This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Fossil fuel companies’ funding of universities’ climate-focused efforts is delaying the green transition, according to the most extensive peer-reviewed study to date of the industry’s influence on academia.

For the study, published in the journal WIREs Climate Change on Thursday, six researchers pored over thousands of academic articles on industries’ funding of research from the past two decades. Just a handful of them focused on oil and gas companies, showing a “worrying lack of attention” to the issue, the analysis says.

But even that small body of research shows a pattern of industry influence: “The academic integrity of higher education is at risk,” they write.

During the past two decades, non-profits, campus organizers and a small group of scholars have sounded the alarm about oil companies’ influence in academia, drawing parallels to tobacco, pharmaceuticals and food producers who have also funded scholarship.

In the new study, researchers found that out of roughly 14,000 peer-reviewed articles about conflicts of interest, bias and research funding across all industries from 2003 to 2023, only seven mentioned fossil fuels. When the authors broadened their search to look at book chapters, they found only seven more.

An influential 2011 MIT report whose authors had ties to the fossil fuel industry “helped to situate natural gas, or fossil gas, as part of the climate solution.”

But even by combing through the small body of existing scholarship, the authors identified hundreds of instances in the US, UK, Canada and Australia where oil and gas interests had poured funding into climate and energy research while sitting on advisory or governing boards, endowing academic posts, sponsoring scholarships, advising curricula or otherwise influencing universities.

“We find that universities are an established yet under-researched vehicle of climate obstruction by the fossil fuel industry,” the authors write.

The analysis found that oil companies have long influenced universities to focus on climate efforts that would enshrine a future for fossil fuels, despite experts’ repeated warnings that the world must stop burning coal, oil, and gas to avert the worst climate impacts.

“The science has been telling us that fossil fuel phase-out is the No. 1 thing that we need to focus on, but within our universities, there’s very little research on how to do fossil fuel phase-out,” said Jennie Stephens, a climate justice professor at Maynooth University in Ireland and study co-author. “This provides some explanation for why society has been so ineffective and inadequate in our responses to the climate crisis.”

Fossil fuel companies’ relationships with universities can create the potential for bias in research and real or perceived conflicts of interest, the authors write.

“Our intention is to protect scientific integrity,” said Geoffrey Supran, a University of Miami associate professor who studies fossil fuel industry messaging and co-authored the study. “We want to warn scholars and university leaders that they can be pawns in a propaganda scheme.”

BP, for instance, funneled between $2.1 million and $2.6 million to Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative between 2012 and 2017. The initiative produced research on ways to decarbonize the economy. “It’s noteworthy of that the scenarios for decarbonization that the initiative outlined, only one of them didn’t include a serious role to be played by fossil fuels paired with negative emissions technologies,” said Supran.

The study highlights an internal 2017 campaign-strategy memo presented by a public relations firm to BP that proposed targeting Princeton as a “partner” that could help authenticate “BP’s commitment to low carbon” despite its commitment to expanding planet-heating fossil fuel production.

In another example, an influential 2011 study from the MIT Energy Initiative called gas “a bridge to a low carbon future” even though it is a planet-heating fossil fuel. Several of the study’s authors had financial ties to, and funding from, major oil and gas companies.

“The report helped to situate natural gas, or fossil gas, as part of the climate solution,” said Stephens. “And it seemed to reinforce the Obama administration’s all-of-the-above strategy,” she added, referring to the former president’s commitments to supporting both fossil fuels and renewables.

A spokesperson for the MIT Energy Initiative said funders “have no control” over the institute’s reports: “no approval or rejection, no opportunity to accept or reject any findings.” He added that the study in question was “developed and vigorously debated by a multidisciplinary team.”

In an earlier example, the study notes that in 1997, Exxon paid a Harvard Law School professor to write about “why punitive damages awards are inappropriate in today’s civil justice system” as the company was appealing a $5 billion punitive damages award following a major oil tanker spill in Alaska.

Fossil fuel companies had donated at least $700 million to US universities in the decade prior, a 2023 study found.

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the US fossil fuel lobby group American Petroleum Institute said: “America’s oil and natural gas industry will continue to work with experts and organizations committed to advancing solutions that tackle climate change, meet growing demand and ensure continued access to affordable, reliable American energy.” The Guardian also contacted BP, Exxon, Princeton, and Harvard ; none were immediately available for comment.

