Exactly. Sorry, but those big oil profits override morality...they override everything. They are not going down without an extremely well-funded fight.
Thank you Simon for amplifying this important issue! To be clear, the Coalition for a True School of Sustainability at Stanford and the Fossil Free Research movement in general are in principle open to universities taking money from companies that are part of the energy transition (based on their investments and lobbying, not their slick ads). At present, all of Stanford's fossil fuel funders fail even the loosest criteria we could reasonably craft, which is why we are targeting all of Stanford's fossil fuel funders.
Researchers are already pressured not to disprove the research from their own lab & members, even when it's crappy. I've see money lead to weird indirect pressures (not even from big lobbies, just to look like what was sold to a small city is worth it).
Isn't that not only ethically wrong but also not the scientific method? If a researcher doesnt want people to test their data, they shouldn't be a researcher. Science is about finding the truth, not about finding who is right.
@@Khronogi It's more "looking the other way". There's zero benefit to calling out bad science, so people tend to focus on their work (which is hard enough).
@@Khronogi Your naiveté is adorable. Most journals have a stated policy of not publishing research which disagrees with a few dogmatic positions, independent of the veracity of the research. And this is less open, but in the field of genetics, the NIH restricts access to data for politically inconvenient research.
@Khronogi You're right, but you also need to understand that research is conducted by humans with psychological pressures just like everyone else, and with a need to funding that tends to be more available if you can drop in a few buzzwords and show positive results. "The scientific method" attempts to work around these effects, and it maybe does a better job than any other large system humans have created. But that is a low bar, and it is still plagued by these issues.
One thing to note is where climate research by universities has the most impact. When it comes to solutions for climate change (as opposed to research into its impacts and projections), the great value of universities is in the very earliest stages of R&D. Private companies are great for taking a technology and scaling/improving it (which is where we are with wind, solar and electric vehicles), but less great for more foundational research. This is where I do see a lot of value for carbon sequestration research by universities. It's just a question of targeting and risk.
Carbon sequestration is a bad example as it has been proven to be a waste of money and energy favored by fossil fuel companies since it'd still allow them to emit.
@@MC--- I think looking at things from a pragmatic perspective, carbon capture and sequestration is likely to be nessecary to some degree. Without it the drastic and rapid reductions in emissions required would likely cause widespread economic and social calamity.
So university researchers take all the risk by pursuing novel ideas which have a high chance of failure, and private companies reap the rewards? The system is obviously broken.
the main campus of Univeristy of Amsterdam in the Netherlands was recently actually occupied by several left-wing protest groups working together in protest of their research being funded by shell
I think the bottom line is; Big oil has lots of resources and access to smart people. They wouldn't donate if it wasn't in their interest. Their interest is to stay in business and keep the world on oil. Going behind their back and spending it against their interest won't work at scale. Unless they're making a big mistake, their money serves them. Edit 1: (Although finding the small area where our interests overlap may be possible, and working with them instead of against them seems incredibly useful.) Edit 2: The reverse case can also be made, universities will spend their money on their interests. So the donations serve both of their interests. What does this say about the interest of the universities? Perhaps that the climate damage isn't as important as the funding. Edit 3: It's also interesting to think about what I would do if they gave me money. Would I reject it to remain unbiased? What is my price?
My price is best described by "an amount of money so large that thenceforth I'm all but guaranteed to not require any more funding at all." They definitely won't like my results, but look and see if I care.
There are two issues. 1 Will the funding compromise the research. 2 How will the conclusions be spun. Politicians and the media will only read the press releases. The public will only hear what politicians, the media and influencers choose to cherry pick. At publication, a rich oil company can have its publicity machine primed ready to deny, spin, cherry pick as it thinks necessary. Only other researchers and a tiny minority of the science literate population will actually ever read the study.
Maybe it’s different in other courses, but in my research area, it is phenomenally hard to enable investors to influence the research and our ethics committee and how the department is structured makes it so they can’t really ask for specific research to be done, only that they have an interest in an area. This of course has a secondary influence as if the research isn’t what they want to find, then they may not fund things in future which I’m sure has an impact. However, there is a lot of protections in psychology and neuropsychology which makes it hard at my uni to interact with researchers in that way? I wonder if this is maybe a select case and not the norm then?
My guess is that for any research with or directly about human beings is more scrutinised. But something like research into more efficient extraction of scale gas probably has less hoops to jump through
Ethics committees can themselves be weaponised against an individual or research topic. All it takes is for an ethics application to be punted up to university ethics committee and them refuse to sign off on the exoeriments to guarantee that those exprs will not be conducted. The reason? Petty internal politics. A departmental or university ethics cmt has the ability to hold up research for months or indefinitely if they want. The worst of these are actually the NHS ethics boards which drag the process out for months and regularly will decide after 6 or 12 months to say No. A certain previous BPS president used to sit on an NHS ethics board as a non-expert member and would torpedo applications from people they worked with but didn't like.
This is a complex issue but I also come down on universities not accepting funding. I think that fossil fuel companies should pay a surtax for the damage they do and that money should be used to mitigate damage and fund research into mitigation and energy alternatives.
I think universities should take money for research from fossil fuels, because sometimes this is research like carbon capture, which despite being considered by some a bad solution is still worth research. My other point is that these researchers are still part of the university and can be held accountable for there research. If the universities were to ban money from fossil fuel industries on the other hand, those same research money would go to private companies, who often don’t have the same standards and might be more detrimental to the environment in the long run
I really think I'm stuck in the middle. I don't think it's wrong to accept money from anyone, however I think it is wrong to do so without care of the fine print in the contract. In short, I'd accept money from any sponsor on the condition of total independent control of the research direction and publications. However as it's rarely so clean cut, with differing levels of independence and control given up, the correlating level of caution should be taken with the sponsors and their backgrounds, aims, and values.
The big problem with fossil fuel money funding research into climate mitigation efforts is that it is always conditional. The researchers can be independent but their project is the one that fossil fuel companies funded because it aligns with their goals, not with the goals of mitigation. Meanwhile, other research from equally independent researchers goes unfunded or underfunded. And step into any geology department (the science field with the more deniers) and see how those fossil fuel dollars turn independence into dependence.
I'm looking into the Fossil Free Research movement, and what I'm trying to figure out is the best way to determine whether my own university has been accepting sponsorships from oil companies. The most I can find some vague policies about research integrity; is there an easy way to determine the sources of research money for an institution?
Thanks for the thoughtful and balanced video Simon, I work in a role affiliated to Cambridge Uni and hadn't realised they had delayed the vote on fossil fuel funding. Given that the university hosts the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, it does seem jarring for other departments to be accepting fossil fuel funding. Then again, I have heard a similar debate around whether conservation organisations should collaborate with fossil fuel companies....and some still do! P.S. love the sneaky Warhammer boxes in the corner, I found your channel after you appeared on Midwinter Minis!
While putting together my BA I actually read a lot of "Shell Studies". It's a really complicated matter, since the money for studies is nice, but Greenwashing can suck my balls.
All research is biased in some sense, a lot of the time researchers throw out evidence that doesn't support their claim or do the research over from scratch to until they have something that fit their beliefs.
This would be a great basis for a satire piece. Someone should write a modest proposal encouraging fossil fuel companies to sponsor climate research so that the bias of the research will guarantee a source of more, opposing research.
@@breakingbadest9772 It's nice to see this comment section isn't just fanboys. The best approach I can see is to have both sides of these divise topics investigated equally. Once someone says the opposing position shouldn't be investigated or funded that's when we should be suspicious.
@@engineeringvision9507 My comment isn't exactly in favor of anything. it's just stating that a lot of times people are biased for various reasons. In the case of renewable energy, if oil does a study on how "bad it is" it shouldn't be trusted for obvious reasons. Other times, like with saturated fats, it's just a truth that has been told so many times that people doesn't even consider that the present literature is false, even though there are plenty of studies saying the same thing: saturated fat is not more harmful than unsaturated, and people who eat mostly unsaturated fat don't live longer or have any less heart disease.
We aren't blaming fossil fuel companies for things done decades ago (only). They are STILL doing terrible things, so yes, we must dissociate. Fossil fuel companies have so much money they could invest hundreds of billions in solar, wind, thermal, wave, algal, and other energy sources and carbon capture. IF they do that, THEN their money might be less tainted. But when they "donate" .0002% to "research on renewables," I'm not impressed.
