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"It's time for our universities to become real climate leaders," said one organizer, "and cut ties with the fossil fuel industry once and for all."
Students at universities and colleges across the U.S. have long demanded that their schools cut ties with the fossil fuel industry as planetary heating has increasingly been linked to extreme weather and pollution-causing emissions have continued.
New findings released by student researchers with the Campus Climate Network on Wednesday, said the organization, "add more detail and evidence to what these students have already been campaigning for—fossil fuel funding has no place in universities' climate research."
The students spoke at a virtual press conference titled "Big Oil's Stain on Our Universities," presenting research compiled in six reports regarding fossil fuel industry ties at Columbia University, Princeton University, Cornell University, American University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and University of California San Diego.
The six institutions have collectively received more than $108 million in direct funding to the fossil fuel industry, published more than 1,500 academic articles and papers funded by oil giants, and count 10 people affiliated with the industry among the members of their university governance boards, according to the research—which follows the first-ever literature review of investigations into Big Oil's links to higher education, published in the peer-reviewed journal WIREs Climate Change earlier this month.
Columbia and Princeton were by far the biggest recipients of fossil fuel money, accepting more than $43 million each from companies and their foundations.
Sunrise Columbia, the Sunrise Movement's chapter at the university, published a report presented at Wednesday's press conference, detailing how Hess Corporation—an oil and gas company acquired by Chevron—was the largest fossil fuel donor to the prestigious university. The company contributed more than $15 million to Columbia from 2005-24.
Koch Family Foundations, "which have spent hundreds of millions to finance groups promoting climate denial," and liquefied natural gas (LNG) firm Cheniere Energy were also major contributors.
Fossil fuel money at Columbia has gone toward funding the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP), the School of International and Public Affairs, and the university's Climate School—which "powers innovative research in the science, consequences, and human dimensions of climate change."
"CGEP, the Climate School, and Columbia repeatedly claim to produce unbiased, reputable research to advance climate solutions. Many of our findings directly contradict these missions."
The Climate School has received $741,967 from fossil fuel giants since it was established in 2020.
"CGEP, the Climate School, and Columbia repeatedly claim to produce unbiased, reputable research to advance climate solutions," reads the report. "Many of our findings directly contradict these missions—from Columbia being named explicitly by a BP [vice president] as essential for their outreach and influence to being specifically mentioned as a producer of biased research, Columbia has fallen short," said Sunrise Columbia.
At Princeton, student researchers wrote that the university "legitimizes and financially supports the fossil fuel industry," continuing to invest "approximately $700 million in privately held fossil fuel companies without justification," even after divesting its endowment of fossil fuel holdings worth $1 billion.
The report notes that the school's New Jersey campus "has not been spared" from extreme weather that's growing more frequent as the planet gets hotter and scientists warn that limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C is getting less likely.
"Last summer, our campus was shrouded by smoke from incinerated Quebecois pine trees, smoke that turned the sky a burning orange. Outdoor workers on and off campus were hit hardest," wrote the students. "Floods nearby destroyed transport infrastructure and made it harder for our community members to come to campus to work or to learn. Scorching temperatures at the start of each fall semester make it difficult to think."
But while students, faculty, and staff have suffered the effects of fossil fuel extraction, major fossil fuel companies including BP, Exxon, Shell, and TotalEnergies have spent more than $43 million on research at Princeton, funding papers containing "explicit applications for continued or expanded fossil fuel use."
At the virtual press conference on Wednesday, Campus Climate Network research manager Maddie Young said the articles detailed in the six reports focus primarily on methods for fossil fuel extraction, methods and "benefits" of "false solutions" like carbon capture, and extending and upholding "the social license of the fossil fuel industry to operate."
"So these might be articles that are connected to healthcare or health research and promote the image of corporate social responsibility connected to the fossil fuel industry," said Young, "and allow them to continue to leverage these relationships to universities and to greenwash their own image and present themselves as socially responsible."
The student researchers recommended that Princeton prohibit all research funding from the industry and complete divestment from all oil, gas, and coal companies, as well as cut ties with Petrotiger, a fossil fuel company that Princeton "appears to own," having earned nearly $140 million in the last 10 years in investment income and direct contributions.
"These recommendations are all within Princeton's power to achieve," said the student researchers. "The university must act upon these items with the urgency the climate crisis demands."
Young, who is also a student organizer at American University, said the student-authored reports are "only the beginning—we have a strong, national student movement that will continue to expose and cut the ties with Big Oil."
“It's time for our universities to become real climate leaders," said Young, "and cut ties with the fossil fuel industry once and for all."
"Our report clearly lays out the way carbon capture tax credits rig the system in favor of the oil and gas industry to the tune of billions of dollars," one expert said.
