Big Oil on Campus

So this was back when I was a grad student at Harvard and I was working at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and you know that's in the Kennedy School of Government. The role of fossil fuel companies in academia had started to become a bigger issue. And this was around probably like twenty fifteen or so. For instance, I think you know, when the Journalism School at Columbia came out with the Exxon New investigation, or

This has been front up.

He first told me the story back in twenty seventeen, and it's actually kind of what got me wondering about fossil feel funding of social science programs at universities. That investigation, he mentioned, Exon knew was led by Columbia Journalism School graduates and it found that Exxon had been using climate science to shape its own business plans for decades, but had simultaneously been hiding that science from the public.

I started to look into this issue at Harvard, looking at what programs are funded by oil companies, and a lot of the programs at the Kennedy School, the Government school to do with public policy, were funded by oil companies. For example, I worked at the Belfer Center for Science International Affairs. It's one of the most influential academic think tanks in the world, and the founder of that founded an oil and gas company. So back to twenty fifteen,

But anyway, to get to the main point.

Once we were called into an all staff meeting for the researchers at the Kennedy School in the Belfer Center and we were simply instructed that if any journalists come to talk to us about oil companies funding the research done there, just don't talk to them. You know, are told that we don't want activists, We don't want journalists digging around and finding out that the programs are being

And this is Harvard that he's talking about, like the university where Jeffrey Sopron and Naomi Erescus work and there are two of the foremost scholars of how like fossil fuel propaganda even works.

Just incredible.

And it's funny because there are so many other schools that take corporate funding, but then they like proudly name buildings or even entire departments after them. But here's Harvard hiding this influence. Our university is generally pretty transparent about where their research funding comes from.

Yeah, that's like traditionally been kind of an ethical policy at universities, although I do think that it's becoming more common to hide that funding or just say anonymous donors or things like that. But at the time that this was happening at Harvard. This is like twenty fifteen. Ben found it to be very, very strange.

We always advertised and disclosed who was funding our research, and we're generally proud of it, but we definitely didn't keep it a secret, and so encountering this secrecy in the public policy space, I just thought that was so strange. And of course for me, when they said don't talk about this thing, I wanted to talk about it more. My ears perked up and I was like, probably dozing off in the back or something, and I popped up ort and.

I was like, Oh, that's something interesting's going on.

But I think it speaks to the broader issue, which is, to what degree has the fossil fuel industry shaped very public policy responses and paradigms and ways of thinking about climate change as a problem. How has the industry shaped those things at the basic level, at the level of students learning about them in universities.

Yes, Ben, that's exactly what this whole series is about, how they've shaped thinking about not only like the problem, but also the possible solutions. Welcome to the final episode in the ABC's of Big Oil from Earth and Drilled.

I'm Darna Noir.

And I'm Amy Westervelt. Today. We're going to college.

Stay with us.

She's got a man, She's promised to love, honor.

And keep house for the right way.

That mean I never helped help with the dishes.

Never bell does my dishes? Look that makes us to shine without washing your white.

I wish I had a cat castle in the sky, away up high where bluebirds like to fly of cozy little castle with a hundred rooms or more. Dear someday, what stars for windows, clothes for rugs, or rainbow for a dawn? I wish I just wish I had a decent kitchen. Hey, we're so sad, and this is the first time I've noticed it.

Nothing really not very convincing, Jane girls.

Whatever it is, I've got just.

A cure for it.

There's a sensational sail going on watching and.

You, ha would be the ideal tonic for you.

I'm going down this say afternoon for smalls free.

How about coming with him?

A lot of ads and TV and movies and stuff from the fifties kind of paint this picture of post World War two Americans being just like so relieved that the war was over that they embraced consumerism wholeheartedly, and all of that also gets wrapped up in like patriotism and nationalism too. But Amy, it seems like you actually found something recently that revealed what was kind of going on under all that, right.

Yes, I found this archive in Wisconsin that held all of the old papers of one of Standard Oil's early pr guys.

