Progress in Europe and the East Coast, Denialism at Stanford, Freedom, Integrity, and a Scoop

(Originally sent on August 11, 2023)

This week, we are:

1) sharing some exciting dissociation updates from universities that are ahead of Stanford

2) addressing a comment made by our dean that exemplifies the conveniently muddled thinking practiced by some of our leadership (including the Managing Director of the Natural Gas Initiative; see her here on PBS repeating the American Gas Association’s talking points), and

3) sharing information about Stanford’s StorageX Initiative.

Exciting News from Leaders in Fossil Fuel Dissociation

Since Princeton University announced its rejection of research funding from 90 fossil fuel companies in September of 2022, momentum for dissociation has been building, this summer in particular:

• In June, Vrije Universiteit university in Amsterdam announced it will end all research collaborations with all companies that cannot demonstrably commit to the Paris Agreement in the short-term. In practice, this means dissociation from all fossil fuel companies.

• In July:

  an internal, university-sanctioned report by Cambridge University was published. It concluded that “it is difficult to find the logic behind the decision to continue to accept funding from fossil fuel funding sources.”

• the University of Utrecht announced its guiding principle that the “university will only enter into research collaborations with fossil fuel companies and organizations if they are intensively and demonstrably committed to accelerating the energy transition, in line with the Paris Climate Agreement.” Specific criteria will be further concretized after the summer.

• the University of Amsterdam announced it will no longer collaborate or accept funding from fossil fuel companies unless a set of strict criteria are met.

• The University of Amsterdam set a particularly forward-thinking example by arriving at its decision through a deliberative process (described in detail in the downloadable report here).

• They pulled off this entire process in a matter of months, compared to Stanford’s year of red tape and closed-door dialogues.

Addressing our Dean’s Denialism

The Doerr School’s dean, Arun Majumdar, was recently a guest on the Hydrogen Initiative Podcast, a podcast partially funded by Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and other fossil fuel companies. Many of the dean’s comments on the podcast were factually-grounded. He did falsely state that all the IPCC’s pathways include carbon removal (see Grubler et al. 2018, cited here by the IPCC for a clear counterexample; also included are pathways with very low carbon removal), but we can let that slide.

However, he also made a jarring claim, saying:

“At least to my knowledge, I’ve seen all major countries, all major corporations, academia, all aligned towards this goal [of addressing climate change] because people realize it’s a problem.”

This is false and contradicts some of his previous statements. Oil and gas supermajors have actually walked back their climate commitments. Many of these companies recently lobbied to weaken the UK’s Climate Compatibility Checkpoint, to weaken gas leak taxation schemes, to weaken renewable hydrogen standards, and to speed permitting of new oil and gas infrastructure (see here for these and numerous other examples). Indeed, the fossil fuel industry’s hostility to climate action has recently become so blatant that prominent COP and UNFCCC organizers have written mea culpas regarding their past willingness to give the industry a seat at the table (see here and here). The Dean’s false statement of global unity is a tacit endorsement of fossil fuel companies whose representatives publicly lie and lobby against climate action.

As an antidote to the denialism exemplified by our dean’s statement, we are sharing a lucid and impassioned talk recently given by former vice president Al Gore. He lists the “unrelenting opposition of the fossil fuel industry” as the #1 obstacle to swift climate progress. Gore also addresses the fossil fuel industry’s latest delay tactics, which have evolved since the days of climate denial, and which have taken root in Stanford’s fertile soil. Click the link above or the image below.

For a bit more history on the fossil fuel industry’s consistent opposition to climate action, we recommend this seven-minute overview.

We also wanted to highlight one of the dean’s statements with which we wholeheartedly agree:

“At the end of the day we have to honor one of the basic principles of academia, which is academic freedom, which means that professors and students should be allowed to pursue their education and their research in ways that cannot be controlled by other people.”

Of course, there are plenty of ways that professors’ research is already affected by other people (what kind of research can secure funding, what is subject to ethics restrictions, what projects are available for students, and more). But in principle, we could not agree more. This is why we want decisions about our school’s focus to be made by students, staff, and faculty, and not be influenced by fossil fuel representatives; why we want courses untarnished by fossil fuel representatives; why we want professors who reject fossil fuel funding to be highlighted and celebrated for their independence; and why we want students to know where their funding comes from and to have the option of pursuing research that is not funded by and influenced by fossil fuel interests. Jake Lowe and Connor Chung have an excellent piece unpacking how fossil fuel funding undermines academic freedom.

