S7, Ep4 | We’re Going Streaking

Ben Franta [00:00:19] So this was back when I was a grad student at Harvard and I was working at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. And you know, that's in the Kennedy School of Government. The role of fossil fuel companies in academia had started to become a bigger issue, and this was around probably like 2015 15 or so. For instance, I think, you know, when the journalism school at Columbia came out with the Exxon Knew investigation or they started doing some work related to that, then Exxon responded by kind of threatening to take away their funding in so many words, and people became more and more interested in who's funding these programs at universities. And is it fossil fuel companies? And what kind of pressure does that put on those academic programs to do one thing or another study one thing or another or not to study something?

Amy Westervelt [00:01:15] This is Ben Franta. He first told me the story back in 2017, and it's actually kind of what got me wondering about fossil fuel funding of social science programs at universities. That investigation he mentioned, Exxon Knew, was led by Columbia Journalism School graduates, and it found that Exxon had been using climate science to shape its own business plans for decades, but had simultaneously been hiding that science from the public.

Ben Franta [00:01:45] I started to look into this issue at Harvard looking at what programs are funded by oil companies and a lot of the programs at the Kennedy School—the government school to do with public policy—were funded by Big Oil companies. For example, I worked at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, it's one of the most influential academic think tanks in the world, and the founder of that founded an oil and gas company. So back to 2015. So this issue is starting to emerge. I'm starting to write about it a little bit, and it was seen as a very unpopular thing to do. And at this early stage, it was seen as like just really uncouth to raise this issue. And I even had professors at the Kennedy School who just wouldn't talk to me. I think because they were upset that I was writing about the issue. But anyway, to get to the main point, once we were called into an all staff meeting for the researchers at the Kennedy School and the Belfer Center, and we were simply instructed that if any journalists come to talk to us about oil companies funding the research down there, just don't talk to them. You know, we were told that we don't want activists, we don't want journalists digging around and finding out that the programs are being funded by oil companies. I mean, when I heard this, you know, I was pretty surprised that level of secrecy was being pursued.

Dharna Noor [00:03:16] And this is Harvard that he is talking about, like the university where Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes work. And they're two of the foremost scholars of how, like fossil fuel propaganda even works, it's just incredible. And it's funny because there are so many other schools that take corporate funding, but then they proudly name buildings or even entire departments after them. But here's Harvard hiding this influence. Aren't universities generally pretty transparent about where their research funding comes from?

Amy Westervelt [00:03:48] Yeah, that's traditionally been kind of an ethical policy at universities, although I do think that it's becoming more common to hide that funding or just say, anonymous donors or things like that. But at the time that this was happening at Harvard, this is like 2015, Ben found it to be very, very strange.

Ben Franta [00:04:11] We always advertised and disclosed who was funding our research, and we were generally proud of it, but we definitely didn't keep it a secret. And so encountering this secrecy in the public policy space, I just thought that was so strange. And of course, for me, when they said, Don't talk about this thing, I wanted to talk about it more. My ears perked up and I was like, probably dozing off in the back or something. And I popped up earlier and I was like, Oh, that's something interesting is going on. But I think it speaks to the broader issue, which is, to what degree has the fossil fuel industry shaped the very public policy responses and paradigms and ways of thinking about climate change as a problem? How has the industry shaped those things at the basic level, at the level of students learning about them in universities?

Dharna Noor [00:05:03] Yes, Ben! That's exactly what this whole series is about, how they've shaped thinking about not only the problem, but also the possible solutions. Welcome to the final episode in The ABCs of Big Oil from Earther and Drilled. Dharna Noor

Amy Westervelt [00:05:18] And I'm Amy Westervelt. Today we're going to college. Stay with us.

Promo [00:05:33] Our friends over at the New Republic have a podcast you should know about, it's called The Politics of Everything. It explores the intersection of culture, politics and media in biweekly interviews with scholars and journalists. The show's hosts are TNR literary editor Laura Marsh and contributing editor Alex Perrin. On recent episodes, they have examined the Lyme vaccine that got away. The real deal on police who have claimed to overdose on fentanyl merely from handling the drug. And Mark Bittman is beef with capitalism. You can find the politics of everything, wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

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Dharna Noor [00:07:55] a lot of ads and TV and movies and stuff from the 50s kind of paint this picture of post-World War Two Americans being just like so relieved that the war was over that they embraced consumerism wholeheartedly. And all of that also gets wrapped up in like patriotism and nationalism, too. But Amy, it seems like you actually found something recently that revealed what was kind of going on under all that, right?

