Carbon Captured How the fossil fuel industry influenced climate research

An investigative series by ProPublica and Drilled

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.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

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. 

The “Wedges” paper was the initiative’s first big swing. And it succeeded beyond anything its authors could have imagined. 

BP executives were deeply involved throughout the paper’s creation, according to an investigation by ProPublica and Drilled. Socolow and Pacala, the authors of “Wedges” and the new center’s co-directors, not only discussed ideas with the company but, in a departure from academic norms, passed drafts back and forth and welcomed extensive feedback. 

Like a book publisher shaping a clunky early draft into a bestseller, an executive at the company suggested the scientists punch up the language, which they did. Browne himself suggested wording that became a part of the title. Together they helped make wonky scientific ideas more digestible for popular consumption. BP even tried — unsuccessfully — to revise a version of it.  

“Chaps, I have had a go at rewriting the paper,” Browne’s climate adviser wrote the researchers at one point. 

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. 

“Chaps, I have had a go at rewriting the paper.”

Chris Mottershead, BP climate adviser

Gardiner Hill, a former vice president and climate executive at BP who worked with the Princeton program, told ProPublica and Drilled that BP took academic freedom seriously. It “did not oversee any of the publications” that Princeton put out under its sponsorship, he said. A spokesperson for BP declined to respond to two lists of questions sent by ProPublica and Drilled.

Socolow and Pacala say they were sincere in their intent to solve climate change in the best way they believed possible, at a time when it was not obvious that wind and solar would succeed the way they have today. The researchers say BP had no control over the scientific content of the paper. They rejected the view that technologies didn’t exist to start solving climate change immediately and hoped carbon capture offered, as Pacala said, a way to make fossil fuels “climate safe.” 

But “Wedges” oversold the readiness of carbon capture and storage, describing it as “already deployed” industrially. Reporting by ProPublica and Drilled has found that even today, the technology faces financial and technical hurdles and is unlikely to ever work at the scale needed to avert extreme warming. 

And the broader solution set that “Wedges” promoted, including expanding the use of natural gas, has meanwhile helped perpetuate a system in which fossil fuels remain the predominant source of energy and the emissions they cause have continued. 

“An unfortunate consequence” of the “Wedges” paper, wrote climate scientist Ken Caldeira, New York University physics professor Marty Hoffert and others in a 2013 critique, “was to make the solution seem easy.”

Moreover, for the past quarter century, as research into carbon capture and storage and other industry-friendly solutions have enjoyed robust funding and attention, other ideas that might have replaced carbon-heavy energy entirely — reducing warming and potentially saving lives — were drowned out, several researchers told ProPublica and Drilled.

“Wedges” would likely never have been written without BP’s funding, Socolow said. Scientists and ethicists say the paper may not have been seen as credible or earned its acclaim had the extent of BP’s involvement been fully disclosed. 

Neither BP nor Princeton responded to specific questions about our findings. 

This is the story of how one of the most influential climate papers in history came to exist thanks to the support of one of the companies most responsible for causing the climate crisis — and one with a deep financial stake in how the technologies described in the paper would play out. It is part of a broader investigation by ProPublica and Drilled into how the fossil fuel industry has helped steer the global response to climate change by pouring billions of dollars into research at elite universities. Since the 1990s, oil companies have sponsored research centers, kept offices on campuses, paid the salaries of scientists and, in at least one case, held veto power over what professors and scientists could study with their money. 

Today, the impacts of those efforts are everywhere, so ingrained in our understanding of what it means to solve climate change that it can be hard to conceive of another way forward. Even the U.N.’s assessment of how to deal with the threat of climate change continues to pin hope on capturing tremendous amounts of carbon pollution and burying it in the Earth. 

So little has been done to avert fossil fuel emissions for so long, said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with the research nonprofit Berkeley Earth, that there is little remaining choice. 

“We’ve just wasted so much time,” he said, that meeting goals to limit global warming has become “functionally impossible.” 

