Speaker 1: Welcome, Mollitasted, our senior reporter editor, extraordinary. Thank you. You
Speaker 1: have been looking into fossil fuel funding in universities in
Speaker 1: lots of different ways. But there's some news recently on
Speaker 1: this front. What's happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's been a lot of movement on a
Speaker 2: conversation that I feel like has been going on, both
Speaker 2: officially and unofficially for several years.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: One of the more interesting things that happened this month
Speaker 2: is a team of researchers released a literature review, which
Speaker 2: sounds kind of boring, but basically what they did is
Speaker 2: they said to themselves, Okay, you know, in order to
Speaker 2: move forward in researching fossil fuel funding in universities, we
Speaker 2: need to figure out what we know first, right, So
Speaker 2: they basically did what's called in academia literature review, which
Speaker 2: is you look at all the literature on a topic
Speaker 2: and you kind of come to some conclusions about it.
Speaker 2: And what's interesting about this literature review is that, you know,
Speaker 2: even though activists and folks in universities, folks concerned about
Speaker 2: the climate, have been talking about fossil fuel funding in
Speaker 2: academia for a really long time, the researchers found that
Speaker 2: there's actually not that many peer reviewed articles about it.
Speaker 2: There's not that much peer reviewed research about what all
Speaker 2: of this oil money is doing to academic research. Yeah,
Speaker 2: which is kind of crazy because like the parallels here
Speaker 2: that they drew were conflict of interest studies on bias
Speaker 2: in research are really prevalent. When it comes to other
Speaker 2: industries like tobacco pharmaceuticals, you can find hundreds of peer
Speaker 2: reviewed articles on this topic like what happens when an
Speaker 2: industry funds research. Those discussions have been going on for decades,
Speaker 2: but there's there's just not a lot with fossil fuel funding,
Speaker 2: and a lot of it is really recent. They found
Speaker 2: seven peer reviewed articles in their search, and only a
Speaker 2: few of them were before twenty twelve, so you know,
Speaker 2: there's a real dearth of peer reviewed research on this topic.
Speaker 2: So to complete their literature review, what they did was
Speaker 2: they use what they call gray literature, which is reports
Speaker 2: from NGOs, reports from journalists, you know, articles about what
Speaker 2: fossil fuel funding is doing and moving through universities, and
Speaker 2: reports from students too, which are a really valuable part
Speaker 2: of this conversation, and they use that to kind of
Speaker 2: bulk out the literature review and found that there's a
Speaker 2: lot of really valuable work going on to understand how
Speaker 2: this industry is shaping policy at the top levels of university.
Speaker 2: But there's also like still a lot more that especially
Speaker 2: folks involved in academia can do. Academia needs to kind
Speaker 2: of turn the mirror towards itself in a sense and
Speaker 2: really take a much closer look at how this industry
Speaker 2: is shaping what's going on inside of it.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly. I think it just sort of helps to
Speaker 1: have this report as like a official accounting of where
Speaker 1: this stuff is at now totally as we're looking towards
Speaker 1: getting more information and figuring out more speaking of which
Speaker 1: I know there are also student reports coming out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, there's a batch of new research that's coming
Speaker 1: on this stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah so what actually and that sort of ties into
Speaker 2: the literature review. So I was talking to one of
Speaker 2: the researchers, Jeffrey Supran, and you know, he really emphasized
Speaker 2: that again, a lot of their literature review came from
Speaker 2: students on campus noticing stuff about how their university takes
Speaker 2: fossil fuel money, and you know, there's no replaceable way
Speaker 2: of doing research on a campus that's quite like being
Speaker 2: on the campus and being in the campus culture and
Speaker 2: understanding the way a school works, whether you work there
Speaker 2: or you're a student there, or you're an a lum
Speaker 2: Those are really the front lines of understanding this kind
Speaker 2: of stuff. And so there's been a push from a
Speaker 2: group called the Campus Climate Network. They have gathered students
Speaker 2: on a couple of different universities across the US and
Speaker 2: some international groups as well, and the first batch of
Speaker 2: their reports on how fossil fuel money is working throughout
Speaker 2: their specific universities were also released in September, and these
Speaker 2: students put a lot of really interesting numbers on a
Speaker 2: problem that doesn't have a lot of numbers right now.
Speaker 2: I think the last real accounting was Data for Progress
Speaker 2: estimated back in twenty twenty three that five fossil fuel
Speaker 2: companies had donated I think seven hundred million to a
Speaker 2: group of US universities over the past decade, and they
Speaker 2: said that was almost certainly an undercount, and really turns
Speaker 2: out it was. So One number that really shocked me
Speaker 2: was students at Columbia really buckled down and combed their
Speaker 2: universities public facing documents like stuff they could obtain publicly.
Speaker 2: This isn't any sort of pea into the inner workings
Speaker 2: of Columbia. They just sat down and they did the work.
Speaker 2: They expanded the reach a little bit to not just
Speaker 2: five major fossil fuel companies, but a variety of different
Speaker 2: fossil fuel influences, and by their calculations, Columbia has taken
Speaker 2: I think more than thirty seven million since two thousand
Speaker 2: and five in fossil fuel funding, which includes an environmental
Speaker 2: health professorship endowed by a descendant of Hesse, the guy
Speaker 2: who started HESS. So there is an environmental health field
Speaker 2: of study that is being funded by like the Hess Foundation,
Speaker 2: which I found particularly ironic, but yeah, it really goes
Speaker 2: to show. And I think in the Data for Progress
Speaker 2: report the number they put on Columbia was five million,
Speaker 2: and you know, it really goes to show like when
Speaker 2: you are familiar with how your school works and where
Speaker 2: to look for these things, it can be insanely beneficial
Speaker 2: in figuring out where the money is coming from and
Speaker 2: what it's going.
Speaker 1: Towards totally, which is a perfect segway into the other
Speaker 1: thing that we're going to talk about in this episode,
Speaker 1: which is like, I know, beautiful smooth transition, but like
Speaker 1: the students are amazing because they know where to look
Speaker 1: for things, and they also like catch with some things
Speaker 1: on campus that they're kind of like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: that seems weird. And the other great place to look
Speaker 1: for information on this stuff because again, a lot of
Speaker 1: these schools do not disclose all of their funding, and
Speaker 1: with the private schools in particular, you can't get at
Speaker 1: it through public records requests. You have to talk to
Speaker 1: people and figure it out. And one of the best
Speaker 1: sources on that stuff is actually other professors at those
Speaker 1: schools too, because in a lot of cases, people who
Speaker 1: are working at these campuses and are working on climate stuff,
Speaker 1: for example, are not super happy about the fact that
Speaker 1: other people are taking fossil fuel money. Like actually, I
Speaker 1: had an interesting conversation with Mark Jacobson at Stanford about
Speaker 1: this and how much some of his colleagues there have
Speaker 1: been ponying up to the fossil fuel money trough.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of fossil fuel funding and institutes like
Speaker 4: at our university we have these institutes that are funded
Speaker 4: largely by fossil fuels. We have even in our new
Speaker 4: school sustainability, what's the number one flagship research project? That
Speaker 4: they're promoting. It's carbon capture besides Stanford Princeton and MIT
Speaker 4: or culprits and pushing carbon capture, direct air capture, blue
Speaker 4: hydrogen electro fuels. So these four technologies are really pushed
Speaker 4: by the fossil fuel industry, and the fossil fuel industry
Speaker 4: is funding universities.
Speaker 1: And you had an interesting conversation with Craig Calendar, who's
Speaker 1: a professor at UC San Diego, both about what he's
Speaker 1: seen there but also they passed some interesting new policies recently.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Craig's doing some really interesting work and under his
Speaker 2: and other folks on his committee's leadership kind of pioneering
Speaker 2: the next step forward in talking.
