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BEYOND DENIAL – HOW OIL EXECS SHAPED A LANDMARK CLIMATE STUDY  
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Maddie Stone, Drilled; additional reporting by Amy Westervelt,
Drilled, and Katie Worth, ProPublica
June 25, 2026
ProPublica
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_ Carbon Captured How the fossil fuel industry influenced climate
research. An investigative series by ProPublica and Drilled _

, Photo illustration by Tonje Thilesen for ProPublica

 

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
[[link removed]],”
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
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and welcomed extensive feedback
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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
[[link removed]].  

“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
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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
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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
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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
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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.” 

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. 

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
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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
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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.”

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.”

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
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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.”

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.

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. 

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
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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
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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
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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
[[link removed]].
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
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its brands more often. One of the few studies to look at the impact of
oil and gas funding in academia found
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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
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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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]],” in
which he introduced key elements of the “Wedges” framework. 

Then, in mid-August, Science published the “Wedges” paper
[[link removed]]_._ 

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
[[link removed]] 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.”

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.’”

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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]].

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
[[link removed]].
“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.”

* big oil
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* BP
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* Climate Change
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* pseudo science
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* carbon capture
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* Natural Gas
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* funding
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* ethics
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* American Petroleum Institute
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* coal
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* academic independence
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