A lab coat surrounded by flowers and office supplies sits in a pool of splattered black oil.

2

A Place of Influence

“Establishing cooperative relationships”

Photo illustration by Tonje Thilesen for ProPublica

On a sunny morning in the spring of 1997, Browne took to the podium at Stanford University’s open-air Frost Amphitheater to deliver a speech unlike anything ever heard from an oil executive. 

“There is now an effective consensus … that there is a discernible human influence on the climate,” Browne, a small, professorly man with an air of British formality, told the audience. For years, BP and the other big oil companies had been part of an industry group called the Global Climate Coalition, working to sow doubt about global warming and avert agreements that would force cuts in heat-trapping pollution. Now Browne, having pulled BP out of the group, was suddenly pledging his company would be taking “substantial, real and measurable” action to fix the crisis.

Still, Browne cautioned against haste even as he urged action. If governments were too aggressive in cutting fossil fuel use, he warned, their actions would “crash into the realities of economic growth.” Instead, BP would seek to be more efficient — seizing “low-hanging fruit.” And it would experiment with capturing carbon to stop fossil fuel emissions from entering the atmosphere. 

This was the start of a long transition in BP’s branding and in the way it worked with thought leaders to shape the company’s future. 

A close-up photograph of a man’s face with a serious expression.
John Browne, the chief executive of BP, in 1998 James Leynse/Corbis/Getty Images

By then, oil companies had already begun investing in universities’ climate work. Exxon started giving money for climate research to Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in the late 1970s. Then in 1991, the company funded the launch of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to the program’s former co-director, Henry Jacoby. Chevron, Shell and BP also later supported the program, which developed influential climate-related models.

Fossil fuel companies recognized that they could benefit from spotlighting the research of prominent scientists whose ideas were aligned with their interests. And they strategized to boost the influence of those ideas in the global policy response to climate change. 

In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute, the largest and most powerful oil industry lobbying group in the U.S., established what it called its Global Climate Science Communications Plan. An internal document described the importance of outreach aimed at “establishing cooperative relationships” with “scientists whose research in this field supports our position” and developing “opportunities to maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours.” 

In 1999, Browne asked his chief scientist, Bernie Bulkin, to find research programs the company could support in the U.S. Bulkin — who told ProPublica and Drilled that he had never heard of the API initiative to engage with scientists — decided to set up a climate-focused program that could test the viability of carbon capture and storage, a budding technology. 

For decades, oil companies had extracted carbon dioxide from the Earth and pumped it back underground to force more oil out under pressure, a process called enhanced oil recovery. If that process were adapted to store CO2 in the earth forever, then billions of tons of carbon emissions could, in theory, be captured from smokestacks and buried. Global emissions could be reduced without cutting fossil fuel use at all. 

A handful of scientists had been making the case that this might be doable. One of them was Socolow, a theoretical physicist who had been leading an interdisciplinary environmental program at Princeton since 1971. 

In 1997, Socolow ran a summer workshop for the U.S. Department of Energy in which he and other experts suggested that natural gas, coal and other fuels could be used to make clean-burning hydrogen. If the emissions from the process could be captured and stored away forever, it might be possible to use fossil fuels without contributing much to global warming. 

Socolow wanted to address climate change. But he was also predisposed to remedies that would not require what he described as “a priori, the sacrifice of the energy value of oil, gas, and coal.” In graduate school he studied with scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project, and he worried that supporting nuclear energy could lead to the proliferation of weapons. He thought solar, wind and hydro power would each present their own environmental problems.

Carbon capture and storage, though, could make switching away from fossil fuels less urgent and was something that “brings the oil industry to the table.”

Robert Socolow, left, and Stephen Pacala, right, of Princeton University, pictured in Time magazine in 2007 Jonathan Saunders

The oil companies had doubts that carbon capture and storage technology would work. “Nobody had any idea what it would cost and whether there was anything practical at scale,” Bulkin recalled in an interview. Still, Bulkin thought there would be little downside for BP in trying. If it didn’t work for the climate, it might help the company produce more fossil fuels. 

