The Conversation has good piece today:
As the climate crisis gets worse, global fossil fuel production is growing and oil and gas companies are making record profits.
While the powerful influence of the fossil fuel industry’s lobbying on climate policy is increasingly acknowledged, our new research also shows how oil and gas companies are influencing universities.
We are researchers with combined expertise on just energy transitions and climate justice and the university (the title of Jennie Stephens’s forthcoming book). With international colleagues we undertook the first comprehensive review of academic and civil society investigations into fossil fuel industries’ ties to higher education in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
…Fossil fuel companies have also been engaging in university curriculum design that promotes fossil fuel futures. In Australia, for example, dozens of fossil fuel industry representatives were involved in developing and teaching the undergraduate program at the School of Oil and Gas Engineering at the University of Western Australia.
Well, given they are the ones that do the engineering that probably makes sense.
More toxic is The Conversation itself which has been pumping oil and gas propaganda for The Grattan Institute for years.
The Conversation is housed just off Grattan St, right next door to its founding partner, the University of Melbourne, also founder of The Grattan Institute.
The Grattan Institute is sponsored by both BHP and Origin Energy. Both were oil and gas giants when the sponsorships were taken on.
And it showed. The energy stream at The Grattan, published regularly by The Conversation, is produced by Tony Wood, a former executive at Origin Energy.
Over the years, the Grattan’s output has been spectacularly favourable to the profits of oil and gas giants.
How about The Conversation practice what it preaches and stops publishing Grattan’s sponsored oil and gas toxic cloud?
