Big Oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus
Stanford's year-old sustainability school is studying the controversial topic of carbon removal, a decision that's raising eyebrows.
Precisely a year ago today, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife announced that they were giving $1.1 billion to Stanford University, the largest gift in its history, to kick-start a new school dedicated to “solving our climate crisis.” And it was also this time last year that the new school’s inaugural dean said that the school would accept funding from the fossil fuel industry.
Ever since then, a number of faculty and students at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability have been concerned that their prestigious institution is greenwashing the corporations responsible for the very climate crisis they’re trying to combat.
Today, I reported on a development that’s giving skeptics even more cause for concern:
Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability recently unveiled its first institutionwide research focus: greenhouse-gas removal. Taking tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere will be “essential” to limiting global warming, as a news release last month explained, and ideas will be marshaled from across the school to get it done.
What the announcement didn’t mention was that the choice of topic had been shaped by meetings organized and attended by representatives of some of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies — Shell, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies — as well as Bank of America, a top financier of the industry, according to emails obtained by The Chronicle. The decision also relied on input from a group of faculty with backgrounds that don’t represent all of the school’s departments.
… Yannai Kashtan, a Ph.D. candidate in earth system science, said he was disappointed that people with “obvious conflicts of interest” were given seats at the table.
“It is hard to convey how demoralizing it is to know that my university and my school are actively collaborating with, taking money from, and burnishing the image of the very same companies that pay to undermine my and my colleagues’ work,” said Kashtan, an organizer with the Coalition for a True School of Sustainability, which is calling for Stanford to reject all fossil-fuel funding.
Why is this area of research so controversial? Carbon removal/capture/storage efforts have been attracting a lot of buzz and investment lately, including from oil and gas companies. They are mentioned as a potential tool in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released this spring. But these projects are nascent and expensive, and critics worry that they are distracting from the need to cut emissions in the first place.
Carbon-removal strategies could eventually be part of a long-term climate-change strategy, said Holly Buck, an assistant professor in the University of Buffalo’s Department of Environment and Sustainability. “From the standpoint of a research institution like Stanford, for example, it does make some sense that they would want to invest a bit in the basic science, because the basic science of a lot of these approaches is uncertain,” she said. “And if we want to be able to use these technologies at midcentury, we need this kind of scientific basis to be developed now.”
But she and other experts say that these systems would require enormous amounts of money, energy, and land to make a dent in the billions of tons of carbon dioxide emitted annually, and so they should not be considered a substitute for phasing out fossil fuels. While small-scale experiments in carbon capture and storage have been demonstrated to work, major commercial projects have underperformed or been felled by economic and technical obstacles in the past.
Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian of science who has studied how the fossil-fuel industry sows climate-change denial, is among those who think that capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air is too often talked about as a present-day solution. It “will likely one day be a useful supplement to carbon reduction,” she said by email. “Right now it is mostly a distraction and potentially a very damaging one, if it makes people think we don’t need a rapid transition away from fossil fuel energy.”
For more about the meetings that were held, and what people at Stanford think about all of this, you can read the full story at The Chronicle of Higher Education.