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Is the Earth itself a giant living creature?

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Monday, April 22, 2024

Rachel Victoria Hillis for Vox An old, much-ridiculed hypothesis said yes. It’s time to take it seriously. In the 1970s, chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis put forth a bold theory: The Earth is a giant living organism. When a mammal is hot, it sweats to cool itself off. If you nick your skin with a knife, the skin will scab and heal. Lovelock and Margulis argued that our planet has similar processes of self-regulation, which arguably, make it seem like the Earth itself is alive. The idea wasn’t unprecedented in human history. “The fundamental concept of a living world is ancient,” says Ferris Jabr, a science journalist and author of the upcoming book Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. The book explores all the ways life has shaped our physical world and, in doing so, inevitably revisits the question “Is the Earth alive?” Lovelock and Margulis called the idea “the Gaia Hypothesis” — named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth. It was openly mocked by many in mainstream Western science. “For many decades, the Gaia hypothesis was considered kind of this fringe sort of woo-woo idea,” Jabr says. “Because for biologists,” Jabr says, life is a specific thing. “It is typically thought of as an organism that is a product of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. And Earth as a planet does not meet those criteria.” It didn’t help that the original articulation of Gaia granted Earth a certain degree of sentience. The hypothesis argued “all of the living organisms on Earth are collaborating to deliberately create a climate that is suitable for life,” as Jabr says. But yet, this idea has persisted, for a few reasons. Scientists have never been able to precisely define what life is. So, it’s been hard to dismiss Gaia completely. The Gaia hypothesis has also evolved over the years. Later iterations deemphasized that life was “collaborating” to transform the Earth, Jabr explains. Which still leaves a lot to be explored: Certainly living things don’t need to be thought of as conscious, or have agency, to be considered alive. Consider the clam, which lacks a central nervous system. Jabr found in the years since Gaia was first introduced, scientists have uncovered more connections between biology, ecology, and geology, which make the boundaries between these disciplines appear even more fuzzy. The Amazon rainforest essentially “summons” its own rain, as Jabr explains in his book. They learned how life is involved in the process that generated the continents. Life plays a role in regulating Earth’s temperature. They’ve learned that just about everywhere you look on Earth, you find life influencing the physical properties of our planet. In reporting his book, Jabr comes to the conclusion that not only is the Earth indeed a living creature, but thinking about it in such a way might help inspire action in dealing with the climate crisis. Brian Resnick spoke to Jabr for an episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast that explores scientific mysteries, unanswered questions, and all the things we learn by diving into the unknown. You can listen to the full conversation here. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Brian Resnick Do you think the Earth is alive? Ferris Jabr I do. I think Earth is alive. We can think of Earth as a genuine living entity, in a meaningful sense, and in a scientific sense. There are four parts to the argument that substantiate that statement. Brian Resnick What’s the first? Ferris Jabr Life isn’t just on Earth. It literally came out of Earth. It is literally part of Earth. It is Earth. All of the matter that we refer to as life is Earth animated — that’s how I come to think about it. If you accept that, then at a bare minimum, you have to accept as a scientific fact that the surface of the planet is genuinely alive, because it is matter that has become animated. Brian Resnick Earth animated? What do you mean by that? Ferris Jabr Every single living organism is literally made of Earth. All of its constituent elements and components are parts of the planet. We all come from the planet. We all return to the planet. It’s just a big cycle. And so life, the biological matter on the planet, is literally the matter of the planet, animated. It is living matter. Imagine a vast beach and sandcastles and other sculptures spontaneously emerge from the sand. They are still made of sand, right? They’re not suddenly divorced from the beach just because they’ve arisen from the beach. Those castles and sculptures are still literally the beach. And I think it’s the same with life and Earth. Brian Resnick So, the physical components of Earth are the material of life. And so distinguishing these two — Earth and life — seems silly because they comprise each other? Ferris Jabr The more you think about this, the more the boundaries dissolve. Every layer of the planet that we’ve been able to access, we find life there. And in the deepest mines that we have dug, we continue to find microbes and sometimes even more complex organisms like nematodes, these tiny, worm-like creatures. Brian Resnick So all life contains Earth, and Earth contains life? Ferris Jabr There are components of the Earth that are not alive in any way. The center of the planet, it’s all molten rock and there might be some solid metal in the core. But think about a redwood tree: It is mostly dead wood in terms of its volume and mass. It is mostly nonliving tissue. And then a little bit of tissue that is laced with living cells. So, you know, most complex multicellular living entities are a jumble of the animate and inanimate. Earth is not unusual in that way. Brian Resnick What is part two of your argument? Ferris Jabr All these organisms [on Earth], they give Earth a kind of anatomy and physiology. Life dramatically increases the planet’s capacity to absorb, store, and transform energy, to exchange gases, and to perform complex chemical reactions. Brian Resnick What’s a good example of this? Ferris Jabr You can think of all of the photosynthetic life on the planet acting in concert. It’s not that they’re deliberately collaborating to do something, but they’re all doing their own thing at the same time. NASA has made these amazing videos and animations and they’ve literally called them “Earth breathing,” because you can see how the levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere fluctuate with the seasons. The amount of vegetation that rings the continents, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, in the mid-latitudes, it changes dramatically with the seasons. It has a sinuous rhythm. It looks like a pulse or like breathing. Brian Resnick So, are you saying something like all of the algae or plankton in the ocean are generating this together? … Is that kind of like how all of the cells in my lungs are working together to exchange gases? Or is that not quite the right way to think about it? Ferris Jabr I think we have to be careful with making too direct a comparison. You as an organism are a product of evolution by natural selection. Your structure, your anatomy is something that was written into your genome. That’s not how the Earth system formed. Brian Resnick I’m realizing a key to this conversation is what you just corrected me on. When we’re discussing this notion about the “Earth being alive,” we’re not suggesting it’s not alive in the same way you and I are. But there’s these equivalent processes that look very similar to the way my body maintains homeostasis, for example. It’s not like the Earth is exchanging gases and doing metabolism-like things in the way I’ve been evolved to. It’s not achieving homeostasis the way you or I do. But yet it is doing something that seems analogous. Is that the kind of thing that you’re arguing here, overall? Ferris Jabr Absolutely. When we’re looking at the planet, we see life-like qualities, things that resemble the characteristics