Welcome Molly Taft, our senior reporter, editor, extraordinary.

Thank you. You have been looking into fossil fuel funding in universities in lots of different ways,

but there's some news recently on this front.

What's happening?

Yeah, so there's been a lot of movement on a conversation that I feel like has

been going on both officially and unofficially for for several years. You know, one of the more interesting things that happened this month is a team of

researchers released a literature review which sounds kind of boring but basically what they did is they said to themselves okay you know in order to move

forward in researching fossil fuel funding in universities we need to figure

out what we know first right so they basically did what's called in academia literature review which is you look at all the

literature on a topic and you kind of come to come to some conclusions about it and what's interesting

about this literature review is that, you know, even though activists

and folks in universities, folks concerned about the climate have been talking about fossil fuel funding in

academia for a really long time the researchers found that there's actually not that

many peer-reviewed articles about it there's not that much peer-reviewed research about what all of this oil money is doing to academic research, yeah, which is kind of crazy because like the parallels here that they drew were conflict of interest studies on bias in research

are really prevalent when it comes to other industries like tobacco, pharmaceuticals. You can find

hundreds of peer-reviewed articles on this topic, like what happens when an

industry funds research.

Those discussions have been going on for decades.

But there's just not a lot with fossil fuel funding.

And a lot of it is really recent.

They found seven peer-reviewed articles in their search,

and only a few of them were before 2012.

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