Speaker 1: About this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: He teaches the philosophy of science, so this is like
Speaker 2: kind of right up his alley, and you know, he
Speaker 2: got on the Academic Senate Committee and they started wrestling
Speaker 2: with this question of like, Okay, what do we do
Speaker 2: about fossil fuel money in our university, in the UC
Speaker 2: system in general, what are the best policies to kind
Speaker 2: of start tackling this. And so back in the early
Speaker 2: two thousands, lots of schools joined on this bandwagon to
Speaker 2: ban tobacco money for specifically medical or health research, and
Speaker 2: a lot of these schools still have those policies in place. Surprisingly,
Speaker 2: that policy actually failed, that you see, but they did
Speaker 2: put on this other policy where you would need a
Speaker 2: special review of tobacco money by the chancellor, and so
Speaker 2: they said, okay, what if we do that for fossil
Speaker 2: fuel money? And that was basically he said. They told
Speaker 2: me that was kind of dead on arrival. There's all
Speaker 2: sorts of concerns about academic freedom. I think late in
Speaker 2: this conversation some times is when you bring this up,
Speaker 2: it's you know, I think people who are working at
Speaker 2: research centers and at universities think that you're accusing them
Speaker 2: of like knowingly conspiring with oil and gas companies, which
Speaker 2: is absolutely like, that's far and away not the case.
Speaker 2: But there is research showing that when you take money
Speaker 2: from an industrial funder or corporate funder, that does like
Speaker 2: set the tone of your research, whether you sort of
Speaker 2: realize it or not. You know, it doesn't mean that
Speaker 2: you're emailing BP every day to update them on your
Speaker 2: progress and destroying the climate, but it does mean that
Speaker 2: if he is paying for something, then they want that
Speaker 2: research done for a specific reason.
Speaker 1: Right, shout out to Doug Allmond and his team at
Speaker 1: YES and their nature piece.
Speaker 2: Yes, that piece is so good and really highlights you know,
Speaker 2: and he being at Colombia is also really interesting, especially
Speaker 2: given this new student report telling some of the money involved.
Speaker 2: But anyway, so Craig and the committee sort of regrouped
Speaker 2: and they were like, all right, so going to get
Speaker 2: a special review from the chancellor. Why don't we just
Speaker 2: like beef up transparency disclosures around this. And I think
Speaker 2: a lot of people I've talked to, and Amy, I'm
Speaker 2: sure you had this experience too, Like people you talk
Speaker 2: to about this are like shocked that that's not required,
Speaker 2: but like they're really there's so few.
Speaker 1: Disclosure requirements for this stuff.
Speaker 2: It is mind blowing. There's no federal policy, state policies,
Speaker 2: nothing in the state. You know, most universities have some
Speaker 2: sorts of ethics stuff, but like a lot of them
Speaker 2: don't require you to talk about where you take money from.
Speaker 1: And there's this really interesting thing. So like the last
Speaker 1: time I wrote about this stuff was around the Data
Speaker 1: for Progress report and the Holy School that gave me
Speaker 1: like a full accounting of their funding from fossil fuel
Speaker 1: companies was Berkeley, and when I asked them about what
Speaker 1: they thought of this push to try to ban fossil
Speaker 1: fuel funding of research, they were like, well, I don't
Speaker 1: think we could do that without getting sued. And I said,
Speaker 1: but what about you know, which is the thing people
Speaker 1: always say is like, well we did it with the
Speaker 1: tobacco industry and they were like yeah, but that was
Speaker 1: pre Citizens United. So that's super interesting how that stuff
Speaker 1: details with this idea that like it's part of academic
Speaker 1: freedom to allow people to take money from wherever. And
Speaker 1: something Craig said to me and I'm sure repeated to
Speaker 1: you as well, is that like even when they talk
Speaker 1: about transparency and disclosure, people will argue that it could
Speaker 1: impact or have like a chilling effect on academic freedom. Yes,
Speaker 1: people have to disclose where their funding is coming from.
Speaker 1: And I'm kind of like I kind of feel okay
Speaker 1: with that show, Like if you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like if somebody ooh, like this money is going
Speaker 1: to make me look bad, or it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: they're worried that they will be criticized for taking money
Speaker 1: from somewhere I don't know. To me, I'm kind of
Speaker 1: like I don't know, it just seems like where there's smoke,
Speaker 1: there's fire on that one.
Speaker 2: But totally. But it's also you know, and and yeah,
Speaker 2: we talked about you know, he was like a lot
Speaker 2: of the standards you think of this stuff come from
Speaker 2: conversations around pharmaceutical products and like ethics around disclosure in
Speaker 2: the pharmaceutical industry, and those conversations were like really heated
Speaker 2: a couple of decades ago, and people were defending writing
Speaker 2: an op ed in favor of a drug while being
Speaker 2: paid for the company that manufactures that drug and saying
Speaker 2: that's academic freedom.
Speaker 1: So our conversations.
Speaker 2: Around yeah, yeah, yeah, Like so that was a hot
Speaker 2: button issue back in I think he said the eighties.
Speaker 2: So I think that one thing I took away from
Speaker 2: him is that our definition of academic freedom, both culturally
Speaker 2: and in universities is subject to debate. I think most
Speaker 2: people now would say that it's it's important to disclose
Speaker 2: if you're getting paid by a drug company to promote
Speaker 2: a drug. But there's also this issue it's not just
Speaker 2: citizens united, but like increasingly universities and research have been
Speaker 2: just so privatized over the past couple of decades.
Speaker 1: That's a really important point. Like I know, I looked
Speaker 1: at this a while ago, and I think it's probably
Speaker 1: only gotten worse. But the proportion of research funding that
Speaker 1: comes from the private sector has just been growing exponentially
Speaker 1: over the past couple decades. So you have corporate donors,
Speaker 1: then you have high net worth individuals donating and they
Speaker 1: have specific agendas oftentimes too, and then you know, donor
Speaker 1: advised funds have become a major donor to universities as well,
Speaker 1: which is where you get a lot of like the
Speaker 1: coke money, but also lots of other hidden industry interests
Speaker 1: as well. So definitely, Yeahkes, there's a lot going on.
Speaker 2: So Craig and his fellow faculty members on the Sundate
Speaker 2: Committee formed is this policy that says, look, you can
Speaker 2: take money from fossip, fel industries. That's fine, you just
Speaker 2: have to disclose it, like you have to be really
Speaker 2: clear about where it's from and what it's going towards.
Speaker 1: Which is so reasonable and a really high margin right.
Speaker 2: Right nine percent in may percent of the vote, So clearly,
Speaker 2: you know, I think these conversations are are, perhaps for
Speaker 2: folks on campuses, difficult to have with your peers who
Speaker 2: might be taking money from a corporation and doing what
Speaker 2: probably is like valuable research, but you know, having the
Speaker 2: conversations around just how low of a barred disclosure is
Speaker 2: and how much good actually just being forthcoming about where
Speaker 2: the money is coming from can help address some of
Speaker 2: the issues and honestly also just open up a dialogue
Speaker 2: about like what's the purpose of taking this money? So
Speaker 2: that measure is with the chancellor right now, so like
Speaker 2: we still don't know if it's going to pass. In
Speaker 2: the meantime, UCSD is actually all of their students are
Speaker 2: being required to take climate change courses. It's a new
Speaker 2: as of the semester and new curriculum requirement for everyone there,
Speaker 2: which is like really cool. But like I think just
Speaker 2: having people on campuses who are starting these conversations is
Speaker 2: going to be some of the most important steps forward
Speaker 2: in even just like learning more about this stuff and
Speaker 2: figuring out where we're at with regards to to trust
Speaker 2: feel money in universities.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like where feels comfortable to draw the lines
Speaker 1: because I feel like you and I were talking about
Speaker 1: this before that like there's a certain amount of this
Speaker 1: stuff that does seem kind of innocuous, you know, it's
Speaker 1: sort of like, oh, they like funded a scholarship here,
Speaker 1: or they funded uh, you know whatever. But then I
Speaker 1: also am like, well, maybe I've just had that stuff
Speaker 1: normalized so much that it seems fine. But there's influence
Speaker 1: there too, And I agree like just really like talking
Speaker 1: like just figuring out as a society, okay, how because honestly,
Speaker 1: I mean, oil companies were like amongst the first to
Speaker 1: actually be major private donors to universities, and they did
Speaker 1: cotton on really quickly. Like there was I found and
Speaker 1: a speech that a Standard Oil New Jersey guy gave
Speaker 1: in the fifties, which is like there was this huge
Speaker 1: influx of private money into universities because they changed the
Speaker 1: tax code in the US, right and they made it
Speaker 1: a write off, right, which it wasn't before. So like
Speaker 1: the companies were starting to do more donations because it
Speaker 1: was like, oh great, it's a tax write off. But
Speaker 1: this guy who was at Standard Oil was like, no,
Speaker 1: you guys are missing the much bigger value, which is
Speaker 1: that like this is going to help us shape how
Speaker 1: people view the economy and public policy, and it's going
Speaker 1: to be the thing that's going to help us push
Speaker 1: back against statism.