There are other toxic industries heavily financing research that don’t contribute as much to climate change, such as Monsanto. It would have been nice to debate about their funding as well
Ah this is a tough issue! It is kind of like using natural gas today. It may be a more efficient energy source but the emissions are still there. Personally I think it depends on the research subject, the specific company sponsor, and the university. I think sponsorships could play an important role but it can’t occur ‘behind the scenes.’ All of these fundings should be clearly displayed to students and the world
Create an independent fund that not only the fossil fuel companies can contribute to, but from other industries as well. Fossil fuel companies keeps their association with 'funding green research', if that's what they're paying for (otherwise they would stop providing funding entirely). Granted (pun intended) that this only pushes the problem to another level, where we start asking if this independent fund should accept fossil fuel company money in the first place. But this reduces the direct association with 'accepting fossil fuel company money' from research grant recipients. The more distance we create from the funders, the less influence we can expect from the actual research. And having more funds to do research is always helpful.
One of my physics professors is supposed to get paid by the UAE for a kinda sci fi mirror swarm to block out a bit of the sun to cool the planet a bit. It's certainly an interesting dillema
Fossil fuel companies will be around for the next 30 years as we hopefully ramp down production. After that we will still need petrochemicals. Profits will be made, and ideally some of those profits would be used to counter the harm that their produce is causing. The ideal scenario would be to do that through taxation, but it is better that at least some of those profits are used to solve problems than disappear into the pockets of their well off investors.
You should see what they get up to in the meantime. They are not good faith actors, as Simon and many others have pointed out. Naomi Oreskes is my favourite public intellectual on this topic. That scale of disinformation needs to be called out, not worked with.
Universities should be publicly funded and they should be free both in research scope and in in student fees. Private companies should be able to offer internships to students to evaluate possible future employees but that should be all. A new, better system to assess teaching personnel should be put in place. Ok, now I go back to my sweet dreams.
Sadly, my university has an entire building funded by oil companies to train petroleum engineers on the latest tech. The irony? It's basically empty. The year they completed construction, the oil price plummeted and they went from over 120 students to barely 10 in a single semester as all the jobs dried up and people switched to mechanical engineering.
What if a big oil company created a subsidiary for clean energy or carbon capture (as many of them do)? Something which met the criteria in the Oxford Martin document, but whose parent company, that may heavily subsidise their R&D and other activities, does not? From a moral perspective that may seem like an easy win, carbon reduction technologies are developed and fossil fuel profits are partially funding it. But of course the big oil company can also use this subsidiary to greenwash their image, and in theory, use as a source of funds in the future for fossil fuel activities. But if it is refused, the oil company may close down the subsidiary because the R&D is too expensive and difficult without access to university expertise and equipment, even if its intentions were noble, as a way to carry on their business in a post fossil fuel world, and a lot of money that would have gone to carbon reduction is instead just divvied out to shareholders.
if we are in a "post fossil fuel world" it doesn't matter if we have a little bit more carbon capture so not allowing them to spend it on messing with research is better as it lowers the chance of us getting there
@@dropyourself Well, what if the research is about carbon capture? Industry does rely on universities for low TRL R&D, and an experimental but promising carbon capture method may be something they would be keen to collaborate on.
Nope. I remember when UT accepted money from Big Oil to study how safe fracking was. Surprise surprise, they "discovered" it was perfectly safe, nothing to worry about.
the solution is to liquidate fossil fool companies and to seize the investments of their investors. that way you can disconnect their money from their influence, and invest in actual mitigation and adaptation.
No. While it's personally bad for me to decline funding, pretending FF corporations can magically reinvent their business models is magical thinking indeed. The chemical industries, however are a more interesting morally ambiguous case. Plastics manufacturers for example are involved in greenwashing and public gilting, but not to the same extent as API members. The principles of investment seem like a great litmus test to me.
I think that there could be a funding system that would enable universities to accept donations by such companies without damaging their conscience or standing. Such a system would have to meet two criteria (I can think of right now): 1. Researchers must not know where the money that funds their research ultimately comes from. If they don't know, it can't bias their results. 2. Donors must not be able to request specific research to be done (or not to be done). We currently don't have such a system, therefore dissociation is the right thing to do. If this were to be instituted, I expect fossil fuel companies to only fund research in as much as it benefits their PR, which is probably much less than they currently do.
Here in Spain a big part of the researching money comes from private banks which also finance fossil fuel companies (Santander, BBVA, Sabadell, etc), and the result is obvious, because there are some companies like Repsol financing researches in the universities, more especially in PhD's of environmental-like careers It's quite disappointing and disgusting, moreover when I'm studying Environmental Science; whoever, there's a movement called End Fossil Occupy, that already won in the University of Barcelona I know that there's a lot of work to do, and also that the Academy in Spain will be corrupted for the next 50 years, but that little victory means a sparkle of hope And, in conclusion, universities shouldn't take fossil fuel companies money, however, that won't be a reality if there's no students and movements pressuring the universities, a fact that unfortunately, is a reality in almost all the universities in my country. Well, at least there a few fellows that will fight to get a truly sustainable Academy
Really great points Simon. I think that divestment and disassociation are a good idea but maybe we should have an exemption on research for improving the efficiency of fossil fuel extraction and usage during the transition.
Wow this is a really tricky one but yes ultimately allowing companies to fund research also allows them to shape its direction, and big oil have shown that they categorically cannot be trusted with that power. (Also enjoying your Longest John's top 🎶)
It's interesting to watch this, in Nigeria, scholarships are given to engineering and science students by fossil fuel companies they provide a huge amount of scholarships available
Unpopular opinion, that I dont fully agree with myself but just want to state the case: Stop thinking of it as the fossil fuel industry, start thinking of it as the energy industry, with major sunk assets and infrastructure in the extraction and use of fossil fuels. Corporations are there to make money, in their areas of expertise with the assets they have. Like most human inventions, they are not inherently evil, they are just tools that can be used in an amoral way. But they are incredibly powerful tools with massive resources. You can make the political case that they are too powerful and should be broken up, but does anyone really think that's going to happen on a timescale useful to us right now? Its just not going to happen, end of. Maybe in the future, but not now, and we need now. Yes, these companies have lied, and sown disinformation, but not for fun. It was in their commercial interest to do so. And in that vein, they will want to bleed their current fossil fuel assets dry, and we should politically work to make that as expensive as possible. But if they see opportunity to use their expertise to make money in renewables, CCS, or energy storage, they will do that, and will be an incredibly focussed and powerful tool in doing that. So it's up to us and our politicians, which we do have more control over, to make that the financially attractive path for them. These entities are not going away anytime soon, so at this critical juncture, society may as well try to direct their power towards something good. That will not happen if we treat them like the boogeyman. But also lets not be naive, be constantly aware they are cold, amoral money-making machines.
@The unknown I'll be honest, I dont know enough about the system to have a hard opinion. Investing in fossil industries obviously helps them go about their current damaging business practices, and divestment adds a tiny bit of pressure on them to change. On the flip side, if you're taking the money you made from them, and putting it purely into renewables research under your complete control (you've earned that money via investment, so presumably you have more control over it than you do a grant or donation from the industry), that's also not the worst thing. But I dont know the dynamics about how these things really tend to happen. I suspect its not the ideal moral case, and have a base feeling of unease about the soft power of investments... therefore have an inclination towards divestment. But open to opinions from people who know more than me.
Fossil fuel money should be used to fund climate research and a green transition... AFTER they have been Nationalized, and their shutdown process has begun.
In my country's equivalent of high school, I had to research a societal topic that played in my country and give a short presentation on it to a pair of dusty old farts who got to decide whether I was going to get my piece of paper that says I'm a "smart boy." The first time, I picked smoking as a topic, in part because it has negatively affected a number of my family members (several died much younger than they should've as a direct result); in part because my lungs are very sensitive to it (I start to cough if I'm within about 50m, outside, and I get the slightest hint of a whiff it sucks); and in part because I felt people who smoked tended to get very defensive about their habits when my young naïve self pointed out it was bad for them. The presentation didn't go super well at the time, for a number of reasons (one or both of them smoked, they were pretty intimidating, and their job is frankly awful to have to do) but looking back I realise one of the biggest ones is simply that a fairly sheltered high school kid with some mental issues can't be expected to grasp the nuances of this whole tobacco industry dealio. There was/is so much conflicting information out there that, rather than trying to figure out which source could or could not be trusted, I got overwhelmed and just chose to summarise what I thought were the main standpoints, without drawing any real conclusions or adding anything to the discussion - in effect adding to the problem. Now that a lot of time has passed, and I have more perspective on the history of smoking and science surrounding it, I have a clearer picture of how far-reaching and terrifyingly effective the tobacco industry's campaigning has been over the course of about a century. Not only have they made it socially acceptable (and at times even expected) to essentially gas anyone in your immediate surroundings because _you're_ stressed; they have fought tooth and nail to make it impossible for even the best investigators to figure just out how much damage they have caused, and will continue to cause, to public health, safety, the environment, and so on. The best guess anyone has is "it's probably worse than you're imagining right now. No, worse than that too."
