase out fossil fuels. Sound familiar?
Naturally, this loose consensus cannot legally require governments to reach the coveted 1.5C target and contains a ‘littany of loopholes,’ as The Guardian’s Fiona Harvey puts it.
The thinly veiled truth, is that deception remains top of the agenda for governments and fossil fuel companies resistant to change and addicted to profits.
If you haven’t been keeping up with our playbook guide series on the subject, check out the previous part on how fossil fuel companies infiltrate climate negotiations.
In this final edition, we’re looking into how gas and oil giants seek to control the narrative of climate change by funding university research that supports their own interests. We’ll then explain how our right to protest fossil fuel expansion is calculatingly thwarted.
An agreement is only as good as its implementation.
This historic Consensus is only the beginning…#UAEConsensus #UniteActDeliver #COP28 pic.twitter.com/KAv0V1cdeC
— COP28 UAE (@COP28_UAE) December 14, 2023
Funding universities to control the narrative of climate change
Propping up three decades of constant growth, fossil fuel giants have meticulously ensured that, wherever possible, scientific research supports their cause. While science and transparency are usually synonymous with one another, here the former is used to conceal the truth.
Following in the footsteps of Big Tobacco, which stockpiled academics and funded university research playing down the health risks of smoking back in 1954, fossil fuel companies have been throwing money at carefully vetted university projects for 30 plus years.
The aim: to stem public concern about the ecological damage being caused by the industry.
The origins of this practice can be traced back to 1991, when governments revealed that gas and oil production would begin to be regulated. The French fossil fuel industry responded by investing heavily in American universities and their respective research into anthropogenic global warming.
Records highlight a notable scheme, where several Colombia University studies into carbon uptake by the ocean were heavily financed by polluters – no doubt to understate the impact of GHG emissions and talk-up the sequestration powers of our oceans.
In 1998, a policy proposal leaked to the media in which the American Petroleum Institute had laid out a multi-year ploy to create ‘scientific uncertainty’ around the links between fossil fuels and climate change.
Headed up by a hand-picked cohort of scientists, the project document read: ‘The centre will be funded at a level that will permit it to succeed, including funding for research contracts.’ In laymen’s terms, fossil fuel proprietors were determined that eco-science in the public domain would exonerate them of any wrongdoing.
In the years since, staples of the modern oil empire – including BP, ExxonMobil, API, and many others – have continued to fund university research with the hope of extending their dirty practices. We’re talking $700m to 27 institutions in under a decade.
The key difference now, however, is that people are way more clued up on climate change and the damage unequivocally caused by fossil fuels. The focus of oil companies has thus shifted to research on ambiguous carbon capture technology and proclaiming it as a primary solution to achieving the terms of the Paris Agreement.
Alas, after decades of blinkered obedience, students and researchers are finally starting to take agency over the situation.
Pupils and faculty members at the likes of MIT, Berkley, Stanford, and George Mason have demanded that administrators pull the plug on funding from fossil fuel companies.
In the rush to disassociate, several student-led lawsuits have also been filed and the ineffective nature of many carbon capture studies has been made public – most notably by the MIT.
Despite this, many universities still maintain a healthy relationship with oil companies and investment from the sector will continue to flow.
This clash of interests has muddied the water for long enough. Is it too much to ask for research papers to be based on unbiased science and not some shady corporate agenda?
You could protest, but that’s a problem entirely of its own standing.