As the U.S. moves to invest in climate solutions, is the money going toward projects that will meaningfully reduce emissions and transition the nation's energy system away from fossil fuels?
A report released Wednesday by worker-owned corporate accountability and environmental justice research organization Empower found that just 34 carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects in Texas could receive between $3.2 billion and $33 billion in annual tax subsides.
At the same time, most of the carbon dioxide pipelines in the state are managed by the major oil and gas companies like Kinder Morgan, Occidental Petroleum, and ExxonMobil that played a disproportionate role in creating the climate crisis in the first place.
"Carbon capture and storage is the most expensive and least effective carbon mitigation solution. It's really not where we need to be investing our money," said Paige Powell, the policy manager at Commission Shift, at a press briefing announcing the new research. "And the public dollars coming from the federal government to fossil fuel companies are our dollars, our taxpayer dollars that could be better spent elsewhere."
"I think it's important for us to ask ourselves, if carbon capture is receiving so much public dollars, why is there little public input?"
For its report, Empower turned up 98 carbon dioxide-related projects in the state of Texas, including 47 pipelines and 13 Class VI Geological Storage projects. These projects are currently primarily funded through tax breaks and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) subsides; the report authors found little evidence of any private investments.
"Our report clearly lays out the way carbon capture tax credits rig the system in favor of the oil and gas industry to the tune of billions of dollars," Empower's Samuel Rosado said in a statement. "Public funding and tax breaks are the largest sources of revenue for CCS projects. Without the massive federal investment, the private sector deems most CCS projects unprofitable."
The main tax credit for CCS is the 45Q tax credit, which assigns a dollar amount for every metric ton of carbon dioxide captured and permanently stored. While this credit was first created by the Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008, the Inflation Reduction Act expanded it, raising the credit to $85 per metric ton. At the same time, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act earmarked more than $8 billion for the DOE's CCS programs.
"These are the key bills that were enacted that enabled CCS to be at least more financially available than it previously was," Rosado said in the briefing.
Yet climate and accountability advocates are concerned that the money is being misdirected.
Powell noted that CCS technology had been around for 50 years, but had failed to advance.
"All of these projects have been largely unprofitable, and they haven't expanded the way that renewables and other climate solutions have, primarily because the technology is problematic," Powell said. "It's unsafe, it's fraught with mechanical failures, and not to mention wildly expensive when compared to other climate solutions."
Dominic Chacon of the Texas Campaign for the Environment said that industry boosting of CCS amounted to a form of "greenwashing."
"It is essentially a marketing PR branding ploy to downplay the obvious risks associated with fossil fuels, to try and rebrand this industry as something that we need for the future," Chacon said.
Autumn Hanna, the vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, noted that there was a history of fraud in past allocation of CCS subsidies.
"A Treasury investigation found that from 2010 to 2019, 90% of tax credit claimants failed to comply with IRS [Internal Revenue Service] and EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] requirements," Hanna said in a statement. "Instead of throwing good money after bad, we should focus our limited resources on climate solutions we know are safe and effective."
At the same time, most federal CCS subsides actually ended up going toward injecting carbon dioxide into depleted oil wells in order to extract even more oil, which is currently the only profitable use of the technology.
"Continuing to funnel these subsidies and tax breaks to the oil companies, which mostly use it to extract more fossil fuels, really weakens its supposed climate benefits," Hanna said in the briefing.
In Texas specifically, there are concerns about the safety of CCS infrastructure and its impact on ecosystems and communities, given the state's weak regulatory culture.
"We need to chart a new course here in Texas and in Washington to incentivize climate solutions that actually work."
"Our state oil and gas regulator, the Railroad Commission of Texas, is reluctant to oversee the industry in a way that protects people and the environment," Powell said.
The Empower report found that 19 CCS projects overlap with at least 24 million acres of water, threatening both coastal and river environments. The report authors also ran into a lack of transparency.
After filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Environmental Protect Agency to access data about CCS projects, they received documents with entire pages redacted on the behest of the companies and with the permission of the EPA.
"This is very dangerous when it comes to corporate accountability and transparency on environmental issues, because entire pages were redacted from FOIA requests and public information requests that are incredibly important for communities and safety in these communities," Rosado said.
The advocates called for greater transparency and accountability around public financing for untested and expensive climate solutions.
"I think it's important for us to ask ourselves, if carbon capture is receiving so much public dollars, why is there little public input?" Chacon asked. "There is no public transparency on this technology."
Hanna called for putting "the breaks on the whole thing until we start to really answer some big questions that are out there instead of just autopilot expansions and extensions that carry huge costs and, again, leave us with these big questions and this lack of transparency and oversight."
Community organizations in the Lone Star State are petitioning the EPA to reject the Texas Railroad Commission's request to have primary oversight over CCS projects in the state.