Amy Westervelt [00:08:20] Yes, I found this archive in Wisconsin that held all of the old papers of one of Standard Oil's early PR guys. His name is Earl Newsoe. He worked for Standard Oil of New Jersey, which is now ExxonMobil from the late 1930s to the late 1960s. Either he or someone in his family donated every single file from his business to the Wisconsin Historical Society archives, and there were dozens and dozens of boxes from his years at Standard.

Amy in the archive [00:08:52] Oooh a folder marked confidential here. So that's interesting to see what's in it. Hmm. OK, this is some kind of strategy. It's 1944.

[00:09:16] Wow, OK. Holy shit. At the top, there's typed at the top of this page, it says "The Premise," and then it goes "next to crushing the Axis and avoiding runaway inflation while we're doing it, the most important problem confronting us is to keep the American people convinced of the intrinsic, social and economic worth of the free enterprise system and of its superiority over statism, so that the people will be determined to remove unnecessary governmental controls and reestablish competitive, democratic, free enterprise capitalism when the war is won.".

Amy Westervelt [00:10:09] I found this plan from 1944, so the the year that World War Two was ending. This plan goes on to lay out how various companies and industries can coordinate their pro free enterprise campaigns without seeming like they're coordinating. And of course, without using the words free enterprise. There's even a whole bit about how they're not going to use the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers because, you know, everyone knows they're just shills for business. And again, this is 1944.

Dharna Noor [00:10:39] So let me just make sure I've got this straight. Americans got too used to the idea that the government could actually maybe, you know, do a pretty good job of taking care of them and making society work. And that was bad for business because if people started thinking that the state should be involved in their lives, then that means no regulation and maybe even a slippery slope to communism.

Amy Westervelt [00:11:00] Exactly. And the reason this really blew my mind is that I happened to read this 1944 strategy document the same day that I read all the stuff from Frank Abrams on why Standard should invest in universities. So you might remember that name from the first episode of this series. Abrams was a VP at Standard Oil of New Jersey during this same time period. And by the early 50s, he was leading the companies university investments and encouraging other companies and industries to do the same, precisely to push this exact idea that government intervention is bad, that free enterprise is what keeps America free. He was also really big on the idea that companies needed to support private universities or else the only ones left would be government funded.

Dharna Noor [00:11:48] Oh, no communist universities. But yeah, it totally makes sense that they'd be donating to more private universities. Although just to be clear, corporations definitely donate massive amounts of money to public universities. To a lot of what this points to is that it really wasn't so much that companies were actually concerned about American people becoming too independent. It's not about the independence of American people. That's not what scares them. It's really that they wanted the American public to be independent. Sure. But on them, not on the government.

Amy Westervelt [00:12:20] That's right. That's right. So today, American companies provide a little over 13 percent of the funding for universities, which is a pretty large percentage of of the money that, you know, is funding all kinds of research in the country. Another 13 and a half percent comes from this nebulous other organizations category, which is mostly what are called donor advised funds and to give you some indication of what those generally are. Donors trust the pot of money that the Kochs use to fund all kinds of stuff, from right wing legislation, farm ALEC to news networks that publish free market propaganda to climate denying university centers. It's a donor advised fund. So this means that, you know, there's a fair bit of of, you know, kind of hidden corporate money also going into universities. The rest is pretty evenly split between foundations and high net worth individuals.

Dharna Noor [00:13:18] You know, there is like this whole idea right now of like the liberal elite trope of universities. But all this talk of conservative right wing like pro-business ideas being muzzled kind of seems like totally misguided. I mean, it sure seems like the conservative agenda school is alive and well and flush with cash, too.

Amy Westervelt [00:13:40] Yeah, that's right. And that's really important because when we looked into what oil companies and the people who love them were funding at universities, especially when we looked outside of the scientific sphere, a lot of it, a lot was economics. So for example, there's this organization called the National Bureau of Economic Research, which, you know, sounds like a totally neutral government agency, right? Totally.

Dharna Noor [00:14:05] Yeah. I think for years, I thought that it was like a really boring federal agency, but it's not. It's not. It's a it's a private nonprofit research organization.

Amy Westervelt [00:14:14] That's right. And it claims to be nonpartisan, and it has all of these statements on its website about how it avoids conflict of interest and things like that. But its funders do include ExxonMobil and the Bradley Foundation, which actually spends more than the entire Coke network pushing a very conservative agenda that also includes climate denial.