Speaker 5: This is like, you know, so like they were really
Speaker 5: really early, and I feel like I don't know that
Speaker 5: there's been enough of a larger cultural conversation about how
Speaker 5: much it's grown and how we feel about it.
Speaker 1: I don't like when I was at school, I remember
Speaker 1: there was a huge push around public private partnerships and
Speaker 1: like commercializing the research that was coming out of universities,
Speaker 1: and like it was kind of all upside right. It's like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: like researchers, you know, don't just want their stuff sitting
Speaker 1: in a lab somewhere. Companies are looking for new ideas.
Speaker 1: It's a win win, you know, and they're just hasn't
Speaker 1: necessarily been enough about like okay, but what are the downsides?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think it's going to get even murkier,
Speaker 2: you know, as oil companies shift from like you know,
Speaker 2: they're not doing explicit deny. No one's doing explicit denial anymore,
Speaker 2: Like no one is denying that this problem is here,
Speaker 2: but they are adopting different tactics to make sure that
Speaker 2: they stay in business, which is a different conversation, right,
Speaker 2: And so what where is the I find this topic
Speaker 2: really endlessly fascinating because I think that a lot of uh,
Speaker 2: disinformation reporting has a hard ethical line, right which it's
Speaker 2: like this company is spreading disinformation, but like now it's like, okay,
Speaker 2: so BP wants to stay in business and one of
Speaker 2: the things they're doing is like funding research at universities
Speaker 2: that will help them stay in business, and.
Speaker 1: Like what do we do about that?
Speaker 2: It's an interesting ethical question or you know, I think
Speaker 2: Doug Almond in that paper, that twenty twenty two paper,
Speaker 2: there's a bunch of recommendations that he has, which include like,
Speaker 2: when someone from a research center that is funded by
Speaker 2: oil and gas money testifies in front of lawmakers, they
Speaker 2: should disclose the funding to their research center, which seems
Speaker 2: really simple, but I can imagine a lot of people
Speaker 2: would be extremely upset to have to do that. And
Speaker 2: so you know, like where where are these ethical aligns?
Speaker 2: Like what are we going to start accepting when it
Speaker 2: comes to money in research and what is going to
Speaker 2: be onerous to the total general Totally.
Speaker 1: I've had so many conversations with people who either run
Speaker 1: or work at centers that are heavily fossil fuel funded
Speaker 1: or even exclusively fossil feel funded at universities, and they're
Speaker 1: line of thinking, and I think this is pretty common
Speaker 1: across a lot of these campuses. Is this idea that
Speaker 1: but we're taking it to research solutions, So it's fine.
Speaker 1: We're not taking it to fund a petroleum engineering department,
Speaker 1: like that would be bad. But what we're doing is
Speaker 1: actually taking their money to look into solutions. But you know,
Speaker 1: I had a conversation with a guy at one place
Speaker 1: who you know, was kind of like, what's like, what's
Speaker 1: the problem with that if it's for not fossil fuel
Speaker 1: development or whatever? And I was like, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: what are you researching at your center? And he's like, oh,
Speaker 1: like mostly mostly hydrogen, but like good hydrogen, green hydrogen,
Speaker 1: and carbon capture. And I was like, okay, well, like
Speaker 1: would would those be the research focuses of your center
Speaker 1: absent the fossil fuel funding, right? And he was like
Speaker 1: I don't know. And I'm like, that's that is where
Speaker 1: the big question lies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's a great that's a
Speaker 2: great question, and like, yeah, I think I think that's
Speaker 2: something that you know, I'm glad that, like people on
Speaker 2: campuses are starting to talk about this, And honestly, it's
Speaker 2: funny because.
Speaker 1: Talk about it, because yeah, I'm like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe they would be maybe we do need more money
Speaker 1: in those things. And like, you know, the other thing
Speaker 1: too is that like people will be like, well, where
Speaker 1: else is the money gonna come from?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 1: It's not like there's some big pot of you know,
Speaker 1: no strings attached money just waiting to fund research. And
Speaker 1: when I've asked students about that, they're kind of like, well, a,
Speaker 1: I'm okay with less research if it means less bias
Speaker 1: in the research. And I'm like, okay, good, you know,
Speaker 1: interesting to think about, yes. But also, and I mean
Speaker 1: I think about this with with respect to the fossil
Speaker 1: fuel industry all the time in general, like why do
Speaker 1: they have to be in charge of how that money
Speaker 1: gets spent? That's the piece where I'm like, Okay, well
Speaker 1: what if they can donate, but they can't have any
Speaker 1: influence right for the most part, is not a thing
Speaker 1: that they are interested in doing. No, almost every thing
Speaker 1: I've ever seen or talk to someone about or whatever,
Speaker 1: there are strings attached. It's like, well, we only want
Speaker 1: to fund research on X, Y Z, or we want
Speaker 1: to have a say in the research projects that are chosen,
Speaker 1: or yeah, we want to have a person who works
Speaker 1: at that center, or you know, it's like there's there
Speaker 1: are a lot of ways that they end up having
Speaker 1: influence if they spend the money, and like you know,
Speaker 1: they don't really make big donations without that. Yeah about
Speaker 1: the strings attached.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Craig compared compared this to like, you know, everyone's
Speaker 2: doing it, but no one wants to show their hand
Speaker 2: in poker, Like no one wants to be the guy
Speaker 2: who goes first. And right. I do think, like, you know,
Speaker 2: if if that is a condition for accepting money, then
Speaker 2: like defend it, you know, like make sure like make
Speaker 2: sure or you have the guardrails in place so that
Speaker 2: it's like we are taking money for this specific project
Speaker 2: and we think this is actually a good thing and
Speaker 2: we're gonna like put your say it with your whole chest.
Speaker 2: Is kind of where I'm at with this, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Like if you think it's if you think having an
Speaker 2: oil executive sit on the board of a center that
Speaker 2: is doing this kind of research is a good thing,
Speaker 2: then why don't you publicize the guardrails you're you're putting
Speaker 2: in place to make sure that the research is you know,
Speaker 2: not biased. Why don't you, like I hate to be
Speaker 2: like a investigative reporter, a stereotype, but like sunlight is
Speaker 2: the best disinfective, just put it out there, make sure
Speaker 2: everything is really public, which is the opposite of what's
Speaker 2: happening right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally awesome. All right, coming up,
Speaker 1: Molly talks to Jeffrey Suprin and Craig Calendar and we
Speaker 1: get into a lot more details on this stuff that's
Speaker 1: all coming up after this quick break. I'm Amy Westervelt,
Speaker 1: and this is drilled. Let's start at the beginning.