The reason fossil fuel companies fund university research isn't only a matter of better PR through association. Academics play a huge role in advising the government, so fossil fuel companies pit universities against each other (for access to their research funding) in return for policy advocacy favourable to the fossil fuel industry. It's difficult to bite the hand which feeds you.
Prevention should be 1st imo. I think we should look into ways (yes including studies) to remove/change the behaviour of people that adds greenhouse gases. For example, the offshore wind energy production from the black seas will be predicted to experience a drastic change in terms of its environment due to differing wind conditions, while looking into differing behaviours that reduces wastage would also offer less energy consumption, reducing the burden on energy production. Furthermore, a few solutions also have other benefits. While electric cars will still produce jams, a greater reliance trains will decrease travel time especially with proper residential planning and such. It will be multidisciplinary, but I'd assume that university should be the best place for multiple branches of science to collaborate.
The video is good but I very heavily disagree with how it frames carbon capture. It is not a technology that significantly helps fight climate change and most climate advocates agree it is a convenient red herring that fossil fuel companies love to lobby for because it takes research money away from things that'd actually replace them like renewables and instead puts it into something that waves away responsabikty and pretends we can continue to emit and just use carbon capture. Importantly, it has not been shown to work in any kind of relevant scale, at best it is an overly expensive use of energy
I think that funding research to mitigate the effects of climate change can be a good part of a balanced reparations package, so long as it's entered into in good faith and the results are actually enacted
Most of the research being done by the private sector would be better called "development". There is very little basic research done by companies. And, in fairness, universities tend to suck at the development part of R&D Just wanted to say because the figures quotes could be misleading
11:24 Well, it matters because of power. What you see here is that universities do everything in their might to dissociate from their participation of power. Power being the entire system of the world. 13:45, the problem here is that using these fundings would undermine our legitimacy and trustworthiness, and therefore our understanding of the natural world. Like this IPCC was criticised for focussing too much on carbon removal from the atmosphere. Can we trust such paper if the clarity of its funding isn't widely available. To what extent is it impartial, for example what effects may contribute to cause influence by other papers influenced by oil organisation. Their is a soft form of corruption of the system available, by overflowing information directed on a certain topic possible, if they can use their monetary power and transfer it to real power. Having information widely available in direction A, and only scarcely available in direction B can definitely cause bias. It is no secret that these oil and smoking organisations have successfully nudged and deflected interest away from solutions to stop emissions/real solutions to climate change/terminating the tabacco industry. Should we allow that? My reservation is that it is unclear what universities would do in the event of being threatened to be cut off from its money supply. Would they hold onto their principle values, or would they succumb to the pressure of power, and all of their stakeholders interests. More importantly, would all universities do what is right, even when the pressure is high. Only one university going away from acting honestly would infect the system. Here their is an opportunity for a big study on the role of power in universities and where this is more/less prevalent. The role of universities in promoting the fossil fuel agenda. Are these data even sufficient to make such study? If not that should be a true indicator of the state of power in universities. Could these organisations assert direct influence and when, and how does indirect influence may be used by big fossil fuels. They are investing in universities, so it should be clear that these fossil fuel organisations are attaining some benefit from this. If you believe fossil fuel and tabacco organisation act from faith think again. They want power. Either through greenwashing, or through indirect/direct knowledge, stimulating their understanding. A university can extract to get more marginal social benefit than marginal social cost from fossil fuel investments, but it is almost certain that not all universities will. Some universities will do more harm receiving money from fossil fuels than do good. They should at least reconsider their funding, but almost none has. More strongly, the secracy is alarming. Is research more important than our planet? If Shell really wants to diversify is this good, and should we trust them? Should we trust the institutions that trust them, governments for example. If these fossil fuels want to really act from good faith, they have plentiful means to participate in research and find other solutions to prevent climate change from within their organisation, or, stunner, begin a new organisation (especially this last point you can still receive the benefits of fossil fuel organisations without the greenwashing effect, you can never prevent all income from fossil fuels because Shell can just make a subsidiary and use that to fund universities if they so wish. You can trace that but at some point we see it everywhere the source of the money can't be traced) Don't make Shell more powerful. Don't infect academics as well. It is pretty clear to me what the response should be, but for universities they are also playing their part in the game of power, just to a very limited extent, balancing their stakeholders and their interests.
Devil is in the details; in this case, in the terms of the donation. Say we instead banned fossil fuel companies from donating to universities, increased carbon tax against them to match what they currently donate, and took that tax revenue to fund research. This scenario is much more ethically sound, however if the origin, destination, and amount of money is the same as our current system, how could one be ethically sound and the other not? That's where the details come in, what constraints on type of research and what can be published. If it's going towards things that prolong emissions (eg extraction technologies) then it's no good, however, if it's going to the university as a whole with no constraints on what research gets funded or what can be published, then I think it's ethically equivalent to increasing tax on fossil fuel companies, which everyone should be able to get behind.
First off: yes, divest. Oil companies make tons of money, they don't need more money from anyone. As for dissociation, I'd say it depends. Research grants from oil companies (and any other outside entity, honestly) should be evaluated on their potential positive impact. A geology study that will help oil companies find more oil should not be accepted. A grant for carbon sequestration tech should.
I mean they can accept it, but expect what they expect. The big guy don't like the research and they pressured to research something that "helped" the industry
I would love big oils money. Just because I accept their money doesn't mean I am doing them a favour. It all depends on how universities spend that money. Once again a nuanced argument is trounced by headlines and outrage. Not unjustified outrage though.
Tonight in Illinois it was so bright at midnight that me and my friends played football in the snow. It was cloudy out but the sky was lighter the. I have ever seen at midnight. Any reason this might have happened?
Sorry, but Direct Carbon Capture is "widely regarded ..."? From what I hear from other climate scientists, the opinions are very much divided (when are they not) and a few things stood out to me in that noise: 1. It has never been proven at scale or in this capacity. Previously this technique was used for enhanced oil recovery (and the major players in DCC are doing so in partnership with OXY, mind you, who literally mention EOR). 2. DCC has been linked to deforestation, which makes sense intuitively, as it is kind of a brutal way to take a lot of tree food (Co2) out of a focussed area at once. 3. Continuing on that, we seem to believe that we can just suck all the carbon out of the air, shove it in the ground and be done with it, however... There are people that seem to believe that this would mean a situation where the pendulum swings the other way in a very extreme way, which might not work out so well for the earth. That itself does not make DCC impossible, the question is how slow do we need to do it to make it palatable for the environment, not to be shocked into the other direction, so to speak. I hope it makes sense the way I am phrasing it. 4. Then finally there are people who say the whole setup is actually quite dangerous, which seems to hold up if you look up the pipeline break in Satartia.
Nope, carbon capture has never been PAID for at scale. It works, POWER is still the issue. CARBON TAX make the fossil fuel industry PAY to clean up their fucking MESS.
So in short. Big oil money doesn't contribute enough to academia so we don't need them and disassociating from them is then the OBVIOUS choice. Reason why universities have trouble accomplishing disassociation is 100% because Exxon got their people inside the universities, what else could be the reason? Someone should ask them, they for sure don't have answers.
If universities don't invest in oil/mining companies, there will always be investment funds pouncing on any excess alpha there. Divesting does almost nothing.
I get a say in government. I get no say in corporations. Why would I ever willingly give the latter control over my world? (This is a rhetorical question; I would not.)
So, divestment. Don't buy the shares. Net result, lower returns, less money. Dissociation. Don't accept money. Net result, unless someone else steps in to provide the same funding,. Less funding less research. Finally Shell et al don't burn their own stuff.
In amsterdam a group of students were beaten by police officers while occupying a University building asking for dissociation. The University of Amsterdam should watch this video and decide for themselves if they want to be seen dealing with some of the worst companies on earth
The Exeter example is a great one. I think the Oxford Martin criteria are really important, and the point with Shell is that they simply don't meet those criteria. Until they do, they shouldn't be allowed to sponsor research.