Dharna Noor [00:14:40] Yeah, and you can see it everywhere. Like one of the top economists at MIT, here is the president of the National Bureau of Economic Research. The President, There, Law and Economics Guy, runs the Center for Law, Economics and Business at Harvard, too. And that center was actually created with funding from John al-Moallem and the Olin Foundation, which has a long history of funding what, what source, what she calls quote a chain of anti-environmental. Pro-business legal advocacy organizations, unquote. And where did John Olsen make his money? Well, guns and chemicals naturally.

Amy Westervelt [00:15:18] Yeah, and a big part of what he did with all that money was fund the creation of these centers. I mean, dozens of them. John M. Olin law and economic centers or centers named something similar to that are at universities all over the country. Most of the top universities. So in addition to the one at Harvard, there's one at Stanford, UCLA, Yale University of Virginia. I know I'm missing several in that list. Allen was a big proponent of what's called the law and economics movement, which again sounds like something fairly innocuous, you know? But it's this movement that arose amidst that whole post-World War Two concern that Americans would turn on free enterprise. So the law and economics folks advocated for analyzing any legislation or legal action or even legal institutions through an economic lens. So really evaluating the value of any kind of policy or law issue via its economic impact.

Dharna Noor [00:16:20] Yeah. And John M. Olin came across this whole sort of framework in the 70s, and obviously it's like a perfect fit for him. He loves it. He throws a ton of money at it, and he creates these centers that really, like most universities, start looking and you start finding them everywhere, and that really accelerates this whole movement. This whole, you know, law and economics movement. And that lays the groundwork for the… Ta-Da! The Federalist Society, which, of course, is the organization that's been working to get more conservative judges appointed in courts throughout the country.

Amy Westervelt [00:16:57] Right. And we're talking about all of this not just because it's like weird and interesting, but also because it dovetails with some new research that Ben Ferrante has done looking at fossil fuel involvement in economics research and particularly in economics research that influences policy discussions.

Ben Franta [00:17:18] The question that's obvious that we should ask is what effect has that had? What has been the influence of decades of funding from these special interests? Latest research is a is one example. Some new research that will be out soon, and by the time this airs, it might already be out. It tracks the activity of a group of economic consultants who were hired by the petroleum industry for decades to produce analyzes that were then used by the companies and by others imposing restrictions on fossil fuels to tell the public that it would just be way too expensive to act on climate and that in any case, climate was not going to be a big deal. So the best thing to do is just do nothing. And this was the economic ammunition that the industry used alongside their scientific merchants of doubt.

Dharna Noor [00:18:17] This point that Ben is making here is really, really important in the last decade or so, I think there's been this increasing realization among many people who think about climate change that that climate inaction has not really caused by, like a lack of scientific evidence or even really by a lack of understanding. I think mostly now we're all kind of thinking of it as an issue of political will, and this kind of stuff kind of plays directly into that and shows you where that lack of political will comes from.

Amy Westervelt [00:18:45] Yeah, that's right. It reminds me of this thing that climate scientist Ken Caldeira said to me a couple of years back, you know, back in

Ken Caldeira [00:18:52] the 80s, we believe the information deficit model of social change and that if we could only get the information to policymakers, then they would do the right thing. And now we see in the age of Trump that it's, you know, really it's not about information deficit, it's about power relations and people wanting to keep economic and political power. So that just telling people some more climate science isn't going to help anything and surprise surprise in this country, especially after Citizens United and all of that money and power entrenched power has disproportionate political influence. You know, I don't understand how social change happens when it challenges the interests of, well, entrenched and powerful minority. And I mean, it seems to me that that's the central question of how that happens. And it's not climate science, it's political strategy. I have no idea what the right answer is, but I'd like to know.

Dharna Noor [00:20:06] Right, and if that wealthy and powerful minority is also funding a bunch of economics and law and public policy programs, for instance, all of those ideas get even more entrenched. It's like this self-perpetuating loop where you have the research that keeps justifying the policy and the companies and the billionaires and the think tanks keep funding the research, and that keeps going back into the policy.

Amy Westervelt [00:20:30] Yes, totally. And I should note here that Caldera himself might be getting a bird's eye view of that because he's kind of he's kind of like Bill Gates is guy on climate research at the moment. But I want to be clear here that a lot of researchers who get funding one way or another from fossil fuel companies or from people or organizations that are friendly to the industry are not necessarily directly compromised. It doesn't look like, you know, some Exxon executive like showing up in their lab and telling them what to research. I understandably get a little defensive about this, and we're not trying to say that that anyone at any of these many, many universities is, you know, ethically compromised in some kind of personal way. We're talking about a systemic issue here, not any one institution or academic. And then, you know, the other problem is that there's not really like a bunch of funding waiting around if all of the fossil fuel or other industry funding goes away.

