The Conversation, September 8
As the climate crisis gets worse, global fossil fuel production is growing and oil and gas companies are making record profits. While the powerful influence of the fossil fuel industry’s lobbying on climate policy is increasingly acknowledged, our new research also shows how oil and gas companies are influencing universities.
We are researchers with combined expertise on just energy transitions and climate justice and the university (the title of Jennie Stephens’s forthcoming book). With international colleagues we undertook the first comprehensive review of academic and civil society investigations into fossil fuel industries’ ties to higher education in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. In all four countries, the research shows multiple ways oil and gas companies have been investing in universities.