"Allowing Texas to continue down this path is irresponsible and only serves oil and gas interests. That's why it's critical that the Environmental Protection Agency not hand over regulation of dangerous CCS projects to the Railroad Commission of Texas, which has shown that it's in the pocket of fossil fuel companies, which stand to profit while putting our communities at risk," Powell said in a statement. "We need to chart a new course here in Texas and in Washington to incentivize climate solutions that actually work."
To that end, Commission Shift is also urging concerned residents to comment on new EPA draft permits for CCS projects in the Permian Basin.
"Let them know we need an extension to review the permits and that we really just don't want these here in the Permian, it's not the right place for all these projects," Powell said.
"It is high time for the American public to understand just how much charitable money is funding climate change disinformation and to recognize the key individuals behind this effort."
A report published Wednesday identifies nearly 140 "climate disinformation organizations" in the United States financed by wealthy donors who receive massive subsidies from the nation's taxpayers.
The analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Climate Accountability Research Project (CARP) explains that wealthy donors are "pouring billions of dollars" into nonprofit organizations to "advance misleading, self-serving agendas that do irreparable harm to our planet"—all while reaping the benefits of charitable contribution deductions in the U.S. tax code.
"Funds directed to fossil fuel industry-friendly think tanks and policy groups help turn disinformation into accepted truth and sow doubt about science," the analysis notes. "Then, these ideas get turned into action—or, more often, inaction—by the policy brass of lawmakers and presidential administrations."
The new report highlights "two troubling examples of this chain of influence: The Competitive Enterprise Institute, or CEI, received $21 million in charitable contributions from 2020 to 2022; it bills itself as 'instrumental' both in blocking ratification of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and in pressuring former President [Donald] Trump to withdraw from the 2016 Paris agreement."
"And the Heritage Foundation received $236 million in contributions over the same three years; this money allowed Heritage to write Project 2025, a policy blueprint overseen by several former Trump administration appointees, that proposes changes to the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency that would be disastrous for our climate," the report adds.
IPS and CARP estimate that donors to the two right-wing organizations were able to deduct "much of" their $257 million in gifts—effectively receiving major public subsidies.
"We are calling for fundamental transparency reforms so we can assess the total amount of taxpayer-subsidized charitable donations flowing to climate disinformation organizations."
In total, the report counts 137 "climate disinformation" nonprofits that received charitable donations between 2020 and 2022, with six of them focused "largely or entirely" on climate issues. The 137 organizations collectively received $5.8 billion in contributions over the three-year period examined in the analysis, which estimates that the total sum the nonprofits spent on climate disinformation "could range anywhere from a conservative $219 million into the billions of dollars."
The three "climate disinformation charities" that held the most in assets in 2022, according to the new report, were the Charles Koch Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Seminar Network.
Between 2020 and 2022, the climate disinformation groups that received the most in total contributions were the Seminar Network, the Stand Together Foundation, and the 85 Fund—an organization connected to Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo.
Chuck Collins, director of IPS' Program on Inequality and a co-author of the report, said in a statement that the analysis "provides some much-needed transparency so that the American public can understand the deceptive ways in which the rich seek to advance and protect their interests."
"Based on our findings from the data sources available to us, we are calling for fundamental transparency reforms so we can assess the total amount of taxpayer-subsidized charitable donations flowing to climate disinformation organizations," said Collins. "Many of these donors have built their fortunes in energy or the banking, insurance, transportation, and legal businesses that support the carbon-intensive industries, so they have strong personal interests in ensuring the world's dependence on fossil fuels."
The report notes that wealthy donors have recently been funneling billions of dollars into so-called donor-advised funds (DAFs), which IPS and CARP describe as a kind of "charitable bank account: a donor can donate to a personalized fund managed by a sponsoring nonprofit organization, and take a charitable deduction for that donation right away, but the donor then retains advisory privileges that let them recommend grants out of the fund to whichever charities they want, on whatever timeline they want."
IPS and CARP found that the three largest sponsors of DAFs between 2020 and 2022 were the National Philanthropic Trust, the Schwab Charitable Fund, and DonorsTrust.
"Because DAFs have a near-complete lack of donor and grantee reporting requirements, they allow for a high level of secrecy in donating funds," the report observes.
Private foundations are also major funders of climate disinformation, according to the new report, which lists the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, among others.
The report outlines a number of potential policy changes to stem the ability of individuals and organizations with fossil fuel ties to secretively finance climate disinformation with the help of taxpayer subsidies, including barring private foundations from "using grants to donor-advised funds to meet their payout requirements" and requiring DAF sponsors to disclose "the names of all individual donors who have contributed $10,000 or more to each DAF account."
"It is high time for the American public to understand just how much charitable money is funding climate change disinformation and to recognize the key individuals behind this effort," the analysis says.