SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Hundreds of millions of dollars from oil and gas companies are flowing to universities around the U.S., funding everything from student scholarships to research. Fueling Knowledge is a two-part series from the WWNO and WRKF podcast "Sea Change", produced with Floodlight and the Louisiana Illuminator. In this excerpt, reporters Halle Parker and Pam Radtke explore whether that funding from the fossil fuel industry comes with strings attached. Their focus - the oil-and-gas-branded campus of Louisiana's flagship university, LSU.
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HALLE PARKER, BYLINE: Geoffrey Supran grew up in the U.K. When he was only 16 years old, he started researching renewable energy. He put his head down, ready to dedicate his life to the lab, a physicist through and through. He didn't really think twice back then that his Ph.D. was being paid for by an oil company.
GEOFFREY SUPRAN: The only perspective I had on this oil company was that it paid for my Ph.D. and it threw fancy banquets for us and gave us, you know, fancy logoed stationery.
PARKER: Supran was halfway into his studies at MIT, dreaming up new technologies to combat climate change. But then one day in his lab, he had an epiphany - the fossil fuel industry itself was the biggest obstacle to solving this crisis. Supran took off his lab coat and decided to study something different - the fossil fuel industry's history of disinformation and propaganda. Now when he looks back, he says that for all of his scientific smarts, he was naive.
SUPRAN: It took me a long time to realize that the photo ops, the public statements about their sponsorship deals with MIT, were part and parcel of a public affairs scheme that massively outsized me and my individual project.
PARKER: He says he was subtly, unwittingly being used by the oil company, and it's not just him. Huge donations by oil and gas companies pay for labs like his and far more at universities around the world - actual professors, scholarships, new buildings, influential research. And Supran, no longer that naive Ph.D. student, is worried.
SUPRAN: Universities are at risk of being pawns in a climate propaganda scheme devised and implemented by fossil fuel interests for decades.
PAM RADTKE: Last fall, Supran and other researchers released a comprehensive study detailing how the fossil fuel industry is embedded in universities around the world, and it's dangerous. He says it mirrors another time in history when industry manipulated universities to buy public opinion.
SUPRAN: It's a situation exactly parallel to public health researchers being funded by the tobacco industry. It's a conflict of interest the size of an oil tanker.
RADTKE: Supran says the fossil fuel industry is working from a well-worn playbook. We reached out to the American Petroleum Institute, which represents oil and gas companies through lobbying and advocacy efforts. They sent us a statement saying the industry is proud to partner with leading universities to prepare the next generation of engineers, scientists and problem-solvers to tackle the world's greatest energy challenges.
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PARKER: What Supran is worried about - the fossil fuel industry using universities to get the study results that they want - well, I found an example of it. LSU has another research hub that it formed back in the '80s. It's called the Center for Energy Studies. The center was created to help inform Louisiana state lawmakers about energy policy, specifically how to keep the oil and gas flowing.
RADTKE: Today, many of the center's reports are sponsored by a who's who in Louisiana petrochemicals. Usually, these companies want to know the economic impact of a particular project - number of jobs and tax dollars created, that sort of thing.
PARKER: Scrolling through pages and pages of these research contracts, one caught my eye. It was sponsored by a big Texas law firm called Bracewell. It's well known for its oil and gas lobbying.
RADTKE: Bracewell was working with a company that's proposed a huge carbon capture project in Louisiana. The company wants to store millions of tons of carbon dioxide underground in southwest Louisiana, and they want to show how it would benefit the state's economy. So they turned to LSU for an economic impact study.
PARKER: But what they asked for wasn't a purely objective scientific study.
RADTKE: In the end, LSU's researchers wrote a report that listed all of the financial reasons the Gulf Coast should welcome this new industry. But the economic risks - it barely mentions any of those.
PARKER: And the red flags kept popping up. One of the biggest was that LSU's contract allows funders to give feedback on the draft before it's published. It also lets the funders stay anonymous if they want, meaning the public would never know who paid for the report - unless, of course, they filed a public records request, like we did.
RADTKE: We went back to Geoffrey Supran, our fossil fuel propaganda expert, and showed him the agreement and final report.
SUPRAN: It's like it gets a D grade, and it's not quite an F. The fact that this report just touts the economic benefits of this specific company funding the report, it kind of makes you wonder if it's worth the paper it's written on.
PARKER: He was stunned LSU would even give the funder the option to stay anonymous. This report did name the funder, but...
SUPRAN: If they exercised it, it would blatantly disregard basic academic norms in terms of disclosing fundamental conflicts of interest.
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RADTKE: When we asked the authors of the LSU report for an interview, one declined to comment, and the other never responded. The head of LSU's research office defended the agreement. He told us that the contract's terms are standard across the university and that he found no problems with the report.
PARKER: Now, technically, LSU is allowed to do all of this. It's not illegal, nor does it fall neatly in the box of research misconduct, like using fake data or plagiarizing. But reports like these, written in language that someone like, say, a lawmaker could understand, could influence decision-making because they carry the credibility of a university.
RADTKE: This got us thinking. How do elected officials use reports from schools like LSU to decide on policy? So Halle went to talk with one.
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DAVANTE LEWIS: Davante Lewis, and I'm the public service commissioner for the 3rd District of Louisiana.
PARKER: As a commissioner, Lewis regulates the electric grid, among other things, which is huge when you're thinking about the energy transition. He's always deep in government reports or research papers from universities.
LEWIS: The research plays a significant role in determining whether or not we're on the right or wrong course.
PARKER: He says he relies on credible, independent information to decide how he votes on new regulations. And he's worried. As more industry money pays for research, policymakers might not get the full picture.
LEWIS: The source is important. I mean, oftentimes we have seen where money drives facts, not facts drive money.
PARKER: This idea that money drives facts, not facts drive money - that's exactly what motivated our reporting.
RADTKE: Lewis' concern that bad research will lead to bad policy is really a national problem, one so bad that Democrats in Congress investigated Big Oil over it. And they found the world's top oil and gas companies were systematically delaying action to fix global warming with this research.
PARKER: But identifying this playbook hasn't been enough to stop it in the past. People still smoke cigarettes, and a lot more people still support the oil and gas industry, especially in Louisiana. Why? - because all those donations aren't only going to research. There's another chapter in this playbook.
RADTKE: The fossil fuel industry doesn't just influence people's minds. They've captured their hearts, too.
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DETROW: That was an excerpt from Fueling Knowledge, a special series from the "Sea Change" podcast in collaboration with reporters at Floodlight and Louisiana Illuminator. We should note that the carbon sequestration company involved in the economic impact research did not respond to a request for comment. Bracewell, the law firm, shared general details about their work with universities but did not comment on the specifics of this research agreement. You can hear the full investigation wherever you get your podcasts.
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