Dharna Noor [00:21:30] Yeah, exactly. Where where are you going to get the rest of that funding if it goes away? What's there to fill the gap? Most academic researchers aren't like these few economists that Ben Front have found, but there are some who are really pretty specifically and strategically are carrying water for the industry. Let's hear a little bit more of that story.

Ben Franta [00:21:48] One thing I do in my historical research is I'll download like the entire online newspaper record. For example, I study the American Petroleum Institute, and so I'll download every newspaper article on an online database with the words American Petroleum Institute and global warming or climate change in their record. You know, that might be a few thousand articles, and I'll sort them in chronological order and I'll read all of them just to get the story, just to see what are their phases of communication? What are the battles they're fighting in different times? And I was doing that over, you know, it takes many days to read that much material. But I was doing that and I noticed that like these there these economists that keep coming up again and again. And I was like, That's interesting. And this is, you know, this was stuff from like the early to mid 1990s. So this is a while ago I thought, Oh, I'm sure they're not doing stuff anymore. Then at the same time, I was doing this research. President Trump announced that the US was going to pull out of the Paris Agreement, and in his speech, he said that the Paris Agreement was going to cost an American family, you know, $4000 per year or something like that. You know, it's going to cost a lot of money. And I thought this doesn't really make sense because those parts of the Paris Agreement are not legally binding to begin with, I thought, who are the economists that are saying this? Where's this analysis coming from to give President Trump the talking points? You know, to say that in a speech? And I looked up the economic analysis that that President Trump used and it was the same people. It was the same economists that I had that I had noticed for working on these things in, like the mid-nineties giving the same talking points against the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

Amy Westervelt [00:23:37] Oh my God, this like history on repeat thing just kills me. The fact that it's the literal same economists giving the exact same talking points to another president pulling out of another international climate treaty 20 years later.

Ben Franta [00:23:52] I mean by like two thousand ten or so they'd already they've been at this for 20 years. And, you know, senators were saying, Look, it's like we don't even need a study because we know that they've already been saying this for 20 years. And in a way, the scientific merchants of doubt ultimately failed. I guess their power waned. But the economics part there, power did not really wane in the same way. And you know, the implications are larger as well, because I looked at this economic consulting firm largely because I just stumbled upon their activities, but they were not alone. You know, there were other consulting firms doing very similar work, but also their work is not that different from the work done at MIT, at the joint program. Where do they do economic modeling there,? That program is funded by the oil industry, not only the oil industry, but they do receive funding from the oil industry.

Dharna Noor [00:24:52] There's this other Cross University group that's funded by fossil fuel interests that Ben mentioned to

Ben Franta [00:24:59] these groups participated in something called the Energy Modeling Forum at Stanford University, which brought together lots of people, and that entire group is funded almost entirely by fossil fuel interests. So there's the consulting part. Then there's the academic environmental economics part and the industries involved with both in terms of their funding. And you know, I think at the end of the day, the question is where does this leave us? Is the analysis wrong? First of all, is a good question to ask. I mean, what if it's actually right now? One of the nice things about this study was that one of these economists was willing to talk to me and honestly share his perspective and experiences, and we talked about the limitations of their models and their models were essentially based on assumptions that have become mainstream in American economics, like the economy performs optimally without intervention and so on. These are unscientific concepts that because they can't be tested, of course, but it's just taken as an article of faith that if somebody has to do something that they're not already doing, it must be suboptimal. The circular reasoning type of logic and there are assumptions built into the model about how expensive clean energy is going to be, and it's assumed to be expensive, like forever, like really expensive and things like that. So the way the model itself is constructed, it's not really like reliable in terms of when is this actually going to cost? So that part's not really quantitatively reliable. Then you have the other side, which is the benefit side, which is not even being addressed, right? So it's impossible to even make a comparison in terms of like, is this policy worth it or not? And so at the end of the day, it's a fraudulent economic product. Right? You have economists saying we did the analysis and it's too expensive, you know, now, even by their own admission, that's not true. So and this has been going on for decades. You know, so now the question is, what do we do about this?

Amy Westervelt [00:27:02] This is kind of the question across the board, really, we've laid out in these four episodes how much the industry invests in schools from elementary schools on through universities. But it's important to note that though the oil industry has different strategies for getting into each level of education, it's not like any of this stuff is unrelated. Yeah, yeah.

