Last time, we learned about the nearly century-old bond between the oil and gas industry and one university — LSU. In the second and final episode of our series, "Fueling Knowledge," we look at how much money is flowing into universities and what the industry may hope to get in return. This relationship comes with big benefits: student mentors, scholarships, research funding, and new buildings, among others. But is all that money truly free? No strings? Or could it be part of a corporate playbook to help keep the industry alive?
Haven't listened to Part One? Listen here, and find the article here.
This series was reported in partnership with the Louisiana Illuminator and Floodlight.
To read more about this investigation and what this financial relationship between fossil fuels and universities could mean, check out this article.
And, to read more about how this money could be shaping climate policy, check out this article.
This episode is hosted by Floodlight's Pam Radke and Halle Parker. This episode was reported by Halle Parker, Pam Radtke, and Piper Hutchinson of the Louisiana Illuminator. It was edited by Johanna Zorn and Carlyle Calhoun, with additional help from Ryan Vasquez, Rosemary Westwood, Greg Larose, and Dee Hall. The episode was fact-checked by Garrett Hazelwood. Our theme music is by Jon Batiste and our sound designer is Emily Jankowski. Carlyle Calhoun is our managing producer.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
________________________________________________________________________________
TRANSCRIPT
TOBACCO AD: Lucky strike is first again, first again with tobacco men. Promenade straight down the pike. It's time right now for a lucky strike.
HALLE: That cheery ad for Lucky Strike cigarettes? It was on TV about 70 years ago, just about the same time all of the hazards of cigarettes began to enter the mainstream. Scientists began linking smoking to cancer, and alerting the public.
ARCHIVAL: Smoke now, pay later.
HALLE: The tobacco industry panicked. What would happen if everyone quit smoking? Tobacco CEOS needed to reassure the public, to build up their credibility. So who did they turn to?
ARCHIVAL: My name is Dr. Kenneth Moser. My name is Norman Heimstrup. I'm Dr. Suzanne Menoble of Indianapolis, Indiana.
HALLE: They recruited academics. That was tape from a 1978 congressional hearing. Where professors from respected universities like Harvard Medical School and the University of Pittsburgh testified in support of the industry. Sewing doubt in the cancer studies. Were cigarettes actually bad? Not according to these scientists.
ARCHIVAL: What we need is good scientific data before I'm going to accept and submit to the proposition that smoking is a hazard.
HALLE: The tobacco industry weaponized science with new studies as part of a coordinated PR campaign. And that research delayed public accountability and laws that limited their sales. For decades. It’s well-documented. And in the years since, a growing chorus of researchers say the fossil fuel industry is following the same corporate playbook. Cozy up to academia. Then, disinform and delay.
<<theme music>>
HALLE: I’m Halle Parker, and you’re listening to Sea Change. This is part two of our investigation into the huge amounts of fossil fuel money flowing into universities around the world. To understand this growing partnership, we’ve zoomed in on one school: Louisiana State University, or LSU. Last time, we learned how LSU’s bond with the oil and gas industry dates back nearly a century, helping to turn the school into the state powerhouse that it is today.
The money hasn’t stopped flowing. In this episode, we’re going to untangle how universities are at risk of becoming victims to a familiar corporate playbook. Whether they know it or not.
And I have a new co-host. Pam Radtke reports for the nonprofit news outlet Floodlight. We’ve been working together on this story for more than a year. And to understand how much money is going to LSU and what the industry hopes to get in return, we had to dig into the numbers first. That was Pam’s job. Hey Pam!
PAM: Hey Halle. Yeah, I spent weeks digging into hundreds of pages of tax documents.
HALLE: You were busy adding up all the donations from oil and gas to LSU.
PAM: Right, I went down this rabbit hole after receiving a report from a progressive ThinkTank – called Data for Progress – The report uncovered the oil and gas money going to universities around the country.
HALLE: We’re talking huge amounts of money to places like Harvard, MIT and Stanford and big state schools like UT-Austin and Georgia Tech. Hundreds of millions of dollars.
PAM: But we thought it was weird that the report didn’t include LSU–the flagship school in a state that is the most dependent on the fossil fuel industry. So we crunched our own numbers and found that LSU received even more than MIT, in fact, more than most of the schools in the report. I kept digging, and found that over the last 13 years, LSU has received at least $75 million dollars from fossil fuel interests.
