WA Parish Generating Station, a natural gas and coal power plant, in Fort Bend County near Houston, Texas. Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto/ZUMA

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........

© Mother Jones