Similar idea, but more on the climate justice side, I’m curious what the analogous numbers are for defense associated research funding. Here in the US it feels like it’s almost impossible to avoid military funding (Military Branches, DARPA, some DOE/NASA funds even) and still conduct research. I’m a PhD student studying batteries and it always feels nefarious that the funders of the research are institutions that have and almost certainly would take violent and carbon intensive geopolitical action to secure my country’s access to green technologies and associated supply chains…
Well I think defence is a brilliant thing to research, but of course I strongly support the funding of people with opposing views to mine because I am so confident in the strength of my position. Those same people however are very keen to silence their own critics and that tells us something!
I think the weight of history and the scale and urgency of the problem would suggest not taking the money. But, I find it hard to agree with your stated principle generally.
The thing is, the sooner money is taken away from fossil fuels and moved to green energy, the sooner those green energy companies can fund universities themselves.
we should bill FF companies for all the damage they already inflicted upon the enviorment, tack on the cost of dealing with the fallout of climate change that is already happening and continue to do so, until they are done. then we can take this money and put it to use for research and doing the right thing without being held accountable to the whims of some business people as a species.
I'm liking the brainstorm. I'm working through this in my head and I believe at least in the US if we do this we destroy the world economy because the entire shipping industry is based on fossil fuels. Should we instead go after the individuals in the company who created these issues? (If they are still alive)
@@Khronogi well either we disrupt soceity for a year or two while we restructure our economy or humanity and perhaps the only sentient life in the universe will burn and die out.
Absolutely, now we have to disassociate medical training from sponsorship from Big Pharma, which accounts for most of the funding for doctors education (the tax payer could never afford it), research into nutrition, CVD, cancers etc etc they also fund Medical journals and conferences. Good luck to us with that x
I am a Chemical Engineer and I have 3 points: 1. A lot of the interesting projects like CO2 --> methanol, plastic recycling via pyrolysis, algae extraction and many other processes require the industrial expertise of the chemical industry since working with test tubes is not the same as Tonnes per second. 2. Another problem is that oil company is equivalent to chemistry industry. Pretty much every bulk chemical is based on petroleum. That makes every Chemical Company to a oil company. Most of the research for sustainable production is already being done by the industry but the really long term, high risk, fundamental research will need to be done by the universities because the incentives are just not there for the industry. That's why I am against not taking Investments (although atmospheric scientists should have a different perspective on it) 3. It would be nice if a small start up could revolutionize the entire industry and turn everything to a carbon neutral process but this is very difficult to do and it will need to come from within these companies and that is something that is being done. Every research department that I have seen is working hard on implementating sustainable processes. And we have been making progress. (Look up chemical yield efficiency EU vs US with time) 4. "Research groups that take money from the oil industry are less critical of the oil industry" that makes sense from the indirect emotional bribery that occurs. But there is another perspective: if you work on plastic production you will notice that there are no alternatives that are substantially better then using oil (at least not at scale). It is easy for everyone on the outside to dislike the plastic production and we also dislike the side effects but putting things into glass or metal also has major side effects.
I am a chemical engineer. And I disagree with your points. I will generally address the points above. Most importantly, at the end, I will explain why many ppl in in fossil fuel industry justify and refuse to accept reality. All your points are “yes, but it’s not as bad… (we are doing our best I.e. green washing) & there is no other option” I don’t need to state the obvious. But those are not good excuses. There is no point in killing ourself thru climate change just to keep using fossil fuels. Also, we do have other energy options like renewable and nuclear energy. The only thing we don’t have is political support to change from fossil fuel & save ourselves. Many chemical engineers and other (even smart) ppl (with degrees) refuse to accept the reality because their job depends on it. In fact, many ppl get angry at me just for mentioning this fact.
I’m a chemical engineer with energy and environment specialization (as well as MBA). Worked in the industry for 7+ years. I apologize to general public for my contribution to support fossil fuel for my own financial gain.
On point 2, why not organise alternative (non-fossil) test facilities at large scale? Have several universities pool resources to set up central shared research-oriented factory-labs for this express purpose. Get non-fossil chemical companies (small though they may be) in on supporting it, as an opportunity for them to grow around their fossil competition. Engineer a solution, rather than just accepting the harmful status quo.
It really is complicated. I do believe, that we should divest as much as possible, but this should come with an actionable plan on not stopping the research, BECAUSE it is "fossil fuel friendy" research, such as in Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). There was a report released two weeks ago on the current state of CDR, which basically said that we are currently way off track to get the amount of CDR we need to get to a below 2°C- pathway. And while it might not be a huge contribution to overall climate science, the projects that are funded by Fossil Fuel Companies are the CDR projects. They get funded for the wrong reasons, but I truly am conflicted about taking away money from this research at this crucial time, especially because there is an incentive to get the best and most effective CDR, for these companies. So while we undeniably need more public funding and more funding from companies that do meet the martin-school criteria, I do think we should keep the funding for these projects up, at least for a little while longer. (Every Scenario for a paris-conforming pathway is clear, that we need to massively reduce emissions as a first priority, and that should be the main focus of political action, so we need this middle way of taking the fossil fuel money to fund CDR optimization while also shutting down their main climate destruction business model). It really is a complex problem.
What about transitive relationships? For example, if Oxford wanted to sponsor your videos, would you accept, knowing Oxford itself is getting funding from the fossil fuel industry? What if Shell donates to Brilliant? You mentioned "greenwashing"--would this transitive relationship be "greenlaundering"?
I'm aware of big oil sponsored PhD students (about 15 years ago) having the publication of experiments from their thesis blocked by their sponsor - because the findings were "problematic" for the company. I was an academic in psychology but my understanding is that it's the T&Cs in industry sponsorship which gags even the best intentioned students and academics. My view is that pre-registration of all research - especially industry funded - should be brought in for all relevant disciplines. That way there is a public record of any research that disappears. Universities should also back their staff when problems occur with industry sponsored research instead of being the cowardly cretins they are. It is becoming progressively more difficult to do any research these days without a big grant paying a postdoc to run the show. UK universities made many supporting roles redundant and transferred those duties to academics with zero training. Universities and govt funding has also pivoted to investing in applied research while fewer and fewer PhDs are graduating with expertise in basic lab based research. It's a disaster brewing.
Can universities afford to abstain from that money in these trying times? I say no. I would not abstain. I’d take it. That Holmes shirt….you realize people will think of the most famous Holmes ever which is Long John Holmes..?
If we could push companies like Exon into becoming the main producers of renewable energy should we do it? Basically rewarding them for causing the problems in the first place and allowing them to maintain power. I see this as a possible future.
"we've lied and propagandized for decades, but we promise now we're going to be honest just trust us bro"
So they have a lot in common with University researchers then.
Exactly. Sorry, but those big oil profits override morality...they override everything. They are not going down without an extremely well-funded fight.
Thank you Simon for amplifying this important issue! To be clear, the Coalition for a True School of Sustainability at Stanford and the Fossil Free Research movement in general are in principle open to universities taking money from companies that are part of the energy transition (based on their investments and lobbying, not their slick ads). At present, all of Stanford's fossil fuel funders fail even the loosest criteria we could reasonably craft, which is why we are targeting all of Stanford's fossil fuel funders.
lol
As long as they don't discriminate against little oil.
😂👌🏻
Hey if the olive oil industry wants to finance climate research they are WELCOME to
@@SimonClark As long as they aren't funding nutrition research. That could have some serious bias.
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 olive oil is pretty good for your health
@@engineeringvision9507 FOUND A SHILL!!1!
For students in Cambridge, please look for Cambridge Climate Justice, we're the uni activist group working on the Fossil Free Research campaign!
Researchers are already pressured not to disprove the research from their own lab & members, even when it's crappy. I've see money lead to weird indirect pressures (not even from big lobbies, just to look like what was sold to a small city is worth it).
True, Epstein.
Isn't that not only ethically wrong but also not the scientific method?
If a researcher doesnt want people to test their data, they shouldn't be a researcher. Science is about finding the truth, not about finding who is right.
@@Khronogi It's more "looking the other way". There's zero benefit to calling out bad science, so people tend to focus on their work (which is hard enough).
@@Khronogi Your naiveté is adorable. Most journals have a stated policy of not publishing research which disagrees with a few dogmatic positions, independent of the veracity of the research. And this is less open, but in the field of genetics, the NIH restricts access to data for politically inconvenient research.
@Khronogi You're right, but you also need to understand that research is conducted by humans with psychological pressures just like everyone else, and with a need to funding that tends to be more available if you can drop in a few buzzwords and show positive results.
"The scientific method" attempts to work around these effects, and it maybe does a better job than any other large system humans have created. But that is a low bar, and it is still plagued by these issues.