HALLE: And we were surprised to learn that most of that money came in very recently. Just in the last few years. Up next, we’re going to tell you how. Stay with us.
ARCHIVAL: Hi, my name is William Tate, and as you might know, I'm the incoming president of LSU.
HALLE: It’s 2021, and LSU just got a new president. William Tate. A few things about Tate: He’s actually the university’s first Black president. And he’s a pretty competitive guy. He compares himself to a point guard in basketball.
ARCHIVAL TATE: I'm not going to give up. If I can't make it happen, I'm going to pass it to the person who can make the shot. And if the person's on the floor who can't make the shot, I'm going to knock it down.
PAM: As president, Tate’s shooting for the moon. He wants LSU to be no. 1. The go-to research university. But dreams this big, require big money. So Tate got to work.
BR PRESS CLUB PREZ: Please welcome President Tate. <<applause>>
HALLE: About a year into the job, Tate’s vision had started to come together. He announced his bold plan in a Baton Rouge seafood restaurant, surrounded by reporters. Standing at the podium, Tate is tall and slender, wearing a sharp suit and a purple tie -- one of the school colors.
TATE: We are now in this generation's Sputnik moment.
HALLE: He listed LSU’s top research priorities to help boost the school’s reputation. One of them caught our attention: he wants LSU to help lead the world when it comes to the future of energy.
TATE: Energy is our leading industry in this state. We must protect it.
PAM: If Louisiana’s future is tied to oil and gas, Tate says LSU’s is too.
TATE: It's time for a partnership in significant fashion to link the work at LSU in our, in our energy areas, including alternative energy, and creating ways to keep that industry vibrant here in this state and for our country.
PAM: Tate is pushing for partnerships. He wants to work with the industry to keep it alive and healthy.
TATE: Thank you. (applause)
PAM: Just a few months later, Tate had another major announcement. LSU had received its largest gift ever from a single corporate sponsor: $27.5 million dollars from Shell – most of it was for energy research. . . With a gift of this size, Tate’s dream was on its way to becoming reality.
HALLE: That money was used to create a new research center on campus: The Institute for Energy Innovation. It’s taking on Tate’s bold mission: to figure out the future of energy.
I sat down with the man in charge of making this happen.
BRAD: I'm Brad Ives, and I'm the executive director of the LSU Institute for Energy Innovation.
HALLE: Ives and I met in his office. He’s affable, sporting glasses. friendly face. In his career, he’s worked with traditional oil and gas companies but he’s also spearheaded wind farm policy. He believes that for this transition to succeed, you have to work with everyone.
Before coming to LSU, he helped make other universities sustainable, carbon neutral even. That was in North Carolina, and he says he’s especially excited to work here in Louisiana.
BRAD: Louisiana occupies this really interesting moment and place and time and geography and geology that we're going to be the center of a lot of new developments in energy. And what we've got to do is find ways for everybody to work together to do it the right way.
PAM: Ives hopes the institute produces research that helps answer practical questions facing Louisiana’s oil and gas industry. Like, how to help them lower their carbon emissions.
BRAD: What led me to take this job was the opportunity to work with the leading oil and gas companies in the world.
HALLE: He tells us he takes comfort in the fact that LSU hired him for this job because he’s committed to the energy transition. He says he wouldn’t have taken the job if the setup was just a farce.
BRAD: I did my diligence to make sure that the funding sources. behind here and the partners we had were interested in moving toward a low carbon future. Uh, and that's that's really the bottom line at the end of the day.
HALLE: Ives says: this money flowing in is a win because it’ll fund innovative, maybe even ground-breaking research. Research he says could help save our planet, create jobs and lead to healthier communities. But is this what industry is after?
PAM: Last year, the nonprofit news outlet, The Lens, dug into that question. Their investigation revealed that LSU and its foundation created an incentives system with the new Institute Ives leads. If a fossil fuel company gives a certain amount of money to the institute, LSU gives them something concrete in return. For example, a seat on the advisory board. After donating millions, Shell got three of the seven seats on that board. On top of that, there are industry lobbying groups on the board, too. So by the numbers, the board is stacked.
HALLE: This imbalance has an impact. This advisory board has the power to help decide what the institute researches by approving the team’s research agenda. And other companies can buy a seat on the board if they donate enough.
