Two good friends, Rebecca Grekin and Yannai Kashtan, met up one crisp December morning at Stanford University, where they both study and teach. The campus was deserted for the holidays, an emptiness at odds with the school’s image as a place where giants roam, engaged in groundbreaking research on heart transplants, jet aerodynamics, high-performance computing. Work that has changed the world.
Ms. Grekin and Mr. Kashtan are young climate researchers. I had asked them there to explain how they hoped to change the world themselves.
They have very different ideas about how to do that. A big question: What role should money from oil and gas — the very industry that’s the main contributor to global warming— have in funding work like theirs?
“I’m just not convinced we need fossil fuel companies’ help,” said Mr. Kashtan, 25, as we toured the lab where he works, surrounded by sensitive electronic gear used to detect methane. “The forces and the incentives are aligned in the wrong direction. It makes me very cynical.”
For Ms. Grekin, 26, that’s a delicate issue. Her entire academic career, including her Ph.D. work at Stanford, has been funded by Exxon Mobil.
“I know people who are trying to change things from the inside,” she said. “I’ve seen change.”
We spent hours that day — first at her lab, then in his, and then off campus at a hole-in-the-wall Burmese joint — as the two disagreed and agreed in amiable and insistent ways about some of the biggest questions facing the next generation of climate scientists like themselves.
Should universities accept climate funding from the very companies whose products are heating up the planet? Is it better to work for change from within a system, or from outside? How much should the world count on cutting-edge technologies that seem far-fetched today?
And the big one. What is gained or lost when oil producers fund climate solutions?
Some of Ms. Grekin’s research has focused on calculating the true climate impact of food and other things that people consume. In the hallway outside her lab hangs a large poster describing her work. The poster prominently features the ExxonMobil logo.
“They brag about their relationship with Stanford, their association with bright, young, environmentally minded scientists,” Mr. Kashtan said, standing in the hallway. “But the majority of their money is going to things that are pretty explicitly about getting more oil out of the ground.”
Ms. Grekin pushed back on any suggestion that Exxon had influenced her research. The poster was simply being transparent about her funding, she said, which is always appropriate. “You’re supposed to share your funding sources,” she said. “They don’t have anything to do with the research. They just happen to fund graduate school.”
In any case, her work is already being used at 40 universities to cut the climate impact of their sprawling food services, she pointed out. Would that have happened otherwise?
Despite differences like these, Mr. Kashtan and Ms. Grekin are friends. They fill in to teach each other’s classes. They both talk passionately about solutions to climate change, and both co-signed an open letter last year calling on Stanford to establish guidelines for engaging with fossil fuel companies.
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