How BP Co-opted Princeton, Fooled Al Gore, And ‘Made The World Safe’ For Fossil Fuels:
Reporting Highlights
- Conflicted Funds: BP sponsored an elite Princeton research center to address the climate problem without getting off fossil fuels, handpicking scientists aligned with their interests.
- A Paradigm-Setting Paper: Princeton scientists who wrote a climate paper criticized as making solutions seem “easy” coordinated with the oil company’s executives and showed them multiple drafts.
- Oversold Solutions: Researchers depicted technology to capture carbon and store it underground as being proven and in use at industrial scale, a characterization that stretched the facts.
It is rare that a single scientific paper shapes how people think about a challenge as daunting as climate change. But one, known as “Wedges,” published 22 years ago by researchers at Princeton University, told an irresistible story.
It made solving climate change seem possible, even simple. It claimed that the world didn’t have to wait for innovation because it had the tools to start work immediately.
The trick was to do a little of everything and let the effects add up. Renewable energy, nuclear power and conservation were certainly pieces of the solution puzzle. But so were a slew of steps that involved using oil, gas and coal despite the carbon dioxide emissions they would continue to produce.
One fix that “Wedges” leaned especially hard on was carbon capture and storage, a technology that promised to grab carbon pollution from smokestacks and other sources and trap it forever underground. Do that enough, and climate change could be curtailed without upending the world as we know it.
The paper, written by scientists Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, became a phenomenon. Former Vice President Al Gore highlighted it in his Oscar-winning climate change documentary. U.S. presidents from George W. Bush to Joe Biden incorporated ideas from it into policy. The United Nations’ panel on climate change worked it into at least three major reports over more than a decade. It was presented in classrooms at Harvard and MIT and cited more than 3,000 times in scientific papers. It was even turned into a board game.
For a generation, people learning how to address global warming were taught the ideas in the “Wedges” paper.
What they didn’t learn was this: “Wedges” was significantly shaped by the British oil giant BP — one of the single global entities most responsible for causing climate change.
In 1997, BP abandoned climate change denial. Instead, the company quietly launched a far-reaching effort to intertwine oil company interests and climate science, in part by using its vast resources to shape the research that major universities undertook.
While its chief executive, John Browne, was rebranding his company as Beyond Petroleum, BP sought out researchers who were already thinking about how to address climate change without replacing fossil fuels. The company found them at Princeton University, where it set about amplifying their work by donating $15 million to start the Carbon Mitigation Initiative. The research program was framed around finding solutions to climate change while keeping fossil fuels in play, focusing heavily on carbon capture.
Then, while the paper was being prepped for publication, BP began aggressively promoting the ideas it contained. Browne touted the framework in a speech as evidence that oil and gas had “sustainable futures” and published an endorsement of “Wedges” in an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine. BP inserted the paper’s ideas into its sustainability reports promoting greater efficiency and natural gas — which it argued offered a low-carbon alternative to coal.
“Wedges,” whose ideas were turbocharged by the sort of high-level marketing scientific papers rarely get, became a regular part of thinking about climate change in classrooms and boardrooms alike. And as that happened, BP kept pouring millions more dollars into Princeton each year, in part to explicitly advance carbon capture and storage technology and, as internal documents make clear, to get the university’s help in turning the idea into a bona fide government-backed solution.
This article will win awards. It closely covers the incestuous relationship between academics and sponsors of research. It’s Sunday morning, please take the time to read this.
Summer is officially here, and it’s kicking off with an extreme heat dome that’s scorching much of the United States. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center, two heat domes are set to combine. Temperatures are expected to soar around the U.S. next week.
The first heat dome is developing in the southwest and the second is forming over the subtropical Atlantic. Predictions show they will merge over the Eastern U.S. to form one larger heat dome by the Fourth of July holiday.
Unlike a heat wave, in which various factors might cause hot weather, it takes specific weather conditions to create a heat dome.
A heat dome is typically driven by a change in atmospheric patterns. When patterns disrupt the flow of the jet stream—the aerial river of strong, fast-flowing winds that swerve across the continent from west to east in a wavy pattern—areas can experience extreme weather patterns, such as heat waves, floods, cold spells, storms and droughts. When a jet stream’s north and south loops become too big, they slow or stagnate, stalling the high-pressure system that then forms the top of the heat dome.