Thanks for highlighting Exeter University! Students are livid about the new Shell investment.
One thing to note is where climate research by universities has the most impact. When it comes to solutions for climate change (as opposed to research into its impacts and projections), the great value of universities is in the very earliest stages of R&D. Private companies are great for taking a technology and scaling/improving it (which is where we are with wind, solar and electric vehicles), but less great for more foundational research. This is where I do see a lot of value for carbon sequestration research by universities. It's just a question of targeting and risk.
Is carbon sequestering worth investing in? Isn't it just a solution that allows us to keep on a carbon fuel reliant path?
@@MC--- not right now, which is why research institutions should work on it, not private companies
Carbon sequestration is a bad example as it has been proven to be a waste of money and energy favored by fossil fuel companies since it'd still allow them to emit.
@@MC--- I think looking at things from a pragmatic perspective, carbon capture and sequestration is likely to be nessecary to some degree. Without it the drastic and rapid reductions in emissions required would likely cause widespread economic and social calamity.
So university researchers take all the risk by pursuing novel ideas which have a high chance of failure, and private companies reap the rewards? The system is obviously broken.
the main campus of Univeristy of Amsterdam in the Netherlands was recently actually occupied by several left-wing protest groups working together in protest of their research being funded by shell
I think the bottom line is; Big oil has lots of resources and access to smart people. They wouldn't donate if it wasn't in their interest. Their interest is to stay in business and keep the world on oil. Going behind their back and spending it against their interest won't work at scale. Unless they're making a big mistake, their money serves them.
Edit 1: (Although finding the small area where our interests overlap may be possible, and working with them instead of against them seems incredibly useful.)
Edit 2: The reverse case can also be made, universities will spend their money on their interests. So the donations serve both of their interests. What does this say about the interest of the universities? Perhaps that the climate damage isn't as important as the funding.
Edit 3: It's also interesting to think about what I would do if they gave me money. Would I reject it to remain unbiased? What is my price?
My price is best described by "an amount of money so large that thenceforth I'm all but guaranteed to not require any more funding at all." They definitely won't like my results, but look and see if I care.
There are two issues. 1 Will the funding compromise the research. 2 How will the conclusions be spun. Politicians and the media will only read the press releases. The public will only hear what politicians, the media and influencers choose to cherry pick. At publication, a rich oil company can have its publicity machine primed ready to deny, spin, cherry pick as it thinks necessary.
Only other researchers and a tiny minority of the science literate population will actually ever read the study.
Maybe it’s different in other courses, but in my research area, it is phenomenally hard to enable investors to influence the research and our ethics committee and how the department is structured makes it so they can’t really ask for specific research to be done, only that they have an interest in an area. This of course has a secondary influence as if the research isn’t what they want to find, then they may not fund things in future which I’m sure has an impact. However, there is a lot of protections in psychology and neuropsychology which makes it hard at my uni to interact with researchers in that way? I wonder if this is maybe a select case and not the norm then?
My guess is that for any research with or directly about human beings is more scrutinised. But something like research into more efficient extraction of scale gas probably has less hoops to jump through
@@heijd yeah that makes sense. Maybe even some more laws and medical/ethical sanctions on what you can do with humans versus earth sciences?
Ethics committees can themselves be weaponised against an individual or research topic. All it takes is for an ethics application to be punted up to university ethics committee and them refuse to sign off on the exoeriments to guarantee that those exprs will not be conducted. The reason? Petty internal politics. A departmental or university ethics cmt has the ability to hold up research for months or indefinitely if they want. The worst of these are actually the NHS ethics boards which drag the process out for months and regularly will decide after 6 or 12 months to say No. A certain previous BPS president used to sit on an NHS ethics board as a non-expert member and would torpedo applications from people they worked with but didn't like.
wish all people act and inform themselves as you, good content thx!
This is a complex issue but I also come down on universities not accepting funding. I think that fossil fuel companies should pay a surtax for the damage they do and that money should be used to mitigate damage and fund research into mitigation and energy alternatives.
I think universities should take money for research from fossil fuels, because sometimes this is research like carbon capture, which despite being considered by some a bad solution is still worth research. My other point is that these researchers are still part of the university and can be held accountable for there research. If the universities were to ban money from fossil fuel industries on the other hand, those same research money would go to private companies, who often don’t have the same standards and might be more detrimental to the environment in the long run
Go look at Climate Town's video on CCS ventures and come back here to disagree with your comment. CCS is a smokescreen to continue BAU.
I really think I'm stuck in the middle. I don't think it's wrong to accept money from anyone, however I think it is wrong to do so without care of the fine print in the contract.
In short, I'd accept money from any sponsor on the condition of total independent control of the research direction and publications. However as it's rarely so clean cut, with differing levels of independence and control given up, the correlating level of caution should be taken with the sponsors and their backgrounds, aims, and values.
The big problem with fossil fuel money funding research into climate mitigation efforts is that it is always conditional. The researchers can be independent but their project is the one that fossil fuel companies funded because it aligns with their goals, not with the goals of mitigation. Meanwhile, other research from equally independent researchers goes unfunded or underfunded. And step into any geology department (the science field with the more deniers) and see how those fossil fuel dollars turn independence into dependence.
could you do a vid covering nz terenchal rainfall in aukland,there was massive flooding and I believe 249 mm in 1 day compared to old record of 161mm
I'm looking into the Fossil Free Research movement, and what I'm trying to figure out is the best way to determine whether my own university has been accepting sponsorships from oil companies. The most I can find some vague policies about research integrity; is there an easy way to determine the sources of research money for an institution?
Thanks for the thoughtful and balanced video Simon, I work in a role affiliated to Cambridge Uni and hadn't realised they had delayed the vote on fossil fuel funding. Given that the university hosts the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, it does seem jarring for other departments to be accepting fossil fuel funding. Then again, I have heard a similar debate around whether conservation organisations should collaborate with fossil fuel companies....and some still do! P.S. love the sneaky Warhammer boxes in the corner, I found your channel after you appeared on Midwinter Minis!
While putting together my BA I actually read a lot of "Shell Studies". It's a really complicated matter, since the money for studies is nice, but Greenwashing can suck my balls.
Yes, they should because we need bias research so people can know how bias research looks like. :3
Indeed. Someone has to provide all those misleading graphs and selection biased surveys for others to debunk.
All research is biased in some sense, a lot of the time researchers throw out evidence that doesn't support their claim or do the research over from scratch to until they have something that fit their beliefs.
This would be a great basis for a satire piece. Someone should write a modest proposal encouraging fossil fuel companies to sponsor climate research so that the bias of the research will guarantee a source of more, opposing research.
@@breakingbadest9772 It's nice to see this comment section isn't just fanboys. The best approach I can see is to have both sides of these divise topics investigated equally. Once someone says the opposing position shouldn't be investigated or funded that's when we should be suspicious.
@@engineeringvision9507 My comment isn't exactly in favor of anything. it's just stating that a lot of times people are biased for various reasons. In the case of renewable energy, if oil does a study on how "bad it is" it shouldn't be trusted for obvious reasons.
Other times, like with saturated fats, it's just a truth that has been told so many times that people doesn't even consider that the present literature is false, even though there are plenty of studies saying the same thing: saturated fat is not more harmful than unsaturated, and people who eat mostly unsaturated fat don't live longer or have any less heart disease.
We aren't blaming fossil fuel companies for things done decades ago (only). They are STILL doing terrible things, so yes, we must dissociate. Fossil fuel companies have so much money they could invest hundreds of billions in solar, wind, thermal, wave, algal, and other energy sources and carbon capture. IF they do that, THEN their money might be less tainted. But when they "donate" .0002% to "research on renewables," I'm not impressed.
There are other toxic industries heavily financing research that don’t contribute as much to climate change, such as Monsanto. It would have been nice to debate about their funding as well
Ah this is a tough issue! It is kind of like using natural gas today. It may be a more efficient energy source but the emissions are still there. Personally I think it depends on the research subject, the specific company sponsor, and the university. I think sponsorships could play an important role but it can’t occur ‘behind the scenes.’ All of these fundings should be clearly displayed to students and the world
It should be printed on the front page of the article, not in some footnote.
Great video!
Create an independent fund that not only the fossil fuel companies can contribute to, but from other industries as well. Fossil fuel companies keeps their association with 'funding green research', if that's what they're paying for (otherwise they would stop providing funding entirely). Granted (pun intended) that this only pushes the problem to another level, where we start asking if this independent fund should accept fossil fuel company money in the first place. But this reduces the direct association with 'accepting fossil fuel company money' from research grant recipients. The more distance we create from the funders, the less influence we can expect from the actual research. And having more funds to do research is always helpful.