There is some evidence that funding from oil and gas companies is associated with a more positive view of fossil fuels, the study notes. And relationships with polluting energy companies can also affect internal campus decision-making, the authors argue.

Universities that are dependent on fossil fuel funding, for instance, may be less likely to divest their endowments from the sector, said Supran.

Despite the authors’ efforts, the scope of fossil fuel funding on campus remains unclear because the vast majority of university research centers do not disclose their donors publicly. One 2023 report from the nonprofit Data for Progress found that fossil fuel companies donated at least $700 million to 27 US universities over the past decade, but the authors noted this was almost certainly an undercount.

Universities have sometimes pushed back on calls for transparency. Years ago, one of the new study’s co-authors, Emily Eaton, requested that her university in Canada disclose its fossil fuel funders; when it refused to do so, she took it to court, and in 2021 a judge ruled in her favor.

The report comes amid increasing public scrutiny of the oil sector’s relationship with universities, including in an April report from Democrats on Capitol Hill. Efforts to push academic institutions to “dissociate” from fossil fuel companies are also ramping up on campuses across the country.

“This literature review confirms what students in our movement have known for years,” said Jake Lowe, executive director of Campus Climate Network, which is pressuring schools to sever ties with the industry. “Big oil has infiltrated academia in order to gain undue credibility and obstruct climate action.”

To avert these conflicts in the future, Stephens said governments should provide more public funding to universities. “More public funding could help them act in the public good,” she said.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed exactly two years ago, was pitched as a policy that puts the “middle class first.” But the spending bill’s residential tax credits have so far disproportionately benefited wealthy families, new data indicates.

That’s a major challenge for the efforts to decarbonize the US economy in time to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis. “If going green is just a niche lifestyle choice for the upper middle class, it won’t move the needle on emissions at a societal level,” said Matt Huber, a geography and environment professor at Syracuse University and the author of the 2022 book Climate Change is Class War.

A Treasury Department report published this month shines a light on the use of two IRA renewable energy tax credits: one that helped Americans boost the energy efficiency of their homes by installing heat pumps, electric water heaters, efficient windows and doors, or other upgrades; and another that helped households install small-scale renewable energy production—most commonly rooftop solar panels.

Households living paycheck to paycheck “do not have the savings or credit to buy a new heating/cooling system…even with a complicated incentive to do so.”

In 2023, about 3.4 million households, representing 2.5 percent of all tax filers, took advantage of at least one of these two subsidies, both of which were expansions of pre-existing incentive programs. That represents a 30 percent rise in the use of efficiency and clean energy tax credits over 2021 levels.

Nearly half of those who claimed at least one of these credits last year had incomes lower than $100,000. Yet roughly 75 percent of tax filers had incomes lower than $100,000 in 2023, and a closer look at the use of the credits by households within that bracket shows that wealthier Americans more frequently adopted both tax credits.

Of all filers making less than $100,000, just 0.7 percent claimed the clean energy tax credit, and just 0.9 percent claimed the efficiency incentive. In the over-$100,000 bracket, those percentages rose to 1.6 percent and a stunningly high 4.0 percent.

This dynamic, said Huber, was predictable. Tax credit programs can be difficult to navigate, especially for families who can’t afford to hire tax accountants, he said.

Further, though tax credits can make upgrades more affordable, they may not bring them into reach for Americans with lower incomes, especially because the programs come with spending caps for each household. “Most working-class Americans, living paycheck to paycheck, do not have the savings or credit to buy a new heating/cooling system…even with a complicated incentive to do so,” he said.

The tax incentives also favor those with higher tax burdens. If an upgrade is eligible for up to $2,000 in credits, for instance, filers must owe that amount or more in taxes to receive the full incentive amount.

This marked a substantial change from earlier proposals, which would have made the incentives available even for those with no tax burden. Lew Daly, a senior fellow with the climate justice group Just Solutions, said this was “a tragic political error” that should be changed by Congress.

“Without refundability, most of our country’s millions of moderate- and low-income homeowners are intentionally being excluded from the clean energy transition and its benefits in their everyday life, even as we are giving a massive fortune of tax dollars to big corporations and affluent households through the energy credits program as codified,” he said.