PAM: Here’s an example of why that matters: the industry is pushing a technology that allows them to keep burning oil and gas. It’s called carbon capture and sequestration. And it’s being pitched as Louisiana’s next great industry. In a nutshell, this is how it works: As fossil fuels are burned, the process separates the carbon and then it's stored deep underground.
HALLE: But it’s expensive, and it’s never been used at this scale before, so it’s also untested. There’s a ton of pushback. Environmentalists worry about dangerous levels of carbon leaking out of the ground. They also say, carbon capture is just a way to keep oil and gas alive, and industry CEOS say that’s true. But Ives says LSU isn’t a part of the debate over whether carbon capture is good or not.
IVES: Whether carbon capture should be done is, you know, that's a policy decision that largely has been made. // So what we're doing is looking at, you know, how do you do it safely?
HALLE: The Institute has funded several carbon capture research proposals. But even with a board stacked with industry, Ives isn’t worried about interference from Shell or another big donor. He says that’s because the Institute has built a firewall between funders and researchers. Safeguards like independent reviews and a rule saying industry can’t talk directly with professors.
BRAD: what we're doing is making sure that the researchers have total academic freedom to let the research take them where it goes.
HALLE: And when we reached out to Shell, the company told us it’s proud to partner with LSU to contribute to peer-reviewed climate science and help identify multiple pathways that can lead to more energy with fewer emissions. And Ives says he’s confident in the system he and LSU have created. That the school’s integrity and credibility are protected.
BRAD: We know we can sleep at night because we are not doing anything that's wrong.
PAM:. Next up, we talk to a researcher who used to feel the same way. But then he says he had a wake-up call. That’s coming up.
HALLE: Geoffrey Supran grew up in the UK. When he was only 16 years old, he started researching renewable energy. To hear him tell the story, his heart has always belonged to science… and its power to create change. He put his head down, ready to dedicate his life to the lab. A physicist through and through. He didn’t really think twice back then that his PHD was being paid for by an oil company.
SUPRAN: the only perspective I had on this oil company was that it paid for my PhD and It threw fancy banquets for us and gave us, you know, fancy logoed stationery.
PAM: Supran was halfway into his studies at MIT– dreaming up new technologies to combat climate change. But then, one day in the lab, he had an epiphany – the fossil fuel industry itself was the biggest obstacle to solving this crisis. Supran took off his lab coat, and decided to study something different: the fossil fuel industry’s history of disinformation and propaganda. Now when he looks back, he says that for all his scientific smarts, he was naive.
SUPRAN: It took me a long time to realize that the photo ops // the public statements about their sponsorship deals with MIT were part and parcel of a public affairs scheme that massively outsized me or my individual project.
HALLE: He says he was subtly, unwittingly being used by the oil company. And it’s not just him. Huge donations by oil and gas companies pay for labs like his and far more at universities around the world. Actual professors. Scholarships. New buildings. Influential research.. And Supran, no longer that naive PhD student, is worried.
SUPRAN: all the research that we've done to date indicates., a deep and widespread infiltration of fossil fuel interests into universities.
PAM: Last fall, Supran and other researchers released a comprehensive study detailing how the fossil fuel industry is embedded in universities around the world. It was the first of its kind. They found that no one’s been paying attention to this relationship. And it’s dangerous. He says it mirrors another time in history when industry manipulated universities to buy public opinion.
SUPRAN: it's a situation exactly parallel to public health research being funded by the tobacco industry. It's a conflict of interest. The size of an oil tanker.
PAM: Supran says the fossil fuel industry is working from a well-worn playbook. He’s going to help us understand how these tactics are being used today.
SUPRAN: Universities are at risk of being pawns in a climate propaganda scheme devised and implemented by fossil fuel interests for decades.
HALLE: Supran says it’s not always as simple as a researcher purposefully skewing results or being bought. But scientists are only human, making these relationships inherently fraught.
SUPRAN: We're all subject to biases. Things like reciprocation, you know, that if I give you a pen. You have some small subconscious desire to reciprocate it in some sense down the line.
PAM: We reached out to the American Petroleum Institute, which represents oil and gas companies through lobbying and advocacy efforts. They sent us a statement saying the industry is proud to partner with leading universities to prepare the next generation of engineers, scientists and problem solvers to tackle the world’s greatest energy challenges.”