One of my physics professors is supposed to get paid by the UAE for a kinda sci fi mirror swarm to block out a bit of the sun to cool the planet a bit. It's certainly an interesting dillema
Fossil fuel companies will be around for the next 30 years as we hopefully ramp down production. After that we will still need petrochemicals. Profits will be made, and ideally some of those profits would be used to counter the harm that their produce is causing. The ideal scenario would be to do that through taxation, but it is better that at least some of those profits are used to solve problems than disappear into the pockets of their well off investors.
You should see what they get up to in the meantime. They are not good faith actors, as Simon and many others have pointed out. Naomi Oreskes is my favourite public intellectual on this topic. That scale of disinformation needs to be called out, not worked with.
Universities should be publicly funded and they should be free both in research scope and in in student fees.
Private companies should be able to offer internships to students to evaluate possible future employees but that should be all.
A new, better system to assess teaching personnel should be put in place.
Ok, now I go back to my sweet dreams.
Sadly, my university has an entire building funded by oil companies to train petroleum engineers on the latest tech.
The irony? It's basically empty. The year they completed construction, the oil price plummeted and they went from over 120 students to barely 10 in a single semester as all the jobs dried up and people switched to mechanical engineering.
What if a big oil company created a subsidiary for clean energy or carbon capture (as many of them do)? Something which met the criteria in the Oxford Martin document, but whose parent company, that may heavily subsidise their R&D and other activities, does not? From a moral perspective that may seem like an easy win, carbon reduction technologies are developed and fossil fuel profits are partially funding it. But of course the big oil company can also use this subsidiary to greenwash their image, and in theory, use as a source of funds in the future for fossil fuel activities. But if it is refused, the oil company may close down the subsidiary because the R&D is too expensive and difficult without access to university expertise and equipment, even if its intentions were noble, as a way to carry on their business in a post fossil fuel world, and a lot of money that would have gone to carbon reduction is instead just divvied out to shareholders.
Some oil compaines already do that.
if we are in a "post fossil fuel world" it doesn't matter if we have a little bit more carbon capture so not allowing them to spend it on messing with research is better as it lowers the chance of us getting there
@@dropyourself Well, what if the research is about carbon capture? Industry does rely on universities for low TRL R&D, and an experimental but promising carbon capture method may be something they would be keen to collaborate on.
Nope. I remember when UT accepted money from Big Oil to study how safe fracking was. Surprise surprise, they "discovered" it was perfectly safe, nothing to worry about.
the solution is to liquidate fossil fool companies and to seize the investments of their investors. that way you can disconnect their money from their influence, and invest in actual mitigation and adaptation.
No. While it's personally bad for me to decline funding, pretending FF corporations can magically reinvent their business models is magical thinking indeed. The chemical industries, however are a more interesting morally ambiguous case. Plastics manufacturers for example are involved in greenwashing and public gilting, but not to the same extent as API members. The principles of investment seem like a great litmus test to me.
I think that there could be a funding system that would enable universities to accept donations by such companies without damaging their conscience or standing.
Such a system would have to meet two criteria (I can think of right now):
1. Researchers must not know where the money that funds their research ultimately comes from. If they don't know, it can't bias their results.
2. Donors must not be able to request specific research to be done (or not to be done).
We currently don't have such a system, therefore dissociation is the right thing to do. If this were to be instituted, I expect fossil fuel companies to only fund research in as much as it benefits their PR, which is probably much less than they currently do.
Here in Spain a big part of the researching money comes from private banks which also finance fossil fuel companies (Santander, BBVA, Sabadell, etc), and the result is obvious, because there are some companies like Repsol financing researches in the universities, more especially in PhD's of environmental-like careers
It's quite disappointing and disgusting, moreover when I'm studying Environmental Science; whoever, there's a movement called End Fossil Occupy, that already won in the University of Barcelona
I know that there's a lot of work to do, and also that the Academy in Spain will be corrupted for the next 50 years, but that little victory means a sparkle of hope
And, in conclusion, universities shouldn't take fossil fuel companies money, however, that won't be a reality if there's no students and movements pressuring the universities, a fact that unfortunately, is a reality in almost all the universities in my country.
Well, at least there a few fellows that will fight to get a truly sustainable Academy
Instead of "shut up and take my money", it's "take my money, but only if you say what I want you to say" 🤔
Really great points Simon. I think that divestment and disassociation are a good idea but maybe we should have an exemption on research for improving the efficiency of fossil fuel extraction and usage during the transition.
That seems like too slow of a process to be worth it, unlikely to be implemented on any significant scale before 2030.
Please look up the Jevons paradox. So no, let's not exempt FF extraction "efficiency".
Hiya, have you got a video about geo-engineering, such as chemtrails I keep seeing my over my house in the south east?
Wow this is a really tricky one but yes ultimately allowing companies to fund research also allows them to shape its direction, and big oil have shown that they categorically cannot be trusted with that power.
(Also enjoying your Longest John's top 🎶)
It's interesting to watch this, in Nigeria, scholarships are given to engineering and science students by fossil fuel companies they provide a huge amount of scholarships available
Unpopular opinion, that I dont fully agree with myself but just want to state the case:
Stop thinking of it as the fossil fuel industry, start thinking of it as the energy industry, with major sunk assets and infrastructure in the extraction and use of fossil fuels.
Corporations are there to make money, in their areas of expertise with the assets they have. Like most human inventions, they are not inherently evil, they are just tools that can be used in an amoral way. But they are incredibly powerful tools with massive resources. You can make the political case that they are too powerful and should be broken up, but does anyone really think that's going to happen on a timescale useful to us right now? Its just not going to happen, end of. Maybe in the future, but not now, and we need now.
Yes, these companies have lied, and sown disinformation, but not for fun. It was in their commercial interest to do so. And in that vein, they will want to bleed their current fossil fuel assets dry, and we should politically work to make that as expensive as possible. But if they see opportunity to use their expertise to make money in renewables, CCS, or energy storage, they will do that, and will be an incredibly focussed and powerful tool in doing that. So it's up to us and our politicians, which we do have more control over, to make that the financially attractive path for them.
These entities are not going away anytime soon, so at this critical juncture, society may as well try to direct their power towards something good. That will not happen if we treat them like the boogeyman.
But also lets not be naive, be constantly aware they are cold, amoral money-making machines.
Your point's good, but what's your stance on divestment?
@The unknown I'll be honest, I dont know enough about the system to have a hard opinion. Investing in fossil industries obviously helps them go about their current damaging business practices, and divestment adds a tiny bit of pressure on them to change.
On the flip side, if you're taking the money you made from them, and putting it purely into renewables research under your complete control (you've earned that money via investment, so presumably you have more control over it than you do a grant or donation from the industry), that's also not the worst thing.
But I dont know the dynamics about how these things really tend to happen. I suspect its not the ideal moral case, and have a base feeling of unease about the soft power of investments... therefore have an inclination towards divestment. But open to opinions from people who know more than me.
I also agree with the dissociation movement
Fossil fuel money should be used to fund climate research and a green transition... AFTER they have been Nationalized, and their shutdown process has begun.
But should universities accept donations for research on "renewables" that are incapable of replacing fossil fuels?
In my country's equivalent of high school, I had to research a societal topic that played in my country and give a short presentation on it to a pair of dusty old farts who got to decide whether I was going to get my piece of paper that says I'm a "smart boy." The first time, I picked smoking as a topic, in part because it has negatively affected a number of my family members (several died much younger than they should've as a direct result); in part because my lungs are very sensitive to it (I start to cough if I'm within about 50m, outside, and I get the slightest hint of a whiff it sucks); and in part because I felt people who smoked tended to get very defensive about their habits when my young naïve self pointed out it was bad for them.
The presentation didn't go super well at the time, for a number of reasons (one or both of them smoked, they were pretty intimidating, and their job is frankly awful to have to do) but looking back I realise one of the biggest ones is simply that a fairly sheltered high school kid with some mental issues can't be expected to grasp the nuances of this whole tobacco industry dealio. There was/is so much conflicting information out there that, rather than trying to figure out which source could or could not be trusted, I got overwhelmed and just chose to summarise what I thought were the main standpoints, without drawing any real conclusions or adding anything to the discussion - in effect adding to the problem.