of the organism, which is the most familiar life form to us. But it is not exactly the same. It is still genuinely alive, in my opinion, but is not exactly an organism. Life is a phenomenon that occurs at multiple scales. The way I think of it is that it’s not identical at all of those scales, but it rhymes and there are analogies between each of those scales. I like to think of a leaf on a tree in a forest on a planet. There’s no disagreement whatsoever within science that the cells that compose that leaf are alive. The tissues that those cells form are alive. The leaf as a whole is a living tissue. The tree we consider an organism that is also alive. We consider each of those layers to be alive. There’s no debate or controversy about that. Once we go above the scale of the organism, this is where the debate begins. Can we think of the forest, the ecosystem, as alive as well? And then one more level higher. Can we think of the planet as alive? My argument is, yes, that each of those levels, each of those scales is equally alive but not identical. And there are analogous processes that happen at each. But they’re not exactly the same. Brian Resnick What is the next plank of your argument? Ferris Jabr Life is also an engine of planetary evolution. The planet evolves over time dramatically. It is not exactly the same as standard Darwinian evolution through natural selection, but it is very much a type of evolution. Organisms and their environments continually co-evolve. Each is profoundly changing the other. This reciprocal transformation is responsible for many of the planet’s defining features: for our breathable atmosphere, our blue sky, our bountiful oceans, our fertile soils. This is all because of life and because of the way that life has changed the planetary environments. These are not default features of the planet. Life has created them over time. Brian Resnick What is the most stunning example of how life has actually changed the planet? Ferris Jabr In the beginning, Earth had essentially no free oxygen in its atmosphere, and the sky was probably a hazy orange. And when cyanobacteria began to oxygenate the atmosphere through the innovation of photosynthesis, the sky probably started shifting toward the blue part of the spectrum. The entire chemistry of the planet changed. I mean, you suddenly had an oxygen-rich environment, whereas before it was an oxygen-poor environment. That changes absolutely everything. Brian Resnick Okay, so to get back to what you were saying before, it’s not that Earth evolves in the same way that organisms evolve. But it evolves with a different mechanism, is that right? Ferris Jabr Evolutionary biologists will say a planet cannot evolve because it doesn’t have a cohesive genome. There’s no genetic inheritance going on; there’s no sexual reproduction going on. But there are analogous processes by which changes are passed down from generation to generation that are not genetically encoded. If we think about a bunch of large mammals, they’re transforming their landscape by walking through it with their immense hefts. They’re tearing down vegetation. They’re digging in, uprooting things. They’re changing the landscape. Those changes persist. And so their descendants now are evolving in a new environment changed by their predecessors. These environmental changes are not themselves genetically encoded, but they are being passed from generation to generation, and they are inevitably influencing the evolution that follows. Brian Resnick If a fundamental part of life is that it changes the world in which it exists, how are we different for accelerating the climate crisis? Because you look at the history of the Earth and you say, well, life has powerfully changed it. Who’s to say what we’re doing is necessarily not a natural process? Ferris Jabr It’s simultaneously humbling and empowering to recognize ourselves as simply the latest chapter in this long evolutionary saga of life changing the planet. It is a basic property of life to change its environment, and we’re not an exception to that. But I do think there’s a major distinction between what our species has done and what has happened before in terms of the combined scale and speed and the variety of our changes to the planet. I don’t think there’s any species or creature before us that has changed the planet on such a large scale so quickly and in so many different ways simultaneously. We have radically altered the atmosphere, the oceans, and the continents. We’ve done it in a couple of centuries. That’s a huge part of the reason for why the crisis we’re going through right now is a crisis. It has so much to do with the scale and the speed of it. Brian Resnick What’s part four of your argument? Ferris Jabr This co-evolution, on the whole, has amplified the planet’s capacity for self-regulation and enhanced Earth’s resilience. Earth has remained alive for, you know, around 4 billion years, despite repeated catastrophes of unfathomable scale, unlike anything that we have ever experienced in human history. We have to account for that resilience, for that incredible persistence through time. It is not a deliberate thing. You know, it is not a conscious or collaborative thing. It is simply an inevitable physical process, just as evolution by natural selection is an inevitable physical process. Even in the mass extinctions in Earth’s history, life recedes to its most fundamental and most resilient forms: microbes. And then life sprouts from there. Brian Resnick Are you sure you’re right about all this? Is the scientific community coming around to accept this notion that Earth is indeed alive? Ferris Jabr I mean, this book is my personal synthesis, an argument. You know, this is my viewpoint. This is how I have come to see the Earth. There are scientists who agree with me, but I would not say that this is the consensus of modern mainstream science. I think the statement that Earth is alive remains quite controversial and provocative. However, everything else we’ve been talking about, the co-evolution of life and environment, the fact that life has profoundly changed the planet. These are all well-accepted points. Brian Resnick Which part are you most likely wrong about? Or which part do you feel like has the most room for doubt? Ferris Jabr We do not have a precise, universally accepted definition of life. We haven’t explained it on the most fundamental level. Like 100 years from now, will we have a fundamental explanation for life that we’re missing right now? And if we do, will that make thinking of planets as alive defunct? And so, I think open-mindedness is fundamental to any scientific thinking or scientific process. And we have to be open to the idea that a century from now, or even sooner, all of this will be wrong. And that’s part of what I find thrilling: We don’t have all of the answers yet. Right? These are incredibly challenging ideas and concepts that we are still working out. If we had figured it out, then we wouldn’t be talking about the Gaia hypothesis anymore. The Gaia would have been officially dead a long time ago. But I think the reason that it remains relevant and continues to be debated means that we just haven’t figured it out yet. Brian Resnick Why is it useful to think of the Earth as alive? Ferris Jabr There’s a massive difference between thinking of ourselves as living creatures that simply reside on a planet, that simply inhabit a planet, versus being a component of a much larger living entity. When we properly understand our role within the living Earth system, I think the moral urgency of the climate crisis really comes into focus. All of a sudden it’s not just that, oh, the bad humans have harmed the environment and we need to do something about it. It’s that each of us is literally Earth animated, and we are one part of this much larger, living entity. It’s a realization that everything that we are all doing moment to moment, day to day, is affecting this larger living entity in some way. Brian Resnick So, the simple point that you’re making is that we are Earth, and don’t self-harm. Ferris Jabr Right, exactly.