Unfortunately for those experiencing them, heat domes tend to be stagnant or move slowly, squatting over large areas. Their course and duration are generally steered by patterns of atmospheric circulation, and particularly, the jet stream.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Climate Change 2023 Synthesis Report finds, “It is virtually certain that hot extremes (including heatwaves) have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the 1950s.”
Heat domes are among those heat events. As warmer ocean and land temperatures provide a higher baseline, the warming effects of a heat dome are amplified. Also, less cooling evaporation can occur as soil moisture dries out with heat and drought.
Climate change may also be altering jet stream behaviors that contribute to heat domes. “Changes in atmospheric circulation—linked to warming in the Arctic—can lead to more stagnant weather patterns that allow heat domes to persist,” explains Ashley Ward, director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University.
Not only are heat domes more common, but they are also lasting longer. Some, like the 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, smashed so many records that they are altering scientists’ understanding of extreme heat in a changing world.
Happy 100th, Mel! Mel Brooks makes it to the century mark:
As the late critic Kenneth Tynan put it in his spectacular Brooks profile for The New Yorker in 1978, “to be Jewish, Brooklyn-born, fatherless, impoverished, and below average stature—no more classic recipe could be imagined for an American comedian. Or, one might suppose, for an American suicide.” I’d add to that: To fight in World War II, to confront the worst of humanity, and to survive—that is difficult enough. But to take those experiences and explode them into comic rapture? To see what Hitler wrought and then dream up The Producers? To confront death and choose humor? To adore the literary greats but reject any modicum of pretension? This is the miracle of Mel Brooks.
Brooks once said that he went into show business “to make a noise, to pronounce myself.” He didn’t just want to make noise but to make the “loudest noise to the most people.” And “if I can’t do that,” he concluded, “I’m not going to make a quiet, exquisite noise for a cabal of cognoscenti.” But I always liked best how Gene Wilder—Brooks’s captivating leading funny man—put it. In the actor’s mind’s eye, Brooks was always “standing bare-chested on top of a mountain, shouting ‘Look at me!’ and ‘Don’t let me die!’”
This is why Brooks’s work—his writing, his directing, and of course his own performances—is defined by a sense of total abandon. No joke can go far enough. No spectacle can be too big. Wild ambition is coupled with an insistence on living in the moment. And it’s the same quality that first captured the attention of Anne Bancroft, who was far more famous than Brooks when they first met in the early 1960s. (Brooks was, at the time, married with three children, but would soon divorce his first wife.) That evening, Bancroft had been asked to sing for the NBC variety show Kraft Music Hall, and Brooks approached her after her performance at the Ziegfeld Theatre, saying—as Bancroft always remembered it—“I’m Mel Brooks. Hiya, A.”
“Just like that,” she recalled, according to Douglass Daniel’s biography of her, Anne Bancroft: A Life. “He talks that way. I liked him.” Fast-forward to 1964 and they were married—at City Hall in New York. For their wedding-night meal, Bancroft cooked spaghetti for them at home. Yet as endearingly low-key as the couple could seem, nothing ever felt ordinary about their romance. Bancroft often described Brooks as literally “incandescent,” so charismatic that he practically glowed. They would stay together for 41 years, until her death in 2005. “She had good taste in everything—except husbands,” Brooks once said with typical self-effacement. When someone once asked him why he never remarried, he was far more earnest: “Once you are married to Anne Bancroft, others don’t seem to be appealing.”
With Blazing Saddles, Brooks looked at the way Westerns had always been told, saw it as “simply a lie,” and decided he wanted to expose that lie in the most ridiculous—and funniest—way possible. Brooks, ever one for grandeur, once compared his approach in Blazing Saddles to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, among the earliest works by the painter that are considered truly revolutionary. And as with Blazing Saddles, not everyone was ready for the revolution. It’s fashionable among comics to say that Blazing Saddles could never be made today, that it is too audacious a parody, and flies far too close to the sun on matters of race in America. (Even Brooks has said a version of this, telling the BBC in 2017 that political correctness and tribalism was leading society toward “the death of comedy.”) But Dave Chappelle—one of the few who can rival Brooks in sheer comedic talent—has persuasively made the point that it isn’t that Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today, but rather that Mel Brooks has always been the only person on Earth who could pull it off, and he just so happens to have already done so.)
Did I mention he was whip-smart?:
