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The statement below was submitted to the Committee on Research Funding from Fossil Fuel Companies in the fall of 2024 by Jason Bordoff, Founding Director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia SIPA ahead of an in-person meeting between the Committee and Bordoff.
Professor Jason Bordoff
Founding Director, SIPA’s Center on Global Energy Policy
Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Affairs, Columbia SIPA
Co-Founding Dean Emeritus, Columbia Climate School
The questions this committee is addressing about fossil fuel funding and research go to the core of Columbia’s values and to the principles that guide our work every day at the School of International and Public Affairs and SIPA’s Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP): academic freedom, integrity of research, independence of scholarship, diversity of thought, and constructive dialogue and engagement—especially with those with whom we may disagree. This committee’s mandate is critical to ensure there is confidence in scholarship and research taking place at a research university like Columbia, the mission of which is to educate, produce new knowledge, and discover truth.
The mission of SIPA’s Center on Global Energy Policy is to develop evidence-based research to help address the world’s most challenging energy and climate problems through research, education, and dialogue. As an energy center, we grapple with a multitude of energy issues, such as rapidly decarbonizing energy systems to address the threat of climate change, reducing geopolitical risks and threats to energy security, and delivering energy to lower income parts of the world that is needed for prosperity and economic growth. Deepening understanding of complex and often controversial issues related to the energy transition, along with educating future leaders, is at the core of CGEP’s work, particularly as we examine the complex intersection of policy, geopolitics, economics, markets, and climate science, and how all of these affect—and are affected by—the clean energy transition.
The first bullet of the just-released 2024 World Energy Outlook, the flagship publication of the International Energy Agency, explains this well: “Geopolitical tensions and fragmentation are major risks for energy security and for coordinated action on reducing emissions.” And the second bullet states: “Robust, independent analysis and data-driven insights are vital to navigate today’s energy uncertainties.” CGEP’s work lies at the intersection of those twin priorities.
Given where the world stands today in the clean energy transition, this work necessarily involves study of and expertise in all segments of the global energy sector, from the legacy system dependent on fossil fuels to the emerging clean energy economy. On the one hand, efforts to accelerate the pace of transition to a low-carbon energy system are yielding remarkable results. In the last decade, battery and solar costs have fallen 90 percent and 80 percent, respectively. This year, global spending on clean energy is on track to reach almost double the amount going to fossil fuels. Solar and wind are set to meet as much as three-quarters of the expected growth in global electricity demand this year and next.
Despite all this progress, however, oil, natural gas, and coal use are all still rising globally, and annual global greenhouse gas emissions will reach their highest level ever in 2024. Today, more than 80 percent of global energy consumption still comes from fossil fuels—a figure that has remained virtually unchanged for decades. That is because the scale of the global energy system remains so vast that even if the tremendous growth in low-carbon energy sources has been able to meet a growing share of the increase in energy use that results from economic and population growth, it is not yet scaling fast enough to significantly replace hydrocarbons and thus drive emissions to net-zero. In 2023, despite record clean energy deployment, two-thirds of the increase in global energy demand was still met by fossil fuels, according to the IEA.
In the past, fossil fuel energy spurred rising prosperity and economic growth, delivering enormous improvements in human well-being even as it also was the primary cause of rising greenhouse gases that threaten to make our planet uninhabitable. To address climate change, global fossil fuel use must fall sharply, according to the International Energy Agency, although significant volumes of fossil fuels will continue to be used even if countries achieve their climate goals.[1] Even if the world were on track to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal that unfortunately now seems unachievable according to Columbia climate scientist James Hansen, oil and gas investment would still need to be $400 billion per year in 2030, roughly half of today’s level, according to the IEA.
Beyond the urgency of combatting climate change, there are, of course, many other energy issues that a school such as SIPA engages with. The recent energy crisis in Europe prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, conflict in the Middle East that threatens global oil supplies and thus economies, and the staggering growth in electricity generation that is needed to power the AI revolution—now spurring a renaissance of nuclear power—are just a few reminders of the myriad economic, market, geopolitical, technological, development and social issues that impact, and are impacted by, the energy sector and require deeper study and understanding.
The first question charged to this committee is whether to categorically prohibit all funding from fossil fuel companies for research and research-related activities. This question raises at least two potential concerns.