An illustration of a land mass is covered in wildlife, lush greenery and people all interacting. Blue water and sea life surrounds.
Rachel Victoria Hillis for Vox

An old, much-ridiculed hypothesis said yes. It’s time to take it seriously.

In the 1970s, chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis put forth a bold theory: The Earth is a giant living organism.

When a mammal is hot, it sweats to cool itself off. If you nick your skin with a knife, the skin will scab and heal. Lovelock and Margulis argued that our planet has similar processes of self-regulation, which arguably, make it seem like the Earth itself is alive.

The idea wasn’t unprecedented in human history. “The fundamental concept of a living world is ancient,” says Ferris Jabr, a science journalist and author of the upcoming book Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. The book explores all the ways life has shaped our physical world and, in doing so, inevitably revisits the question “Is the Earth alive?”

Lovelock and Margulis called the idea “the Gaia Hypothesis” — named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth. It was openly mocked by many in mainstream Western science. “For many decades, the Gaia hypothesis was considered kind of this fringe sort of woo-woo idea,” Jabr says. “Because for biologists,” Jabr says, life is a specific thing. “It is typically thought of as an organism that is a product of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. And Earth as a planet does not meet those criteria.”

It didn’t help that the original articulation of Gaia granted Earth a certain degree of sentience. The hypothesis argued “all of the living organisms on Earth are collaborating to deliberately create a climate that is suitable for life,” as Jabr says. But yet, this idea has persisted, for a few reasons. Scientists have never been able to precisely define what life is. So, it’s been hard to dismiss Gaia completely.

The Gaia hypothesis has also evolved over the years. Later iterations deemphasized that life was “collaborating” to transform the Earth, Jabr explains. Which still leaves a lot to be explored: Certainly living things don’t need to be thought of as conscious, or have agency, to be considered alive. Consider the clam, which lacks a central nervous system.

Jabr found in the years since Gaia was first introduced, scientists have uncovered more connections between biology, ecology, and geology, which make the boundaries between these disciplines appear even more fuzzy. The Amazon rainforest essentially “summons” its own rain, as Jabr explains in his book. They learned how life is involved in the process that generated the continents. Life plays a role in regulating Earth’s temperature. They’ve learned that just about everywhere you look on Earth, you find life influencing the physical properties of our planet.

In reporting his book, Jabr comes to the conclusion that not only is the Earth indeed a living creature, but thinking about it in such a way might help inspire action in dealing with the climate crisis.

Brian Resnick spoke to Jabr for an episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast that explores scientific mysteries, unanswered questions, and all the things we learn by diving into the unknown. You can listen to the full conversation here. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Brian Resnick

Do you think the Earth is alive?

Ferris Jabr

I do. I think Earth is alive. We can think of Earth as a genuine living entity, in a meaningful sense, and in a scientific sense. There are four parts to the argument that substantiate that statement.

Brian Resnick

What’s the first?

Ferris Jabr

Life isn’t just on Earth. It literally came out of Earth. It is literally part of Earth. It is Earth. All of the matter that we refer to as life is Earth animated — that’s how I come to think about it. If you accept that, then at a bare minimum, you have to accept as a scientific fact that the surface of the planet is genuinely alive, because it is matter that has become animated.

Brian Resnick

Earth animated? What do you mean by that?

Ferris Jabr

Every single living organism is literally made of Earth. All of its constituent elements and components are parts of the planet. We all come from the planet. We all return to the planet. It’s just a big cycle. And so life, the biological matter on the planet, is literally the matter of the planet, animated. It is living matter.

Imagine a vast beach and sandcastles and other sculptures spontaneously emerge from the sand. They are still made of sand, right? They’re not suddenly divorced from the beach just because they’ve arisen from the beach. Those castles and sculptures are still literally the beach. And I think it’s the same with life and Earth.

Brian Resnick

So, the physical components of Earth are the material of life. And so distinguishing these two — Earth and life — seems silly because they comprise each other?

Ferris Jabr

The more you think about this, the more the boundaries dissolve.

Every layer of the planet that we’ve been able to access, we find life there. And in the deepest mines that we have dug, we continue to find microbes and sometimes even more complex organisms like nematodes, these tiny, worm-like creatures.

Brian Resnick

So all life contains Earth, and Earth contains life?

Ferris Jabr

There are components of the Earth that are not alive in any way. The center of the planet, it’s all molten rock and there might be some solid metal in the core.

But think about a redwood tree: It is mostly dead wood in terms of its volume and mass. It is mostly nonliving tissue. And then a little bit of tissue that is laced with living cells. So, you know, most complex multicellular living entities are a jumble of the animate and inanimate. Earth is not unusual in that way.

Brian Resnick

What is part two of your argument?

Ferris Jabr

All these organisms [on Earth], they give Earth a kind of anatomy and physiology. Life dramatically increases the planet’s capacity to absorb, store, and transform energy, to exchange gases, and to perform complex chemical reactions.

Brian Resnick

What’s a good example of this?

Ferris Jabr

You can think of all of the photosynthetic life on the planet acting in concert. It’s not that they’re deliberately collaborating to do something, but they’re all doing their own thing at the same time.

NASA has made these amazing videos and animations and they’ve literally called them “Earth breathing,” because you can see how the levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere fluctuate with the seasons. The amount of vegetation that rings the continents, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, in the mid-latitudes, it changes dramatically with the seasons. It has a sinuous rhythm. It looks like a pulse or like breathing.

Brian Resnick

So, are you saying something like all of the algae or plankton in the ocean are generating this together? … Is that kind of like how all of the cells in my lungs are working together to exchange gases? Or is that not quite the right way to think about it?

Ferris Jabr

I think we have to be careful with making too direct a comparison. You as an organism are a product of evolution by natural selection. Your structure, your anatomy is something that was written into your genome. That’s not how the Earth system formed.

Brian Resnick

I’m realizing a key to this conversation is what you just corrected me on. When we’re discussing this notion about the “Earth being alive,” we’re not suggesting it’s not alive in the same way you and I are. But there’s these equivalent processes that look very similar to the way my body maintains homeostasis, for example. It’s not like the Earth is exchanging gases and doing metabolism-like things in the way I’ve been evolved to. It’s not achieving homeostasis the way you or I do. But yet it is doing something that seems analogous. Is that the kind of thing that you’re arguing here, overall?

Ferris Jabr

Absolutely.

When we’re looking at the planet, we see life-like qualities, things that resemble the characteristics of the organism, which is the most familiar life form to us. But it is not exactly the same. It is still genuinely alive, in my opinion, but is not exactly an organism.

Life is a phenomenon that occurs at multiple scales. The way I think of it is that it’s not identical at all of those scales, but it rhymes and there are analogies between each of those scales.

I like to think of a leaf on a tree in a forest on a planet.

There’s no disagreement whatsoever within science that the cells that compose that leaf are alive. The tissues that those cells form are alive. The leaf as a whole is a living tissue. The tree we consider an organism that is also alive. We consider each of those layers to be alive. There’s no debate or controversy about that.