Bulkin began evaluating America’s top universities. It was, he wrote in his 2019 memoir, a “determinedly elitist” selection process aimed at getting “the greatest benefit to the company.” Researchers at MIT and Stanford had pioneered work on carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery. But a colleague had heard Socolow give a presentation on carbon capture and was impressed. So Bulkin added Princeton into the mix, and in early 2000, Bulkin said, each of the universities submitted proposals to BP for funding of a program to expand carbon capture research. 

Stanford saw carbon capture and storage as a geological problem, MIT more of an engineering challenge, Bulkin said. Princeton’s labs didn’t have the technical expertise in carbon capture that the other two schools had. But Socolow came off as masterful at synthesizing energy challenges and environmental concerns, and Pacala brought deep knowledge of how carbon moves between Earth’s atmosphere, land and oceans. Together, they offered a more systemic way of thinking about carbon capture. 

That June, weeks before BP announced it was rebranding as Beyond Petroleum, Bulkin told Pacala and Socolow they had won. BP would commit roughly $15 million over 10 years to form the university’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative. The program would focus roughly one third on earth sciences research, one third on carbon capture and one third on policy efforts. Pacala got Ford Motor Co. to contribute $5 million more. 

When it was announced that October, the $20 million gift amounted to the largest corporate grant in Princeton’s history. 

A spokesperson for Princeton told ProPublica and Drilled that partnerships with corporations make up just over 3% of the university’s research funding but help it “address real-world problems.” Princeton, the spokesperson added, maintains policies that “prevent outside funders from exercising undue influence over research,” including not permitting sponsors to have veto power over publications. 

Representatives from Columbia University and Ford did not respond to requests for comment. A representative from MIT wrote that Exxon “did not direct the Joint Program’s research agenda.”


BP Promotes New Princeton Carbon Mitigation Initiative

Courtesy of Science History Institute

From the start, Princeton’s contract with BP was supposed to protect its academic independence, Pacala told ProPublica and Drilled. The company wasn’t supposed to direct what its money was going to be spent on, he said. “BP can’t tell us what to do.” 

But BP and the Princeton researchers were eager to collaborate, and both Socolow and Pacala said they sought ideas no matter where they came from. “The university has an obligation to welcome all points of view, while fiercely protecting its own independence and the independence of its investigators,” Socolow said in an email. 

In late 2000, Princeton researchers, BP officials and representatives from Ford gathered at the enormous Italianate mansion of Princeton’s president. 

“We spent about two days just talking about what would be useful to us,” Bulkin recalled in an interview. Princeton scientists “threw out ideas, and we said, ‘Well, we could help on this’ or ‘That’s maybe interesting, maybe not,” he said. “Tell us more.’”

Together, the scientists and their funders hammered out an ambitious vision: According to a memo summarizing the meeting, the Carbon Mitigation Initiative would become a “world-class” program focused on basic earth science and carbon capture through “a new kind of engagement.” 

It would become “a place of influence” that would, ultimately, “help shape government research priorities.”

Rows of desks are lined up in a miniature library setting. The sun shines on the wooden walls, casting a shadow on the BP logo hung there.

3

Evolution of “Wedges”

“A complete blank-sheet-of-paper rewrite”

Photo illustration by Tonje Thilesen for ProPublica

In January 2003, BP executives traveled to Princeton for the Carbon Mitigation Initiative’s second annual meeting. The center had much to show for its work on earth systems modeling and had made technical progress on carbon capture and storage. But Pacala and Socolow quickly turned to their newest work: a simple framework they were developing to bring CO2 emissions under control immediately using methods that already existed. 