First, principles of academic freedom (see, e.g., University Statutes §70) suggest scholars should be free to identify the subject matter of their research and the sources of funding for their work, consistent with robust and strict university guardrails to protect against conflict of interest and undue influence of funders. Because research and related activities necessarily require scarce resources, the Faculty Handbook lays out specific policies “to promote the scholarly and scientific inquiries of its faculty and officers of research and to meet the regulatory and other requirements of the external sponsors that provide the financial resources that sustain much of that research.” It explains, “The University regularly enters into agreements with external funding sources, such as government agencies, foundations, and corporations, to support research undertaken by its faculty and professional officers of research.”
“To ensure that these projects do not compromise the University’s commitment to unrestricted scholarship,” the Handbook notes there are three conditions under which the University will not accept external support. The most relevant condition for the question before this committee is that “An outside party may not be given the power to censor, exercise an effective veto over, or unreasonably delay the publication or other dissemination of the results of the project.” These “fundamental principles” are broadly applicable and do not distinguish between types of companies. The key considerations in funding are the independence of the research, the merits of the research activity, and the benefits of engagement with a diverse set of views.
Second, and related, is the principle of institutional neutrality, a topic which another advisory committee, appointed by Interim President Armstrong, is currently addressing. The University Statutes (§440) note that “Columbia, in particular, has a long tradition of valuing dissent and controversy and in welcoming the clash of opinions onto the campus.” It goes on to state:
“To be true to these principles, the University cannot and will not rule any subject or form of expression out of order on the ground that it is objectionable, offensive, immoral, or untrue. Viewpoints will inevitably conflict, and members of the University community will disagree with and may even take offense at both the opinions expressed by others and the manner in which they are expressed. But the role of the University is not to shield individuals from positions that they find unwelcome. Rather, the University is a place for received wisdom and firmly held views to be tested, and tested again, so that members of the University community can listen, challenge each other, and be challenged in return.”
The urgent challenge of climate change requires considering numerous difficult and complex questions, such as the relative pace of transition away from oil and gas in developing versus developed countries, the role of technologies such as carbon capture and removal that may affect how much oil and gas is used in net-zero scenarios, the pace and timing of achieving net-zero emissions relative to the cost of climate change’s impacts, and the role of traditional oil and gas companies in delivering clean energy solutions. Leading and highly respected experts and academics, including within Columbia, hold different views about such questions. Institutional positions by the university about the moral propriety of engaging with oil and gas companies, including through funding relationships, must be taken carefully to avoid inhibiting dialogue, debate, and dissenting viewpoints about such questions and many others, or imposing a collective viewpoint on those in the Columbia community about difficult social and moral questions.
To be sure, there are limits to these principles. Certain issues, such as apartheid or human slavery and trafficking, may rise to such an egregious level of immorality that dissociation is clearly warranted. But this bar should be quite high for such institutional determinations, as reflected in Stanford University’s recent decision on the question of fossil fuel funding. Similarly, at Columbia, the University Statutes make clear that limitations on the right of freedom of expression “are to be narrowly construed.” (§440)
The Complexities of Classifying and Evaluating Energy Sector Companies
Fossil fuel companies are typically considered to be those that produce, process, and distribute fossil fuels. Yet, today’s global economy runs on fossil fuels not only because of such companies, but also because of the collective decisions of myriad firms that make investment decisions every day related to infrastructure that requires fossil fuels to operate. Power generators operate plants that often run on fossil fuels. Airplane manufacturers produce transportation equipment that requires jet fuel to operate because there is not yet a suitable zero-carbon option available at commercial scale. At least for vehicles, a technology does exist to produce them in ways that do not require oil to operate, yet more than 95 percent of the vehicles Ford produces are useless 2-ton machines without gasoline or diesel. (The same is true for nearly every other American auto company.) The equipment and infrastructure being manufactured and constructed in myriad other sectors, such as steel, cement, chemicals, and heating, most of which will operate for decades, similarly deepen and prolong our dependence on fossil fuels. By this measure, Boeing, GE, GM, Stellantis, Carrier, Dow, US Steel, American Airlines, and many other companies and industries contribute—either directly or indirectly—to continued dependence on fossil fuels.
Once a definition is determined, another question charged to this committee is whether all fossil fuel companies warrant the same approach, or whether differences among them should be considered. Even among the narrow set of companies that produce, process, and distribute fossil fuels, there is much heterogeneity so it is difficult to paint “the industry” with a broad brush.[2]
In drawing lines between individual companies, several reasons have been suggested to refuse to accept funding, including (1) demonstrated history of misinformation and disinformation about the science of climate change; (2) lack of credible plans to be net-zero by 2050; or (3) obstruction of strong climate policy. Each of these concerns should be taken very seriously, as each has merit based on historical behavior. Yet, in practice, making institutional determinations about what activity constitutes disinformation, credible plans for net-zero, or obstruction require judgments that are exceedingly hard to make and risk imposing institutional views on difficult questions on which faculty may reasonably disagree, as a commitment to academic freedom would allow them do.