Once we go above the scale of the organism, this is where the debate begins. Can we think of the forest, the ecosystem, as alive as well? And then one more level higher. Can we think of the planet as alive?

My argument is, yes, that each of those levels, each of those scales is equally alive but not identical. And there are analogous processes that happen at each. But they’re not exactly the same.

Brian Resnick

What is the next plank of your argument?

Ferris Jabr

Life is also an engine of planetary evolution. The planet evolves over time dramatically. It is not exactly the same as standard Darwinian evolution through natural selection, but it is very much a type of evolution.

Organisms and their environments continually co-evolve. Each is profoundly changing the other.

This reciprocal transformation is responsible for many of the planet’s defining features: for our breathable atmosphere, our blue sky, our bountiful oceans, our fertile soils. This is all because of life and because of the way that life has changed the planetary environments. These are not default features of the planet. Life has created them over time.

Brian Resnick

What is the most stunning example of how life has actually changed the planet?

Ferris Jabr

In the beginning, Earth had essentially no free oxygen in its atmosphere, and the sky was probably a hazy orange. And when cyanobacteria began to oxygenate the atmosphere through the innovation of photosynthesis, the sky probably started shifting toward the blue part of the spectrum.

The entire chemistry of the planet changed. I mean, you suddenly had an oxygen-rich environment, whereas before it was an oxygen-poor environment. That changes absolutely everything.

Brian Resnick

Okay, so to get back to what you were saying before, it’s not that Earth evolves in the same way that organisms evolve. But it evolves with a different mechanism, is that right?

Ferris Jabr

Evolutionary biologists will say a planet cannot evolve because it doesn’t have a cohesive genome. There’s no genetic inheritance going on; there’s no sexual reproduction going on.

But there are analogous processes by which changes are passed down from generation to generation that are not genetically encoded.

If we think about a bunch of large mammals, they’re transforming their landscape by walking through it with their immense hefts. They’re tearing down vegetation. They’re digging in, uprooting things. They’re changing the landscape.

Those changes persist. And so their descendants now are evolving in a new environment changed by their predecessors. These environmental changes are not themselves genetically encoded, but they are being passed from generation to generation, and they are inevitably influencing the evolution that follows.

Brian Resnick

If a fundamental part of life is that it changes the world in which it exists, how are we different for accelerating the climate crisis? Because you look at the history of the Earth and you say, well, life has powerfully changed it. Who’s to say what we’re doing is necessarily not a natural process?

Ferris Jabr

It’s simultaneously humbling and empowering to recognize ourselves as simply the latest chapter in this long evolutionary saga of life changing the planet. It is a basic property of life to change its environment, and we’re not an exception to that.

But I do think there’s a major distinction between what our species has done and what has happened before in terms of the combined scale and speed and the variety of our changes to the planet. I don’t think there’s any species or creature before us that has changed the planet on such a large scale so quickly and in so many different ways simultaneously.

We have radically altered the atmosphere, the oceans, and the continents. We’ve done it in a couple of centuries. That’s a huge part of the reason for why the crisis we’re going through right now is a crisis. It has so much to do with the scale and the speed of it.

Brian Resnick

What’s part four of your argument?

Ferris Jabr

This co-evolution, on the whole, has amplified the planet’s capacity for self-regulation and enhanced Earth’s resilience. Earth has remained alive for, you know, around 4 billion years, despite repeated catastrophes of unfathomable scale, unlike anything that we have ever experienced in human history. We have to account for that resilience, for that incredible persistence through time.

It is not a deliberate thing. You know, it is not a conscious or collaborative thing. It is simply an inevitable physical process, just as evolution by natural selection is an inevitable physical process.

Even in the mass extinctions in Earth’s history, life recedes to its most fundamental and most resilient forms: microbes. And then life sprouts from there.

Brian Resnick

Are you sure you’re right about all this? Is the scientific community coming around to accept this notion that Earth is indeed alive?

Ferris Jabr

I mean, this book is my personal synthesis, an argument. You know, this is my viewpoint. This is how I have come to see the Earth. There are scientists who agree with me, but I would not say that this is the consensus of modern mainstream science. I think the statement that Earth is alive remains quite controversial and provocative. However, everything else we’ve been talking about, the co-evolution of life and environment, the fact that life has profoundly changed the planet. These are all well-accepted points.

Brian Resnick

Which part are you most likely wrong about? Or which part do you feel like has the most room for doubt?

Ferris Jabr

We do not have a precise, universally accepted definition of life. We haven’t explained it on the most fundamental level. Like 100 years from now, will we have a fundamental explanation for life that we’re missing right now? And if we do, will that make thinking of planets as alive defunct? And so, I think open-mindedness is fundamental to any scientific thinking or scientific process. And we have to be open to the idea that a century from now, or even sooner, all of this will be wrong.

And that’s part of what I find thrilling: We don’t have all of the answers yet. Right? These are incredibly challenging ideas and concepts that we are still working out. If we had figured it out, then we wouldn’t be talking about the Gaia hypothesis anymore. The Gaia would have been officially dead a long time ago. But I think the reason that it remains relevant and continues to be debated means that we just haven’t figured it out yet.

Brian Resnick

Why is it useful to think of the Earth as alive?

Ferris Jabr

There’s a massive difference between thinking of ourselves as living creatures that simply reside on a planet, that simply inhabit a planet, versus being a component of a much larger living entity. When we properly understand our role within the living Earth system, I think the moral urgency of the climate crisis really comes into focus.

All of a sudden it’s not just that, oh, the bad humans have harmed the environment and we need to do something about it. It’s that each of us is literally Earth animated, and we are one part of this much larger, living entity. It’s a realization that everything that we are all doing moment to moment, day to day, is affecting this larger living entity in some way.

Brian Resnick

So, the simple point that you’re making is that we are Earth, and don’t self-harm.

Ferris Jabr

Right, exactly.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Two years into his term, has Gov. Shapiro kept his promises to regulate Pennsylvania’s fracking industry?