Speaker 2: So the first piece of research you guys have is
Speaker 2: two thousand and three, right, It's the New Economics Foundation Report,
Speaker 2: And like I got to tell you, like I looked
Speaker 2: it up and I was pretty not surprised, but it
Speaker 2: sounded like something that could have been written yesterday, right,
Speaker 2: And like a lot of the tenets of what people
Speaker 2: who study this stuff they were right there. And you
Speaker 2: do the math, and there are like kids in college
Speaker 2: now who were born after that report came out, Right,
Speaker 2: So you know, this stuff has been out there for
Speaker 2: a while. How has the research around it grown and changed?
Speaker 2: And was it the nature of academia to sort of
Speaker 2: sit on topics for a while? Until someone kind of
Speaker 2: lights a fire under someone's ass or is it the
Speaker 2: circular nature of this kind of discussion, or like, what
Speaker 2: kind of prevented this from catching on quicker in the literature,
Speaker 2: do you think?
Speaker 7: I mean so, I think this our findings are a
Speaker 7: bit of an interesting needle to thread in terms of
Speaker 7: communicating them, because on the one hand, what we found
Speaker 7: is that civil society, right like non academic researchers have
Speaker 7: been warning about this for quite some time, right since,
Speaker 7: as you said, the early two thousands. So part of
Speaker 7: the story is that there has been quite a significant delay,
Speaker 7: like on the order of a decade or more in
Speaker 7: terms of an uptake on this topic by academics who
Speaker 7: are doing more scholarly, peer reviewed research. So on the
Speaker 7: one hand, this is a story about sort of an
Speaker 7: intransigence and the delayed serious attention being paid on it.
Speaker 7: But on the other hand, I think what we find
Speaker 7: is that there has already been enough research, both the
Speaker 7: gray literature and the peer of viewed literature to substantiate
Speaker 7: that there already is an emerging consensus around the idea
Speaker 7: that this is a big, threatening problem that should be
Speaker 7: taken more seriously. But yeah, I guess, like specifically on
Speaker 7: this question of how it's evolved and why it hasn't
Speaker 7: evolved quicker academically, I think you could ask almost the
Speaker 7: same question about why supply side climate research very broadly
Speaker 7: has only taken off in the last few years, and
Speaker 7: for anyone listening who isn't very familiar, supply side academic
Speaker 7: literature basically refers to putting fossil fuel production and supply
Speaker 7: front and center rather than just consumer demand and the
Speaker 7: associated greenhouse gas mission. So it's about looking at the
Speaker 7: top end of the pipeline rather than the bottom end,
Speaker 7: to use like an oil industry.
Speaker 2: Metaphorprint versus the people who are actually like selling the
Speaker 2: shoes kind of yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and and and and it's really
Speaker 7: by some kind of fortune, I suppose, over almost exactly
Speaker 7: the span of my academic career on this topic, that
Speaker 7: that transition has happened. And I've actually, i think written
Speaker 7: a few articles about and definitely some Twitter threads like
Speaker 7: about why this has happened. And I think it's a
Speaker 7: confluence of multiple factors, perhaps foremostly activism that has really
Speaker 7: you know, especially I'm thinking of the fossil fuel divestment movement,
Speaker 7: the Blockadia campaigns, things that really put front and center
Speaker 7: fossil fuels and fossil fuel producers and their political complicity
Speaker 7: as much as anything through lobbying and disinformation and so on.
Speaker 7: And I think going along with that has been things
Speaker 7: like the economics the warnings of carbon bubbles and stranded
Speaker 7: fossil fuel assets, increasing public health research about the direct
Speaker 7: public health harms and fossil fuels, and frankly the economics
Speaker 7: of renewables that has increasingly made fossil fuels economically more expensive.
Speaker 7: And so I think it's a number of those factors
Speaker 7: that will come together. I would say also it's about courage.
Speaker 7: Like I wrote a piece back in like I don't
Speaker 7: know twenty sixteen, seventeen or so in Huffington Post saying
Speaker 7: like higher education needs to be braver when it comes
Speaker 7: to addressing the climate crisis. And part of that was
Speaker 7: about a campaign we were running to try to get
Speaker 7: the American Geophysical Union, which is the world's largest earth
Speaker 7: science organization, to reject funding from Exomobile. And at the
Speaker 7: same time we were campaign for fossil fuel Divestment MIT
Speaker 7: and students were doing us around the world, and we
Speaker 7: were very conscious that the very universities we were asking
Speaker 7: to take climate action were also taking hundreds of millions
Speaker 7: of dollars from David Cooch and other fossil fuel interests.
Speaker 7: And so I think that there's just been this generational
Speaker 7: shift too, in terms of like no longer feeling like
Speaker 7: we have time to waste, in terms of, you know,
Speaker 7: I'm going to get tenure and be really safe before
Speaker 7: I start to address this topic. Although constentity, that is
Speaker 7: what has happened to me. But that is purely kind
Speaker 7: of coincidence, because you know, like I've been, I've been
Speaker 7: writing publicly but in a non academic way about this
Speaker 7: since like twenty sixteen, seventeen, but it's just taking a
Speaker 7: long while to get our ducks in a row because
Speaker 7: academics are like, you know, psychhiding cats. But yeah, I mean,
Speaker 7: I think it's just taken a moment for the sort
Speaker 7: of the realization that this is a big deal, like
Speaker 7: when I testified in the Senate, like very recently, and
Speaker 7: I think perhaps the most interesting documents that came out
Speaker 7: of that joint how Senate investigation were the revelations these
Speaker 7: internal oil industry memos showing how strategic and intentional. Their
Speaker 7: infiltration of academia and their weaponization of those relationships has
Speaker 7: been and a lot of people were coming up to
Speaker 7: me afterwards and being like, Oh, this whole like academia
Speaker 7: thing actually seems kind of important, And I was like, yeah,
Speaker 7: like this is what we've been saying for a while.
Speaker 7: So I don't know, it's just a I guess it's
Speaker 7: just the way things happen that sometimes things take a
Speaker 7: moment for people to cotton onto them.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, actually, now that you're saying it, it's like
Speaker 2: a lot of people I know who are doing activism
Speaker 2: in two thousand and nine, twenty ten, like you know,
Speaker 2: they grew up and like furthered in their careers, and
Speaker 2: it does seem like academia is more rife with people
Speaker 2: who came from a different perspective on this and who
Speaker 2: might have actually had experience on the front lines of
Speaker 2: activism versus just coming at this from like an academic perspective.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly, I think. And that's kind of the general
Speaker 7: trend that we observed that essentially activists and advocates and
Speaker 7: civil society in general has been on the leading edge
Speaker 7: of addressing this and recognizing this problem, and it still is. Frankly,
Speaker 7: it's still frankly the student at activists at places like
Speaker 7: Campus Climate Network leading the charge back in twenty twelve
Speaker 7: twenty thirteen. Like when we were organizing around fossil fueled
Speaker 7: divestment at MIT, we were explicitly conscious of the fact
Speaker 7: that there was also this funding problem. But I guess
Speaker 7: alan naive approach was, well, let's solve one problem at
Speaker 7: a time, and we thought, you know, once a MITS divested,
Speaker 7: then we'll get onto addressing the funding issue. Unfortunately they
Speaker 7: never divested. But actually I just the students miit just
Speaker 7: reached out to me the other day and in a
Speaker 7: couple of weeks their graduate student union has a referendum
Speaker 7: vote on whether the university should take fossil fuel funding.
Speaker 7: So there is a new generation, you know, working on this.
Speaker 2: That ties into my next question, which is folks in
Speaker 2: the climate world love the tobacco industry.
Speaker 1: Analogy with good reason.