To the first point, there is a demonstrated history, as documented by some Columbia faculty, of some fossil fuel companies engaging in disinformation. Such instances must be called out, as disinformation is fundamentally at odds with a university’s mission to search for the truth.
The role of exposing disinformation and misinformation should be left to experts who study these issues, as identifying exactly which companies have engaged in these practices requires clear and objective criteria that may be quite difficult to implement in practice. This sentiment was documented in Stanford’s report by Columbia Law School’s Michael Burger, who expressed skepticism to Stanford’s committee on fossil fuel funding about whether universities could create reliable screening metrics in the foreseeable future for misinformation.
To the second point, identifying which companies have credible plans to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 is exceedingly difficult and necessarily involves making institutional judgments about matters of technology or equitable burden-sharing. For example, the IEA has modeled different pathways for the multi-decade decline in oil and gas production in a net-zero 2050 scenario depending on whether one prioritizes reducing cost, emissions, or inequity. In the first scenario, high-cost producers such as Algeria and Canada would shut their taps first, while in the last lower-income countries such as Mozambique and Nigeria would produce longer. Evaluating whether a country or company is on a net-zero pathway requires making such subjective judgments. Although discussion of oil and gas funding typically centers on a few household names, such as ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, or Chevron, the so-called “supermajors” account for about 15 percent of the world’s oil and gas production, while the great majority is produced by nationally-owned companies that vary enormously in their practices, capabilities, and social obligations.
To the third point, obstruction of climate policy similarly involves making complex judgments on matters of public policy about which faculty with expertise may well disagree. A company that opposes a carbon tax, for example, may be branded as obstructionist, while Columbia faculty themselves have written extensively both in favor (a view I share) and against a carbon tax as a climate policy solution.[3] Faculty who properly hold depth of expertise in energy similarly will disagree about carbon offsets, the role of carbon capture and removal technology, and myriad other policy and technology approaches, requiring institutional determinations about credible net-zero pathways that depend on inherently uncertain and subjective judgments.
In no way are these comments intended to defend the fossil fuel industry. As noted above, there is little doubt that companies at times have engaged in misinformation and disinformation and have made it more difficult to adopt stronger climate policies, particularly through their trade associations. Few, if any, oil and gas producers are doing enough to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy. Indeed, I sharply criticized oil and gas companies for this reason, and for mischaracterizing their climate efforts, on the op-ed page of the New York Times in 2023. Rather, these comments are intended to demonstrate the difficulty of making institutional judgments about difficult and complex social, moral, technological, policy, and equity questions, tradeoffs, and concerns that are properly left to our faculty to research, debate, and even disagree about.
As another question to the committee notes, there are significant risks with industry funding. Companies are self-interested economic actors that may seek to use funding to influence research outcomes, burnish their reputations, or lead researchers to skew findings to avoid losing funding.
Tech companies such as Amazon and Google may have self-interested positions on controversial issues such as privacy or internet regulation, just as banks such as J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs may have self-interested positions on matters of financial sector regulation. An assumption that funding from corporations leads to research that is inherently biased would preclude the university from accepting funding for research from almost any private sector company.
Safeguards to protect against such undue influence of corporate funding from all sectors require strict requirements for disclosure, transparency, conflict of interest, quality review, and other matters. These guardrails are essential to build trust and confidence in Columbia’s work, and to protect against the possibility that funding could ever be linked to particular outcomes and research findings dictated by donor desires and interests. Unrestricted, general use gifts by their terms promise nothing in exchange, yet, even there, the potential for implicit or undocumented promises exists. Ultimately, protecting against funder influence requires a culture of the highest integrity and faculty judgment, ethics, and responsibility for the objectivity of research.
Suggestions for Additional Oversight
There are two responses to this potential concern. First is rigorous auditing and oversight. Such a process would review relevant center or institute publications for quality and integrity and solicit input from faculty, scholars, and students to learn how the center or institute operates, including how funder interests manifest themselves, if at all. SIPA commissioned such a review of CGEP, for example, in 2021, conducted by two leading energy faculty members at peer universities (discussed further below). Centers and institutes with corporate funding, ideally not only from fossil fuel companies but from any private-sector interest, should be subject to rigorous and regular audits to ensure all are meeting the highest standards of integrity.