PITTSBURGH — Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro ran on a promise to regulate Pennsylvania’s oil and gas industry more stringently. Two years into his term, the Environmental Health Project, a public health advocacy nonprofit focused on fracking, has published a report that assesses the Shapiro administration’s progress. “Despite some steps in the right direction, we are still missing the boat on actions that can improve our economic, environmental, and health outcomes,” Alison L. Steele, executive director of the Environmental Health Project, said during a press conference. As attorney general, Shapiro spearheaded a 2020 grand jury report that concluded, in his words, that “when it comes to fracking, Pennsylvania failed” in its “duty to set, and enforce, ground rules that protect public health and safety.” During his campaign for governor in 2022, Shapiro said that if elected, he would implement the eight recommendations made by that grand jury, which included expanding no-drill zones from 500 to 2,500 feet from homes, requiring fracking companies to publicly disclose all chemicals used in wells before they’re drilled, and providing a “comprehensive health response” to the effects of living near fracking sites, among other measures. Some progress has been made on enacting those recommendations, Steele said, but “there are more opportunities available to Gov. Shapiro over the next two years of his term.” The report applauds the Shapiro administration’s progress on some environmental health measures “despite increasing challenges at the federal level,” including identifying and plugging 300 abandoned oil and gas wells, promoting renewable energy projects, and proposing alternatives to the state’s stalled participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). But the report also says the Shapiro administration has fallen short on regulating the oil and gas industry to reduce health risks, prioritizing clean energy that doesn’t include fossil fuels, and fully supporting a just transition to renewable energy.The Shapiro administration has yet to expand no-drill zones in Pennsylvania from the required 500 feet to 2,500 feet, still doesn’t require fracking companies to publicly disclose all chemicals used in fracking, and has failed to acknowledge the science on health risks of exposure to shale gas pollution, according to the report. The report also says that, despite positive efforts to advance environmental justice, agencies like the Pennsylvania Department of Health and Department of Environmental Protection are not engaging enough with frontline communities and health care providers in fracking communities, and that the Department of Environmental Protection needs additional funding to enforce existing environmental regulations. While the Shapiro administration was able to obtain a 14% increase in funding for the Department of Environmental Protection in the 2024-2025 budget, “the bulk of the 2024-2025 funding was earmarked for staff in the permitting division, not the enforcement division, where a real regulatory need exists,” according to the report. Shapiro called for an additional 12% increase in funding for the agency in the 2025-2026 budget, but details about how those funds would be allocated have not yet been released. The report makes the following recommendations for the Shapiro administration: Urge the General Assembly to amend Act 13 and mandate greater distances between homes, schools, hospitals, and fracking sites.Press the legislature to require full disclosure of all chemicals used in fracking wells, even if they are considered proprietary or a trade secret.Develop a comprehensive health plan for preventing fossil fuel pollution exposureAddress cumulative emissions when permitting fracking sites.Further increase funding for the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Health.Call on the state’s departments of health and environmental protection to work more closely and transparently with communities.Take a precautionary approach to petrochemicals, blue hydrogen, and liquified natural gas.Transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable forms of energy. Steele acknowledged that some of the recommendations, including increasing the distance between wells and homes, would require new legislation. The Republican-controlled state senate vocally opposes any new regulations for the oil and gas industry, limiting what the Shapiro administration can achieve. “In those cases,” Steele said, “he could at least use his authority to vocally encourage legislative action.” Pennsylvania state Rep. Dr. Arvind Venkat, an emergency physician who represents parts of western Pennsylvania, said these recommendations are timely as federal environmental protections are being rolled back under the Trump administration. “What we're seeing out of DC is as extreme an attack on environmental regulation and the scientific understanding of the relationship between the environment and health as I've seen in my lifetime,”Venkat said during the press conference. “Both parties are pushing more things down to the state and local level, so as bad as this is…it creates an opportunity for us to be far more responsible than we have been at the state level.”Editor’s note: The Environmental Health Project and Environmental Health News both receive funding from the Heinz Endowments.

PITTSBURGH — Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro ran on a promise to regulate Pennsylvania’s oil and gas industry more stringently. Two years into his term, the Environmental Health Project, a public health advocacy nonprofit focused on fracking, has published a report that assesses the Shapiro administration’s progress. “Despite some steps in the right direction, we are still missing the boat on actions that can improve our economic, environmental, and health outcomes,” Alison L. Steele, executive director of the Environmental Health Project, said during a press conference. As attorney general, Shapiro spearheaded a 2020 grand jury report that concluded, in his words, that “when it comes to fracking, Pennsylvania failed” in its “duty to set, and enforce, ground rules that protect public health and safety.” During his campaign for governor in 2022, Shapiro said that if elected, he would implement the eight recommendations made by that grand jury, which included expanding no-drill zones from 500 to 2,500 feet from homes, requiring fracking companies to publicly disclose all chemicals used in wells before they’re drilled, and providing a “comprehensive health response” to the effects of living near fracking sites, among other measures. Some progress has been made on enacting those recommendations, Steele said, but “there are more opportunities available to Gov. Shapiro over the next two years of his term.” The report applauds the Shapiro administration’s progress on some environmental health measures “despite increasing challenges at the federal level,” including identifying and plugging 300 abandoned oil and gas wells, promoting renewable energy projects, and proposing alternatives to the state’s stalled participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). But the report also says the Shapiro administration has fallen short on regulating the oil and gas industry to reduce health risks, prioritizing clean energy that doesn’t include fossil fuels, and fully supporting a just transition to renewable energy.The Shapiro administration has yet to expand no-drill zones in Pennsylvania from the required 500 feet to 2,500 feet, still doesn’t require fracking companies to publicly disclose all chemicals used in fracking, and has failed to acknowledge the science on health risks of exposure to shale gas pollution, according to the report. The report also says that, despite positive efforts to advance environmental justice, agencies like the Pennsylvania Department of Health and Department of Environmental Protection are not engaging enough with frontline communities and health care providers in fracking communities, and that the Department of Environmental Protection needs additional funding to enforce existing environmental regulations. While the Shapiro administration was able to obtain a 14% increase in funding for the Department of Environmental Protection in the 2024-2025 budget, “the bulk of the 2024-2025 funding was earmarked for staff in the permitting division, not the enforcement division, where a real regulatory need exists,” according to the report. Shapiro called for an additional 12% increase in funding for the agency in the 2025-2026 budget, but details about how those funds would be allocated have not yet been released. The report makes the following recommendations for the Shapiro administration: Urge the General Assembly to amend Act 13 and mandate greater distances between homes, schools, hospitals, and fracking sites.Press the legislature to require full disclosure of all chemicals used in fracking wells, even if they are considered proprietary or a trade secret.Develop a comprehensive health plan for preventing fossil fuel pollution exposureAddress cumulative emissions when permitting fracking sites.Further increase funding for the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Health.Call on the state’s departments of health and environmental protection to work more closely and transparently with communities.Take a precautionary approach to petrochemicals, blue hydrogen, and liquified natural gas.Transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable forms of energy. Steele acknowledged that some of the recommendations, including increasing the distance between wells and homes, would require new legislation. The Republican-controlled state senate vocally opposes any new regulations for the oil and gas industry, limiting what the Shapiro administration can achieve. “In those cases,” Steele said, “he could at least use his authority to vocally encourage legislative action.” Pennsylvania state Rep. Dr. Arvind Venkat, an emergency physician who represents parts of western Pennsylvania, said these recommendations are timely as federal environmental protections are being rolled back under the Trump administration. “What we're seeing out of DC is as extreme an attack on environmental regulation and the scientific understanding of the relationship between the environment and health as I've seen in my lifetime,”Venkat said during the press conference. “Both parties are pushing more things down to the state and local level, so as bad as this is…it creates an opportunity for us to be far more responsible than we have been at the state level.”Editor’s note: The Environmental Health Project and Environmental Health News both receive funding from the Heinz Endowments.

