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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBeyond Denial: How Oil Execs Shaped a Landmark Climate Study
https://www.propublica.org/article/wedges-climate-research-bp-fossil-fuel-princetonIT IS RARE that a single scientific paper shapes how people think about a challenge as daunting as climate change. But one, known as Wedges, 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 didnt 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.
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RockCreek
(1,635 posts)with all payout being in reparitions for the world to use to fight climate change.
From later in the article:
"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 BPs funding, Socolow said. Scientists and ethicists say the paper may not have been seen as credible or earned its acclaim had the extent of BPs 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 by ProPublica and 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, held veto power over what professors and scientists could study with their money.""
dalton99a
(96,256 posts)maxsolomon
(39,430 posts)What they didnt 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.
The Wedges paper was the initiatives first big swing. And it succeeded beyond anything its authors could have imagined.
Weve just wasted so much time, he said, that meeting goals to limit global warming has become functionally impossible.
DemocracyForever
(324 posts)My engineer father always taught me that carbon capture is nothing more than an excuse to keep burning the planet killing fossil fuels. He also taught me that nuclear power isn't green because no one has figured out how to dispose of the toxic nuclear waste. BTW, Al Gore has since said that the fossil fuel industry is better at capturing politicians than it is at capturing greenhouse gas emissions.