Dharna Noor [00:27:23] And also, you know, even though the oil industry is sort of pushing this idea that the reign of the free market is what we need and, you know, pushing the virtues of limiting governance, the public sector is actually helping them with this whole scheme. Like, remember, think back to episode one when Carroll Muffett from the Center for International Environmental Law explained to us how the government actually had hundreds of contracts out for energy, industry funded school and education projects. This is something that that slide show that he walked us through in episode one also kind of got into.

Amy Westervelt [00:27:58] I think it's really

Speaker 6 [00:27:59] important to recognize that this presentation was presented to the Society of Petroleum Engineers in the early 2000s and at the moment that he's presenting. What he's acknowledging here is that between Delhi and IOG CC, which is the independent oil and gas companies, there were more than 300 active school outreach programs that the Energy Literacy Project and documented, along with another forty seven programs from the National Mining Association.

Dharna Noor [00:28:38] So speaking of that energy literacy project slideshow show Amy, we were actually able to have a pretty special guest on the podcast too, weren't we?

Amy Westervelt [00:28:48] That's right. That's right. A huge get. We have to speak with John Tobin of the Energy Literacy Project. He's still around

Dharna Noor [00:28:56] who made the slide show.

Amy Westervelt [00:28:57] That's right, he made that slide show back in the early 2000s. He's a long, well known industry consultant. And he explained to us that he's working on a new initiative to create university curricula with funding from the oil and gas industry and an emphasis on helping to sort of train university students to deal with the big problems facing the energy industry.

Speaker 6 [00:29:21] The emphasis on this is not just the technological or narrow expertize that the different universities have in their various classes, but putting it together in terms of something that can actually turn into a real program. And that brings some of the business, the economics, the political science, the social sciences into the picture before whatever they're going to present. Their solution can mean anything the decision maker wants to know. You know, how is this going to work? Can I justify this to my shareholders or my stakeholders or whatever? What's at stake here? How much? If you'll excuse my French is my buttocks closed on this deal because it's personal? One of the things that when I present in these sort of sections talking about the business decision process, try to make sure that everybody understands that whatever you're going to be forecasting here is wrong. It's what you just hope. It's within the range of what you're talking about. That's what actually happened. And if there's a difference between admitting to the uncertainty and if you had to be considering the price of oil, right, and risk is personal, it's what the decision maker looks at that uncertainty. Is this a risk I can take? So it's kind of a capstone or wrapping these things together in terms of how to apply if you were a petroleum engineer was looking at this sort of thing, how do you apply that so that somebody can make it sound well-reasoned decision about whether to go ahead with the project?

Dharna Noor [00:30:59] And Tobin said that, you know, working on this new Natural Resources education program, he's finding opportunities for grant funding from the public sector or from the government to get this project off the ground. But they come with some stipulations, including needing to partner with higher education institutions. So that means that he'd need to actually collaborate with colleges and universities on his energy industry funded project in order to be eligible for federal money.

Speaker 6 [00:31:27] We dug into the financing of such things at the size of the budget that we would look for. The most direct area was Shaw we found was the U.S. Department of Education. All of their grants require an association or partnership with an institution of higher learning. I think it's because the Department of ED wants to make sure that they were at least indirectly funding colleges.

Amy Westervelt [00:31:55] Yeah. Wow. So I mean, at this point, what we've found. Over the course of of kind of researching this series is that schools across the board are pretty dependent on either, you know, free materials from industry sources or in the case of universities on funding from corporations. So it kind of makes you wonder, is it even possible at this point to remove this influence without losing the financial support for universities?

Dharna Noor [00:32:27] Exactly. It's a really tough problem to solve. How you, you know, keep education stable without all of that money. But there are definitely people working on creating real climate education and kicking the fossil fuel industry out of schools. And we're going to bring you all of those silver linings and an extra bonus episode. So come back for that.

Amy Westervelt [00:32:56] Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency podcast network. This series is a collaboration with Earther, Gizmodo's climate and justice site. My co-host and co reporter for the series is Darna Noah. Our editors are Julia Richie for Drilled and Brian Kahn for Earther. Our producer is Juliana Bradley, mixing and mastering by Peter Duff. Our fact checker is Trevor Gowan. Music is by Martin Weissenberg. Our artwork was created by Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaten of the First Amendment project. You can find corresponding stories, videos and documents for this series on earther dot com. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.