Alcohol makes male fruit flies more attractive

Alcohol increases the release of chemical sex signals and makes males more attractive to females.

Male fruit flies that drink alcohol become more attractive to females, according to a new study.Adding alcohol to males' food increases their release of chemicals that attract females and leads to higher mating success. Fruit flies, or Drosophila melanogaster, are often found around our food waste bins as they feed on rotting fruit which gradually produces alcohol.Scientists have been trying to study why they are attracted to alcohol and how it affects them.Previous research has studied different theories about this attraction, such as the flies were seeking a euphoric state or a substitute for the high of mating among males rejected by females.Study author Bill Hansson, head of the Department of Evolutionary Neuroethology at the Max Planck Institute, said such research has taken an anthropomorphic view of fly behaviour, whereas this latest study suggests drinking alcohol gives the flies a reproductive advantage."We don't think flies drink alcohol because they are depressed," he said.The fly's attraction both to the carbohydrates and yeast in rotting fruit, as well as to the alcohol, cannot be separated, he added.In the study, alcohol, and particularly methanol, increased the males' production and release of chemical sex signals, called pheromones, which made them more attractive to females.Pheromones are released into the air from one individual to influence the behaviour of another animal of the same species.Males were therefore strongly attracted to alcohol, especially those males which had never mated.The new study also showed that the fly's response to smelling alcohol is controlled by three different neural circuits in its brain.While two are responsible for attracting male flies to small amounts of alcohol, a third ensures that excessive amounts have a deterrent effect. Because alcohol is toxic, the fly's brain must carefully weigh the risks and benefits of drinking it, and it does this by balancing signals of attraction with aversion."This means that the flies have a control mechanism that allows them to get all the benefits of alcohol consumption without risking alcohol intoxication," lead author Ian Keesey, of the University of Nebraska, said. For their investigations, the researchers combined physiological studies - such as imaging techniques to visualise processes in the fly brain, chemical analyses of environmental odours, and behavioural studies. The paper is published in the journal Science Advances.

Oregon moves to regulate harmful ‘forever chemicals’

The state Department of Environmental Quality is adding six PFAS to Oregon's list of more than 800 regulated contaminants.

Oregon’s list of regulated hazardous substances is getting its first update in nearly two decades with the addition of six “forever chemicals” known to harm human health.The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality on Tuesday announced it would add six perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, to the state’s list of more than 800 regulated contaminants and begin creating regulations to limit Oregonians’ exposure to them.“We need this rulemaking to hold parties responsible for contamination and to address that contamination,” said Sarah Van Glubt, a manager in DEQ’s environmental cleanup program who is leading the rulemaking. “Otherwise, right now, everything is voluntary. We can’t require parties to test and treat for these chemicals.”The Environmental Quality Commission is expected to vote on adding the chemicals to the state’s list and adopting new regulations on or after May 21.PFAS are human-made chemical chains used in products such as flame retardants, nonstick cookware and waterproof clothing that do not break down or go away naturally but instead have for decades leached into rivers and streams and contaminated soil, water and even air.They are thought to now be in the blood of everyone in the U.S., according to research and testing from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and can lead to increased risks for cancers, heart damage, high cholesterol and birth defects, among other adverse health effects.Suspected sources of past or ongoing PFAS pollution in Oregon include 139 commercial airports that are or were required to maintain PFAS-containing firefighting foam on site, as well as 18 municipal fire training facilities near 20 of the most populous cities in the state, according to rulemaking documents from DEQ.Officials at Portland International Airport began testing for PFAS in 2017 in and around a firefighter training ground there used by the Air National Guard. They identified PFAS contamination adjacent to the nearby Columbia Slough and found PFAS-impaired fish and aquatic species. They’ve since switched to using PFAS-free firefighting foam and have begun initial stages of cleanup.Oregon lawmakers are considering a bill — Senate Bill 91 — that would ban PFAS from firefighting foam used on the ground by firefighters. The Oregon Senate voted to pass the bill nearly unanimously in February, but a vote in the House has not yet been scheduled.Other sites to potentially test for PFAS contamination include 22 bulk fuel facilities and 93 metal plating facilities in Oregon.In 2024, the U.S. Envionmental Protection Agency added several PFAS to the federal list of regulated hazardous substances, and mandated states begin testing for them in drinking water systems.The Oregon Health Authority has identified PFAS in 35 Oregon public drinking water systems, with 24 of those exceeding the EPA’s new drinking water standards for the compounds. The state has until April 2026 to adopt the federal agency’s new PFAS standards and public water systems have until April 2029 to comply with those standards.DEQ’s new regulations would apply to PFAS pollution in rivers, lakes, soil and groundwater but would not address potential contamination released through the air, such as when biosolids and sewage sludge containing PFAS are burned, releasing PFAS into the air, or potential PFAS contamination from those biosolids being spread on farm fields as fertilizer.Biosolids filtered from Portland’s sewer and wastewater get heated and dried out in anaerobic digesters and sent to farms in eastern Oregon as fertilizer. The department doesn’t test those biosolids, which likely contain PFAS.Department spokesman Antony Sparrow said the EPA is developing a risk assessment for sewage sludge that will inform future state regulations.Van Glubt said the department is working on a strategic plan that would combine the work of DEQ’s air, water, biosolids and other teams, as well as work being done at other agencies, to deal with ongoing PFAS issues.“This rule making really is just addressing one piece of the puzzle,” she said. “There are other issues at play with PFAS that will need to be addressed.”Oregon’s hazardous substances list was last updated in 2006, when environmental regulators added methane to the list.Participate in the rulemaking: Email comments to PFAS2025@deq.oregon.gov. Join a public hearing on April 22 at 11 a.m. here or 6 p.m. here-- Alex Baumhardt, Oregon Capital ChronicleThe Oregon Capital Chronicle, founded in 2021, is a nonprofit news organization that focuses on Oregon state government, politics and policy.

