Stanford Politics

On May 28, 2020, the Stanford Faculty Senate convened to vote on a resolution supporting Stanford’s divestment from fossil fuel companies. The resolution was written by the Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) and Fossil Free Stanford, a student group that has been advocating for divestment from fossil fuels since 2012. Hundreds of attendees logged on to the virtual meeting, many of them students displaying the orange Fossil Free banner as their Zoom backgrounds to show support for divestment.

The orange backgrounds weren’t the only signs of support. Leading up to the Faculty Senate vote, the divestment resolution had been passed by both the ASSU Undergraduate Student Senate and Graduate Student Council and a petition calling for divestment had gathered thousands of signatures from individual students, staff, and faculty. Now it was time to see if the faculty governing body would heed the community’s call.

As the meeting progressed, it became apparent that a majority of the Faculty Senate members was reluctant to support divestment, though they reassured attendees that they were dedicated to promoting sustainability and fighting climate change. Several faculty — many of whom research energy and environmental issues — argued against divestment from fossil fuels, fearing that significant research funding that Stanford receives from fossil fuel corporations might be withdrawn if Stanford were to divest.

“Stanford partnerships with the petroleum industry over the last several decades have contributed toward research and tangible benefits to the health of the planet, as well as to the education of over a thousand students … and postdocs in our science and engineering departments. My concern is that a vote in favor of the resolution today may serve to undermine those partnerships, so successfully cultivated over the years,” said Professor Stephan Graham, who is Dean of Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth) and who has also worked as a geologist for Exxon and Chevron prior to working at Stanford.

In the end, the Faculty Senate rejected the resolution by a 29 to 11 vote, with 6 members abstaining. Students, alumni, and faculty were quick to express disappointment, not only that the resolution failed, but also that blatant conflicts of interest were involved in the decision.

“The fossil fuel industry…has consistently demonstrated its valuing of profit over human life, more specifically Black and Brown lives,” wrote Fossil Free Stanford members Zoe Brownwood, Miriam Wallstrom, Logan Leak, and Keagan Cross in an op-ed. “If any of these faculty truly understood that we must rapidly transition away from fossil fuels, they would understand that these corporations will never willingly nor quickly transition their business models away from fossil fuels.”

David Palumbo-Liu, Professor of Comparative Literature and one of the Faculty Senate members who supported divestment, also criticized the view that Stanford should not divest for fear of losing industry sponsors. In an op-ed, he wrote, “In making this argument they  [Faculty Senate members] proved that they knew these funders were not committed to unbiased and objective research — they knew this because they feared that these companies might retaliate against them for even being at an institution that had divested.”

Stanford staff member David Tattoni also commented in an op-ed, “It is unethical for faculty who have any of these conflicts of interests to have voted on this decision”.

These conflicts of interest raise several ethical concerns regarding Stanford’s research partnerships with fossil fuel corporations on energy and environmental research — for a school committed to intellectual freedom, such partnerships appear to threaten the independence that Stanford claims to uphold.

Industrial Affiliate Program

One of the most visible ways in which Stanford Earth receives money from fossil fuel companies is through Industrial Affiliate Programs. According to the Office of the Vice Provost of Research, “Industrial Affiliate Programs offer companies an opportunity to engage with University faculty, researchers, students and industry peers in an open environment to discuss pre-competitive research and teaching activities in a field of mutual interest.”

In order to take part in the affiliate program, a company pays annual dues to support the program’s general research areas. Depending on the amount the company pays into the program, benefits can include participation in the program governance board, student recruitment opportunities, personalized exposure to ongoing Stanford research, and the opportunity for the company’s staff to do a research fellowship at Stanford.

The majority of these programs’ founding or sustaining members are fossil fuel companies which rank among the top 20 companies that have contributed to a third of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965. Marked with Stanford’s stamp of approval, these partnerships send a clear message that fossil fuel companies are key players in the fight against climate change, even without sufficient work acknowledging their role as leading causes of climate change.

For example, Stanford’s Natural Gas Institute (NGI) is funded by Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Conoco Phillips, and the American Petroleum Institute. Its research includes promoting natural gas for energy access in developing nations and optimizing development of oil and gas reservoirs. NGI’s description states that the “natural gas revolution has led to beneficial outcomes like falling U.S. carbon dioxide emissions as result of coal to gas fuel switching in electrical generation, opportunities for lower-cost energy, rejuvenated manufacturing, and environmental benefits worldwide but has also raised concerns about global energy, the world economy, and the environment.” This description paints a largely positive picture of the natural gas revolution. It includes a thorough list of environmental benefits while simply referring to the negative impacts as unspecified “concerns.” Nowhere does it acknowledge that natural gas is a fossil fuel that must be phased out rapidly. This kind of rhetoric coming out of Stanford University validates natural gas and gives the fossil fuel industry its “social license to operate.”

This isn’t an accident. Dr. Benjamin Franta and Dr. Geoffrey Supran, a Stanford JD-PhD student and a Post-doctoral Associate at Harvard respectively, explained that “fossil fuel interests … have colonized nearly every nook and cranny of energy and climate policy research in American universities, and much of energy science too.” Oil and gas companies use their partnerships with prominent universities as marketing tactic, positioning themselves as standing on the frontlines of climate action and innovation, when in reality, they’ve collectively spent a billion dollars to control or delay climate policy.  

What is also concerning, though harder to trace, is the potential impact that fossil fuel companies’ agenda has on research at Stanford. The highest-paying member corporations are represented on program governance boards and can customize research based on company interests, giving fossil fuel companies ample opportunities to influence or even steer the research’s direction. Stanford’s Openness in Research policy prohibits any agreements that give outside entities control over what research is publishable, but more subtle forms of influence that emerge from Industrial Affiliate Programs are harder to regulate.

In a presentation on the influence of industry money in research, Dr. Franta described multiple benefits that companies gain by funding academic research. These include creating a favorable view of the industry among academics and selectively influencing the landscape of research. “They will fund safe research, research that does not threaten the industry, and they will avoid funding … research that could be threatening to the industry,” he said.

Faculty affiliated with the Industrial Affiliate Programs, however, maintain that their research remains independent. Professor Mark Zoback, Director of the Natural Gas Initiative and Professor of Geophysics and reservoir geomechanics researcher, believes that “[i]t’s naïve to say that when you take money from a company, you’re automatically biased.” He said, “I’ve been at Stanford for 36 years. I’ve never once had a company suggest how I should message my research or direct it to the benefit of making the company look better in the eyes of the public.”

Additionally, he stressed that much of the money coming from fossil fuel companies is used for decarbonization research. As an example, he said that NGI is partnering with the natural gas industry because of natural gas’s importance in the transition to a low-carbon system, given the intermittency of wind and solar power and the fact that many developing nations still rely on coal power which is more polluting than natural gas.

When asked what he thought of the dichotomy between fossil fuel companies publicly expressing their commitment to decarbonization while privately continuing to lobby against climate regulations, Professor Zoback said, “I think the big companies, the companies we principally work with, are past the dichotomy. I think they’re on board. If you actually look at the policies now being discussed by Shell and Exxon and BP … they’re talking about decarbonization goals, and they’re very aggressive goals.”

While Shell, Exxon, BP and the other large oil and gas companies have indeed made public statements in support of climate goals and the Paris Accords, there’s evidence that they continue to less publicly work to obstruct environmental laws. All these companies pay millions in dues to trade associations such as the American Petroleum Institute (itself Corporate Sponsor of the Natural Gas Initiative) which is notorious for perpetuating climate denial and fighting laws that would address climate change. Additionally, a report by Oil Change International found that each of the company’s climate commitments is actually woefully inadequate to keeping global warming under 1.5 degrees C.

Event Partnership

The Stanford Global Carbon Management Workshop, organized by the Strategic Energy Alliance and held from September 1 to 3, 2020, featured speakers from oil and gas majors Shell, ExxonMobil, and Total. The workshop aimed to explore “exciting opportunities at Stanford University for global carbon management research,” but its main focus was on natural climate solutions as a way to manage global carbon. Natural climate solutions focus on conserving and managing land such that the biosphere sequesters carbon through building a healthy ecosystem. The Workshop Organizing Committee included Ajay Mehta, General Manager of New Energies Research & Technology at Shell, and Shaffiq Jaffer, Vice President of Corporate Science and Technology Projects at Total.

The workshop follows a pattern of fossil fuel industry-sponsored events featuring solutions that do not threaten fossil fuel profitability. In fifteen presentations and panel discussions held over the three-day workshop, not one focused on decreasing society’s dependence on emitting carbon into the atmosphere.

Another example of an event held at the School of Earth that reinforced common fossil fuel industry talking points was “Atmospheric Carbon Removal at the Gigaton Scale,” held on September 30, 2020 as part of the Global Energy Dialogue series. It again featured Ajay Meta as one of three panelists, alongside Stanford Professors Sally Benson and Chris Field.

The importance of CCS in solving climate change is controversial. Stanford Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Mark Jacobson published a study suggesting that CCS causes more air pollution and has a higher social cost than focusing on renewable energy. “There is a lot of reliance on carbon capture … that diverts resources away from real solutions,” he said. However, the Global Energy Dialogue framed carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology as a critical climate solution.

When asked why Shell is interested in carbon capture technology, Dr. Ajay Mehta replied that fossil fuels are “not going to be going away anytime soon because we’re going to have to continue to have to provide the energy that the world needs.” He added that Shell needs to “ensure that [it]is operating at top quartiles so that we continue to have the cash to even be able to think about how the energy system of the future is going to evolve and what role we could play in that.”

