The fossil fuel industry has captured parts of academia. What does this mean for climate action campaigns?
Image credit: Honi Soit
Last month, investigative journalist Royce Kurmelovs revealed that Monash University had hosted a ‘climate change and energy transition’ conference at its Italian campus, funded by gas giant Woodside Energy.
Monash’s presence in Italy was itself a surprise to many, but worse is its partnership with one of Australia’s biggest climate polluters. The University’s tight-lipped response to questions – the conference’s website has been deleted and no papers presented there could be found online – only deepened suspicions.
However, Monash’s embrace of fossil fuel money is no longer unusual in the tertiary education sector.
A campaign of infiltration
With the fossil fuel industry beginning to feel public pressure concerning its role in driving global warming, it has actively infiltrated universities, think tanks and other academic bodies in a process of co-option that spans decades: a sophisticated form of greenwashing.
Industry representative bodies and corporations involved in fossil fuel extraction, transport and sales have funded a range of research centres and named faculty chairs at reputable universities across the world. Some examples include:
18 chairs at 13 universities funded by Foundation CMG (FCMG), including the recent 2017 Research Chair in Onshore Gas Modelling at the University of Queensland. FCMG is funded by dozens of leading oil and gas companies, including Saudi Aramco, BP, Chevron, Equinor, Petrobras, Petrochina, Petronas, and Shell.
Fossil fuel companies donated $700 million to US universities between 2010 and 2020, including to UC Berkeley, Stanford and MIT.
The industry, of course, expects a return on its investment. A recent Nature study by Columbia University researchers, based on 1706 reports from 26 US universities, quantified the implications of this funding and found that:
‘research centers accepting funding from the gas industry were far more likely to
embrace fossil gas as a climate solution, and to downplay the role renewable energy
sources might play in the energy transition, than their non-fossil-funded counterparts.’
Australian universities are rife with these kinds of compromised relationships. Monash itself has taken a leading role, hosting the Woodside-funded FutureLab, the eponymous Woodside Building for Technology and Design, and the Woodside Monash Energy Partnership. The University of Western Australia hosts the Woodside Chair in Leadership and Management and the Woodside-funded Oceanworks, among others, while Curtin University hosts the Curtin Woodside Oil, Gas and LNG Construction and Project Management Chair and the Woodside-Chevron Chair in Materials and Corrosion Engineering.
The impact of this trend has been significant. It has allowed the industry to cite approving scholarship about its claims from legitimately credible scientists and universities to time- and expertise-poor decision makers in government and regulatory bodies, boosting their influence.
As a result, industry analyses and talking points are common in the climate debate, and in government positions on oil and gas. This is in large part due to the veneer of respectability that the academic credentials of their proponents affords them.
What does this mean for climate campaigning?
Fossil fuel capture of academia isn’t new, and it isn’t going away. Climate campaigners need to be aware of it and actively counter it in their work.
The first step is to push past the instinctive discomfort at criticising academics simply by virtue of their status. It is entirely consistent to exhort governments to ‘follow the science’ when it comes to climate change while criticising scientists who take tainted money from coal, oil and gas giants. In the same way that a university wouldn’t take tobacco industry funding, it should also refuse partnerships with fossil fuel companies who seek to greenwash their operations by being associated with respected universities while pushing for new oil and gas drilling.
The climate movement should continue to boost the voices of leading academics who are willing to speak out against fossil fuels but, crucially, these relationships must be, and be seen to be, without influence or favour.
Finally, it must resource campaigns that seek to expose and stigmatise academics and institutions who speak out of both sides of their mouth on climate change: claiming to be leading on climate research while taking millions of dollars from the very companies who are accelerating global warming. Divestment of university funds isn’t enough. Universities must be made to refuse to take direct donations as well, whether in the form of shiny new buildings or named chairs or research programmes.
In this crucial decade for climate action, any less is far too little.