Dow Wants to Power Its Texas Manufacturing Complex With New Nuclear Reactors Instead of Natural Gas

Dow, a major producer of chemicals and plastics, wants to use next-generation nuclear reactors for clean power and steam at a Texas manufacturing complex instead of natural gas

Dow, a major producer of chemicals and plastics, wants to use next-generation nuclear reactors for clean power and steam at a Texas manufacturing complex instead of natural gas.Dow's subsidiary, Long Mott Energy, applied Monday to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a construction permit. It said the project with X-energy, an advanced nuclear reactor and fuel company, would nearly eliminate the emissions associated with power and steam generation at its plant in Seadrift, Texas, avoiding roughly 500,000 metric tons of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions annually.If built and operated as planned, it would be the first U.S. commercial advanced nuclear power plant for an industrial site, according to the NRC.For many, nuclear power is emerging as an answer to meet a soaring demand for electricity nationwide, driven by the expansion of data centers and artificial intelligence, manufacturing and electrification, and to stave off the worst effects of a warming planet. However, there are safety and security concerns, the Union of Concerned Scientists cautions. The question of how to store hazardous nuclear waste in the U.S. is unresolved, too.Dow wants four of X-energy's advanced small modular reactors, the Xe-100. Combined, those could supply up to 320 megawatts of electricity or 800 megawatts of thermal power. X-energy CEO J. Clay Sell said the project would demonstrate how new nuclear technology can meet the massive growth in electricity demand.The Seadrift manufacturing complex, at about 4,700 acres, has eight production plants owned by Dow and one owned by Braskem. There, Dow makes plastics for a variety of uses including food and beverage packaging and wire and cable insulation, as well as glycols for antifreeze, polyester fabrics and bottles, and oxide derivatives for health and beauty products.Edward Stones, the business vice president of energy and climate at Dow, said submitting the permit application is an important next step in expanding access to safe, clean, reliable, cost-competitive nuclear energy in the United States. The project is supported by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program.The NRC expects the review to take three years or less. If a permit is issued, construction could begin at the end of this decade so the reactors would be ready early in the 2030s, as the natural gas-fired equipment is retired.A total of four applicants have asked the NRC for construction permits for advanced nuclear reactors. The NRC issued a permit to Abilene Christian University for a research reactor and to Kairos Power for one reactor and two reactor test versions of that company's design. It's reviewing an application by Bill Gates and his energy company, TerraPower, to build an advanced reactor in Wyoming. X-energy is also collaborating with Amazon to bring more than 5 gigawatts of new nuclear power projects online across the United States by 2039, beginning in Washington state. Amazon and other tech giants have committed to using renewable energy to meet the surging demand from data centers and artificial intelligence and address climate change.The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Oil and gas money shapes research, creates ‘echo chamber’ in higher education

Louisiana’s flagship university is looking to partner more closely with petrochemical industries in the state.

