Universities Are Starting to Say No to Fossil Fuel Funding

Drilled

Critical Frequency

True Crime, Earth Sciences, Social Sciences, Science

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Beginning with Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon) in the late 1940s, oil companies have invested heavily in universities, not just to fund engineering programs and, eventually, climate science, but also to fund the public policy centers and economics programs that shape policy solutions. Fossil Free Research, a new group formed by many of the same students who pushed their campuses to divest from fossil fuels, is demanding that the world's top universities break their addiction to fossil fuel money and in late September they logged their first big win: Princeton University. In this episode we take a look at the roots of fossil fuel funding in universities and the evolution of the movement to root it out.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to Drilled, I'm Amy Westervelt.
0:24.5	You might remember in the season we did with Earther last year that Darnanore and I got
0:29.6	into how much money will companies invest in research at top tier universities and some
0:37.2	of the reasons behind those investments.
0:39.9	Although they certainly influence how climate science is studied and which solutions are
0:44.9	given more research funding, we wanted to look at the social side of the equation.
0:50.8	Where were fossil fuel companies investing in public policy schools or law schools or
0:57.0	economics programs?
0:58.8	How were they working to narrow the social and political understanding of the problem
1:04.2	and the available solutions to it?
1:07.2	Things how most folks have coalesced around the idea that addressing climate change is
1:11.7	a political, not scientific question, that seemed like an important place to look.
1:17.0	And we were pretty shocked by what we found.
1:19.1	Going back to the 1950s, when Standard Oil first started to heavily invest in universities,
1:24.9	fossil fuel companies have always thought about the social and political conditions necessary
1:29.6	to preserve their wealth and power.
1:32.4	And they have supported university research that does just that.
1:36.5	In recent years, university students have started to push their campuses to refuse this
1:40.8	money.
1:41.8	And last week, Princeton University became the first to actually do so.
1:46.6	Or at least take a first, very big step toward doing so.
1:50.4	The university announced that it would no longer accept gifts or grants from 90 fossil
	...

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