Louisiana State U Invites Big Oil To Help With Climate 'Research,' If Price Is Right

It's not pay-to-play, it's 'Energy Innovation' with 'innovative' funding!

LSU’s ‘Old Law’ building plus an oil refinery. Images: ‘Kkmurray,’ GNU Free Documentation License 1.2 and ‘Art Prof,’ Creative Commons License 2.0

Big Oil has long considered state governments in oil-producing states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana to be helpful partners, or wholly owned subsidiaries. The oil companies keep drilling and pumping, and the pols don’t get in the way with burdensome regulation or nosy investigations into the occasional plant explosion, and the campaign donations keep coming. It’s a happy symbiosis between producers of toxic sludge and politicians who love to talk about all the great jobs they bring to the states.

Heck, no reason that state universities shouldn’t get in on the grift, too, as the Guardian and nonprofit New Orleans newsroom The Lens reported Sunday. After all, a university is a costly thing to run, so why not help students prepare for the Jobs Of the Future by inviting major industries to help set the research agenda and even some of the class offerings, as seems to be the case at Louisiana State University, the state’s flagship school.

The Lens used a public records request to obtain university emails and

a boilerplate document that Louisiana State University’s fundraising arm circulated to oil majors and chemical companies affiliated with the Louisiana Chemical Association, an industry lobbying group[.]

The appeal from the LSU Foundation offers companies the chance to help out LSU’s “Institute for Energy Innovation.” It’s a classic public-private partnership, soliciting money from the fossil fuels industry, and in return offering them seats on the board that decides what research projects the Institute will approve, “robust review and discussion” of the research’s output, and access to any intellectual property (IP) developed by the projects. Pony up the right cash, and companies will even have the chance to participate in research projects.

Like, Page 7 of the document includes a price menu and everything:

An investment of $5 million, over five years, will get your company a vote on the institute’s advisory board, which includes “choosing institute’s research activities.” For the lesser price of $1.25 million over five years, you also get a vote on the board and that “robust review and discussion” of research, but you don’t get the IP access. Or if your company wants to sponsor a particular bit of research — as an “advisory partner” — that can be arranged too, minus the vote on the board but with that “robust review” and IP access, to be defined as part of your project.

The Guardian reports that the fundraising effort follows up on a beautiful act of corporate generosity by one of the world’s biggest polluters:

Records show that after Shell donated $25m in 2022 to LSU to create the Institute for Energy Innovation, the university gave the fossil fuel corporation license to influence research and coursework for the university’s new concentration in carbon capture, use and storage.

There’s a lot of controversy around the still-developing technologies in carbon capture, mostly related to the fact that Big Oil has often put forward proposals to take carbon dioxide out of the air (or out of smokestacks) as a substitute for actually reducing the use of fossil fuels. That’s some bullshit.

But even as we transition away from burning fossil fuels, we’ll almost certainly need to deploy aggressive carbon capture (assuming the tech gets there) to reduce CO2 to levels that meet, or get anywhere near, those laid out in the Paris Climate Agreement. This 2021 Mother Jones article is one of the most complete discussions of all the complex issues involved.

Because of the history of bad faith approaches to carbon capture pushed by the industry, its understandable that many academics and students are very damn skeptical of LSU’s seeking out funding from big polluters like ExxonMobil and others.

As the Guardian notes, the director of LSU’s Institute for Energy Innovation, Brad Ives, thinks it’s just dandy, commenting that “being able to work with oil and gas companies is ‘really a key to advancing energy innovation.’”

Fossil fuel bigwigs from Shell and ExxonMobil thought it was pretty nifty too, and offered statements burbling about being proud to partner with LSU and do excellent climate science and energy innovation and all that. We initially quoted them, but thpppt, they have plenty to say without us helping.

Currently, Shell is the only oil company to meet the donation threshold to buy obtain a seat on the institute’s board, but two industry trade association representatives — the head honchos of the Louisiana Chemical Association and the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association — also have votes on what research the Institute will pursue.

The Guardian didn’t have any difficulty finding critics of the fundraising document and the “advisory” roles of big oil companies, like former LSU journalism prof Robert Mann, who called it an “egregious violation of academic freedom.”

“You don’t expect to see it written down like that,” Mann said, after the Lens asked him to review the boilerplate document. […] If you’re a faculty member in that unit you should know that the university is fine with auctioning off your academic freedom,” he said. “That’s what they’re doing.”

For his part, Institute director Ives said the arrangement isn’t any different from similar academic institutes at other universities, such as the “Texas Bureau of Economic Geology,” which also does corporate-funded research.

“I think researchers saying that somehow having corporate funding for research damages the integrity of that research is a little far-fetched,” Ives said.

Research performed at the institute is subject to the faculty’s individual ethics training and subject to peer-review, he said. “A donor that provided money that goes to the institute isn’t going to be able to influence the outcome of that research in any way.”

Apart from, say, having a vote on what research will be pursued in the first place, but there we go being paranoid about our very best corporate citizens.

Karsten Thompson, Interim Dean of LSU’s College of Engineering, agreed there’s nothing the least bit questionable here, because who knows more about carbon emissions than the oil industry?

“To me, it’s not a conflict at all. It’s a partnership because they’re the ones that are going to make the largest initial impacts on reducing CO₂ emissions.”

Or, you know, not. Also, for shits and giggles, the Guardian asked Mr. Thompson why there wasn’t similar funding for energy innovation from companies in the renewable energy field, which seems to have left Thompson wondering what kind of crazy question that was:

LSU faculty has not been similarly engaged with renewable energy companies, because oil and gas companies have the resources to tackle the climate crisis now – and are not reliant on future technology, Thompson said. “Renewable energy is much more abstract,” he said. “So, I think that’s the difference. It’s not that we don’t care as much.”

After all, renewables are only the fastest-growing parts of the energy mix, with wind, solar, and storage only making up 75 percent of new energy capacity over the last three years. That’s pretty abstract, and the fossil fuel money is knocking at the door right now, so you sunshine children hush now.

In conclusion, this is all very normal and very legal, and if it’s legal then it’s also ethical the end.

[Guardian / The Lens / Mother Jones / NREL / Wonkette Photoshop. Original images: Kkmurray, GNU Free Documentation License 1.2 and “Art Prof,” Creative Commons License 2.0

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