HALLE: Supran worries that the closer the ties between industry and a university, the greater the opportunity for industry to push its own ideas forward. What university scientists say carries weight — Just like when they told us that cigarettes might not cause cancer.
SUPRAN: the influence that the oil industry has - gently putting its thumb on the scales of knowledge production in our society and gently steering a focus in one direction and away from another direction - can have a societal level biasing effect on our understanding of what problems we face and what the solutions to them can or should be.
HALLE: What Supran is worried about: the fossil fuel industry using universities to get the study results that they want? Well, I found an example of it. First a refresher… as we mentioned in episode 1, LSU has another research hub that it formed back in the 80’s. It’s called the Center for Energy Studies. The center was created to help inform Louisiana state lawmakers about energy policy. Specifically, how to keep the oil and gas flowing.
PAM: Today, many of the center’s reports are sponsored by a who’s who in Louisiana petrochemicals. Usually, these companies want to know the economic impact of a particular project. Number of jobs and tax dollars created, that sort of thing.
HALLE: Scrolling through pages and pages of these research contracts, one caught my eye. It was sponsored by a big Texas law firm called Bracewell. It’s well-known for its oil and gas lobbying.
PAM: Bracewell was working with a company that’s proposed a huge carbon capture project in Louisiana. Remember carbon capture? Well this time, this company wants to store millions of tons of carbon dioxide underground in southwest Louisiana. And they want to show how it would benefit the state's economy. So they turned to LSU for an economic impact study.
HALLE: But what they asked for wasn’t a purely objective, scientific study. According to the contract, the company had a hand in shaping the report from the start – even presupposing the report’s conclusions. This was a huge red flag, not just for us, but for all the experts we consulted.
PAM: In the end, LSU’s researchers wrote a report that listed all of the financial reasons the Gulf Coast should welcome this new industry. But the economic risks? It barely mentions any of those.
HALLE: And the red flags kept popping up. One of the biggest was that LSU’s contract allows funders to give feedback on the draft BEFORE it’s published. It also lets the funder stay anonymous if they want, meaning the public would never know who paid for the report. Unless of course, they filed a public records request, like we did.
PAM: We went back to Geoffrey Supran, our fossil fuel propaganda expert - and we showed him the agreement and final report.
SUPRAN: it gets a D grade and, it's not quite an F. // The fact that this report just touts the economic benefits of this specific company funding the report. It kind of makes you wonder if it's worth the paper is written on.
HALLE: He was stunned that LSU would even give the funder the option to be anonymous. This report did name the funder, but
SUPRAN: if they exercised it, it would blatantly disregard basic academic norms in terms of disclosing fundamental conflicts of interest.
PAM: other researchers we talked to felt a similar way. When we asked the authors of the LSU report for an interview, one declined to comment and the other never responded. The head of LSU’s research office defended the agreement, He told us that the contract’s terms are standard across the university, and that he found no problems with the report.
HALLE: Now, technically, LSU is allowed to do all of this. It’s not illegal, nor does it fall neatly in the box of research misconduct like using fake data or plagiarizing. But reports like these, written in language that someone like, say, a lawmaker could understand could influence decision-making. Because they carry the credibility of a university.
PAM: this got us thinking … How do elected officials use reports from schools like LSU to decide on policy?
So Halle went to talk with one.
<<office ambi>>
HALLE: I’m on the 11th floor of a tall office building in Baton Rouge. I’m sitting in a conference room with a large window stretching across one entire wall. You can see the capitol building, and behind it, the gigantic ExxonMobil refinery.
HALLE: Oh, what a view.
HALLE: It’s quite the contrast.
Then, in walks the guy I’m here to meet.
DAVANTE: Devante Lewis and I'm the public service commissioner for the third district of Louisiana.
HALLE: As a commissioner, Lewis regulates the electric grid, among other things. Which is huge when you’re thinking about the energy transition. He’s one of the youngest to ever serve on this commission. Yet he’s already deep in the utility wonk. He hits me with all the jargon.
DAVANTE: We're gonna need significant baseload growth.
DAVANTE: distributive energy resources
DAVANTE: you're not really looking at transmission buildup.
HALLE: Yes, my head was spinning a little bit. But not his. He’s always deep in government reports or research papers from universities.