Now that a lot of time has passed, and I have more perspective on the history of smoking and science surrounding it, I have a clearer picture of how far-reaching and terrifyingly effective the tobacco industry's campaigning has been over the course of about a century. Not only have they made it socially acceptable (and at times even expected) to essentially gas anyone in your immediate surroundings because _you're_ stressed; they have fought tooth and nail to make it impossible for even the best investigators to figure just out how much damage they have caused, and will continue to cause, to public health, safety, the environment, and so on. The best guess anyone has is "it's probably worse than you're imagining right now. No, worse than that too."
The reason fossil fuel companies fund university research isn't only a matter of better PR through association. Academics play a huge role in advising the government, so fossil fuel companies pit universities against each other (for access to their research funding) in return for policy advocacy favourable to the fossil fuel industry. It's difficult to bite the hand which feeds you.
Prevention should be 1st imo.
I think we should look into ways (yes including studies) to remove/change the behaviour of people that adds greenhouse gases. For example, the offshore wind energy production from the black seas will be predicted to experience a drastic change in terms of its environment due to differing wind conditions, while looking into differing behaviours that reduces wastage would also offer less energy consumption, reducing the burden on energy production.
Furthermore, a few solutions also have other benefits. While electric cars will still produce jams, a greater reliance trains will decrease travel time especially with proper residential planning and such. It will be multidisciplinary, but I'd assume that university should be the best place for multiple branches of science to collaborate.
The video is good but I very heavily disagree with how it frames carbon capture. It is not a technology that significantly helps fight climate change and most climate advocates agree it is a convenient red herring that fossil fuel companies love to lobby for because it takes research money away from things that'd actually replace them like renewables and instead puts it into something that waves away responsabikty and pretends we can continue to emit and just use carbon capture. Importantly, it has not been shown to work in any kind of relevant scale, at best it is an overly expensive use of energy
My take no they shouldn't.
If anything they should try investing on proven technologies and make money to be able to afford the schools.
Take all the money you can get to help mitigate changing climate. We no longer have time and luxury of being picky.
I think that funding research to mitigate the effects of climate change can be a good part of a balanced reparations package, so long as it's entered into in good faith and the results are actually enacted
I mean Universities accept research money form the government so not much a difference form bit oil in morals.
The government is far worse.
@ShankarSivarajan true but the government is also funded by big oil.
@@ShankarSivarajan idk they are very similar
The problems are visible and the solution is obvious. The hard bit is getting everyone to agree that being an asshole should be illegal
Most of the research being done by the private sector would be better called "development". There is very little basic research done by companies. And, in fairness, universities tend to suck at the development part of R&D
Just wanted to say because the figures quotes could be misleading
11:24 Well, it matters because of power. What you see here is that universities do everything in their might to dissociate from their participation of power. Power being the entire system of the world. 13:45, the problem here is that using these fundings would undermine our legitimacy and trustworthiness, and therefore our understanding of the natural world. Like this IPCC was criticised for focussing too much on carbon removal from the atmosphere. Can we trust such paper if the clarity of its funding isn't widely available. To what extent is it impartial, for example what effects may contribute to cause influence by other papers influenced by oil organisation. Their is a soft form of corruption of the system available, by overflowing information directed on a certain topic possible, if they can use their monetary power and transfer it to real power. Having information widely available in direction A, and only scarcely available in direction B can definitely cause bias. It is no secret that these oil and smoking organisations have successfully nudged and deflected interest away from solutions to stop emissions/real solutions to climate change/terminating the tabacco industry. Should we allow that?
My reservation is that it is unclear what universities would do in the event of being threatened to be cut off from its money supply. Would they hold onto their principle values, or would they succumb to the pressure of power, and all of their stakeholders interests. More importantly, would all universities do what is right, even when the pressure is high. Only one university going away from acting honestly would infect the system. Here their is an opportunity for a big study on the role of power in universities and where this is more/less prevalent. The role of universities in promoting the fossil fuel agenda. Are these data even sufficient to make such study? If not that should be a true indicator of the state of power in universities. Could these organisations assert direct influence and when, and how does indirect influence may be used by big fossil fuels. They are investing in universities, so it should be clear that these fossil fuel organisations are attaining some benefit from this. If you believe fossil fuel and tabacco organisation act from faith think again. They want power. Either through greenwashing, or through indirect/direct knowledge, stimulating their understanding. A university can extract to get more marginal social benefit than marginal social cost from fossil fuel investments, but it is almost certain that not all universities will. Some universities will do more harm receiving money from fossil fuels than do good. They should at least reconsider their funding, but almost none has. More strongly, the secracy is alarming.
Is research more important than our planet? If Shell really wants to diversify is this good, and should we trust them? Should we trust the institutions that trust them, governments for example. If these fossil fuels want to really act from good faith, they have plentiful means to participate in research and find other solutions to prevent climate change from within their organisation, or, stunner, begin a new organisation (especially this last point you can still receive the benefits of fossil fuel organisations without the greenwashing effect, you can never prevent all income from fossil fuels because Shell can just make a subsidiary and use that to fund universities if they so wish. You can trace that but at some point we see it everywhere the source of the money can't be traced) Don't make Shell more powerful. Don't infect academics as well. It is pretty clear to me what the response should be, but for universities they are also playing their part in the game of power, just to a very limited extent, balancing their stakeholders and their interests.
has since Seoul
no
Devil is in the details; in this case, in the terms of the donation. Say we instead banned fossil fuel companies from donating to universities, increased carbon tax against them to match what they currently donate, and took that tax revenue to fund research. This scenario is much more ethically sound, however if the origin, destination, and amount of money is the same as our current system, how could one be ethically sound and the other not? That's where the details come in, what constraints on type of research and what can be published. If it's going towards things that prolong emissions (eg extraction technologies) then it's no good, however, if it's going to the university as a whole with no constraints on what research gets funded or what can be published, then I think it's ethically equivalent to increasing tax on fossil fuel companies, which everyone should be able to get behind.
It’s ok to take money from CCP but not from oil companies???
First off: yes, divest. Oil companies make tons of money, they don't need more money from anyone.
As for dissociation, I'd say it depends. Research grants from oil companies (and any other outside entity, honestly) should be evaluated on their potential positive impact. A geology study that will help oil companies find more oil should not be accepted. A grant for carbon sequestration tech should.
Reagan, Sununu and Nirenberg, what the world would have been like had they not existed...
I mean they can accept it, but expect what they expect. The big guy don't like the research and they pressured to research something that "helped" the industry
I would love big oils money.
Just because I accept their money doesn't mean I am doing them a favour.
It all depends on how universities spend that money.
Once again a nuanced argument is trounced by headlines and outrage.
Not unjustified outrage though.
Wowza
As long as those advocates can find a another investment source that promises massive returns I am in
musicccccc
Anyone socoud divest form focial fules and invest in green tech
Tonight in Illinois it was so bright at midnight that me and my friends played football in the snow. It was cloudy out but the sky was lighter the. I have ever seen at midnight. Any reason this might have happened?
WASF
Down with fossil fuels
Sorry, but Direct Carbon Capture is "widely regarded ..."? From what I hear from other climate scientists, the opinions are very much divided (when are they not) and a few things stood out to me in that noise: 1. It has never been proven at scale or in this capacity. Previously this technique was used for enhanced oil recovery (and the major players in DCC are doing so in partnership with OXY, mind you, who literally mention EOR). 2. DCC has been linked to deforestation, which makes sense intuitively, as it is kind of a brutal way to take a lot of tree food (Co2) out of a focussed area at once. 3. Continuing on that, we seem to believe that we can just suck all the carbon out of the air, shove it in the ground and be done with it, however... There are people that seem to believe that this would mean a situation where the pendulum swings the other way in a very extreme way, which might not work out so well for the earth. That itself does not make DCC impossible, the question is how slow do we need to do it to make it palatable for the environment, not to be shocked into the other direction, so to speak. I hope it makes sense the way I am phrasing it. 4. Then finally there are people who say the whole setup is actually quite dangerous, which seems to hold up if you look up the pipeline break in Satartia.
Nope, carbon capture has never been PAID for at scale. It works, POWER is still the issue. CARBON TAX make the fossil fuel industry PAY to clean up their fucking MESS.
So in short. Big oil money doesn't contribute enough to academia so we don't need them and disassociating from them is then the OBVIOUS choice. Reason why universities have trouble accomplishing disassociation is 100% because Exxon got their people inside the universities, what else could be the reason? Someone should ask them, they for sure don't have answers.
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If universities don't invest in oil/mining companies, there will always be investment funds pouncing on any excess alpha there. Divesting does almost nothing.
Dum dum dum dum
We need fossil fuels today and we need to know where we are going, the best new technology.
Why not? Money is money is money, why bring religion into it?
Simon you need to drink more water, your lips look dehydrated af
Should universities accept research money from even bigger government?
I get a say in government. I get no say in corporations. Why would I ever willingly give the latter control over my world? (This is a rhetorical question; I would not.)
Yes because money is good no matter where it comes from
That's the attitude that got us into this problem in the first place
Dumb comment.
@@xeozim I only care about money.
@@TheWunder what a shallow way to live
@@antlerman7644 Thank you 👍
NO!
So, divestment. Don't buy the shares. Net result, lower returns, less money. Dissociation. Don't accept money. Net result, unless someone else steps in to provide the same funding,. Less funding less research. Finally Shell et al don't burn their own stuff.
In amsterdam a group of students were beaten by police officers while occupying a University building asking for dissociation. The University of Amsterdam should watch this video and decide for themselves if they want to be seen dealing with some of the worst companies on earth
No
The Exeter example is a great one. I think the Oxford Martin criteria are really important, and the point with Shell is that they simply don't meet those criteria. Until they do, they shouldn't be allowed to sponsor research.
Similar idea, but more on the climate justice side, I’m curious what the analogous numbers are for defense associated research funding. Here in the US it feels like it’s almost impossible to avoid military funding (Military Branches, DARPA, some DOE/NASA funds even) and still conduct research. I’m a PhD student studying batteries and it always feels nefarious that the funders of the research are institutions that have and almost certainly would take violent and carbon intensive geopolitical action to secure my country’s access to green technologies and associated supply chains…
Well I think defence is a brilliant thing to research, but of course I strongly support the funding of people with opposing views to mine because I am so confident in the strength of my position. Those same people however are very keen to silence their own critics and that tells us something!
When you accept someone's money, you accept their agenda. This is a very simple truth, and almost no grey areas.
I wouldn't even sell a painting to an oil company, to buy groceries.
@@MrLeafeater Do you believe your grocery store accepts your agenda?
@@ShankarSivarajan this question is classic deflection. It doesn't quite make sense in this context, nice try.
I think the weight of history and the scale and urgency of the problem would suggest not taking the money. But, I find it hard to agree with your stated principle generally.
@@carlbennett2417 Obviously, I'm not paying you enough. :)
We need to get climate change activist investors on the boards of the big oil companies.
yes because climate change activists have the money and power to do that
The thing is, the sooner money is taken away from fossil fuels and moved to green energy, the sooner those green energy companies can fund universities themselves.
The BIGGEST CLIMATE PROTEST IN UK HISTORY is being planned for Friday 21st April, Parliament Sq. London. Be there!
we should bill FF companies for all the damage they already inflicted upon the enviorment, tack on the cost of dealing with the fallout of climate change that is already happening and continue to do so, until they are done. then we can take this money and put it to use for research and doing the right thing without being held accountable to the whims of some business people as a species.
I'm liking the brainstorm.
I'm working through this in my head and I believe at least in the US if we do this we destroy the world economy because the entire shipping industry is based on fossil fuels.
Should we instead go after the individuals in the company who created these issues? (If they are still alive)
@@Khronogi There are plenty of greenwashers around now!
@@Khronogi well either we disrupt soceity for a year or two while we restructure our economy or humanity and perhaps the only sentient life in the universe will burn and die out.
Absolutely, now we have to disassociate medical training from sponsorship from Big Pharma, which accounts for most of the funding for doctors education (the tax payer could never afford it), research into nutrition, CVD, cancers etc etc they also fund Medical journals and conferences. Good luck to us with that x
I am a Chemical Engineer and I have 3 points:
1. A lot of the interesting projects like CO2 --> methanol, plastic recycling via pyrolysis, algae extraction and many other processes require the industrial expertise of the chemical industry since working with test tubes is not the same as Tonnes per second.
2. Another problem is that oil company is equivalent to chemistry industry. Pretty much every bulk chemical is based on petroleum. That makes every Chemical Company to a oil company. Most of the research for sustainable production is already being done by the industry but the really long term, high risk, fundamental research will need to be done by the universities because the incentives are just not there for the industry. That's why I am against not taking Investments (although atmospheric scientists should have a different perspective on it)
3. It would be nice if a small start up could revolutionize the entire industry and turn everything to a carbon neutral process but this is very difficult to do and it will need to come from within these companies and that is something that is being done. Every research department that I have seen is working hard on implementating sustainable processes. And we have been making progress. (Look up chemical yield efficiency EU vs US with time)
4. "Research groups that take money from the oil industry are less critical of the oil industry" that makes sense from the indirect emotional bribery that occurs. But there is another perspective: if you work on plastic production you will notice that there are no alternatives that are substantially better then using oil (at least not at scale). It is easy for everyone on the outside to dislike the plastic production and we also dislike the side effects but putting things into glass or metal also has major side effects.
I am a chemical engineer. And I disagree with your points. I will generally address the points above. Most importantly, at the end, I will explain why many ppl in in fossil fuel industry justify and refuse to accept reality.
All your points are “yes, but it’s not as bad… (we are doing our best I.e. green washing) & there is no other option”
I don’t need to state the obvious. But those are not good excuses. There is no point in killing ourself thru climate change just to keep using fossil fuels. Also, we do have other energy options like renewable and nuclear energy. The only thing we don’t have is political support to change from fossil fuel & save ourselves.
Many chemical engineers and other (even smart) ppl (with degrees) refuse to accept the reality because their job depends on it. In fact, many ppl get angry at me just for mentioning this fact.
I’m a chemical engineer with energy and environment specialization (as well as MBA). Worked in the industry for 7+ years. I apologize to general public for my contribution to support fossil fuel for my own financial gain.
On point 2, why not organise alternative (non-fossil) test facilities at large scale? Have several universities pool resources to set up central shared research-oriented factory-labs for this express purpose. Get non-fossil chemical companies (small though they may be) in on supporting it, as an opportunity for them to grow around their fossil competition. Engineer a solution, rather than just accepting the harmful status quo.
It really is complicated. I do believe, that we should divest as much as possible, but this should come with an actionable plan on not stopping the research, BECAUSE it is "fossil fuel friendy" research, such as in Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). There was a report released two weeks ago on the current state of CDR, which basically said that we are currently way off track to get the amount of CDR we need to get to a below 2°C- pathway. And while it might not be a huge contribution to overall climate science, the projects that are funded by Fossil Fuel Companies are the CDR projects. They get funded for the wrong reasons, but I truly am conflicted about taking away money from this research at this crucial time, especially because there is an incentive to get the best and most effective CDR, for these companies. So while we undeniably need more public funding and more funding from companies that do meet the martin-school criteria, I do think we should keep the funding for these projects up, at least for a little while longer. (Every Scenario for a paris-conforming pathway is clear, that we need to massively reduce emissions as a first priority, and that should be the main focus of political action, so we need this middle way of taking the fossil fuel money to fund CDR optimization while also shutting down their main climate destruction business model). It really is a complex problem.
What about transitive relationships? For example, if Oxford wanted to sponsor your videos, would you accept, knowing Oxford itself is getting funding from the fossil fuel industry? What if Shell donates to Brilliant? You mentioned "greenwashing"--would this transitive relationship be "greenlaundering"?
Well, instead of campaining perhaps, they should be paying the Uninversities instead. Doing something more useful the work can continue.
I'm aware of big oil sponsored PhD students (about 15 years ago) having the publication of experiments from their thesis blocked by their sponsor - because the findings were "problematic" for the company. I was an academic in psychology but my understanding is that it's the T&Cs in industry sponsorship which gags even the best intentioned students and academics.
My view is that pre-registration of all research - especially industry funded - should be brought in for all relevant disciplines. That way there is a public record of any research that disappears. Universities should also back their staff when problems occur with industry sponsored research instead of being the cowardly cretins they are.
It is becoming progressively more difficult to do any research these days without a big grant paying a postdoc to run the show. UK universities made many supporting roles redundant and transferred those duties to academics with zero training. Universities and govt funding has also pivoted to investing in applied research while fewer and fewer PhDs are graduating with expertise in basic lab based research. It's a disaster brewing.
Can universities afford to abstain from that money in these trying times? I say no.
I would not abstain. I’d take it.
That Holmes shirt….you realize people will think of the most famous Holmes ever which is Long John Holmes..?
Everytime international being mentioned, I have to remind myself it refers to US and UK. Haha... Thank you for the insightful video though
If we could push companies like Exon into becoming the main producers of renewable energy should we do it? Basically rewarding them for causing the problems in the first place and allowing them to maintain power. I see this as a possible future.