Climate progress was in a state of paralysis. Groups denying the evidence of climate science were eroding political support for policy action. At the same time, climate modelers were suggesting it might be too expensive to fix climate change until the end of the century. President George W. Bush, in tacit agreement, pulled the United States out of the Kyoto treaty, the 1997 legally binding agreement that 192 countries signed to reduce emissions. Instead, Bush’s administration focused on expanding basic research into low-carbon energy technologies, which suggested to Pacala and Socolow that leaders didn’t think they had tools to address the crisis. 

The Princeton researchers believed they did have tools and that failing to deploy them soon could spell disaster for the climate. They’d listed the fuels, technologies and conservation approaches that would lead to lower emissions, including manufacturing cars that get 60 mpg, expanding wind and solar power, regrowing forests and developing hydrogen-based fuels. The idea was to stack them up, allowing each to account for a portion of the reductions needed to flatten the surging rate of global emissions. They diagrammed it for their BP sponsors as a big triangle beneath the rising line of future carbon emissions, what Socolow recalls describing as a “wedge,” cut up into equal-sized slices. Each one represented a strategy that could offset a billion tons of CO2 each year by the middle of the century.

Two Charts in Pacala and Socolow’s Original Paper Introduced the Concept of “Wedges”

The first chart shows how emissions would rise under a business as usual (BAU) scenario versus one where emissions were stabilized (WRE500).
The second chart shows a “stabilization triangle” made of slices or wedges representing possible methods for reducing emissions.
Source: The journal Science. Annotated by ProPublica.

Many of the approaches remained dependent on using fossil fuels and could result in still more emissions, not less. So the plan also leaned heavily on carbon capture to remove pollution and make those approaches work. “We were CCS enthusiasts,” Socolow said in an interview. 

But the researchers appeared to be stretching their own parameters to make carbon capture and storage fit. The “Wedges” framework was supposed to be made up of “ready to deploy” technologies. Yet carbon capture and storage had barely been tested, and no experts interviewed could recall a commercial power plant using it. 

Still, the Princeton group kept it at the center of the mix. 

That fall, Pacala traveled to London to present the work directly to BP CEO Browne. In the city’s Westminster district, Pacala traversed the leafy St. James’s Square and entered BP’s brick office building, where he was shown past a pair of security guards and seated across from Browne in a busy room. 

Pacala, whom a colleague described as an expert “pitchman,” presented his chart of ideas: Use oil and gas more efficiently. Replace coal-fired power plants. Reduce emissions, ultimately, by capturing them and burying them underground. Each action, he said, would take “slices” out of the total amount of future carbon pollution. 

Browne listened attentively. The straightforward framework made a complex problem seem manageable. But the “slices” terminology confused him. “They’re kind of wedges, aren’t they?” Pacala recalls him saying.   

“We’re like, ‘Yeah, whatever you want,’” Pacala remembers thinking. “‘You’re paying the bills, buddy.’”

From that point forward, Socolow and Pacala were thoroughly committed to “Wedges.” Days after the London meeting, they wrote the material up into a white paper for BP titled “The Stabilization Wedge: Consolidation of BP’s Environmental Leadership.” In an email to ProPublica and Drilled, Socolow wrote that the document was not a first draft of “Wedges,” but, he added, it was the first substantial write-up of his ideas. 

A November 2003 email from BP climate adviser Chris Mottershead to Pacala and Socolow proposes that BP and Princeton co-brand the research BP sponsored. Courtesy of Science History Institute. Redacted by ProPublica.
A March 2004 email from Mottershead to Pacala and Socolow says he has rewritten a draft of their paper. Courtesy of Science History Institute. Redacted by ProPublica.

In the months following, Pacala and Socolow refined that work, and BP remained closely involved. 

At one point the researchers sent an early paper draft for review, and Chris Mottershead, Browne’s climate adviser, offered “scathing criticism,” Pacala recalls. Mottershead asked for a “punchy” and “non-academic” tone that might have more popular appeal. 