Speaker 2: Right, and now everyone I've interviewed on the university funding
Speaker 2: aspect brings up the tobacco conversation. And in the early
Speaker 2: two thousands, it seems like a lot of the conversation
Speaker 2: around tobacco funding policies was coming from academics and public
Speaker 2: health groups and not the kind of grassroots students and
Speaker 2: frontline folks that we're talking about here. And it does
Speaker 2: seem like as a result, a lot of you university
Speaker 2: is very explicitly decided to stop taking tobacco funding or
Speaker 2: really put guardrails on other types of funding. No one
Speaker 2: has really been able to do that with fossil fuel
Speaker 2: funding yet, Like, why do you think the response from
Speaker 2: universities to this movement has been so limited?
Speaker 1: Have we just not given them enough time?
Speaker 2: Or is it the nature of the request is thornier
Speaker 2: than when it comes to you know, pharmaceuticals or tobacco.
Speaker 2: What are some of the sticking points that you've noticed
Speaker 2: in this work and the rest of your work.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, in a way the questions above my
Speaker 7: pay grade. Ultimately, it's university leaders themselves who have to
Speaker 7: explain the decision making. I would, you know, to give
Speaker 7: them the benefit of the doubt. It has in some
Speaker 7: cases been a relatively recent push, you know, like on
Speaker 7: the order of a few years by students and faculty
Speaker 7: trying to get universities to cut these ties. But in
Speaker 7: other cases, I mentioned the American Geo Physical Union. We
Speaker 7: ran a year long campaign and we wrote a whole
Speaker 7: report proving that the EXON sponsorship of the AGU conference
Speaker 7: violated the organization's own by laws. And this is an
Speaker 7: organization of for and by Earth scientists, you know. And
Speaker 7: the only way the funding relationship ended was because in
Speaker 7: the end, after like more than a decade or two,
Speaker 7: Exon actually cut their tires. And my only presumption is
Speaker 7: that it ended up being on net worse pr than
Speaker 7: good pr for them that we were running this campaign,
Speaker 7: So there is a measurable sort of recalcitrants from universities
Speaker 7: to act on this. And you know, our reports specifically
Speaker 7: shines a spotlight on the failure to disclose like a
Speaker 7: failure of transparency to even just provide data on who
Speaker 7: is funding and how much are they funding, let alone
Speaker 7: you know, what are the terms of these these contractual agreements.
Speaker 7: And all the evidence that we have uncovered points to
Speaker 7: the fact that these relationships are and these contracts are
Speaker 7: sometimes really problem in terms of the control that they
Speaker 7: hand to the fossil fuel funders. As far as universities
Speaker 7: are concerned, this is a significant source of revenue and
Speaker 7: they obviously I remember once a board member at MIT
Speaker 7: telling us it's not so much an issue of should
Speaker 7: they take money from A or should they take money
Speaker 7: from be. They just want to take money from everywhere,
Speaker 7: you know, like anywhere they can find it. And I
Speaker 7: think we're sympathetic as scholars to the fact that funding
Speaker 7: is tight and federal funding has been falling in part
Speaker 7: as a result of the politics that the oil industry
Speaker 7: has been lobbying in favor of for decades. So there
Speaker 7: is a circularity to all this. So we're not saying
Speaker 7: it's easy and necessarily the immediate response has to be
Speaker 7: just like cutt ale ties overnight. You know, if people
Speaker 7: make that response, that's like saying, oh, you're saying we
Speaker 7: should end fossil fuel use tomorrow. It's like it's a
Speaker 7: very reductive oversimplification of raising of concerns and the proposal
Speaker 7: that we, as you said, do more. There are dozens
Speaker 7: and dozens of safeguards that you can impose between doing
Speaker 7: nothing and cutting the ties. And I have another paper
Speaker 7: coming out where we really elaborate all those in detail,
Speaker 7: based on the history of tobacco but also pharmaceuticals and
Speaker 7: junk food. I myself have really taken most insight from
Speaker 7: those other disciplines where there has been an awful lot
Speaker 7: of scholarship proving that these conflicts of interest often lead
Speaker 7: to bias.
Speaker 2: That's something I sort of noticed in the spring when
Speaker 2: both the documents came out, and then concurrently there were
Speaker 2: all of those campus protests where they were really calling
Speaker 2: out the campus ties to like Lockheed and Razeon and
Speaker 2: defense contractors. And I saw a lot of not in
Speaker 2: response to the FOSSi Field documents, but a lot of
Speaker 2: university kind of folks who sided with the universities saying, well,
Speaker 2: there's no way to just cut off all funding altogether, right,
Speaker 2: Like where else are we going to get the money?
Speaker 2: And I'm glad you mentioned the safeguards because one thing
Speaker 2: that I think is difficult is like there's just no
Speaker 2: way to tell a lot of the time what the
Speaker 2: money is going to be used for, Like if Exxon
Speaker 2: is building a dance hall versus if it's funding studies
Speaker 2: on renewable energy. Right, and either a group of students
Speaker 2: or some faculty who want to either do research in
Speaker 2: academic discipline on this or start some sort of group
Speaker 2: on campus, what can they do to kind of root
Speaker 2: a little bit more down into how funding is used
Speaker 2: at their university, what tools are available to their disposal.
Speaker 7: Well, it's actually interesting you asked that question. If I
Speaker 7: was a little more prepared, i'd have like a perfect response.
Speaker 7: But we are actually in the process of trying to launch,
Speaker 7: essentially a global survey to pool all of these insights
Speaker 7: from different campuses, and a lot of this information, probably
Speaker 7: most of it is not on the internet, right, Like
Speaker 7: I can tell you that grad students who go to
Speaker 7: the careers for MIT, at least in my day, Exon
Speaker 7: was a recruiter and they would hand out little stress
Speaker 7: reliever squeezy toys in the shape of an oil barrel
Speaker 7: with the company logo on.
Speaker 6: That's crazy.
Speaker 1: They were the shape of an oil barrel. That's insane.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I have a photo of it. There was another
Speaker 7: any the Italian oil company sent us like a ten
Speaker 7: thousand dollars custom made horse size toy in the shape
Speaker 7: of the company logo, and it sat in my office
Speaker 7: and we would would ride it like a horse like
Speaker 7: it was like it was it's like so eccentric. So
Speaker 7: like anything you can imagine exists, you know, like students
Speaker 7: that either Camebridge rugs. So I can't remember engineering students
Speaker 7: being required to wear hard hats with the BP logo
Speaker 7: on things like that, you know, like and so I
Speaker 7: think one simple answer is that they should get in
Speaker 7: touch like people who want to be involved, because actually
Speaker 7: we are looking for information, and you, as a student
Speaker 7: or a professor at your specific universe, have a unique
Speaker 7: insight into not just the financial ties, but the non
Speaker 7: financial ties, like these weird things that you see and hear.
Speaker 7: Sometimes you will know about the dollar values of contracts
Speaker 7: because they're spoken about on campus, but they're not on
Speaker 7: any official database that the university releases. And we're developing
Speaker 7: the infrastructure to pool all of these insights and give
Speaker 7: us some better statistics on these phenomena. Campus Climate Network,
Speaker 7: which was formerly known as Fossil Free Research, is the
Speaker 7: foremost use led organization campaigning to cut these fossil fuel
Speaker 7: ties at universities. For transparency sake, I should note that
Speaker 7: I'm on the advisory board of Campus Climate Network, and they,
Speaker 7: I'm sure would love for people to reach out, you know,
Speaker 7: anything from providing information all the way up to helping
Speaker 7: launch a new campaign. As another university they're looking to
Speaker 7: help coordinate and facilitate that work. So I think those
Speaker 7: are a couple of the ways at the individual level
Speaker 7: scholars can inform themselves better about the science of comfort
Speaker 7: of interest, and that runs all the way through to
Speaker 7: the responsibility of universities as we discussed, but also journals
Speaker 7: implementing better protective measures. Frankly, there are things that politicians
Speaker 7: can do, even at the national level, And as I said,
Speaker 7: we're almost ready to publish a sort of kind of
Speaker 7: comprehensive guidebook if you like, on all those different measures.
Speaker 2: You're totally right where it's like just being in a
Speaker 2: place and being in the culture of a place is
Speaker 2: like way more important than what anyone can do kind
Speaker 2: of from the outside. On the journals thing, I was
Speaker 2: talking to Craig Calendar, he's one of the uses, and
Speaker 2: he told me that pharmaceutical journals have much more regulations
Speaker 2: on disclosing conflicts of interest than energy journal He said
Speaker 2: that like most climate and energy journals don't really require
Speaker 2: the types of disclosures that pharmaceutical journals do. Is that
Speaker 2: something you've seen.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's broadly correct. The measures in place for public
Speaker 7: health researchers all levels from you know, disclosures they have
Speaker 7: to make internally within their universities. Yeah, through to disclosures
Speaker 7: they have to make with the journals are much tighter
Speaker 7: when it comes to research that in any way touches
Speaker 7: on areas that tobacco or pharmaceuticals or others might get
Speaker 7: involved in. And in comparison, climate and energy research right
Speaker 7: now is the world West. I think it's certainly something
Speaker 7: that there is already a blueprint in place with safeguards
Speaker 7: against tobacco and pharmaceutical funding to mitigate most of this,
Speaker 7: and so we don't have to reinvent a lot of wheels.
Speaker 7: In many cases, we can just implement these things. So
Speaker 7: it's all about simply compelling those impositions of power and
Speaker 7: decision making to do so. And that's kind of the
Speaker 7: point of this paper is to basically ask the question
Speaker 7: of what do we know already? Because often the first
Speaker 7: step to solving a problem is recognizing there is one,
Speaker 7: and so bringing all of our current knowledge together allowed
Speaker 7: us to realize that although yes, there are many many
Speaker 7: details that need to be further scrutinized, broadly speaking, a
Speaker 7: lot of this thinking has been done when it comes
Speaker 7: to other industries, and so I think that you know,
Speaker 7: we see this as essentially putting university leaders on notice
Speaker 7: that the existing research is clear that this has been
Speaker 7: a massive elephant in the climate and energy policy research realm,
Speaker 7: and they need to start taking it seriously, starting with
Speaker 7: just acknowledging the science of conflicts of interest, because right
Speaker 7: now they basically do the opposite, and they actively solicit
Speaker 7: and encourage this kind of oil industry funding.
Speaker 6: The actual opposite.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the actual opposite.
Speaker 2: So let's get started with the basics. How did you
Speaker 2: get involved in this specific issue given that your academic
Speaker 2: background isn't exactly climate change.
Speaker 6: So I got into this because, yeah, I thought, I
Speaker 6: I've taught environmental ethics for about twenty or thirty years,
Speaker 6: but also I'm a philosopher of science and of philosters
Speaker 6: of science. One sort of thing we look at is methodology,
Speaker 6: and then of course bias, and so you know, those
Speaker 6: two interests sort of collided. At one point a long
Speaker 6: time ago, I co taught a course with Naomi Erski's
Speaker 6: who's the author of Merchants of Doubt and the movie
Speaker 6: Merchants of Doubt, and so this had been on my
Speaker 6: radar for a long time. Then you know, I got
Speaker 6: recruited to the Campus Climate Change Committee, which is the
Speaker 6: only standing academic senate committee in the UC system devoted
Speaker 6: to campus climate change in the whole system. Yeah, in
Speaker 6: the whole system.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 6: And actually, when we think about solutions, that's one of
Speaker 6: the biggest ones I think is actually having an academic
Speaker 6: senate committee lends a lot of legitimacy to the climate
Speaker 6: change question. And so then this team, we were approaching
Speaker 6: all sorts of different issues like offsets and climate teaching
Speaker 6: and all sorts of things. And one of the topics
Speaker 6: was then also, of course all the fossil fuel money
Speaker 6: coming in, and so we decided to have an initiative
Speaker 6: on research. And so then I was put in as
Speaker 6: one of the one of the main people thinking about that. So,
Speaker 6: you know, the first thing I did was then look
Speaker 6: at what u SE did with tobacco back in the
Speaker 6: early two thousands, and they tried to ban which would
Speaker 6: be like what the group Fossil Free Research is calling for,
Speaker 6: you know, ban on taking money from fossil fuel industry
Speaker 6: for climate research. Many schools did ban, or many units
Speaker 6: in particularly banned taking tobacco money for medical or health research.
Speaker 6: So surprisingly that failed. That you see, so the University
Speaker 6: of California voted down a tobacco ban by a large
Speaker 6: margin due to worries about academic freedom, but they did
Speaker 6: put in this other policy that we still have that
Speaker 6: mandates a special review of any tobacco money that's accepted,
Speaker 6: and so the chancellor has to form an ad hoc
Speaker 6: committee reviewing it, and I write a public letter if
Speaker 6: it's accepted on why it's justified. And so I thought, well,
Speaker 6: that's not as good as a ban, but you know
Speaker 6: that's if that worked with tobacco, and the fossil fuel
Speaker 6: issue and climate change are even worse, so why not
Speaker 6: just run with this. So it basically just took that
Speaker 6: policy and crossed off the word tobacco and replaced it
Speaker 6: with fossil fuel and then tried to run with that.
Speaker 6: But we were more or less told that that was
Speaker 6: dead on arrival, and.
Speaker 2: Just her timeline like when when did you first get
Speaker 2: involved with the committee itself?
Speaker 6: And like when four years four years ago? Four years ago? Okay? Yeah,
Speaker 6: So then we've switched to a transparency measure because we thought, well,
Speaker 6: transparency seemed to us and it seems to many people,
Speaker 6: you know, all over the place. If I just take
Speaker 6: my dog for a walk and talk to somebody. You know,
Speaker 6: they're all about transparency. So we switched then from this
Speaker 6: kind of special review, not anything bandlike or any kind
Speaker 6: of friction on this. They can still take as much
Speaker 6: money as you want from anyone you want, but it
Speaker 6: would definitely disclose it. And so we pushed this policy
Speaker 6: for about three years and then in May it was
Speaker 6: finally voted on in the Academic Senate UCSD and it
Speaker 6: passed with ninety one percent of the vote, which was great.
Speaker 2: It does it does feel like I think a lot
Speaker 2: of people are just really surprised to hear that that's
Speaker 2: not like a set policy, especially at a public school.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so if this policy, which got voted on but
Speaker 6: has not been implemented yet, if it gets implemented, it
Speaker 6: will be by far the most progressive transparency policy in
Speaker 6: the country. I think none of the schools disclose anything
Speaker 6: apart from what they have to more or less so
Speaker 6: that if you take federal money, then the federal government
Speaker 6: insists you disclose. They might encourage you to disclose, but
Speaker 6: you don't have to, and they jealously guard the information.
Speaker 6: So it's not common practice at all. It does surprise
Speaker 6: most people when you talk to them. That, especially a
Speaker 6: big public research university doesn't disclose a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 6: U see does disclose more than most I think, but
Speaker 6: you cannot find if they're like gifts to centers and
Speaker 6: things like that. You cannot find that information anywhere apart
Speaker 6: from a foyer request. So, for instance, the institute I
Speaker 6: co direct, the Institute for Practical Ethics, that would challenge
Speaker 6: you to find out where we get funding. There's no
Speaker 6: way you could find out.
Speaker 2: So I could be talking to you right now, and
Speaker 2: you could be like cashing or your institute could be
Speaker 2: cashing a check from like Chevron, and I just wouldn't
Speaker 2: have any idea unless you chose to disclose. Is that's right?
Speaker 6: Yeah, So the university might disclose some aspects of some grants,
Speaker 6: but not gifts. And if you think about this, I mean,
Speaker 6: if we're going to be now fair and think about
Speaker 6: it from the anti transparency side, you know, from their
Speaker 6: point of view, what's happened is public funding is basically
Speaker 6: plummeted in the universities. They have to make up the gap.