DAVANTE: research is extremely important as we are looking at the future. // the research plays a significant role in determining whether or not we're on the right or wrong course
HALLE: He says he relies on credible, independent information to decide how he votes on new regulations. And, he’s worried. As more industry money pays for research, policy-makers might not get the full picture.
DAVANTE: the source is important. I mean, oftentimes we have seen where, money drives facts, not facts drive money.
HALLE: This idea that money drives facts, not facts drive money… That's exactly what motivated our reporting. And it’s why Lewis is wary of cases like LSU’s carbon capture report. Where the funder sets the research agenda and the result is pretty one-sided.
DAVANTE: I think that's the effect that it could have on policymakers is giving a very narrow answer to complex questions.
HALLE: Lewis says if he and his colleagues don’t have all the information they need to make wise decisions about the electric grid, and, really, climate policy more broadly… it could lead to huge setbacks.
DAVANTE: it could be that we will invest significant amount of money amount of resources depleting our water usage, potentially harming on the environment and putting communities in danger. And we barely put a dent in emissions reductions because we were only looking at our left hand and not our right hand at the same time
PAM: Lewis’ concern –that bad research will lead to bad policy – is really, a national problem. One so bad that Democrats in Congress investigated Big Oil over it. And they found the world’s top oil and gas companies were systematically delaying action to fix global warming with this research.
HALLE: But identifying this playbook, hasn’t been enough to stop it in the past. People still smoke cigarettes, and a lot more people still support the oil and gas industry. Especially in Louisiana. Why? Because all those donations aren’t only going to research. There's another chapter in this playbook.
PAM: The fossil fuel industry doesn’t just influence people’s minds. They’ve captured their hearts, too. That’s coming up.
<<ambi>>
HALLE: I’m at LSU’s student career fair. It’s in one of the arenas on campus and as soon as I walk in, I’m flanked by tables and tables of recruiters from energy companies. Big names like Shell and Marathon. Chevron and OxyChem. In fact, the majority of the companies here are either part of the oil and gas industry or serve that industry.
Students pass by wearing their best professional clothes. Jacket and ties, blouses and slacks. They’re locked in.
STUDENT: I think the expo was really cool to get my name out there and see people face to face.
HALLE: I caught up with this engineering freshman outside of the career fair. She was one the handful I talked to who appreciated the industry presence. She was grateful even that the same sponsors who helped build LSU’s state-of-the-art engineering building were at the expo.
STUDENT: not only did they donate to the school, they also take in some of the students here. And they help build relationships with the students here. It's, it's really cool.
HALLE: From the first day of class, engineering students like her are surrounded by the fossil fuel industry. I saw it firsthand on a tour of this big, modern engineering school.
TOUR LEADER: So this is our donor wall. // You'll see some companies such as Dow or Chevron
HALLE: As my tour guide takes me through the building, those names keep popping up. Study halls sponsored by Chevron, research labs donated by Dow.
TOUR: This is our B A S F, Sustainable Living Lab.
HALLE: My tour guide said that beyond the fancy computers and equipment, the companies also supply mentors and help pay for some students’ tuition. She got help, too.
TOUR LEADER: the Exxonmobil Diversity Scholarship Program, I got that. And so I got a mentor, shout out to my mentor, Abdu
PAM: This all matches up with what I saw when I followed the money for this story. Aside from research funding, companies donated tens of millions of dollars for things we all love… like those scholarships and mentors. Plus health programs and new facilities. Even fun stuff like sponsoring big football tailgates.
HALLE: All these things help boost the industry’s reputation and make people feel warm and fuzzy about these companies. And who can blame them? Free money for college? Hands on experience? It’s no wonder that one in five LSU engineering students graduate into an oil and gas job. Again, it seems like a win-win. But Geoffrey Supran, our guide to oil and gas industry propaganda, sees it another way..
GEOFFREY: It's pro-fossil fuel brainwashing.
HALLE: He says these efforts to generate good will are what’s called “soft influence.” The industry is building a deep bench of support from LSU, among the faculty, staff and students.
PAM: Supran says these relationships with students are part of a long game. Decades after they’ve graduated, they show up to support the industry. I’ve seen it myself.
EPA STAFF: I will be calling on people who have registered to make comments…
In 2023, I was covering federal hearings about whether Louisiana should be allowed to approve carbon capture and storage in the state instead of waiting for the federal government to decide. Something the industry was really pushing for. So it’s time for public comments. One by one, people walk up to the microphone, and I started to notice this… pattern.
