Cautionary Expose of GEP research

[Paul Wapner]

Hi Gepers,

 

In 2004, Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow of Princeton University, published the article, “Stabilization wedges: Solving the climate problem for the next 50 years with current technologies,” Science, 305(5686), 968–972.  Many of us used it in our classes to help students strategize paths toward a sustainable energy future. ProPublica just published a seemingly devastating critique of the study showing that the research was not only funded by BP and Ford but that those companies had a direct hand in ensuring that the article guaranteed continued use of fossil fuels in the future.  To the degree that the expose is accurate, it serves as a reminder that academic research is never value-free and that many of us may be subscribing to scholarly studies that have agendas of which we are unaware.  The critique is especially relevant for researchers of climate capture technologies. 

 

Here is a link to the ProPublica article: https://www.propublica.org/article/wedges-climate-research-bp-fossil-fuel-princeton 

 

Below is a summary of the article by author, Bill McKibben.  The summary is from Bill’s newsletter so please read beyond the first two paragraphs. 

 

Princeton, BP, and a sad but extremely revealing chapter in the climate fight

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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more "You're paying the bills, buddy." Princeton, BP, and a sad but extremely revealing chapter in the climate fight Bill McKibben Jun 29     READ IN APP   I spent the last few days in Altadena, interviewing survivors of the horrific fires in January of 2025 (just 18 months ago, though a lot has happened since); brave people told me about brothers, sisters, fathers that died. I stopped in Boulder on the way home to talk with climate scientists—an orange cloud from the wildfire that yesterday killed three firefighters near the Utah border obscured the sky. So I’m not in the best mood to talk coolly and clinically about where we stand right now. And that bad mood was deepened by some truly remarkable reporting that began dropping late last week, from a combined team at Pro Publica and Drilled that included the truly vital freelance reporter Amy Westervelt. It concerned a paper by two Princeton professors, Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, from the summer of 2004, 22 years ago. A two-decade-old academic paper does not seem all that crucial—but it played a huge role in setting the terms of the climate and energy debate, one that endures to this day. And it illustrates exactly how wasteful much of our current federal effort has become. So—even though it’s infuriating—it’s a story very much worth recounting. Settle in. Apologies for my anger here; it comes, perhaps, from having watched this whole climate story play out over such a long stretch. Thanks to those who make this free newsletter possible by taking out a voluntary and modestly priced subscription Subscribed This paper quickly became known as “Wedges.” It emerged at one of the low points in the climate cycle that I referred to last week, the post-Kyoto pre-Inconvenient Truth period when Dick Cheney was driving federal energy policy and not much was happening, and so people were grateful for the assertion from these two climate academics that Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century. A portfolio of technologies now exists to meet the world’s energy needs over the next 50years and limit atmospheric CO2 to a trajectory that avoids a doubling of the preindustrial concentration. They went on to outline a series of fifteen “wedges”—everything from substituting natural gas for coal to inreasing fuel efficiency for cars—that they said would add up to enough emissions reductions to stabilize global temperatures. And crucially they said that that none of this was pie-in-the-sky. Every element in this portfolio has passed beyond the laboratory bench and demonstration project; many are already implemented somewhere at full industrial scale. Although no element is a credible candidate for doing the entire job (or even half the job) by itself, the portfolio as a whole is large enough that not every element has to be used. Because it told people what they very much hoped to hear, it became an instant sensation—when Al Gore’s remarkable movie came out in 2006, for instance, it ended on a positive note. 