Getting fossil fuel interests out of academia

Climate Accountability Lab
Organisation
Climate Accountability Lab
Grant
DKK 3,062,978
Programme Area
The Influence Industry
Year
2023

As part of a wider campaign to delay climate policy, fossil fuel interests have strategically used their funding relationships with universities around the world to undermine academia’s ability to help address the climate crisis. For example, it has been documented that Exxon, Chevron, and the American Petroleum Institute, in 1998, developed a strategy to leverage academia to halt ambitious climate action. A strategy that included building “cooperative relationships with all major scientists whose research in this field supports our position”, while actively using PR firms to discredit scientists who were vocal about the dangers of climate change. More recently, a U.S. House Oversight Committee investigation uncovered a BP executive in 2019 describing the company’s relationships with universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Tufts, and Columbia as “key parts of [BP’s] long-term relationship-building and outreach to policymakers and influencers in the US and globally."

Climate Accountability Lab
Two organizations have joined forces to raise awareness and mobilize action on this issue: Climate Accountability Lab at the University of Miami has a long track record of investigating climate change disinformation by fossil fuel interests, and in this project they will research the scale and influence of fossil fuel-university partnerships worldwide and investigate the role of fossil fuel funding of academia in obstructing climate action. This work will be supplemented by Fossil Free Research – an organization supporting students and faculty working to expose and dismantle fossil fuel industry influence on higher education. Fossil Free Research will be working with student groups across the globe and provide trainings to advocacy groups campaigning to get academic institutions to address this issue.
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