"Despite decades of donations and research footed by the industry, we’re just now beginning to understand how much fossil fuel money has shaped academia."
"In 2013, the Hess Foundation—the charitable arm of oil and gas company the Hess Corporation—gave $500,000 to Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health to endow a professorship in the Environmental Health Sciences. The donation came just a year after the company settled with the EPA for $850,000 in penalties for violations of the Clean Air Act, agreeing to spend $45 million to install new pollution controls at a refinery in Port Reading, New Jersey—just across the bridge from Staten Island, the southern tip of New York City. More than a decade later, the Leon Hess Professorship persists, endowed to the school’s chair of environmental health. The Hess Foundation has quietly continued its donations to Columbia, giving more than $6.3 million over the past 10 years.
The name “Hess” may not be as recognizable as Exxon and Shell. But the Hess Corporation ranks 67th among the 100 companies whose historic emissions are the most responsible for climate change; according to research compiled by the group Carbon Majors, Hess is responsible for .15% of emissions since the Industrial Revolution began. Founded in 1933 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey by Leon Hess, what began as a small oil delivery company eventually grew into a fossil fuel exploration empire, with operations in the U.S., Southeast Asia, and South America. At the time of its initial donation to Columbia, the president of the Hess Foundation was also CEO of the Hess Corporation. (The Hess Corporation did not respond to a request for comment from Drilled.)
This is the normalcy in which fossil fuel money functions in the U.S. university system. Elite universities have, for decades, accepted millions of dollars from some of the world’s biggest polluters. In turn, associations with these universities have served to burnish these companies’ public image, fund science that’s used as the basis for industry-friendly policy proposals, and—in some cases—advance their perspectives and goals in front of politicians and policymakers as the world increasingly turns away from their products. Journalists have rarely written about routine donations, like the ones made from the Hess Foundation to Columbia; student protesters, until recently, have focused primarily on money flowing from their universities’ endowments to fossil fuel companies via various investments and retirement funds, not the money flowing onto their campuses from these companies."
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