So this was back when I was a grad student at Harvard and I was working at the

Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and you know that's at the Kennedy School of

Government. The role of fossil fuel companies in academia had started to become a bigger issue and

this was around probably like 2015 or so. For instance I think you know when the journalism school at

Columbia came out with the Exxon new investigation or they started doing some work related to that,

then Exxon responded by kind of threatening to take away their funding in so many words and it

just people became more and more interested in who's funding these programs at universities and

is it fossil fuel companies and what kind of pressure does that put on those academic programs to

do one thing or another study one thing or another or not to study something. This has been

front up. He first told me the story back in 2017 and it's actually kind of what got me wondering

about fossil fuel funding of social science programs at universities. That investigation he mentioned,

Exxon knew was led by Columbia Journalism School graduates and it found that Exxon had been

using climate science to shape its own business plans for decades but had simultaneously been

hiding that science from the public. I started to look into this issue at Harvard looking at what

programs are funded by oil companies and a lot of the programs at the Kennedy School, the government

school to do with public policy were funded by big oil companies. For example I worked at the

Belfer Center for Science International Affairs it's one of the most influential academic think tanks

in the world and the founder of that founded an oil and gas company so back to 2015. So this issue

is starting to emerge. I'm starting to write about it a little bit and it was seen as a very

unpopular thing to do and at this early stage it was seen as like just really uncouth to raise

this issue and I even had professors at the Kennedy School who just wouldn't talk to me. I think

because they were upset that I was writing about the issue but anyway to get to the main point

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