The fossil fuel industry’s deep reach into higher education

As the public has become more aware of the role of the fossil fuel industry in accelerating climate change—which account for over 75 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions—campaigns against fossil fuels have become more widespread.

In universities, this has often taken the form of campaigns calling on universities to stop investments in fossil fuel companies. However, higher education has many ties to the fossil fuel industry that go beyond its investments.

This is explored in a recent study, Fossil Fuel Industry Influence in Higher Education: A review and a research agenda, the first academic study to synthesize academic and civil society investigations into the fossil fuel industry and higher education in Canada, the U.S., UK, and Australia.

As a student involved in the movement for divestment from fossil fuels, I was drawn to this study because it encapsulates many different areas where fossil fuel companies can influence higher education, spread out across institutions in different countries.

Emily Eaton, the report’s co-author and a professor at the University of Regina, explained some of the connections they’d found. Fossil fuel companies’ influence can take forms such as ties to university boards of governors, funding research centres or programs, academics consulting or serving on the boards of fossil fuel companies, career recruitment events, sponsoring lectures or conferences, or even involvement in developing curricula.

Eaton said they’d even found evidence of universities leasing land to fossil fuel companies for extraction—for example, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and the University of Texas-Arlington.

Why universities?

According to Eaton, fossil fuel companies use universities to legitimize their activities, advancing their policy and lobbying goals. She believes this has been going on since at least the 1970s, a time when oil company executives were aware of the potential harmful effects of burning fossil fuels, but concealed this from the general public.

“Fossil fuel industries have been interested in promoting a benign image of themselves, and they’ve always seen universities as one arena through which they can gain credibility,” she explained, adding that “universities are understood as these independent, scientifically rigorous, credible institutions.”

This is even more relevant today, where regulation of the fossil fuel industry and development of cleaner, renewable forms of energy figure prominently in the policy arena. Eaton explained that fossil fuel companies are interested in using universities’ credibility to greenwash their activities, giving the impression that these companies are concerned with reducing greenhouse gases or reducing their environmental impact despite continuing to extract fossil fuels.

“[Fossil fuel companies] want the Canadian government’s climate policies not to legislate them out of existence. They see these policies as existential threats,” said Eaton. “So they want to fund research and produce knowledge that says ‘look, there really is room for fossil fuel corporations in a low-carbon future’.”

Canadian universities

The relationship between the University of Calgary and Enbridge is one of the most prominent examples of this type of collaboration in Canada. From 2012 to 2014, Enbridge endowed the Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability at the university. At the time, Enbridge was trying to advance its Northern Gateway pipeline project in Alberta and British Columbia.

A CBC investigation uncovered evidence that Enbridge had significant influence in the centre’s operations, seeking to influence staffing, board membership, and student awards. For example, centre Director Joe Arvai was removed after expressing opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline. Enbridge also ran the PR for the centre and could withdraw funding if it was ever dissatisfied with the centre’s work.

A further investigation by the Canadian Association of University Teachers found a serious conflict of interest due to then-President Elizabeth Cannon’s position on the Enbridge Income Fund Holdings Board. Enbridge’s name was dropped from the centre in 2014, but it continues to sponsor events at the university, such as the Enbridge Research in Action Seminar Series.

Besides the University of Calgary, the University of Alberta features heavily in the study due to numerous partnerships with fossil fuel companies. The study cites current and former executives from Syncrude Canada, Encana, Oil Sands Developers Group, Suncor, and Epcor sitting on the board of governors, the Shell Enhanced Learning Fund, and a research partnership between TransAlta and a public health professor, which determined that coal plants did “not negatively impact the health of local residents.”

In other industries, such as tobacco or pharmaceuticals, Eaton said there’s a greater awareness among academics about how collaborations with companies in the industry can lead to conflict of interests and bias in research. She and her colleagues noticed a “gaping hole” in research on the fossil fuel industry’s influence on higher education.

According to Eaton, the tobacco industry used similar strategies to the fossil fuel industry in leveraging universities’ credibility to obscure the harmful effects of their product. However, both tobacco and pharmaceuticals came under greater scrutiny when the health effects became more widely known to the public, which she believes is now happening for fossil fuels.

“I think that now that we’re linking fossil fuels more to human health and the future of humans and non-humans [and] the planet, that then lends itself to more of a look at what those biases are in research,” she explained.

A call to action

At this point, numerous Canadian universities have committed to divestment from fossil fuels due to pressure from students, staff, and faculty. While these campaigns have become widespread across the country, Eaton and her co-authors’ research shows that divestment is just the tip of the iceberg.

Although early campaigns focused primarily on divestment, Eaton said many are now moving towards calling for universities to cut all ties with fossil fuel companies. In fact, many of the studies reviewed in the paper come from civil society organizations, including university faculty and students.

“If we are going to have a habitable planet, we actually need a whole bunch of different types of research, learning, and training that will prepare us for this different world,” said Eaton.

“Universities are a place where students recognize that the future isn’t going to be so much like the past, where they’re asking for more opportunities and more partnerships that will prepare them for that future rather than tie them to this model that is really planet-killing.”

Uncovering a university’s ties to fossil fuel companies isn’t always straightforward. In some cases, this information is publicly displayed by universities or companies that want to celebrate their partnerships. In other cases, those relationships can be obscured.

Most Canadian universities are public institutions subject to freedom of information laws, but even then, they may try to resist sharing information. Eaton has personal experience with this, having gone through a drawn-out court battle with her employer, the University of Regina, after they refused to disclose information regarding fossil fuel influence.

“One of the reasons that we don’t have more research on this is just because of the lack of transparency that universities have around their various different connections to the fossil fuel industries,” she explained.

Ultimately, Eaton and her co-authors see this paper as a call to action, encouraging more people to look into the connections between fossil fuels and higher education.

“Really, what the paper is trying to do is sound an alarm bell and say that fossil fuel companies are deeply embedded in universities across the U.S., the UK, Canada, and Australia, but that we don’t actually know a lot about what they’re up to,” she said.