Speaker 6: So a lot of that gap is going to be
Speaker 6: filled by money from industry and then but you have
Speaker 6: other schools. Were not the only school who is funding
Speaker 6: deprived from public funds, they all are, and so then
Speaker 6: it's like a battle against them. And so these donors,
Speaker 6: you know, so they're then it's like a high stakes
Speaker 6: game of poker. And so the idea of disclosing your
Speaker 6: gift funding is like, you know, showing your hand and
Speaker 6: the game of poker from their point of view, of course,
Speaker 6: if everybody showed their hand, you know, then it would
Speaker 6: be we.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't be playing poker, basically playing poker.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which, Yeah, one of the takeaways that Jeffrey Suprann
Speaker 2: and I were talking about was that there's this robust
Speaker 2: body of research around conflict of interest with regards to
Speaker 2: money from other industries. Like there's a lot around tobacco.
Speaker 2: There's been conversations about fast food funding, but until very
Speaker 2: very recently, the conversation around oil and gas was like
Speaker 2: people noticed it was happening, but it didn't really start
Speaker 2: becoming an issue until like very recently. Does that track
Speaker 2: with your experience in thinking about this and working on this,
Speaker 2: and why do you think it's taken so long for
Speaker 2: folks to kind of start this conversation.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that does track with my understanding. So much of
Speaker 6: the movement and energy was all based around health and
Speaker 6: big pharma, and so you had all of these conflict
Speaker 6: of interest policies and things which were challenged and fought
Speaker 6: step you tooth and nail. From the early seventies, National
Speaker 6: Academy of Science have reports about conflicts of interests with
Speaker 6: big Pharma and so these things. It took decades really
Speaker 6: for a lot of this to all get to the
Speaker 6: where it is now. Even things that you think of
Speaker 6: as like completely consensus, you know, so for instance, that
Speaker 6: there would be internal review board that would review the
Speaker 6: ethics of whether the subjects of an experiment have consent,
Speaker 6: Even that stuff was fought. People are stunned when they hear.
Speaker 1: This, but that's crazy.
Speaker 6: If you just look back a little while, you would
Speaker 6: see that people fought based on that. There like freedom,
Speaker 6: because it's like a restraint on academic freedom. You can't
Speaker 6: do the experiment the way you want it, or you
Speaker 6: have to change the design, maybe you can't even do
Speaker 6: it because it's unethical. And so people thought this. People
Speaker 6: thought all the conflict of interest rules and all the journals,
Speaker 6: they thought everything. I was reading a paper with one
Speaker 6: of the one of the main medical journals, had instituted
Speaker 6: a thing where you couldn't write op ed or editorial
Speaker 6: if you were about a particular drug if you were
Speaker 6: being paid for by the company that made that drug.
Speaker 6: And then the reaction was that this was called the
Speaker 6: new McCarthyism. People are really heated against that sort of thing.
Speaker 6: It's greaz it's so much of the energy. It was
Speaker 6: all there in a big pharma. Yeah, even on like
Speaker 6: core things like just you know, ethical consent forms and
Speaker 6: things like that. This seventies, eighties, nineties, you know, going
Speaker 6: all the way up to eventually you have Obamas the
Speaker 6: Sunshine Act, which most people don't know about. Maybe you
Speaker 6: can go online and then go to a registry and
Speaker 6: then see if your physician is taking money from particular companies,
Speaker 6: and then when the physician recommends a particular drug, you
Speaker 6: can see where they're getting many money from that person
Speaker 6: that that company. So that was actually what the UCSD
Speaker 6: thing was modeled after, is to have a kind of
Speaker 6: public registry like in this Obama Sunshine Act. But that
Speaker 6: was maybe what two thousand, somewhere between two maybe two,
Speaker 6: I guess twenty eleven, But it is around then.
Speaker 2: I feel like that's right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think why it happened there was because you know,
Speaker 6: everyone cares about medicine and health, and there was just
Speaker 6: so much interference. But then as those transparency policies started
Speaker 6: to appear, then you start to see more conflicts of interest,
Speaker 6: and then there's more works now, you know, fast forward
Speaker 6: to the fossil fuel case. You know, have those transparency
Speaker 6: policy and a lot of those journals. It's more theoretical
Speaker 6: and not something the American public cared about as much,
Speaker 6: and so you didn't get as much transparency. The transparency alone,
Speaker 6: of course, doesn't solve the problem at all. Right, it's
Speaker 6: still say you can take the money and be influenced,
Speaker 6: but you know, it's like a necessary condition for finding
Speaker 6: the breadcrumbs that would lead you to serious conflicts of interest,
Speaker 6: and so you need those transparency policies. And we've known,
Speaker 6: really for a long time, but now we know without
Speaker 6: beyond the shadow of the doubt, that there is this
Speaker 6: kind of influence. And that's not just like advertising and
Speaker 6: oh maybe they had to believe the wrong thing or something.
Speaker 6: It's about a deliberate strategy, and that strategy is contrary
Speaker 6: to the mission of the university, which is to produce
Speaker 6: an unbiased knowledge for you know, a democratic republic. So
Speaker 6: you have a lot of people say that money doesn't
Speaker 6: influence our outcomes and things like that, But the scientists
Speaker 6: should be scientific about this. Now we've got a couple
Speaker 6: of decades of evidence, right, it's happening. And so if
Speaker 6: they apply their saying scientific you know, acumen to this problem,
Speaker 6: then you can just see it's a problem. And then
Speaker 6: once you know, now you've got the responsibility of this knowledge.
Speaker 6: And then if you're being used as a weapon, and
Speaker 6: now you know you're being used as what your infrastructures
Speaker 6: allow it you to be weaponized, well, now you have
Speaker 6: a duty to not be a weapon.
Speaker 2: I think everyone kind of thinks they're going to be
Speaker 2: the exception, like, oh, if you know, I wouldn't be
Speaker 2: swayed in my work. And I don't know what you
Speaker 2: think about, but like it's hard to sort of articulate
Speaker 2: where it's like, well, it's kind of not even about you.
Speaker 2: It's just about the fact that this money was delivered
Speaker 2: to the institution you're working at, not out of the
Speaker 2: goodness of this company's heart. You know, it's like a
Speaker 2: tool doesn't know. It's a tool necessarily, it's not a
Speaker 2: comment on the quality of the work even all the time.
Speaker 6: Well, yeah, so have two thoughts about this. What is
Speaker 6: a lot of the work in this area has shown
Speaker 6: that even if you are just the most pure researcher
Speaker 6: in the world, you know, the most innocent, pure research
Speaker 6: in the world, still this money can make it such
Speaker 6: that you're part of a network such that it distorts
Speaker 6: the evidential base. So if you think of when Robert
Speaker 6: Profter showed how he called a distraction science where tobacco
Speaker 6: would fund work on asbesos causing lung cancer, genetics causing
Speaker 6: lung cancer, all that work maybe is perfectly good, and
Speaker 6: all those people are you know, as far as I know,
Speaker 6: there was tobacco funded, but probably weren't doing anything bad science.
Speaker 6: On the other hand, it skews the evidential landscape, you know,
Speaker 6: in a big way. Same thing. I it is probably
Speaker 6: happening now when think of how much money is going
Speaker 6: into carbon capture and storage versus other things. And so
Speaker 6: you as the individual research could rightly say, yeah, it
Speaker 6: hasn't affected my outcomes, But you're part of this social network.
Speaker 6: And when you think about that, so mostly we know
Speaker 6: also that that's not true that it does buy us outcomes.
Speaker 6: I'm saying, even if it didn't buy us outcomes, it
Speaker 6: would still be the case that you could be part
Speaker 6: of this kind of weaponization of the academic structure. And
Speaker 6: then the other thing is, you know, it always reminds
Speaker 6: me of when people say guns don't kill people. People do.