Stating that the world needs fossil fuels to operate and positioning fossil fuel companies as the pre-requisite solution to climate change are both common industry talking points. Now, they are being repeated at Stanford-sponsored, fossil fuel industry co-sponsored events.

Divesting from Fossil Fuels: A Tale of Two Resolutions

A final incident that offers a window into Stanford’s relationship with the fossil fuel industry is the disparate reactions that faculty had to two different resolutions related to divesting from fossil fuels.

As mentioned earlier, the ASSU and Fossil Free Stanford introduced a resolution at the May 28 Faculty Senate meeting calling on the Stanford Board of Trustees to freeze “all new investment in the top 100 oil and gas companies” and “fully divest … from publicly traded oil and gas companies within 90 days.” This resolution was rejected with 63 percent of Faculty Senate members voting against it.

However, on November 5, 2020, the Faculty Senate voted to pass a different resolution that calls for Stanford to accelerate its fossil fuel divestment. This Sustainability Resolution, drafted by Professor Jeffrey Koseff and Professor Noah Diffenbaugh, urges the University to transition its endowment to net-zero emissions no later than 2040. The resolution passed with 89 percent of members voting “yes,” 7 percent voting “no,” and 4 percent abstaining.

This overwhelming approval stood in stark contrast to the Faculty Senate’s response to the ASSU Divestment Resolution. One reason could be that achieving net-zero emissions in the endowment by 2040 is a less stringent goal than the ASSU resolution’s divestment demands. However, there may be more to it, given that none of the faculty who expressed opposition to the ASSU Divestment Resolution raised any concerns about the divestment timeline or the nuances of net-zero emissions versus full divestment. Rather, comments given at the May 28 meeting expressed fears that condemning fossil fuel companies could seem hypocritical and fears of losing funding from fossil fuel companies.

Professor Koseff, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said in an interview that the Faculty Senate largely approved of the resolution because they all understand the threat of climate change. He also said he suspects that much of the objection to the ASSU Divestment Resolution was more of an objection to the language than of disagreement with the resolution’s intent. “People felt it was finger-pointing,” he said.

The ASSU resolution certainly does use much stronger language indicting the actions of fossil fuel companies. It makes the case for divesting from fossil fuel companies because of their “abhorrent and ethically unjustifiable” behavior. It asserts that fossil fuel extraction continues to have “profound, violent, and unjust consequences for current and future generations around the world,” and the resolution draws attention to the fact that fossil fuel companies were “aware of the long-term consequences of carbon emissions for nearly 70 years” while actively denying climate change.

Some faculty felt that this language would make Stanford seem hypocritical given that the university still relies on fossil fuels. Professor Bruce Cain, Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, said during the May 28 meeting, “If we’re saying to them that this is an evil industry, but yet using that industry, I think that just feeds the sort of sense of hypocrisy.”

Ultimately, the Faculty Senate voted against the ASSU Divestment Resolution in favor of a resolution with less condemning language.   

Saying “No” to Fossil Fuel Money

Despite evidence that the fossil fuel industry engineers greenwashing campaigns while obstructing important climate policies, Stanford maintains close research partnerships with the industry. These partnerships reflect the belief that climate change can be effectively addressed by corporations whose business depends on the continued use of fossil fuels.

Unfortunately, Stanford’s research partnerships with oil and gas companies have already proven to cause a conflict of interest. The decision to vote against the divestment resolution was directly tied to the fact that the fossil fuel industry pours large amounts of money into Stanford Earth’s research programs. In addition to influencing the divestment decision, these research partnerships have enabled the perpetuation of the fossil fuel industry’s favored talking points through university-sponsored events.

As it happens, Stanford has a fresh opportunity to say no to oil and gas money. It is currently in the process of forming a new School of Sustainability, a hub for climate and sustainability related research across the University.

There are mixed views on whether Stanford should prohibit research funding from certain industries. Professor Koseff said that this hinders faculty’s academic freedom to create research partnerships of their choice and that banning funding from any one industry could put Stanford on a slippery slope.

Fossil Free Stanford has a different view, believing that accepting money from the fossil fuel industry for environmental research poses an inherent conflict of interest. The student group has begun a new campaign to set standards to prevent conflicts of interest in the School of Sustainability. The group is in the process of writing an open letter presenting its requests to Dean of Stanford Earth Stephan Graham and Vice Provost and Dean of Research Kathryn Moler.

“By taking easy money from a morally corrupt industry, Stanford has opted for short term gains instead of prioritizing long term academic integrity and public benefit,” said Chris Rilling, Fossil Free Stanford member. “Money talks, and whether we continue to unquestioningly take money from the fossil fuel industry to build the School of Sustainability will demonstrate our true priorities as a self-proclaimed pioneering institution in the push for sustainability.”