ROSE: Back in the seventies, the oil and gas industry provided me a scholarship to L. S. U. Louisiana State University.
DAVE: My wife and I have raised two children here in Baton Rouge and both graduated from LSU.
CHARLES: Charles Davidi, representing Exxon Mobil. I'm a L.S.U. Graduate.
PAM: Many of the people who offered their support to the oil and gas industry invoked their tie to LSU in the same breath.
HALLE: It’s hard to say whether all this LSU name-dropping changed the way the federal officials weighed their comments… But in the end, they did hand responsibility over carbon capture wells to the state. The industry got what it wanted. Control closer to home and faster approvals.
PAM: That’s the industry playbook at work.
HALLE: But this playbook isn’t bulletproof. And around the world, faculty and students are speaking out and pushing back.
PAM: You might remember this guy from the first part of this series:KEVIN: My name is Kevin Cope, Kevin L. Cope.
HALLE: Yep, it’s Dr. Cope. He’s a British literature professor at LSU and served as the top voice of the faculty for a long time. We asked him what he thought about this influx of oil and gas money into research at the university.
COPE: I could certainly sum it up in one word, and that is unfortunate
HALLE: Cope is that rare professor who feels comfortable speaking his mind. He’s tenured and he’s used to criticizing LSU’s leaders. When I tried to interview others, they didn’t want to go on the record. And Cope says he understands why other faculty prefer to stay quiet.
COPE: they really don't know what to do because the economic momentum of the combined university and Petroleum energy industry funding juggernaut is just too great.
PAM: Here’s one way that juggernaut keeps professors in a bind. Cope says faculty need to pull in grants, that’s how they get promotions, how they keep their jobs. And it’s harder to get those grants without the right equipment or lab space. Expensive stuff that the industry can provide.
COPE: So all of these factors put faculty members under considerable duress to conform.
PAM: The voices of students have started to grow though. Like Alicia Cerquone.
ALICIA: I'm a grad worker at Louisiana state university in the department of geography and anthropology.
PAM: Alicia represents all of LSU’s grad students in the student government. She told us that as Louisiana’s flagship public university, LSU should help lead the state – and the country – in minimizing the impacts of climate change. Be a role model, as she puts it.
ALICIA: they have a responsibility to the taxpayers who create that public fund to // try to stop the consequences of climate change because it's hurting this state. It's hurting it environmentally and it's also hurting the people of this state.
PAM: So, she wrote a resolution asking LSU to stop investing any of its nearly billion-dollar endowment in fossil fuels. The student Senate overwhelmingly passed it. Though at this point, it isn’t binding.
HALLE: Other schools across the country are also under pressure to divest from oil and gas.
NEWS CLIP: A coalition of students and professors are celebrating after Rutgers University, the largest state university system in New Jersey, voted Tuesday to begin to divest from fossil fuels.
NEWS CLIP: Stanford University's Board of Trustees announced Tuesday it would no longer invest in coal mining companies because of climate change concerns
Divesting is just the first step towards loosening the fossil fuel industry's grip on higher ed. But the next step, schools not taking donations from oil and gas? Students are taking on that challenge, too.
TED TALK: we at fossil free research are demanding that our institutions step up. We're demanding that they cut ties with these companies and put people and the planet over profit.
PAM: Over the course of this series, we’ve discovered how the fossil fuel industry has everything to gain from these partnerships with Universities. New recruits, a positive image, and “a thumb” on the scale of research and policy. Policies that help oil and gas companies maintain their dominance. But for others, there are clear downsides.
HALLE: Students trained by the companies may end up stuck in a dying industry. Universities risk their credibility as an objective voice in how we should address climate change. And policymakers could lose out on critical information when making decisions about the future of the planet.
PAM: Through this investigation, we learned for oil and gas, this has been a long game. Just think about the story of LSU, and how we started this series… standing among the towering live oak trees on its hallowed campus - a campus that’s been intertwined with fossil fuels for almost a century.
HALLE: It will take a momentous effort to pull them apart. And that effort is up to each university. They face a hard question: is all of the money worth it?
*We'd like to provide further clarity about Brad Ives’ work. He has a long career in sustainable energy, in which he has worked on renewable-energy-specific projects with oil and gas companies.