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. I remember hoping that much of this paper would turn out to be true—at least it gave people something to work on. And hey, it was coming from respected, independent researchers, right? Why not give them the respect they seemed to deserve. But the paper’s scientific validity began to erode pretty fast. For one thing, they’d picked a comparatively easy baseline, plotting to hold atmospheric concentrations of co2 to 550 parts per million, or double the level before the Industrial Revolution. Already by 2004 that number was seriously in question; by then more and more scientists were murmuring about 450 ppm, and in 2008 Jim Hansen published a landmark paper putting the safe maximum at 350 ppm. (I remember this well, because we built the planet’s first big global grassroots climate campaign on the back of that number). There were plenty of other things that seemed unlikely, and that turned out to be wrong. For instance, they were big on biomass (and when I mean big, I mean they proposed using one sixth of the planet’s cropland to grow stuff you would then burn). They wanted to produce massive amounts of hydrogen for use in fuel cell cars, a technology that’s gone nowhere. The word “batteries” goes unmentioned. But these are mistakes—they couldn’t have known then how these technologies would develop, though their guesses were staggeringly wrong, despite being delivered with absolute Ivy League assurance. Their biggest “mistake” was to advocate replacing much of the world’s coal-fired power with natural gas—indeed they wanted to quadruple the amount of natural gas. It was a few years later that scientists led by Bob Howarth at Cornell began to explain exactly what folly this was—that you were simply trading reductions in heat-trapping carbon dioxide for increases in heat-trapping methane—but by then it was too late, and we were deep into the fracking era whose final chapter (overseas export of liquefied natural gas) is now the main goal of the fossil fuel industry. If you’ve been paying attention, most of these mistakes pointed in the direction of continuing to burn stuff. And it turns out that was no mere mistake—it was pretty much the goal. Because as Westervelt and the Pro Publica team have now uncovered, the tiny-print final footnote to the paper was the most misleading thing in it The authors thank J. Greenblatt, R. Hotinski, and R. Williams at Princeton; K. Keller at Penn State; and C. Mottershead at BP. This paper is a product of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI) of the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University. CMI (www.princeton.edu/cmi) is sponsored by BP and Ford. In fact, BP was no footnote to this study—the paper had been a joint production of its authors and British Petroleum, whose chairman, John Browne, literally came up with the phrase (“wedges”) that would define the paper. “We’re like, ‘Yeah, whatever you want,’” Pacala remembers thinking. “‘You’re paying the bills, buddy.’” The enterprising reporters have tracked down the voluminous correspondence between the oil company and the scientists, and god it’s damning. Here’s a note from a BP executive to the researchers, for instance The pro-fossil fuel slant of the Wedges paper was no accident. Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative was funded by BP, and the reasons were quite explicit. Here’s the most damning exchange the reporters uncovered, in my opinion 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.” This commitment was unblushing in ways that blow my mind. 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.” And of course if your plan for dealing with global warming was to keep burning lots of fossil fuel, you were going to have to figure out how to deal with all the carbon that would therefore pour into the atmosphere. By default, one—or really, three—of the wedges would have to be carbon capture and sequestration. And in order to make the case that this was a viable technology, the authors had to—well, they had to massage the truth way past the point where they should have. “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. The effect of this paper can be felt today. When the Inflation Reduction Act was passed in the Biden years, it contained desperately needed funding for sun, wind, and batteries. But Joe Manchin, who had taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anyone else in DC (including from BP’s North American Political Action Committee) traded his decisive vote for a grab bag of gifts for the fossil fuel industry—including huge amounts of federal money for carbon capture and sequestration. I remember a conversation with Mark Jacobson—the unbought Stanford researcher who figured out that sun, wind, and batteries were the wedges that would count—shortly after the IRA passed. Jacobson (who had been attacked by a committee of 21 luminaries for insisting that renewable energy was the best way out of the climate mess) was lamenting the waste of money on carbon capture, and I was dutifully explaining that it was the pound of flesh that had been necessary to get the money for the actual energy transition. Jacobson, as it turns out, had the last bitter laugh—when the Republican congress gutted the IRA last year, the carbon capture part was one of the few things