While auditing is helpful, the ultimate bulwark against undue corporate influence is institutional trust in the integrity, judgment, and quality of the university’s faculty and scholars and the centers and institutes they lead. If the institution loses confidence in the integrity of Columbia centers or institutes, the university should move to rescind the Provost’s or Trustees’ approval of those organizations.
CGEP has carefully navigated conflict of interest issues since its founding in 2013. It is a recognized leader in advancing evidence-based and actionable energy and climate solutions through research, education, and dialogue. As part of a leading school of international and public affairs, CGEP brings together a diverse group of scholars with deep experience and expertise in many different fields necessary to understand today’s complex energy transition, particularly by connecting knowledge of foreign policy, national security, and key regions and countries with knowledge of energy markets, finance, policy, and climate change. Our goal is to bring insights from academic research to policymakers and other energy leaders in the formats and timeframes they need to inform real-world decision-making.
Integrity, Conflict of Interest, and Transparency at CGEP
Since its inception, CGEP’s funding has come from a diverse group of donors, including from individuals, companies (both inside and outside the fossil fuel sector), and foundations. At CGEP, this year’s fiscal budget anticipates roughly 15 percent of our revenue to come from companies whose primary business is producing oil and gas, a figure that has been in gradual decline over time as CGEP has grown. We operate under the highest standards of academic integrity and requirements set by the university, giving confidence that the work is free of outside influence.
To minimize the potential for conflict, corporate funding for CGEP is typically accepted only as general, unrestricted gifts, for which no research products are promised in return. This model allows our scholars to operate with complete freedom, choosing the topics they want to work on and reaching the conclusions and findings they wish to, without concern about funder viewpoints or influence. As a functional matter, corporate gifts go into a general pool of revenue, and that is used to meet annual budget needs completely free of donor influence. Most gifts are used to pay salaries of administrative and research staff, which account for two-thirds of CGEP’s annual budget. Unrestricted gifts are diversified among many companies in roughly similar amounts to prevent any particular company or companies from having disproportionate potential influence.
Transparency about funding is critically important as a bulwark against conflict of interest. As required by the University’s Institutional Conflict of Interest (ICOI) Committee, CGEP lists on its website gifts from corporations, as well as gifts from foundations and individuals. Additionally, every CGEP research publication must disclose corporate gifts to CGEP that exceed $1 million, another step required by the university’s ICOI Committee.
CGEP reports (as opposed to shorter blog posts and commentaries) are subject to a double-blind expert review process. Scholars frequently publish in external outlets as well, both peer-reviewed journals and leading non-academic journals. (My writing, for example, is most often in Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, two widely respected magazines for the foreign policy community.) Research scholars and senior research scholars at CGEP are hired by SIPA faculty committees and periodically reviewed by SIPA faculty committees. CGEP scholars are highly respected experts in the energy field. (As just one example, more scholars from CGEP were asked to review this year’s IEA World Energy Outlook than from any other institution.)
Oversight is obviously necessary to ensure that all in our community are conducting themselves according to the highest standards of integrity. As noted above, SIPA conducts external reviews of its centers and institutes periodically to examine the quality and integrity of work being done by institutes and centers.
EDITORIAL NOTE: The section below has been updated since this statement was submitted to the Committee on Research Funding from Fossil Fuel Companies in the fall of 2024 to reflect further revisions to Heal and Bordoff (2025). The original statement as submitted can be found HERE.
In 2021, SIPA commissioned a review of CGEP by two leading faculty members at peer universities. After reviewing CGEP’s publications and other outputs and interviewing dozens of faculty and students, they found in their report:
“We engaged in extensive questioning around whether funding sources have affected research agendas, outputs, and messages. We have, based on that questioning, no concerns on that front. It appears to us that a firewall has been erected between funding sources and the research and policy engagement operations of CGEP.”
While I am not aware of any member of our community who has alleged a particular paper or other product from CGEP is evidence of inappropriate funder influence, some who appear before this committee may reference a paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change by my SIPA colleague Doug Almond, with Xinming Du and Anna Papp, which has been cited by others as evidence of bias due to corporate funding.
While the paper raises important questions about the influence of funding on research, a recent article written by myself with Columbia Professor Geoff Heal demonstrates clearly that the Almond et al. paper does not support the finding that CGEP’s research is biased or influenced by corporate funding. Rather, we found:
Distinguishing Between Basic Scientific or Engineering Research and Policy or Legal Research
In response to another question put to this committee, the concerns and risks I discuss at length above apply, in my view, to all types of research, including law, policy, business, engineering, science, and others. While engineering research may be technical collaboration, industry actors can use the promise of certain technologies, bolstered by the credibility of Columbia faculty, to support certain arguments. For example, fossil fuel companies might point to the work of engineering faculty on carbon capture or removal technologies to support their view that oil, gas, or even coal use can continue as in the past thanks to such technology.[4] The West Virginia Coal Association pointed to the research of Columbia Professor Klaus Lackner, for example, to argue that coal CO2 emissions were a “valuable byproduct of coal use, not just a bothersome pollutant.”