In response Pacala says he did “a complete blank-sheet-of-paper rewrite” and sent the revised draft back to Mottershead and Socolow four hours later. Mottershead loved it. He later replied with a question: “What is the potential for co-branding the ‘wedges paper … ?’” Socolow and Pacala declined. Mottershead wanted to change certain terms and asked for a more open-ended timeframe to reduce emissions. He was denied. Another time, he checked the researchers’ calculations, finding a single error. 

In late 2003, Browne himself borrowed from the “Wedges” thinking in a speech. A few months later, records show, Socolow solicited feedback from another member of BP’s management. The researchers also contributed ideas from their work for BP’s internal training and corporate communications. 

Then in March, Mottershead wrote his own version of the two scientists’ near final draft, stating in an email that he was attempting to “make the word ‘wedge’ the brand for the work.” 

To Mottershead, Princeton’s draft was too dense to break through into popular discourse. He pushed for language that would make the “wedges” concepts more digestible. 

“We’re like, ‘Yeah, whatever you want. You’re paying the bills, buddy.’”

Stephen Pacala, “Wedges” co-author and co-director of Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative

Most significantly, the draft shows, Mottershead tried to inject language that raised doubt about the legitimacy of basic climate science, describing that science as “provisional” and adding that “great uncertainties remain.”

Ultimately, Mottershead did not convince the authors to adopt that specific text. “BP tried to cross the line repeatedly,” Pacala said in an interview. “They were constantly trying to push their agenda. We just didn’t do any of it.”

But several edits would survive, including one that couched emissions in the context of economic growth and another in which Mottershead suggested moving a punchy line from lower in the article up to the very top. All, Pacala says, were changes the researchers would have made anyway. 

Still, the situation amounted to what several academic researchers describe as a highly unusual level of coordination on a major scientific work on climate change. Pacala went so far as to offer Mottershead co-authorship, at one point placing his name at the top of the paper. Yet Mottershead declined. In retrospect, Pacala told ProPublica and Drilled, Mottershead contributed to the paper’s style and presentation but not to its original scientific ideas. Mottershead did not respond to several messages, including a list of questions, over several months. 

The relationship “flies in the face of the idea of academic independence,” said Benjamin Franta, an associate professor of climate litigation at University of Oxford who studies fossil fuel influence in academia.

Pacala and Socolow each defended their independence in several interviews with ProPublica and Drilled, saying that it is common for sponsors to be involved in sharing preliminary ideas. Socolow wrote that he was buoyed by BP’s interest and thought it offered “a way of amplifying Steve’s and my impact.” 

Pacala acknowledged that there are “inevitable dangers of proximity” to industry but said that BP’s staff had “no control over the findings.” Instead, the researchers believed they were influencing BP by encouraging it to plan for climate change, which, Pacala said, “was a win.”

Pacala rejected the concern that BP’s influence on their thinking might be subtle, stating that people who are subconsciously influenced in this way have “weak character.” 

In fact, decades of peer-reviewed research has found that, across fields of study, industry funding tends to bias researchers whether they are aware of it or not, affecting what people choose to study and what they find. Industry-funded studies of food or drugs are more likely to conclude they are safe. In medical settings even a small gift from a drug company — like a box of doughnuts — can lead doctors to prescribe its brands more often. One of the few studies to look at the impact of oil and gas funding in academia found that reports out of fossil-fuel-funded research centers describe natural gas more favorably than renewables, whereas reports from centers less reliant on that funding do not. The influence of this funding, according to a working paper from Harvard researchers, is not always visible to those swayed by it. 

“It’s the whole subconscious bias problem,” said Harvard historian of science and corporate influence expert Naomi Oreskes. If “continued funding relies on having this good relationship and having this alignment, you are going to be influenced by it.”

At Princeton, Michael Oppenheimer, the director of Princeton’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, said that he does not believe Socolow or Pacala would have been swayed by feedback they disagreed with. But Oppenheimer, a close colleague of the two, added that Princeton doesn’t train researchers on how to navigate the influence that might come from close interactions with sponsors. 