Instead of creating individual incentives, “why not work with utilities on a program that would aim to install heat pumps in every household for free.”

The two credits also require Americans to pay the up-front cost of home upgrades and wait until tax season to recoup costs—an option some households cannot afford.

It’s a major problem for lower-income Americans who are grappling with rising utility bills and a “threadbare social safety net,” said Daly. “The exclusionary design of the energy credits program is just piling on to create a future of worsening inequity.”

Despite these issues, when compared with similar tax incentives that pre-dated the IRA, the distribution of these credits has been more even, said James Sallee, energy economist at the University of California, Berkeley. One study showed 60 percent of benefits went to the top 20 percent of households from 2006 to 2020.

“But, the benefits are still regressive,” Sallee said. “In every income category, the more money you make, the more money on average people are claiming per tax return.”

The IRA does include provisions aimed at promoting equal distribution. The renewable energy tax credit, for instance, can be used to enroll in community solar—a helpful arrangement for renters and apartment dwellers who tend to have lower incomes than house-owners.

The bill also includes point-of-sale rebates for efficient appliances and upgrades, though their rollout has been slow because they are being distributed locally. Only two states have yet to offer rebates, though others could launch their programs within months.

Other changes could help change the distribution of tax credits, said Sallee. One of them: placing income caps on eligibility.

But ultimately, said Huber, to create green benefits that are easier for all Americans to access, they should be universal rather than means-tested.

“Instead of putting out incentives for individual households, why not work with utilities on a program that would aim to install heat pumps in every household for free,” he asked. “That might sound outlandish, but if we see solving climate change [as] critical to the public good, there’s no reason why decarbonization shouldn’t be seen as a core public service like healthcare or education.”

This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

US politics is an outlier bastion of climate denial with nearly one in four members of Congress dismissing the reality of climate change, even as alarm has grown among the American public over dangerous global heating, an analysis has found.

A total of 123 elected federal representatives—100 in the House of Representatives and 23 US senators—deny the existence of human-caused climate change, all of them Republicans, according to a recent study of statements made by current members.

“It’s definitely concerning,” said Kat So, campaign manager for energy and environment campaigns at the Center for American Progress, which wrote the report.

The report defined climate deniers as those who say that the climate crisis is not real or not primarily caused by humans, or claim that climate science is not settled, that extreme weather is not caused by global warming, or that planet-warming pollution is beneficial.

It also highlights examples of denial from representatives. “Of course the climate is changing,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in 2018. “The climate has been changing from the dawn of time. The climate will change as long as we have a planet Earth.”

Just because politicians “say they believe in climate change doesn’t mean that they are not still obstructing climate action, or using rhetoric that is antithetical to climate action.”

Other instances are more recent. “We’ve had freezing periods in the 1970s. They said it was going to be a new cooling period,” Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise said in a 2021 interview, referencing long-debunked research that is often still cited by climate deniers. “And now it gets warmer and gets colder, and that’s called Mother Nature. But the idea that hurricanes or wildfires were caused just in the last few years is just fallacy.”

Climate-denying lawmakers have received a combined $52 million in lifetime campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, the report also found.

The research shows that the American public, perhaps uniquely among people in developed countries, is represented disproportionately by climate deniers. Although 23 percent of the entire US Congress is composed of those who dismiss the climate crisis, polls show the proportion of Americans who share this view is significantly smaller, by as much as half.

Even as a quarter of US lawmakers deny the climate crisis, the American public has been moving significantly in the other direction. Fewer than one in five people in the US reject the findings of climate science, according to various studies, with long-running polling by Yale University showing that those they class as “dismissive” stand at just 11 percent.

While this slice of the American public opinion has remained largely unchanged in recent years, a much larger, growing cohort is worried about the climate crisis following a string of record hot years and a parade of wildfires, storms and other climate-fueled events. More than half of Americans are now “alarmed” or “concerned” about climate change, the Yale surveys find.

“The amount of people at each end of the spectrum—alarmed and dismissive—were essentially tied back in 2013 but today there are three alarmed people for every one dismissive, so there’s been a fundamental shift in how people see climate change in the US,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in climate public opinion at Yale.

Though the portion of lawmakers who deny the climate crisis is stunning, it has been steadily declining in recent years. Just five years ago, 150 lawmakers denied the crisis. But many elected officials who don’t deny the crisis still use anti-climate rhetoric and work to thwart greenhouse gas curbing policies.

