KPIX-TV5 (CBS – San Francisco, CA)
March 13, 2007
by Hank Plante
Watch the video of this broadcast here.
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They’re calling it "Big Oil U," as hundreds of millions of dollars are gushing from big oil companies onto local campuses, including UC Berkeley and Stanford.
The ads are already running.
"ExxonMobil has teamed up with Stanford university, to find breakthrough technologies, to deliver more energy while reducing greenhouse gas emissions," an ExxonMobil ad says.
And the criticism is coming in.
"They mention Stanford because they get credibility by being associated with Stanford," said John Simpson of the Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights.
And now his consumer-rights group is raising questions about oil companies sponsoring research projects on local campuses.
"Here you have companies that don’t have very good images doing everything they can to associate with well known high quality research institutions. And clearly they’re burnishing their image," Simpson said.
CBS 5 asked Simpson why he thinks this is happening.
"Because it’s what I call ‘green-washing’," Simpson said. "They’re trying to wrap themselves in a new-found mantra of concern about the environment."
At Stanford, their ties to ExxonMobil have already cost the university $2.5 million that Hollywood producer Steve Bing has rescinded.
At Cal, BP will spend $500 million, a world record for a university research grant.
In both cases, the companies are paying for research on biosciences and energy.
"What this BP initiative is about is vastly improving the technology," said Steve Chu, Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "And so we’re really thinking between one third and all of U.S. gas consumption today being replaced by biofuels."
At issue: who’s really going to govern how the research is done on campus.
"I think that the idea of large scale investment by an oil company, an oil company with a somewhat troubled history is not necessarily a bad thing. We actually have been clamoring for years in fact decades for the big energy companies to get involved in solar and wind and biofuels," said UC Berkeley energy professor Dan Kammen. "But the problem is that governance really has to keep a clear separation between the public interest and what a private company would want to do."
The details are presently being worked out.
Both Stanford and UC Berkeley say they will direct their own research, and that it won’t be subject to oil company approval. The universities say their goal is to find real solutions to the energy problem.