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.
Some faculty and students fear that the Stanford Doerr School — which began last year with a $1.1-billion gift from the venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife Ann Doerr — is helping greenwash the corporations perpetuating the very climate crisis they’re trying to combat. The fossil-fuel industry has been promoting and investing in technologies that aim to capture carbon emissions from industrial plants or, more recently, suck carbon dioxide directly out of the air. But critics say that these nascent, expensive projects are distracting from the need to cut emissions in the first place.
Jef Caers, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the Stanford Doerr School, said that he was “concerned about the way these decisions are made, with the input of the oil and gas industry and seemingly without the input of several important parts of our school.” And 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.
The school is pursuing the focus — which it calls a “flagship destination” — amid calls from international scientific bodies to limit the Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as well as growing scrutiny of the ivory tower’s financial ties to fossil-fuel companies.
Such ties are commonplace: A report from the think tank Data for Progress and the nonprofit Fossil Free Research estimates that a half-dozen fossil-fuel companies donated or pledged at least $677 million to 27 universities between 2010 and 2020, with at least $56 million going to Stanford. (A university spokesperson has questioned how the amount was calculated.) Stanford also invests in fossil-fuel companies. In contrast, Harvard, Princeton University, the University of California system, and others have divested or plan to divest. And under pressure from activists, Princeton and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam have recently adopted restrictions on industry funding, including for research.
When the Stanford Doerr School was created with the largest gift in the university’s history, the dean, Arun Majumdar, told The New York Times that it would accept industry money. The new school inherited pre-existing “affiliate programs” in which companies like ExxonMobil, BP, and Chevron sponsor research groups. (Stanford says that scientists retain full control over their research.) In response, more than 800 people affiliated with the university have signed a letter calling for a funding ban, and some alumni say they won’t donate to their alma mater until it happens.
Meanwhile, carbon-capture startups have attracted a flurry of investment, including from Bill Gates. It’s not clear how much oil and gas giants have spent in comparison, but the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Biden last year, offers big tax credits for capturing and storing carbon. And in March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the final section of its review of climate science, which mentioned carbon capture as a potential tool for limiting global warming — a last-minute addition that the Saudi Arabian delegation lobbied for, according to The Guardian.
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.”
It’s just showing how disconnected the leadership is here in understanding what are the priorities in solving the climate problem.
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.”
This spring at Stanford, according to internal emails sent to a faculty member, Majumdar decided the Stanford Doerr School would first focus on greenhouse-gas removal based on input from three sources. They included two workshops about a variety of carbon removal and management methods, held in 2020 and 2021, before the Stanford Doerr School was formed. One focused on natural solutions like planting trees, and the other on engineered ones, like systems to suck greenhouse gases out of the air and store them deep underground.
In its April 13 news release, the school acknowledged that “two recent workshops” factored into the decision, but did not specify when they occurred or whom they involved. Agendas show that organizers, advisers, and attendees of the two virtual conferences collectively included employees from TotalEnergies, Shell, and ExxonMobil, as well as Bank of America, which has been criticized for being one of the biggest financiers of fossil-fuel companies.
If the process seems tainted by corporate interests, then it’s really hard to trust the outcome, even if the outcome really is the best possible outcome.
Through Stanford’s Strategic Energy Alliance, an academic-industry partnership, those four companies have sponsored carbon dioxide removal and storage research by Chris Field, one of the faculty members who helped organize both workshops. He is also a director of Stanford’s Carbon Removal Initiative, a newly formed research group, which co-hosted the events. Field said by email that the two efforts have separate funding, and that his sponsors have no influence over his research. He added that there was value to Stanford working with those types of companies.
“It is important that the thinking in the school not be narrowed or directed by relationships with or funding from the oil and gas industry,” Field wrote. He added: “But it is also important to recognize that solving the climate crisis looks like it will be faster, cheaper, safer, and more equitable if we can take advantage of some of the technologies (like carbon capture and storage) where the oil and gas companies have great expertise. Adhering to both principles simultaneously is a balancing act. We may not have the balance exactly right at the moment, but my colleagues and I on the faculty are committed to continuous improvement.”
Another employee of the Carbon Removal Initiative is Sarah Saltzer, who previously spent 25 years at Chevron and also helped organize both workshops. (Saltzer did not return a request for comment.) Other attendees of the workshops included scientists from within and outside of Stanford, and employees of think tanks, investors, and nonprofits, such as the World Wildlife Fund.