His name was Earl Newsom.

He worked for Standard Oil of New Jersey, which is now Exon Mobil from the late nineteen thirties to the late nineteen sixties. Either he or someone in his family donated like every single file from his business to the Wisconsin Historical Society archive, and there were dozens and dozens of boxes from his years at Standard. Okay, I've got a folder marked confidential here, so that's interesting. See what's tony.

Premise?

Hmm, Okay, this is some kind of strategy. It's nineteen forty four. Wow, Okay, holy shit. At the top, there's typed at the top of this page, says the premise, and then it goes next to crushing the axis and

And again, this is around nineteen forty four, so let me just make sure I've got this straight. Americans got too used to the idea that the government could actually maybe you know, do a pretty good job of taking care of them and making society work. And that was bad for business because if people started thinking that the state should be involved in their lives, then that means oh, no regulation and maybe even a slippery slope to communism.

Exactly, and The reason this really blew my mind is that I happened to read this nineteen forty four strategy document the same day that I read all the stuff from Frank Abrams on why standards should invest in universities.

So you might remember that name from the first episode of this series.

Abrams was a VP at Standard Oil of New Jersey during this same time period, and by the early fifties he was leading the company's university investments and encouraging other companies and industries to do the same, precisely to push this exact idea that government intervention is bad, that free enterprise is what keeps America free. He was also really big on the idea that companies needed to support private universities or else the only ones left would be government funded.

Oh no, communist universities.

But yeah, it totally makes sense that they'd be donating to more private universities, although just to be clear, corporations definitely donate massive amounts of money to public universities too. A lot of what this points to is that it really wasn't so much that companies were actually concerned about American people becoming too an independent. It's not about the

That's right, that's right.

So today American companies provide a little over thirteen percent of the funding for universities, which is a pretty large percentage of the money that you know is funding all kinds of research in the country. Another thirteen and a half percent comes from this nebulous other organizations category, which

A lot was economics.

So for example, there's this organization called the National Bureau of Economic Research, which you know, sounds like a totally neutral government agency, right, totally.

Yeah. I think for years I thought that it was like a really boring a federal agency, but it's not.

It's not.

It's a private, nonprofit research organization.

That's right, And it claims to be non partisan, and it has all of these statements on its website about how it avoids conflict of interest and things like that. But its funders do include x on Mobile and the Bradley Foundation, which actually spends more than the entire Coke network, pushing a very conservative agenda that also includes claim and denial.

Yeah, and you can see it everywhere.

Like one of the top economists Mit is the president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the president their Law and economics guy runs the Center for Law, Economics and Business at Harvard too, and that center was actually created with funding from John lm Olan and the Oln Foundation, which has a long history of funding what Source Watch calls, quote a chain of anti environmental, pro business legal advocacy organizations unquote.

And where did John Owen.

Make his money, Well, guns and chemicals, naturally.

Yeah, And a big part of what he did with all that money was fund the creation of these centers.

I mean dozens of them.

John m Ollen Lawn Economic Centers or centers named something similar to that, are at universities all over the country, most of the top universities.

So in addition to the one at.

Harvard, there's one at Stanford, UCLA, Yale, University of Virginia. I know I'm missing several in that list. Olan was a big opponent of what's called the law and economics movement, which again sounds like something fairly innocuous, you know, but it's this movement that arose amidst that whole post World War two concern that Americans would turn on free enterprise.

Yeah, and John em Ollen came across this whole sort of framework in the seventies and obviously it's like a perfect fit for him.

He loves it.

He throws a ton of money at it, and he creates these centers that really, like most universities, start looking and you start finding them everywhere, and that really accelerates this whole movement, this whole you know, law and economics movement, and that lays the ground work for DA DA DA the Federalist Society, which of course is the organization that's been working to get more conservative judges appointed in courts throughout the country.

Right.

And we're talking about all of this not just because it's like weird and interesting, but also because it dovetails with some new research that ben Fronta has done looking at fossil fuel involvement in economics research, and particularly in economics research that influences policy discussions.

The question that's obvious that we should ask is what effect has that had what has been the influence of decades of funding from these special interests. Latest research is one example, some new research that will be out soon, and by the time this airs, it might already be out.

It tracks the.

Activity of a group of economic consultants who were hired by the petroleum industry for decades to produce analyzes that were then used by the companies and by others opposing restrictions on fossil fuels to tell the public that it would just be way too expensive to act on climate, and that in any case, climate was not going to be a big deal, so the best thing to do is just do nothing. And this was the economic ammunition that the industry used alongside their scientific mergence of doubt.

This point that Ben is making here is really really important. In the last decade or so, I think there's been this increasing realization amongst many people who think about climate change that climate inaction is not really caused by a lack of scientific evidence, or even really by a lack

That's right.

It reminds me of this thing that climate scientists Ken Caldera said to me a couple years back.

You know, back in the eighties, we believe the information deficit model of social change and that if we could only get the information to policy makers that they would do the right thing.

And now we see in the age of Trump that it's you know, really, it's not about information deficit. It's about power relations and people wanting to keep economic and political power, so that just telling people some more climate science isn't going to help anything. And surprise, surprise, in this country, especially after citizens United and all of that

And I mean, it seems to me that that's the central question of how that happens. And it's not climate science, it's political strategy. I have no idea what the right answer is, but I'd like to know.

Right and if that wealthy and powerful minority is also funding a bunch of economics and law and public policy programs, for instance, all of those ideas get even more entrenched. It's like this self repetuating loop where you have the research that keeps justifying the policy, and the companies and the billionaires and the think tanks keep funding the research, and that keeps going back into the policy.

Yes, totally.

And I should note here that Caldera himself might be getting a bird's eye view of.

That, because he's.

Kind of like Bill Gates's guy on climate research at the moment. But I want to be clear here that a lot of researchers who get funding one way or another from fossil fuel companies or from people or organizations that are friendly to the industry are not necessarily directly compromised. It doesn't look like, you know, some excellent executive like showing up in their lab and telling them what to research.

We're talking about a systemic issue here.

Not any one institution or academic And then you know the other problem is that there's not really like a bunch of funding waiting around if all of the fossil fuel or other industry funding goes away.

Yeah, exactly where where are you going to get the rest of that funding if it goes away? What's there to follow the gap? Most academic researchers aren't like these few economists that ben Fronta have found. But there's some who are really pretty specifically and strategically at carrying water for the industry. Let's hear a little bit more of that story.

One thing I do in my historical research is I'll download like the entire online newspaper record. For example, I studied the American Petroleum Institute, and so I'll download every newspaper article on an online database with the words American Patrolling Institute and global warming or climate change in their record.

It was the same economists.

That I had that I had noticed we're working on these things in like the mid nineties, giving the same talking points against the Kyoto Protocol in nineteen ninety seven.

Oh, my God, this like history on repeat thing just kills me.

The fact that it's the literal same economists giving the exact same talking points to another president pulling out of another international climate treaty twenty years later.

I mean by like twenty ten or so, they'd already they've been at this for twenty years. And you know, Senators were saying, look, it's like, we don't even need to study because we know that they've.

Already been saying this for twenty years.

And in a way, the scientific merchants of doubt ultimately failed. I guess their power waned, but the economics part, their power did not really wane in the same way. And you know, the implications are larger as well, because I looked at this economic consulting firm largely because I just stumbled upon their activities.

But they were not alone.

You know, there were other consulting firms doing very similar work. But also their work is not that different from the work done at MIT, at the Joint program where they do economic modeling there. That program is funded by the oil industry. Not only the oil industry, but they do receive funding from the oil industry.

There's this other Cross University group that's funded by fossil fuel interests.

That Ben mentioned to these groups participated in something called the Energy Modeling Forum at Stanford University, which brought together lots of people, and that that group is funded almost entirely by fossil fuel interests.

You know.