“There’s a culture of silence—climate has joined sex, religion and politics as the topics not to bring up at the Thanksgiving table.”

The Florida representative Mario Diaz-Balart, for instance, previously used the language of climate denial, but more recently described climate change as being “more of a religion”—a different form of “climate obstruction,” the report says. He has also continued to oppose climate aid.

“There are lots of harmful ways to talk about climate and act on it,” said So. “Just because they accept the scientific findings or say they believe in climate change doesn’t mean that they are not still obstructing climate action, or using rhetoric that is antithetical to climate action.”

Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University who has long studied anti-climate rhetoric, said it was “unsurprising” that the report found old-school climate denial is on the decline.

“It’s harder to deny the science when it’s so much more apparent that the climate is warming, that extreme weather is getting worse and happening constantly,” she said. “Nobody can deny the science with a straight face, given everything.”

She noted, however, that the fossil fuel industry and its allies have long used a variety of messaging to rebuff concerns about the climate. She said she was unsure those other forms of rhetoric were any less harmful.

“As far back as the 1990s, they were saying renewable energy isn’t reliable enough, or they were saying that wind power…kills whales,” she said. “Is it really so different from climate denial if you don’t deny the science but you deny the possibility of solutions?”

Among ordinary people, Leiserowitz said the views of the relatively small group of people who deny that temperatures are warming, or tie climate science to conspiracy theories involving Al Gore or the United Nations, are often exaggerated both politically and throughout US society.

“This small minority of Americans are really vocal, they are more likely to vote and clearly they are more than adequately represented in the halls of Congress,” he said. “They are punching above their weight and having an undue influence on the public square, to the extent that most people don’t want to talk about climate change because they think half of the country doesn’t believe in it. There’s a culture of silence—climate has joined sex, religion and politics as the topics not to bring up at the Thanksgiving table.”

Political polarization and the prevalence of “safe” congressional seats, which encourage candidates to hew to more extreme views in order to secure key party primary contests, have helped entrench this imbalance, Leiserowitz said, along with a flood of donations from the fossil fuel industry.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Companies have spent decades obstructing efforts to take on the plastics crisis and may have breached a host of US laws, a new report argues.

The research from the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) details the widespread burdens that plastic pollution places on US cities and states and argues that plastic producers may be breaking public nuisance, product-liability, and consumer-protection laws.

It comes as cities such as Baltimore have begun to file claims against plastic manufacturers, but the authors write that existing cases “are likely only the beginning, as more states and municipalities grapple with the challenges of accumulating plastic waste and microplastics contamination.”

Taxpayers foot the bill to clean plastic pollution from streets and waterways, and research shows people could ingest the equivalent of one credit card’s worth of plastic per week.

“We’re in the midst of a population-scale human experiment on the impacts of multigenerational toxic exposures,” said Carroll Muffett, president of CIEL and a report co-author. “Plastics are at the epicenter of that.”

“We’re in the midst of a population-scale human experiment on the impacts of multigenerational toxic exposures. Plastics are at the epicenter of that.”

Drawing on newly revealed internal documents and previous investigations, the authors write that producers knew of these risks and produced and marketed plastics anyway.

Petrochemical producers such as ExxonMobil Chemical and Shell Polymers, and disposable plastic goods producers like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Unilever, should be held responsible, they say.

Global plastics production exploded shortly after the Second World War, when “an industry that had been producing plastics primarily for military purposes needed new markets,” said Muffett.

From 1950 to 2000, global plastic production soared from 2 million tons to 234 million tons annually. And over the next 20 years, production more than doubled to 460 million tons in 2019, the authors write, citing data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). But plastics producers knew in the 1950s that their products don’t break down and in 1969, documents show, industry interests discussed plastics accumulating in the environment but kept marketing them.

As the public grew concerned about plastic pollution, the industry responded with “sophisticated marketing campaigns” to shift blame from producers to consumers—for instance, by popularizing the term litterbug.

In the 1980s, the industry “misled the public” by lobbying states to adopt a plastic-packaging numbering system that resembled the “chasing arrows” recycling symbol and therefore appeared to indicate recyclability. (The Federal Trade Commission is currently re-evaluating the use of the symbols.)

