UC San Diego describes itself as a “leading university” when it comes to combating global climate change. However, a document recently released by a campus activist group, Green New Deal at UCSD, complicates this picture. 

The 30-page report describes extensive ties between UCSD and fossil fuel companies, who the report’s authors describe as “the undeniable antagonists in a world on the brink of climate disaster.” These ties include corporate subsidization of university research, investment of university endowments in the oil and gas industry, and the use of technology developed at UCSD in environmentally-destructive oil and gas drilling. 

Green New Deal at UCSD was founded in 2019 and describes itself as a “democratically organized, grassroots collective of students, trainees, staff, union members, faculty, alumni, and retirees affiliated with our university.” According to its website, the organization’s main goals are: 

• Ensure justice & degrowth are taught in the general education climate requirement
• Implement the Chancellor’s goal to electrify by 2030
• Cut ties with fossil finance and end industry-funded research
• Advocate for non-profit public ownership of the city’s electric distribution
• Support student well-being and workers’ rights.

A committee of the organization’s members compiled the report using publicly-accessible financial documents. Some of this information was freely available on databases run by independent watchdogs such as Web of Science and Foundation Directory, while others had to be sought out using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. FOIA allows private citizens to obtain otherwise undisclosed documents from government entities under the principle of freedom of information.

The report found that UCSD has received over $82 million in direct donations from the fossil fuel industry since 2003. It is worth noting that, since not all donations are required to be disclosed, the true figure could be even higher. Additionally, UCSD — and the University of California system as a whole — has extensive investments in the fossil fuel sector; the UCSD Foundation has just shy of $40 million invested in oil and gas companies, while the UC Regents endowment has almost $69 million in fossil fuels and another $12 million in “midstream funds,” which refers to  the construction and operation of oil pipelines.

These ties run deeper than mere financial entanglements: several members of the UCSD Foundation’s Board of Directors currently serve or have served on the boards of fossil fuel companies, including two current members who are also on the board of Sempra Energy, a natural gas company. 

Further, the fossil fuel industry plays an extensive role in funding research at UCSD;  since 2008, at least 296 scientific articles published by UCSD researchers have relied on funding from fossil fuel companies. Moreover, so-called “research partnerships” between oil and gas companies and UCSD institutions, especially the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, allow corporations like Shell to utilize technology created by UCSD researchers in exchange for funding its development. 

One of the report’s undergraduate student authors, Aliya Ahmed, argued that corporate funding gives research at UCSD a pro-fossil fuel bias. 

“When a fossil fuel company funds a research project, that gives them a good amount of influence and power over that project,” Ahmed said. “It influences our research to be friendly towards fossil fuels and continuing the use of fossil fuels and delaying the transition to renewable energy on campus.”

Ahmed said that oil and gas companies’ involvement with the university helps to normalize these businesses’ environmentally destructive activities. 

“It provides a social license to operate,” Ahmed explained. “It tells our researchers and our community that it’s okay for fossil fuel companies to continue their operations as usual — because they’re funding our research, funding our education, so we’re going to let them do what they’re going to do.” 

Ahmed cited the so-called “research partnerships” as an example of how UCSD directly participates in the extraction of fossil fuels. Under one such partnership, scientists at the SIO developed electromagnetic methods of surveying the seafloor. This technology is then used by companies like Shell—a fossil fuel giant that has funded this research intermittently since 2005 —to find and tap into undersea oil and gas reserves. In this case, the technology developed at UCSD is indispensable to the process of extracting fossil fuels,  and is being directly paid to do so by the oil companies themselves. 

“You can see that Shell is getting to use the resources of SIO for its own interests,” Ahmed said. 

She explained that she hopes the report will help focus the goals of climate activism on campus — that in order to call for the university to dissolve its ties with the fossil fuel industry, it’s critical to know what exactly those ties are.

Ahmed also emphasized that the report is not exhaustive, given that there are aspects of UCSD’s connections with the fossil fuel industry that the university is not obligated to make public and cannot be accessed by FOIA requests. For example, money that the university may have indirectly invested in fossil fuels through private equity firms is not required to be disclosed. 

“[The report] is incomplete until the university discloses all of this information, which includes all the investments, all the research funding. … All the information we included is all publicly-disclosed information, but there is still loads of information that the university is hiding from the public. We encourage the university to respond to this report,” Ahmed said.

Ahmed stressed that these kinds of links to the fossil fuel industry are made all the more egregious by UCSD’s long tradition of climate change research. Notably, the university’s founding father, Roger Revelle, was among the first scientists to study anthropogenic climate change. UCSD researchers today, including at SIO, are undeniably at the forefront of researching climate change and its impacts. 

“It’s not that the university isn’t doing climate or environmental research — it’s not like folks at Scripps Institution of Oceanography aren’t doing good research. They definitely are,” Ahmed said. “But at the same time, it’s being tainted by these kinds of back door ties.”