So there's the consulting part, then there's the academic environmental economics part, and the industry is involved with both in terms of their funding. And you know, I think at the end of the day, the question is where does this leave us?

Like is the analysis wrong? First of all?

Is a good question to ask, you know, I mean, okay, what if it's actually right?

Now?

One of the nice things about this study was that one of these economists was willing to talk to me and honestly share his perspective and experiences, and we talked about the limitations.

Of their models, you know.

And their models were essentially based on assumptions that have become mainstream in American economics, like the economy performs optimally without intervention and so on. These are unscientific concepts that because they can't be tested, of course, but it's just taken as an article of faith that if somebody has to do something that they're not already doing it must

This is kind of the question across the board.

Really. We've laid out in these four episodes how much the industry invests in schools, from elementary schools on through universities.

But it's important to note that.

Though the oil industry has different strategies for getting into each level of education, it's not like any of this stuff is unrelated.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And also, you know, even though the oil industry is sort of pushing this idea that the reign of the free market is what we need and you know, pushing the virtues of limiting governance, the public sector is actually helping them with this whole scheme. Like remember think back to episode one when Carol Muffett from the Center for International Environmental Law explain to us how the government actually had hundreds of contracts out for energy industry funded school

I think it's really.

Important to recognize that this presentation was presented to the Society of Petroleum Engineers in the early two thousands, and at the moment that he's presenting to SDE, what he's acknowledging here is that between DOE and IOGCC, which is the independent oily gas companies, there.

Were more than three hundred active school outreach programs that the Energy Literacy Project had documented, along with another forty seven programs from the National Mining Association.

So, speaking of that Energy Literacy Project slide show, Amy, we were actually able to have a pretty special guest on the podcast too, aren't we.

That's right, that's right, a huge get. We got to speak with John Tobin of the Energy Literacy Project.

He's still around who made the sledge show.

That's right.

He made that slideshow back in the early two thousands. He's a long time well known industry consultant, and he explained to us that he's working on a new initiative to create university curricula with funding from the oil and gas industry and an emphasis on helping to sort of train university students to deal with the big problems facing the energy industry.

The emphasis on this is not just the technological or narrow expertise that the different universities have in their various classes, but putting it together in terms of something that can actually turn into a real program, and that brings some of the business, the economics, the political science, the social sciences into the picture. Before whatever they're going to present. Their solution can mean anything the decision maker wants to know.

And Tobin said that, you know, working on this new natural resources education program, he's finding opportunities for grant funding from the public sector or from the government to get this project off the ground, but they come with some stipulations, including needing to partner with higher education institutions, So that means that he'd need to actually collaborate with colleges and universities on his energy industry funded project in order to be eligible for federal money.

We dug into the financing of such things, the size of the budget that we would look for. The most direct area was we found was the US Department of Education. All of their grants require an association or partnership with in the institution of higher learning.

Right.

I think it's because the department they've had wants to make sure that they are at least indirectly funding colleges.

Yeah. Wow.

So, I mean at this point, what we've found over the course of kind of researching this series is that schools across the board are pretty dependent on either you know, free materials from industry sources or, in the case of universities, on funding from corporations.

So it kind of makes you wonder, is it even possible.

At this point to remove this influence without losing the financial support for universities Exactly.

It's a really tough problem to solve, how you know, keep education stable without all of that money. But there are definitely people working on creating real clouate education and kicking the fossil fuel industry out of schools, and we're going to bring you all of those silver linings in an extra bonus EPISOD, so.

Come back for that.

Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency podcast Network. This series is a collaboration with earther, Gizmoto's climate and justice site. My co host and co reporter for the series is Darna Noir. Our editors are Julia Richie for Drilled and Brian Kahn for Earther. Our producer is Juliana Bradley. Mixing and mastering by Peter Duff. Our factchecker is Trevor Gowan. Music is by Martin Wissenberg.

Our artwork was created.

By Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the First Amendment Project. You can find corresponding stories, videos, and documents for this series on earther dot com. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.

The att