Policy or legal research raises similar concerns. It is important to note that policy research does not mean advocacy in support of certain policy positions. Principles of institutional neutrality preclude organizations such as Columbia, including CGEP, from taking institutional positions on policy issues, so CGEP does not advocate or lobby for policy outcomes. Of course, individual scholars and faculty may wish to express policy views, as consistent with principles of academic freedom, but there are and should be no institutional positions. Rather, being a policy-focused center means having expertise on matters of geopolitics, policy, security, and markets that helps inform discussions and understanding, for policy makers and other leaders in civil society or the private sector, about today’s complex and dynamic energy landscape.
The view that engineering and science differs from policy and legal research suggests a false distinction that the former is descriptive while the latter is normative. The work being done at this university demonstrates clearly that engineering research can be either descriptive or normative, as can policy or legal research. The work we do at CGEP, for example, intentionally does not take institutional views on what government “should” do, but rather may attempt to explain analytically what the consequences of different choices or proposed policies would be—on greenhouse gas emissions, on economic growth, on energy prices, on geopolitical risk, on energy access, or other broad societal objectives.
If Columbia were to make a distinction between policy or legal research and engineering or scientific research, any such distinction should be reflected in rules and guidelines for all schools and faculty and applied universally, not just to funding from fossil fuel companies. Such concerns about policy or legal research would be applicable to work that may affect corporate interests in technology, public health, and many other fields, not just fossil fuels.
The questions this committee is addressing go to the core of this university’s values: academic freedom, integrity of research, independence of scholarship, diversity of thought, and constructive dialogue and engagement—especially with those with whom we may disagree. Concerns about corporate funding of university activities are understandable, as some fossil fuel companies have a demonstrated history of engaging in misinformation or disinformation, obstructing climate policy, or falling short of stated climate commitments. Principles of academic freedom and institutional neutrality make it exceptionally difficult, in practice, to preclude faculty and scholars from accepting funding from companies or differentiating between companies in one sector versus others or within certain sectors.
The potential for funding from fossil fuel companies to influence research is real, and indeed exists for all corporate funding. Strict guardrails, transparency, disclosure, oversight, and auditing are necessary to ensure university research is free of funder influence. The ultimate bulwark against undue corporate influence is the integrity and judgment the university’s faculty and scholars. The track record of CGEP over its 12-year history demonstrates clearly and unquestionably that it is possible to include fossil fuel companies in a broad and diversified mix of funding sources while operating according to the highest standards of academic excellence and integrity, free of conflict and funder influence.
[1] In a scenario in which all countries meet the climate targets they have set, which is not yet the case, oil and gas use fall by 45 percent and 41 percent, respectively, by 2050. In a scenario where the world achieves net-zero emissions by 2050, a goal for which nearly all actors in society are far off track today, oil and gas use in 2050 are around 20 percent of today’s level.
[2] According to the IEA, for example, clean energy investment by the oil and gas industry as a whole represented 2.7% of its total capital spending in 2022, although that figure was as high as 15-25% for a handful of companies. https://www.iea.org/reports/the-oil-and-gas-industry-in-net-zero-transitions
[3] See, e.g., Report of the High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices, High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices (Joseph Stiglitz and Lord Nicholas Stern, Co-Chairs). 2017. Washington, DC: World Bank; Fixing the Climate: Strategies for an Uncertain World. Charles F. Sabel and David G. Victor. 2022. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; “Coase, Hotelling and Pigou: The Incidence of a Carbon Tax and CO2 Emissions,” Geoffrey Heal and Wolfram Schlenker. NBER Working Paper 26086.
[4] In my view, there is no truth to such a view, as I told the New York Times: “While it is correct for al-Jaber to focus on emissions, it is also true that meeting our emissions goals means we’re going to have to be using much less fossil fuels than we do today. It is also true that we will need carbon capture to meet our goals on time. So there’s an element of necessity there. It just can’t be used as cover for a real phasedown.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/climate/un-climate-oil-uae-al-jaber.html
The Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University SIPA today announced the release of new research focused on the causes of rising electricity prices in the...
Critical minerals were once again near the top of the agenda for G7 leaders as they met in Évian, France, this week, a year after the G7 launched the Critical Minerals Action Plan.