Fossil fuel companies’ funding of universities’ climate-focused efforts is delaying the green transition, according to the most extensive peer-reviewed study to date of the industry’s influence on academia.
For the study, published in the journal WIREs Climate Change on Thursday, six researchers pored over thousands of academic articles on industries’ funding of research from the past two decades. Just a handful of them focused on oil and gas companies, showing a “worrying lack of attention” to the issue, the analysis says.
But even that small body of research shows a pattern of industry influence: “The academic integrity of higher education is at risk,” they write.
During the past two decades, non-profits, campus organizers and a small group of scholars have sounded the alarm about oil companies’ influence in academia, drawing parallels to tobacco, pharmaceuticals and food producers who have also funded scholarship.
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