The third source of input was the faculty advisory council to the school’s Sustainability Accelerator. The program describes itself as pairing Stanford experts with outside entities to “co-develop potentially scalable sustainability technology and policy solutions.” Half of its 12-member advisory committee, which includes Field, are professors of physical sciences or engineering, and 10 are men. Four of the school’s departments are not represented: earth and planetary sciences, geophysics, oceans, and civil and environmental engineering. (A total of seven core departments and divisions are listed on the school’s website.)
According to the news release announcing the climate-research focus, faculty and “external experts” will now outline the current state of greenhouse gas-removal methods. A workshop will identify barriers to achieving them, and the school says it will encourage and possibly fund projects that address those gaps.
The announcement stunned Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering who has criticized the spotlight on carbon-capture technologies and published research indicating that they increase air pollution more than reduce it. “It’s just showing how disconnected the leadership is here in understanding what are the priorities in solving the climate problem,” he said, “and it’s completely disconnected from students’ concerns about solving these problems and being disassociated with fossil-fuel companies.” (He added that he was not referring to natural carbon-reduction methods, like reforestation.)
“If the process seems tainted by corporate interests, then it’s really hard to trust the outcome, even if the outcome really is the best possible outcome,” said Erin Mordecai, an associate professor of biology who is affiliated with the Stanford Doerr School.
Stephen Monismith, a professor in the school’s oceans and civil and environmental engineering departments, said that he wanted to hear the school’s leaders explain how the decision was made and what the goal is. “I would like some clarification about, to what extent are we thinking about being able to continue emitting versus trying to draw it down?” he said.
But “I wouldn’t want to dismiss the folks from that workshop advisory group because of their oil-company background,” he added. “It could just really mean they’re knowledgeable.”
Oreskes, the Harvard historian, turned down an offer to speak at the Stanford Doerr School’s opening ceremony, citing concerns that Big Oil money would warp the university’s research priorities. She said that the flagship destination’s backstory confirmed these fears, as skeptical voices were missing from the workshops.
“It’s clearly designed to move full steam ahead, with the blessing (and money!) of the fossil fuel industry,” she wrote by email. She also criticized the makeup of the Sustainability Accelerator’s advisory council: “It appears to reflect the usual technocratic approach: let’s make this work, and worry about the social, ethical, moral, or legal consequences later.”
Chevalier Gray, a spokesperson for ExxonMobil, said that “we are making progress reducing our own emissions and helping others do the same.” The company has agreements to transport and store about 4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually for third-party customers, Gray said. Bank of America declined to comment, and TotalEnergies and Shell did not return requests for comment. When asked for comment, Majumdar, the dean of the Stanford Doerr School, did not specifically address critics’ concerns about how the flagship destination was chosen.
“As we work to reduce emissions, which is critical and is an ongoing area of research for many within the school, most data suggests reducing emissions alone is not enough to stay below 2 degrees Celsius,” he said in a statement. He said that the workshops showed there is a need to scale up carbon-capture and -removal strategies, and that “we feel ready to tackle this challenge, engaging diverse experts both within and outside Stanford.” He also said that this is the first of several flagship destinations that the school plans to solicit ideas for and pursue.
In response to concerns about funding from the fossil-fuel industry, Majumdar spoke to more than 160 students in the summer and fall. In an interview with Stanford’s media-relations office, he said that he heard from those worried about the industry’s potential influence on research. But other students, he added, “felt it was important to develop clean-energy technologies to address the climate challenge, work with the fossil-fuel companies to scale these technologies, and help them transition,” and they “felt they were under attack because of their sources of funding.”
In December, after Majumdar’s listening tour, Stanford’s president announced the formation of a committee to review the university’s policies for accepting industry funding. Majumdar said in a statement that the school is continuing to discuss the subject with students and faculty.
That pace isn’t fast enough for at least one researcher. Caers was a professor of energy resources engineering, formerly known as petroleum engineering, until 2015, and for 25 years, he worked with 37 oil and gas companies. Starting this year, he has pledged to stop accepting new fossil-fuel funding. He has also founded a new Stanford research group, Mineral-X, which is dedicated to finding cobalt, lithium, and other materials used in batteries key to the electric-energy transition through “efficient exploration and responsible mining.”
The midcareer pivot grew out of years of personal struggles and a desire to not be “the enabler” for the world’s addiction to oil and gas. Caers said Stanford should follow suit. “What is more important is that we focus on not collaborating with the oil industry in any of these initiatives,” he said, “whether it is the renewable-energy transition or carbon removal.”