they left intact. It’s an ongoing pointless effort whose only purpose is to continue providing some kind of cover for burning more fossil fuel. A government that doesn’t believe in global warming is nonetheless paying the oil industry incredible sums to pretend to capture carbon. And when I say pretend, that’s what I mean. The Pro Publica crew simultaneously published another piece demonstrating quite conclusively that two decades later Socolow’s “enthusiasm” for CCS was a dead end. As they write, “right now, globally, we’re permanently burying less CO2 than a single large power plant can emit in a year.” Here’s the key chart from that paper If you look at it closely, the blue lines show the projections made by the various groups that followed Socolow and Pacala for how much carbon we’d capture, compared with the brown line at the bottom, which shows how much we actually do capture. Which is, to a rounding error, none. The second chart shows all the projections for how much solar power we’d generate, none of which came even close to capturing how fast this technology would explode. Give Jacobson the last laugh here. As he pointed out last week, “replacing gas with renewables for California’s electricity has reduced twice the carbon as all the world’s carbon capture projects.” That is, a few years work in one of the fifty states in one of the 200 countries on earth has done more than the thing that the fossil fuel industry has based its whole climate rationale on. A couple of final footnotes here, which really get at the perfidy of all of this. In the same year that BP was rewriting the Princeton paper, they were also using one of the world’s biggest ad agencies, Ogilvy and Mather, to spread the idea of the “carbon footprint,” which is to say the idea that it’s all your fault, not BP’s. (Read Rebecca Solnit’s account. It’s a hard call but I’d say their pollution of the world’s information system outranks even their pollution of the Gulf of Mexico). And last month Princeton became the first of the Ivies to renege on their pledge to divest from fossil fuels. Why? Because according to their investment manager, fossil fuel companies “will necessarily play a significant role in the clean-energy transition we want for our nation and for the Earth.” Hey, put a Tiger in your tank. At intellectually corrupt Princeton, and among the nation’s intellectually corrupt elites, too little ever changes. Share In other energy and climate news: +One of the better accounts of Europe’s extreme heat came from the Wall Street Journal, which interviewed lots of Americans and expats Americans in Europe have been getting the shock of their lives this summer as temperatures soar to new records across the continent. Highs have approached 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the U.K. this week, and topped that level in cities like Paris. Expats and tourists from some of the hottest, muggiest U.S. states are bewildered: How has a lifetime of sweltering heat not prepared them for this? “I did get humbled,” said Marissa Parks, a 30-year-old nurse who moved to London last year from Houston. “Being a Texan, it feels kind of embarrassing to be in London and be like, ‘I can’t handle the heat here.’” But if you want a real, sweaty feel, you need to read Sarah Wilson’s Parisian chronicle in her This is Precious substack. My apartment is currently 43C. It drops to 38C overnight. I slept in a tent in a forest for a few nights. I tried three nights in the apartment. Each night I would wander the city with my laptop, hopping from a workspace to a hotel foyer to a gym (where I’d take a cold shower in my bra and undies and dry myself with my dress; my soggy outfit would keep me cool for another hour or so). I sat in parks, my feet in the fountain, talking to family and friends in Australia until 1am when it was safe(ish) to head upstairs. After opening the window, I turned on the fan, putting a wet towel over the top. I showered with my sheet and another towel and got into bed, wearing frozen socks (a tip from a WhatsApp group), the wet sheet and towel over my body, and holding two ice bricks. Within two hours everything was dry and hot again and I repeated the process. There has been much pointless social media back-and-forth about air conditioning in Europe, which of course we need now. (We need it even more desperately in Asia, South America, and Africa). And the good news is that it comes most easily and efficiently from the device—the heat pump—that we’ve been advocating for nonstop since this newsletter started. (Thanks again to all of you, who spearheaded our successful effort to get a quarter billion dollars from the Defense Production Act under Biden for boosting their production). My only addition to this debate would be to point out that on an overheating world we might be better off calling them ‘cold pumps.’ In fact, Dan McCarthy reported over the weekend that whatever you call them, these devices are about to surpass air conditioners in total American sales +Boy oh boy do they work fast in China, where in a matter of months sodium batteries have gone from cool new innovation to being tested—successfully—in long-haul 18-wheelers. As Jo Borrás reports: Chinese heavy truck brand FAW Jiefang recently completed a full-condition, systematic test that ran for nearly seven months and covered more than 15,000 km (~9,350 miles). The tests closely tracked its electric truck fleet’s real-world operations in both extreme heat and cold, relying on continuous service-style operations (as opposed to laboratory test cycles) that exposed the sodium-ion battery packs to the kinds of stresses electric trucking fleets actually face on a daily basis: long-haul runs, repeated charging sessions, and constant exposure to changing road and weather conditions. At -40°C, the 339 kWh sodium-ion battery pack co-developed by FAW and battery supplier Zhongke Haina retained more than 90% of its usable capacity – more than enough to ensure it can reliably meet the freight needs in the coldest regions of northern China, where nighttime temperatures can frequently plummet to -20°C in areas like Harbin and Shenyang. Meanwhile, Chinese carmaker BYD froze one of its luxury EVs at -22F for 24 hours just to show it wouldn’t matter. And as Iulian Dnistran reports, when they plugged it in the “car’s state of charge went from 20% to 97% in 12 minutes, just like BYD claimed when it debuted its latest battery tech, making the range meter read nearly 626 miles (1,009 kilometers).” I know you well enough to know that you would like a picture . +What happens when you pretend climate change doesn’t exist? In Corpus Christi, as Dylan Baddour describes, they’re finding out: Climate scientists have concluded that the Earth’s warming atmosphere has made droughts worse over the past 25 years and will continue to do so over the next 25. But that isn’t reflected in Texas’ water plans. “Climate-related projections are not something that any of Texas’ state water plans have included,” a spokesman for the Texas Water Development Board said, referring questions about climate to the Office of the State Climatologist. “The majority of factors point toward increased drought severity,” said an assessment of weather trends by the climatologist’s office in 2024, Corpus Christi’s hottest year on record. “Future rainfall deficits comparable to those earlier in the 20th century will have greater impacts due to higher temperatures.” As a result, the city very nearly ran out of water this spring. +A Pakistani dentist, Zain Ashar, was noticing huge levels of tooth decay in many of his patients who were outdoor laborers. And he figured out why, in a story that gives you some deep sense of just how much we’re pushing the limits of the planet and of ourselves. Like most outdoor laborers during peak season, Rashid drinks 15 to 20 liters of water daily to survive the relentless heat. (While this can seem like an excessive amount of water, a worker can sweat as much as 1 to 1.5 liters an hour from heavy labor in 45°C temperatures. To compensate for the loss of electrolytes through sweat, workers here consume yogurt and lime drinks with added salt, and eat pickles and other salty foods.) By mid-morning, sweat soaks through his clothes as his body’s cooling mechanism works overtime. He chews on sugarcane during breaks, which provides quick calories — an ancient practice that sustained ancestors but now compounds health problems. Nothing about his general health seemed unusual at first. But when I asked about saliva — that often-overlooked component of oral health that most people never think about — there was a long pause. “My mouth is always dry,” he said quietly in Urdu. “Even when I drink water until I feel sick. My mouth stays dry.” That’s when something clicked into place that would fundamentally reshape my understanding of what I’d been observing in my practice. I’d documented this pattern of tooth decay in 37 patients by this point, all agricultural workers, all from the same climate-ravaged zones in the central-eastern state of Punjab. I just hadn’t connected the dots to heat-induced dehydration and its catastrophic effects on oral chemistry. Their mouths weren’t just dry — external climate forces were fundamentally turning them into hostile environments for their own teeth. I realized I was witnessing something far more systemic and urgent than a collection of individual dental problems. This was environmental collapse writing itself directly into human biological systems. SALIVA IS NOT just moisture. It’s a physiological fortress, a sophisticated system that most people take entirely for granted until it fails them. For anyone, but especially for people doing physically demanding work in extreme conditions, saliva performs three critical functions