And whether the researchers were affected by that proximity or not, Mottershead’s persistent feedback about the article’s scientific ideas “goes over the line,” Oppenheimer said. “That’s bad, that’s unacceptable.”

A spokesperson for Princeton told ProPublica and Drilled that the university provides “extensive guidance and information” to faculty and researchers about working with industry. Sponsors review drafts only to guard confidential material, the university added, or in cases where a sponsor is a co-author of a work. The university did not respond to a question about whether the extent of BP’s involvement in “Wedges” violated its policy and did not say whether it trains its staff on how to protect against more subtle influence.

Other colleagues at Princeton encouraged Socolow and Pacala to challenge BP more. In written feedback on the original draft for BP, visiting scientist Stefano Consonni said that the researchers needed to be more blunt with BP about the difficulty of and need to move away from fossil fuels in order to truly reduce carbon emissions. Bob Williams, a senior research scientist at Princeton whose detailed work on carbon capture inspired Socolow’s, warned the researchers that the draft made solving climate change “sound easier than it actually is.” 

In early May 2004, Socolow and Pacala submitted their paper to the journal Science. By then, “slices” had indeed become “wedges,” a decision Socolow says they made to “harmonize” their vocabulary with Browne’s. The paper included 15 wedges, three of which involved some form of carbon capture and eight of which involved using traditional fossil fuels, though in more efficient, or less polluting, ways. 

It described all of those wedges as “already deployed at an industrial scale,” a characterization that some experts said stretched the facts in the case of carbon capture and storage. Pacala told ProPublica and Drilled that each of the components required for carbon capture and storage were in use and just needed to be combined in a new way. He conceded the paper’s description was a “communications compromise.” 

And the researchers made a key assumption — one that left room for the continued use of oil and gas — about how much carbon pollution the atmosphere could absorb while still avoiding disastrous warming. The number was in the mainstream at the time, but BP officials made it clear to the researchers that they supported it. 

In an email to Socolow after the paper’s submission, Mottershead celebrated, writing that the target meant that “around 50% of primary energy could still come from fossil fuels.”

This, Mottershead wrote, was “THE key piece of the framework for politicians and business, in my view.” Socolow acknowledged, in another subsequent email, that the figure would keep the fossil fuel industry a “part of things for at least another 50 years.” 

In the July/August 2004 edition of Foreign Affairs, Browne published his own lengthy essay, titled “Beyond Kyoto,” in which he introduced key elements of the “Wedges” framework. 

Then, in mid-August, Science published the “Wedges” paper. 

In a small-type footnote that comprises “References and Notes,” Socolow and Pacala list BP and Ford as sponsors of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative and thank Mottershead as a BP employee, along with several other scientists. 

But it is not clear that anyone understood the depth of their collaboration. In response to emailed questions, Science pointed to its policy stating that anyone contributing substantially to an article must be listed as an author. The journal does not have a policy about sponsors providing editorial feedback on drafts. And in a statement, a spokesperson wrote, “Science cannot assess authorship questions based on third-party descriptions of contributions.” 

Science also pointed to a conflict disclosure essay from 2004, which describes a “check off form” the journal supplied researchers to gauge potential conflicts. The journal said it did not keep copies of forms from that time. 

“Obviously there’s a conflict of interest here,” said Oxford’s Franta, pointing to BP’s financial interest in climate policy that might arise from the paper’s conclusions. 

“The issue is how well it is managed,” Pacala said, noting that “almost every researcher” with outside funding grapples with such issues. “Of course there is conflict of interest.”

Regardless of whether explicit conflict disclosures were in place or were met, said Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University who studies climate policy and activism, there were norms and expectations around interactions with sponsors. BP’s repeated input on the “Wedges” paper throughout its development, she said, was simply “wrong.”

“That is not how science is supposed to happen.”

A science magazine is open on a wooden desk surrounded by trinkets in the shape of a globe, a brain and flowers. A hand with a blue medical glove is lifting up a page with oil splattered over it.

