For more than a decade, students have been begging their universities to stop investing in oil and gas companies. In 2019, protesters stormed the field of a Harvard-Yale football game at halftime, yelling, “Hey hey, ho ho! Fossil fuels have got to go!” Hundreds of schools have now taken steps to divest (including Harvard and, at least in part, Yale), and many campus climate activists are moving onto the next phase: calling on schools to end their ties with fossil fuel money altogether, rejecting grants and other funding.
According to a new study published on Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal WIREs Climate Change, these activists have good reason to suspect that oil money might influence academic research. It’s the first comprehensive look at the extensive ties between Big Oil and universities, uncovering hundreds of instances in which fossil fuel funding may have led to conflict of interests for researchers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
The scale of influence is huge, involving thousands of partnerships at hundreds of univers... Read more