We also recognize that with great prestige and power comes a responsibility for academic integrity. And we know that when its reputation is sufficiently at stake, Stanford’s leadership can be forced to care about academic integrity. In his own words, former Stanford President Tessier-Lavigne resigned because Stanford “needs a president whose leadership is not hampered” by questions of his academic integrity and by discussions of his research. We want all the hard work and scholarship at Stanford to be respected by the world and to be free from the stain of fossil fuels and allegations of conflicts of interest.

This Week’s Scoop: StorageX

Stanford’s StorageX initiative thankfully appears less entangled with fossil fuel interests than other Doerr School affiliate programs: it doesn’t list any former high-level employees at climate-obstructive companies as directors (unlike the Natural Gas Initiative and Hydrogen Initiative — see here) and its reports don’t appear to advocate for policy that directly contradicts the Paris Agreement (unlike the Natural Gas Initiative, see here). Its research largely focuses on batteries and electrification, a crucial part of a rapid energy transition.

In Oct. 2020, a year after its launch, StorageX announced a broadening of focus to include non-electrical storage technologies such as thermal storage and chemical storage. Chemical storage in particular (especially as inefficient and expensive “e-fuels”) is popular among oil and gas companies, but we don’t see evidence that fossil fuel representatives had a direct role in shaping this focus. Shell and ExxonMobil had already been funding this initiative for 10 and 7 months, respectively, once this announcement was made.

This is good news, right? Yes, this is good!

And yet, even in this relatively “clean” affiliate program, fossil fuel money still wields undue influence. At present, StorageX counts Chevron (the world’s most climate-obstructive company according to InfluenceMap), ExxonMobil, Shell, and ConocoPhillips among its funders. This funding comes with all the typical strings attached: seats on the advisory council, invitations to StorageX courses, facilitated student engagement and recruitment opportunities, and more. It also includes intellectual property benefits negotiated as part of sponsored research projects, a benefit absent from other affiliate programs. We were unable to find a public list of these sponsored research programs.

But is all this so bad if students are (largely) working on genuine climate solutions? As we have argued before, fossil funding does damage in several ways even if it is (at least partially) funding pro-climate research.

• First, working with companies which oppose climate progress and science itself compromises trust in Stanford’s research. Concerns about academic integrity were raised back in 2007, five years after ExxonMobil donated $100 million to launch the Stanford Global Climate and Energy Project (which allowed companies a say in research proposal selection, granted them final veto power, and gave companies exclusive 5-year rights to any discoveries). More recently, the University of Massachusetts is being investigated after the Boston Globe reported on an industry-influenced study touting hydrogen a substitute for natural gas in residential distribution.

• Second, fossil fuel companies are using Stanford’s name to purchase social license as they walk back climate commitments in the name of short-term profit and invest at most single-digit percentages of their operating budgets in renewables. University partnerships and/or Stanford’s name in particular have been touted in the advertising or public-facing websites of ExxonMobil (and here, touting GCEP), Chevron, BP, Saudi Aramco (for more on Stanford’s close relationship with Saudi Arabia and its national oil company, see here), and several more.

• Third, Stanford is letting fossil fuel companies recruit its talented graduates into damaging and dead-end careers in the oil and gas industry. For instance, after Chevron became a StorageX sponsor in Spring 2021, paid Chevron internships were offered through StorageX researching carbon capture utilization and storage, the “hydrogen value chain,” “circular plastics,” and other low carbon technologies. These summer opportunities serve both as a recruitment pathway for Chevron and push students towards industry-preferred “solutions.” Some of these “solutions,” like CCS, haven’t seen improvement despite over 50 years of development (see here for a full, peer-reviewed analysis from Oxford) yet offer a license to continue polluting.

We were pleased that StorageX seems less affected by fossil fuel influence than other Stanford affiliate programs, but as our previous Scoops have shown, the bar is very low. We can do better, and with a new president and a renewed focus on academic integrity and on Stanford’s reputation, we believe we will.