4

A Credible Success

“How to save the world in fifteen easy steps”

Photo illustration by Tonje Thilesen for ProPublica

In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” exposed millions of viewers to the fact that fossil fuel use was pushing the planet toward disaster. Gore soberly presented the earth’s dwindling ice, rising seas and increasingly violent weather. And then, toward the end, he shifted to optimism. Americans need not despair, he said, because “we already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem.” Behind him as he spoke, the opening words of Socolow and Pacala’s paper — the same ones Mottershead had suggested moving to the top — appeared on a screen. 

Papers published in Science often enjoy a media moment before fading into obscurity. “Wedges” was different. Its simple, optimistic message — polished with the help of BP’s sophisticated public relations expertise — had an irresistible allure. And the media loved it. “How to save the world in fifteen easy steps,” read one headline the day it was published. “The 15 ways to stop global warming revealed!” read another. 

Socolow gave dozens of interviews and spoke at institutions including the American Petroleum Institute, Lehman Brothers and the United Nations Conference of the Parties, where representatives from more than 190 countries coordinate international climate action. When the Bush administration released a major climate change technology strategy document in 2006, it highlighted the “Wedges” framework. “‘I get it, we don’t need pie in the sky,” Socolow recalled an administration official telling him. 

“Wedges” fast became part of the zeitgeist. In 2006, Pacala and Socolow wrote a popular article about it for Scientific American. BP, in lockstep, took out a full-page ad. In 2007, Princeton released a “Wedges” game online, which Pacala built a prototype for from planks of wood in his garage. High school students, business leaders and policymakers played it. University professors folded Princeton’s climate plan into their lessons across the country. Geoffrey Supran, a climate disinformation expert at the University of Miami, says that the paper was “mandatory reading” when he was a grad student at MIT.

“This was a paradigm paper for a whole generation of university students and grad students,” said Franta, who was also taught the “Wedges” paper as a graduate student at Harvard. “It was like, ‘This is how you solve climate change.’”

Al Gore stands in front of a screen with a quote saying, “Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problems … .” The quote is attributed to Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow in Science on Aug. 13, 2004.
The findings of the “Wedges” paper were referenced in the conclusion of former Vice President Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” when Gore says, “We already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem.” “An Inconvenient Truth.” Screenshot by ProPublica.

Had a BP executive’s name been on the top of “Wedges,” the paper’s message would likely have been less credible and its release met with more skepticism as a product of oil industry interests, several academics told ProPublica and Drilled. 

“Would Gore have used it if he knew?” asked Craig Callender, a philosophy professor at the University of California San Diego, referring to the details of BP’s involvement. “Many were already skeptical of the wedge paper’s reliance on CCS,” he said. “If they saw the hand of BP behind it, that skepticism would have grown.”

A spokesperson for Gore distanced him from Socolow and Pacala’s work but did not directly address the question of whether knowledge of BP’s role in the paper would have changed his opinion of their findings. Pacala said in an interview that he thought broader disclosure of BP’s partnership would have made the paper more credible, not less. 

Branded as Princeton research, the paper’s influence continued to expand, boosting the university program’s renown and Pacala and Socolow’s stature. 

In 2007, Time magazine touted the scientists as “innovators” in its “Global Warming Survival Guide.” Socolow was offered a seat on a National Research Council committee on climate policy. He testified before the Senate Finance Committee, where, in a 2007 hearing, he touted a BP carbon capture and storage pilot project as evidence that the technology was “commercially mature.” He argued that the U.S. should offer tax credits for coal power only if those plants used carbon capture technology. A year later, Congress inserted a significant carbon capture subsidy into the tax code — though it didn’t require coal plants to adopt it.

Pacala, meanwhile, was selected as chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committees focusing on emissions monitoring and on carbon dioxide removal. In 2021, when President Joe Biden appointed him to serve on his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a White House press release cited the “Wedges” paper as Pacala’s standout accomplishment.  