Around that same time, some municipalities began attempting to curb plastic pollution.

Coordinated pushback

In 1989, Massachusetts considered banning all single-use packaging. The ballot initiative, proposed by the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, “had teeth to ensure compliance” including potential fines, jail time, and the possibility of civil-enforcement actions.

The ban was set to appear on the 1990 ballot, but the industry devised a “highly coordinated and sophisticated campaign” to kill it, the authors write based on internal documents.

“Despite being local in its scope, the Massachusetts ban represented a serious threat to plastics producers and a host of other industry interests,” the report says.

From 1950 to 2000, global plastic production soared from 2 million tons to 234 million tons annually. And over the next 20 years, production more than doubled to 460 million tons in 2019, the authors write.

Tobacco lawyers, whose industry had come under fire for littered plastic cigarette butts, lobbied the Massachusetts attorney general to shut down the measure. And, consumer goods producers like Procter & Gamble, petrochemical trade groups like the Chemical Manufacturers Association (which later became the American Chemistry Council), and tobacco lobby group the Tobacco Institute, created a task force to direct opposition.

The Council for Solid Waste Solutions (CSWS), an industry group funded by major petrochemical producers such as Exxon, Dow, DuPont, and Chevron, hired consultants to develop a plan for opposing legislative bans.

CSWS also facilitated the creation of a “front group”, which purported to represent local business interests. And it lobbied state lawmakers to water down the measure, promoting recycling instead of packaging bans.

Another strategy: pitting environmentalists and organized labor against one another. CSWS recruited members of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO to oppose the measure at hearings. Soon after, the labor organization passed a resolution opposing the ban. (The Tobacco Institute took credit for the success of the “labor resolution process,” writing in a document: “Labor and consumer groups are natural allies to environmental organizations; however, efforts are underway to diffuse such alliances on this issue.”)

CSWS also sued to invalidate the measure on a technicality, arguing that because the petition’s signatures and text did not appear on the same page, the signatories may not have reviewed the proposal. This was ultimately successful on appeal; within months, the ballot initiative was dead.

The industry also successfully fended off a similar ballot initiative in Oregon, the report says. And politicians in Oregon, California, and Wisconsin introduced a bill drafted by the right wing think tank American Legislative Exchange Council promoting recycling over packaging bans.

Plastic interests appear to be using similar tactics today. Using Facebook’s advertising database, the researchers found that the petrochemical trade group the American Chemistry Council had run $10m worth of seemingly local ads in US states in recent years encouraging people to contact local officials to oppose anti-plastic measures and support for so-called advanced recycling, which breaks plastic polymers down but is energy-intensive and creates pollution.

Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, part of the American Chemistry Council, called the research a “misdirected distraction” from the resources the industry is putting into preventing pollution and said it ignored “the environmental benefits of plastics,” citing a McKinsey study that environmentalists have contested.

Legal theories

The effects of this deception and plastic pollution are widespread, the report argues. Plastic has clogged sewer grates, leading to increased flooding, while also forcing municipalities to invest in expensive skimmers to remove materials from waterways. It has also exposed populations to microplastics, which studies show are pervasive and which researchers believe to be harmful.

The report outlines different legal theories that could help governments pursue accountability for these harms. Nuisance could account for the harms themselves, product liability could put companies on the hook for damage caused by poor design, and consumer-protection law could be used to combat deceitful marketing practices.

Existing lawsuits have made use of these theories. Baltimore sued six plastic companies this month and filed a similar suit against cigarette manufacturers for littered plastic cigarette filters. New York in 2023 also filed a case against PepsiCo. But the damages are more widespread than these suits indicate, the authors say.

Other attempts at accountability are underway. In California, a two-year-old investigation by the attorney general, Rob Bonta, into the plastics industry and its communication about recycling could potentially result in a case against oil interests.

A February report from the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) found that companies knew for decades that plastic recycling is not feasible, but promoted it anyway. Both reports add to a “growing body of evidence” showing the plastics crisis was “created and perpetuated by a decades-long campaign of deception,” said Alyssa Johl, CCI vice president.

Brian Frosh, former attorney general for Maryland, who reviewed both reports, said if currently an attorney general, he would be actively pursuing legal action.

“This is a crisis that’s been imposed on the public and one that needs redress,” he said.