that are absolutely essential to tooth survival: It buffers acids from food and stomach reflux that would otherwise erode enamel; it holds calcium and phosphate minerals, which actively remineralize tooth enamel when microscopic damage occurs; and it contains enzymes and antibodies that fight bacteria, helping prevent infection and decay. Without adequate saliva flow — and I mean genuinely adequate, not just the minimal amount needed to swallow — teeth begin to demineralize within weeks, a process that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse. +An Italian windfarm took down its older generation of windmills, replacing them with newer models—and as Reuters reports, even though the number of turbines fell by 73 percent, the farm is now producing two and half times as much electricity. Edison ​said updating ⁠plants could play a major role in Italian wind power growth, noting that those ​suitable for upgrades account for around 6 ​GW of ⁠the country’s 13.5 GW of installed wind capacity. Modernisation of existing wind sites could potentially add more than 13 GW ⁠of ​renewable capacity, helping meet Italy’s national ​target of 26 GW of installed wind power by 2030. +Dan Gearino has a cheery account of the dawn of the plug-in solar era in America where (and huge shout out here to Michael Richardson and his Third Act crew) ten states have now approved the new technology this spring. He talks with Craig Morris, head of Germany’s plug-in solar association: Morris explained that the main benefit he sees with plug-in solar is that consumers are taking greater control of their energy costs and becoming participants in the transition to clean energy. He views this as part of creating and maintaining a political consensus that supports the transition, which is good for everyone. He also sees land-use benefits, with plug-in solar occupying otherwise unused spaces in yards and on roofs and balconies. His organization has calculated that widespread adoption of plug-in solar would meet about 2 percent of Germany’s electricity demand. +Interesting new book from Will Hackman, who makes the case that we need to be using different language Let’s talk about public health. Let’s talk about pollen counts, allergies, lung inflammation, asthma and other conditions made worse by climate change. Let’s talk about hurricanes, floods and fires, but not only from 30,000 feet. Let’s talk about what happened in those communities and what it took for people to rebuild. There are so many ways to make this more specific to humans. It is not about saving the planet. It is about saving us. It is not just a climate crisis; it is a humanity crisis. I have found that this approach can be received well by Republicans and conservatives. I live in a rural and conservative part of Virginia. When you start talking to people about what climate change means to them personally and locally — why they have a self-interest in the issue — they respond. +This is disgusting: Kylie Mohr documents the upsurge in betting on wildfires in prediction markets like Polymarket In January 2025, Polymarket listed almost 20 questions, created by the platform’s “markets team,” related to the wildfires burning up Southern California. How many acres will the Palisades Fire burn by Friday, three days after it ignited on a Tuesday? Will the Palisades Fire reach Santa Monica by Sunday? When will the Palisades fire be 50% contained? Will the Palisades and Eaton fires be contained before February? People spent $1.2 million betting on these queries, according to Aeon Magazine. Aside from the moral problem, as Mohr points out this creates a lucrative incentive for arson. +Sudarshan Varadhan, Ruth Chai and Adrian Portugal bring the good news that the Philippines may be the new Pakistan when it comes to ultra-rapid solar deployment. In the wake of the Iran war, People in the Philippines are flocking to install solar power ​on rooftops and escape the burden of soaring electricity prices, making it the world’s biggest spender on solar panels since ‌the war in Iran started. Top power distributor Meralco has raised prices by 10% since the Middle East conflict began in late February. Now, a median household spends around 12% of monthly income on electricity, assuming it consumes 200 kilowatt-hours — approximately the monthly average for three people. Adrian Sabatera, a 39-year-old software engineer, thought about getting solar for years but found it too ⁠costly. That changed as costs came down and electricity prices kept rising. “I wouldn’t be shocked if a third of the middle-class population eventually finds ​their way to this setup,” Sabatera said after recently pulling the trigger on a 570,000 peso ($9,300) installation at the Manila house he shares with ​three others. If you can afford a modestly priced subscription without undue financial stress, thank you, and if you can’t, no worries Subscribed