The paper would go on to see an explosive degree of exposure. According to Supran’s lab at the University of Miami, the roughly 3,000 peer reviewed papers that cite “Wedges” have themselves now been cited over 210,000 times, demonstrating a ripple effect rare in the universe of published science.

“That is not how science is supposed to happen.”

Dana Fisher, sociologist at American University

“Wedges” “certainly did help them a lot,” Bulkin said of the two scientists’ swift rise. “And of course, it increased the reputation of CMI and of Princeton as leading thinkers about climate change.”

This was exactly what was intended. And the benefits cut both ways.   

BP’s investment in Princeton had proven an enormous success. “Wedges” “drove strategy” within the company, according to a 2014 internal memo. After the paper was published, BP announced it would double down on carbon capture and storage demonstration projects. It also said it would spend $8 billion over 10 years on four other wedge strategies: solar, wind, hydrogen and natural gas. (The company had nearly $240 billion in oil-and-gas-related revenues in 2005 alone.) 

As BP’s initial commitment came to a close, Princeton and the company worked out a deal to keep it going. Princeton’s proposition was that it would continue to do work that would grow political and regulatory support for carbon capture, effectively using the university’s reputation to advance BP’s policy interests. “The few research groups perceived by the public as relatively unbiased will have a major role to play,” Pacala and Socolow wrote to BP in a 2007 funding document.

In response, Pacala says that Princeton was “advancing its own interest to provide to the public unbiased information.” Any “partial alignment” with BP was coincidental. 

Another funding document stated that with BP’s support, Princeton sought to become “the world’s premier institution in climate and energy” and suggested its graduates could one day work for the company. In addition to carbon capture, the documents showed the initiative’s work had expanded in earth sciences, climate modeling and policy.

Jeff Greenblatt, a former researcher for Socolow who contributed to the “Wedges” paper, said the researchers had engaged in “a delicate dance” between maintaining their intellectual integrity and pleasing BP. “I’m sure that if they included that fossil fuels were not part of the solution to a significant extent, they probably would have seen their last year of funding,” he said. “That’s just the reality of these kinds of things.”

Socolow, in an interview, agreed that BP’s funding was likely conditioned on his support for maintaining fossil fuels. “There was a synergy,” he told ProPublica and Drilled in January. When the university and BP revisited their relationship for a 2016-2020 funding renewal, the parties made it explicit: “A premise from the outset was that CMI’s job was to invent a future where the fossil fuel industries have not disappeared,” the renewal document said. “This is still our job.” 

BP extended its funding for Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative three times. It was originally slated to sunset in 2010 but was renewed through 2015, then 2020 and finally until 2025. All told, the company gave Princeton’s program more than $56 million. 

Meanwhile, for all of the paper’s popular acclaim, many fellow scientists say “Wedges” missed its target. 

“We thought it was wrong,” Caldeira, the climate scientist and former researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told ProPublica and Drilled. His research showed that far more carbon needed to be dealt with than “Wedges” acknowledged and that effective solutions would require much more research. 

Two years before “Wedges” was published, Caldeira and Hoffert, the NYU professor, published their own research in Science concluding that a “radical restructuring of the global energy system,” was needed. They thought that few of the technologies “Wedges” focused on were mature and described “severe deficiencies.” In 2013, they explicitly criticized Pacala and Socolow’s analysis in a rejoinder article titled “Rethinking Wedges,” in which they wrote that “Pacala and Socolow gave us a way to believe that the energy-carbon-climate problem was manageable.” 

To a lot of people, Hoffert said, “Wedges” served a purpose. “You have to give people hope” that climate change could be solved without radically disrupting society, he said in a recent interview. “Yet in the end,” he added, if that hope is gained by convincing people they can continue without getting rid of fossil fuels, “you’re gonna be driving the car over a cliff.” 

The fact is, he added, BP “got their money’s worth.”