Speaker 6: And you might go to a store later and buy
Speaker 6: a weapon to protect your dogs and cats and have
Speaker 6: only love and peace in your heart. But we still
Speaker 6: know what having like automatic weapons does in the society.
Speaker 6: It changes your incentives, it changes your choices, it changes
Speaker 6: all around you that network, and so it will end
Speaker 6: up leading to more deaths. And so again it's sort
Speaker 6: of failing to appreciate the way the individual and the
Speaker 6: social connect to each other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, in our society, I think people think
Speaker 2: of professors and researchers as sort of the third leg
Speaker 2: of knowledge, like an informed source. In journalism, we're always
Speaker 2: taught to reach out to academics and confirm studies or
Speaker 2: to talk to you about scientific issues. But the university
Speaker 2: system in the country is so privatized and getting even
Speaker 2: more and more privatized each day, and I'm wondering which
Speaker 2: people should know about the funding system for some of
Speaker 2: these research that they might not know already.
Speaker 6: Yeah. I think people are shocked really when they see
Speaker 6: dependent most researches on getting grants in general, you know,
Speaker 6: most of the grants are from the federal government, but
Speaker 6: still she plays a huge role in many, many different disciplines.
Speaker 6: I think people are shocked. They don't really appreciate that fact.
Speaker 6: It's a big question I think about whether once people
Speaker 6: hear this, whether they'll continue to trust science. Now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, That's why I think the disclosure is so important,
Speaker 3: because who do you believe, you know, somebody who says, well, OK,
Speaker 3: I have this interest, or somebody who says, no, I'm
Speaker 3: hiding something.
Speaker 2: So the resolution passed in May with ninety one percent support.
Speaker 2: What are the next steps on campus right now?
Speaker 6: Yeah? Good? So I think you know, when we're thinking
Speaker 6: about solutions. The first thing is I think having an
Speaker 6: academic Senate committee to devote to campus climate change was huge
Speaker 6: and so the activist on campus who pushed for that
Speaker 6: were really geniuses. So there was an academic Senate task
Speaker 6: force devoted to climate change in the late twenty teens,
Speaker 6: maybe twenty seventeen or nineteen somewhere around there, and then
Speaker 6: they came up with all these recommendations, and one was
Speaker 6: the formation of this committee, and then it was formed.
Speaker 6: And then having it be a committee meant that it
Speaker 6: gives a legitimacy to the voices on campus who care
Speaker 6: about climate change because now you have a seat at
Speaker 6: the table and can comment on various things that are
Speaker 6: going on. But you could also put forward resolutions and
Speaker 6: then see what the faculty whether they vote on this
Speaker 6: or not. So that was really just a stroke of
Speaker 6: genius and really very unique and right away, you know.
Speaker 6: So we had this memorial go through the whole system.
Speaker 6: It took about a year, but it was basically to
Speaker 6: replace this kind of carbon neutral by whatever date with
Speaker 6: actual emission reduction targets, and implicitly it was it was
Speaker 6: against carbon offsets. You could see we were getting closer
Speaker 6: and closer to carbon neutral, but our missions were going up,
Speaker 6: up and up and up. So how can be getting
Speaker 6: closer to carbon neutral was by buying all these offsets.
Speaker 6: And so we went, we had this memorial go through
Speaker 6: the whole to ten campuses and one resoundingly, I think
Speaker 6: it got about eighty five percent approval. And then we
Speaker 6: have the Climate education requirement that's starting in two weeks
Speaker 6: or three weeks. So already a whole list of courses
Speaker 6: have been approved, so every student will have to take
Speaker 6: this ongoing and then if it spreads to other campuses,
Speaker 6: this could be something that eventually affects hundreds of thousands
Speaker 6: of students. Now I'm off the committee as of just
Speaker 6: a couple of weeks ago, served four years on it.
Speaker 6: I will be very curious to see hopefully the disclosure
Speaker 6: thing will be adopted. You see, like at many schools,
Speaker 6: you have what's called shared governance, and so it's shared
Speaker 6: between the admin and faculty. The admin where I think
Speaker 6: it's to say, we're not fans of the disclosure of policy,
Speaker 6: and so it's been sent to them asking them to
Speaker 6: make a team and to make it happen. So you see,
Speaker 6: has like the president of the whole system, and then
Speaker 6: each each campus has a chancellor, and so the chancellor
Speaker 6: would have to form a team to make this happen.
Speaker 6: So far as I know, I haven't heard of anything
Speaker 6: happening yet.
Speaker 1: So it could sort of sit in limbo.
Speaker 6: Just ask I think, I mean, there would be a
Speaker 6: grave offense to share governance because if ninety one percent
Speaker 6: of the faculty voted in favor of it, it doesn't happen.
Speaker 6: It's about the faculty's own work and money.
Speaker 2: Okay, so it's it requires like a little bit more implementation,
Speaker 2: but it's it's kind of with the chancellor's.
Speaker 6: Off us now, yeah, and then we'll see what happens.
Speaker 6: Hopefully it happens. But like I said, they weren't fans,
Speaker 6: so I'm not counting my chickens when I talk about
Speaker 6: this with people. The transparency thing opens the doors because
Speaker 6: if you want to give an industrial center money to
Speaker 6: find oil and gas, I'm curious if you agree or not.
Speaker 6: That doesn't seem to have the same ethical layers as
Speaker 6: BP funding a public policy school or Chevron funding.
Speaker 2: You know, I was just looking at numbers for this center.
Speaker 2: I'm sure you've seen the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy,
Speaker 2: where their experts are constantly in front of Congress. They
Speaker 2: are doing policy work, and I think that people get
Speaker 2: really defensive, like you said when you mentioned funding, because
Speaker 2: they're like, well, we can't, you know, not take money.
Speaker 2: But it's like, why don't we just start having a
Speaker 2: conversation about where this money is going as a starting point,
Speaker 2: which we're not doing right now.
Speaker 6: You know, I couldn't agree more with what you just said.
Speaker 6: That the money that goes into shaping climate policy and
Speaker 6: that's not disclosed, that's what really bothers me the most.
Speaker 6: So of course, some petroleum engineer gets money from a
Speaker 6: fossil fuel industry, I mean, that's the whole business model,
Speaker 6: and they typically they disclose it all, you know, and that,
Speaker 6: But when you're trying to influence policy, then if even
Speaker 6: our politicians are supposed to reveal their donors, and everyone's
Speaker 6: wanting now the Supreme Court to have to disclose who's
Speaker 6: giving them money and gifts, and we want our doctors
Speaker 6: to disclose money and gifts, whereas everybody have to disclose
Speaker 6: who are trying to influence industry policy except for these
Speaker 6: scientists at these climate centers. That's study by Doug Almon
Speaker 6: at Columbia where he looks at the favorability ratings coming
Speaker 6: out of climate centers comparing natural gas and methane versus renewables.
Speaker 6: I mean, and it's shocking. Really people are under the
Speaker 6: illusion that it doesn't really do anything, but holy moly,
Speaker 6: this money does a lot those centers produce all these
Speaker 6: white papers. Those white papers get used at local level
Speaker 6: to open up an area for fracking, or national level
Speaker 6: congressional evidence dockets just all over the place, and so
Speaker 6: it really does shape national policy and local policy. And
Speaker 6: so it's not the factor I think of why we're
Speaker 6: in the state we're in, but it's definitely a causal factor.
Speaker 1: That's it for this time. We'll be back soon with
Speaker 1: another episode in this series. Don't forget to check out
Speaker 1: the print stories that are going along with this series
Speaker 1: as well on our website at Drilled dot Media, and
Speaker 1: of various co publishing partners, including Rolling Stone and Vox.
Speaker 1: This episode was mixed and mastered by Peter duff. Our
Speaker 1: theme music is Bird in the Hand by Forenoon. Our
Speaker 1: artwork is by Matthew Fleming. You can also check us
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