BP backed the carbon wedges. Did it shape the science — or are we seeing shadows?
by Auden Schendler
Most of you have probably seen the Propublica report on the influence BP had on the “Wedges” study done by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala. If not, it’s good reporting and worth reading: https://www.propublica.org/article/wedges-climate-research-bp-fossil-fuel-princeton.
In short, the study — which became the basis for decades of climate thinking and strategy — was funded and heavily influenced by BP. You know: Beyond Petroleum. Or, put more succinctly: game, set, and match, bro.
When I first came across it, and read Bill McKibben’s take (https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/youre-paying-the-bills-buddy?utm_source=publication-search) I thought: “Man, we’ve been duped from the beginning and duped to the end.” We fell for the notion of the benevolent business (still falling for it), fell for “Beyond Petroleum,” fell for personal responsibility as a way to distract us from taking on system change.
The “Wedges” paper was just another example of falling for it. EVERY major environmental leader I knew at that time cited it, treated it as gospel, saw it as the way forward. I did too. And I thought: wow. We are really screwed, because even the best of us, the most hard-nosed, fell for it. Think about the now completely debunked things most mainstream climate activists backed over the years (myself absolutely included): gas as a bridge past coal; biomass as climate solution; unregulated offsets as anything; corporate sustainability as systemic cure. And think about the things we’re still falling for: carbon capture, hydrogen, small nukes, nature-based offsets.
I felt so dispirited about all this that I contacted two friends who provided very different takes on the situation.
One, a climate science and policy expert, pointed out that carbon capture and storage (CCS)—which is widely seen as a pure-play by fossil fuel interests to enable continued emissions without any there there on efficacy—was just one of the wedges. It was not the centerpiece. There were wedges of gas, some hydrogen. But there were more wedges of energy, efficiency, and renewable energy. Each individual wedge was incredibly difficult to achieve.
So it wasn’t so much that they were hyping carbon capture and storage but rather showing how incredibly difficult it was to do this. And as Propublica points out, there were only shooting for 500 ppm. This was before there was a consensus that you had to keep emissions below 450 ppm or better. My colleague felt they were overhyping the technological availability of CCS, yes, but pointed out that one could argue they were overhyping the technological availability of solar also. It was not a prediction, nor was it prescriptive. That’s one take on the situation, which my friend also noted was bad, just perhaps not as bad as the article made it out to be.
I also talked to,Naomi Oreskes, who has thought a lot about patronage through her work on the history of tobacco funding among other areas:
“I think people misunderstand how patronage works. It is very rare that a patron tells a scientist what to say or do. Rather, it is a process of selection. Patrons look for people who, for whatever reason, might be sympathetic to their views. Then they cultivate, support, promote them. It seems clear that is what happened here, and it matters, as various people have said, because that work got tremendous attention, and gave credibility to the idea—which we are still stuck in—that CCS could be a major part of the solution, not in the distant future, but now. Also, I recall even at the time that the whole paper was weird, because it was framed around emissions stabilization, when what we needed was immediate emissions reduction and then eventual elimination. So even if you take away the dubious wedges, it was never the solution that it was billed as.”
Naomi’s point about patronage is that it’s like mob-strategy, where you don’t actually have to say anything at all, it’s clear. “It’s so cool you’re studying CCS, boys!”
In many ways, though, the whole story of BP’s patronage of Socolow and Pacala, which happened 25 years ago, was just a drop in the bucket, and the very beginning of a much larger problem, as Joe Romm pointed out to me. What problem? As just one example, here are some of the sponsors of the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy. At the “Visionary” donor level of more than $1M since 2022, you have Occidental Petroleum and Tellurian, an LNG company. At the “Transformative Circle” of a quarter million to a million since 2024, you have ExxonMobil, Aramco Americas, and Venture Global LNG, Inc.
For more on the subject, Benjamin Franta is your guy. The Pernicious Influence of Big Oil on America’s Universities – Op-Ed or Opinion Piece – Stanford Law School.
In conclusion, the climate movement, academia, and the corporate sustainability agenda have always been in a death embrace with fossil fuels. That’s in part why colleagues and I are organizing a summit to rethink the notion of sustainable business, and figure out what might be next, if there even is a role for business in the pursuit of sustainability at all. Watch this space for updates on that.
Auden Schendler is the author of “Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul” (2025) and ‘Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution” (2009). He was a member of the Colorado Quality Control Division from 2066 to 2020. He spent 26 years running the sustainability programs for Aspen One, formerly called the Aspen Skiing Co. In December 2025, upon the occasion of the winter solstice, he contributed an essay to Big Pivots: “Why light will prevail over darkness.”
- A death embrace with fossil fuels - July 16, 2026
- When snow runoff is low, so are our spirits - May 11, 2026
- Why light will prevail over darkness - December 24, 2025