Jackson Voss loves his alma mater, Louisiana State University. He appreciates that his undergraduate education was paid for by a program dreamed up by an oil magnate and that he received additional scholarships from ExxonMobil and Shell. But the socially conscious Louisiana native was also aware of what the support of those companies seemed to buy — silence. Voss, who graduated from LSU in Baton Rouge 11 years ago with a degree in political science, says when he attended school there, he didn’t hear discussions of how climate change made Hurricane Katrina worse; why petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River sickened residents of the mostly Black communities around those facilities; or about the devastating and permanent impact of the BP oil spill that happened during Voss’ time at LSU. Voss, now director of climate policy for the New Orleans-based consumer advocacy group, the Alliance for Affordable Energy, says he didn’t hear climate change or “Cancer Alley” openly discussed until he went to the University of Michigan, 1,100 miles away, for graduate school. “It was not a place that was really discussing these issues in the way that should have been discussed at the time,” he said of LSU, where oil wells dotted the campus at least into the 1970s. Any such discussions weren’t taken seriously, he said, and even fellow students were often defensive of the industry.  “The discussions that did happen had to focus on, kind of finding a way to talk about climate without talking about climate,” Voss said, “and it was especially important not to talk about the role that oil and gas played in worsening climate change.” Louisiana State University graduate Jackson Voss attended the Baton Rouge-based school as an undergraduate about a decade ago. Pam Radtke / Floodlight Whether through funding of research projects, the creation of new academic programs focused on energy or, more subtly, through support of everything from opera to football, the oil and gas industry has been shaping discourse at LSU — and universities around the world — for decades. LSU administrators insist they have safeguards against undue influence by fossil fuel companies, which have given tens of millions of dollars to the university in just the past three years. But a joint investigation by Floodlight, WWNO/WRKF and the Louisiana Illuminator found the funding allows the industry to place a thumb on the scale of what gets studied at the state’s flagship university — and what is left out. Research by Floodlight shows between 2010 and 2020, petrochemical companies gave LSU at least $44 million through their charitable foundations, making it one of the top recipients of fossil fuel funding among U.S. universities, based on research from the nonprofit Data for Progress. LSU received more from petrochemical companies than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and Texas A&M — and 20 times more than Voss’s other alma mater, the University of Michigan. The Data for Progress research showed over that decade, the 27 schools they examined received almost $700 million total. Increasingly, researchers are questioning the longstanding ties between fossil fuels and universities at a time when scientists and governments across the globe overwhelmingly agree that sharply reducing the use of fossil fuels and increasing reliance on renewable energy are crucial to stalling or reversing climate change. Last year, a joint report from Congress found “the oil and gas industry cultivates partnerships with academic institutions as a way to influence climate research.” And a first-of-its-kind study released by researchers last year found the fossil fuel industry’s approach is similar to how the tobacco, pharmaceutical and other industries co-opted academics.  “It’s a situation exactly parallel to public health research being funded by the tobacco industry. It’s a conflict of interest — the size of an oil tanker,” said Geoffrey Supran, associate professor of environmental science and policy who studies fossil fuel disinformation at the University of Miami and is director of its Climate Accountability Lab. He says LSU and other schools like it have become “an echo chamber for pro-fossil-fuel narratives.” LSU and its president, William Tate IV, have doubled down on the university’s ties with the fossil fuel industry in recent years, despite its shrinking importance to the Louisiana economy. Since 2020, Tate has solicited and received more than $30 million from fossil fuel companies, including a record $27.5 million from Shell. During LSU’s Giving Day campaign on Wednesday, Shell plopped down another $1.5 million for LSU libraries and the College of Science. “It’s time for a partnership in significant fashion to link the work at LSU in our energy areas, including alternative energy, and creating ways to keep that industry vibrant here in this state and for our country,” Tate told reporters in 2022, about a year after he was named to head the school.  LSU insists there are firewalls in place to prevent oil and gas companies from unduly influencing research and study. But public records and interviews indicate that fossil fuel funding can have a subtle and even direct impact on research and critical discourse.  “Universities are at risk of being pawns in a climate propaganda scheme devised and implemented by fossil fuel interests for decades,” Supran said.  ‘Tip of the iceberg’ It’s impossible to pin down how much money fossil fuel interests — or any industry — gives to universities such as LSU. Although it is a public institution, much of the money for scholarships, workforce development and buildings goes through LSU’s foundation — a nonprofit separate from the university. The foundation, in accordance with philanthropic standards, does not disclose its donors unless they agree to be identified. In its research, Data for Progress used public announcements from universities and companies, along with tax filings from fossil fuel companies’ foundations, to determine how much the universities received from those companies. “It’s most likely the tip of the iceberg,” said Jake Lowe, executive director of Campus Climate Network, which under its previous name, Fossil Free Research, worked with Data for Progress to create its 2023 report.  Louisiana State University President William Tate IV visits Shell’s facility in Convent, La., in 2023 to talk about his plan to focus on five areas at the university, including energy. Louisiana State University For example, the report includes millions of dollars the ExxonMobil Foundation gives for scholarships — but not the money going directly from the company to a school or its foundation. “If the ExxonMobil corporation has a research contract with LSU, you’re not going to see that in the tax documents or annual reports,” Lowe said. Floodlight, with the help of a Data for Progress researcher, used the same method to look at how much petrochemical money went to LSU. The analysis included examining public announcements from the companies and tax filings, called 990s, of the foundations for Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Entergy, Koch Inc., Southwest Electric Power Corp., Schlumberger (now known as SLB), Dow and Taylor Oil. From 2010 to 2020, Taylor Oil’s foundation gave the most to LSU, almost $21 million.   The second highest amount was from ExxonMobil, which gave more than $10 million — the majority of which came from a matching gift program in which the company gave $3 for every dollar donated by an employee or retiree to a college or university. Louisiana State University’s “Quad” is the heart of the campus and was named after ExxonMobil in 1999. Piper Hutchinson / Louisiana Illuminator But then, in 2022, Shell dwarfed the amount given over the previous decade with a single $27.5 million donation to LSU. The majority, $25 million, was for a new Institute for Energy Innovation to focus on “scholarship and solution delivery” on “hydrogen and carbon capture … the coast; and low-carbon fuels.” Donations buy influence  LSU doesn’t hide that the institute’s mission was shaped in partnership with the industry. In the early days, a former Shell executive, Rhoman Hardy, served as the research center’s interim director. The company also has three of the institute’s seven board seats; industry groups hold another two. Last year, the nonprofit New Orleans news outlet The Lens discovered LSU created a system: If a fossil fuel company gives $50,000 or more to the institute, it gets the right to participate in a specific research project, to use the intellectual property from that project and “robust review and discussion of the specific study and project output.” For a $1.25 million donation, a company also receives “voting rights for selected institute activities, including research.” A contribution of $5 million or more earns a donor a seat on the institute’s board. LSU president William Tate IV poses with LSU mascot Mike the Tiger. Louisiana State University When reached for comment about the institute, its donations and its potential influence, Shell responded, “We’re proud to partner with LSU to contribute to the growing compendium of peer-reviewed climate science and advance the effort to identify multiple pathways and build the ecosystems that can lead to more energy with fewer emissions.” In 2023, ExxonMobil gave $2 million to LSU and became a “strategic” partner. With the donation, ExxonMobil will work with the institute to study batteries, solar power, carbon capture and “advanced” plastics recycling. ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment about the donation or about the money it has previously given to LSU. At a Louisiana Board of Regents’ Energy Transition Research Symposium at LSU later that year, ExxonMobil gave a presentation on advanced plastics recycling, a controversial technology that opponents say amounts to greenwashing the problem of plastic waste by burning it rather than reusing it. “It is clear based on the board and research focus areas of the new Institute for Energy Innovation that it is focused squarely on innovations using fossil fuels,” said Logan Atkinson Burke, Voss’ boss at the Alliance for Affordable Energy, an energy consumer advocacy group. Environmentalists say technologies being studied by the institute, including carbon capture, hydrogen and low-carbon fuels, are “false solutions” that will do little to address the climate crisis. ‘Subconscious’ bias?  The institute’s current director, Brad Ives, and LSU’s vice president for research and economic development, Robert Twilley, say they have put safeguards in place to prevent industry influence. And Twilley says this type of research — working hand in hand with industries on the ground — is core to the mission of LSU as a land grant university, a program Abraham Lincoln established in 1862 that used federal land sales to fund universities focused on practical subjects including architecture, engineering and agriculture. “It’s how we as an institution manage it and the safeguards and being very conscious of our ethics, being very conscious of what projects we work on,” Twilley said. He points to federal guidelines, the scientific method and peer review as some of the safeguards that keep the university’s research independent from industry influence. The institute sends its research proposals to an anonymous third-party panel of scientists to be ranked, Twilley says. Those rankings help decide what research it funds. Louisiana State University’s Petroleum Engineering Research & Technology Transfer, or PERTT, Laboratory, is an industrial-scale facility for training and research on borehole technology. According to LSU, it is the only such facility in North America. Louisiana State University Ives says funders aren’t allowed contact with researchers either. “What we’re doing is making sure that the researchers have total academic freedom to let the research take them where it goes,” Ives said. “We know we can sleep at night because we are not doing anything that’s wrong.” But Supran, who once worked on projects funded by oil and gas, says it’s not always as simple as a researcher purposefully skewing results. Scientists are only human, making these relationships inherently fraught. “We’re all subject to biases,” he said. “Things like reciprocation. You know that if I give you a pen, you have some small subconscious desire to reciprocate it in some sense down the line.” For example, one study showed how reviews of the health effects of secondhand smoke funded by the tobacco industry were almost 90 times more likely to conclude that it was not harmful compared to reviews funded by other sources. There’s evidence that the lines between funding and academic independence are sometimes blurred at LSU. Several influential reports and studies from LSU’s Center for Energy Studies have drawn scrutiny over the years for being misleading. In one case, a utility-funded report led to the dismantling of Louisiana’s successful rooftop solar program. In another, a report helped curb efforts to sue oil and gas companies for decades of environmental damage, claiming the lawsuits cost the state more than it would gain. A more recent example was found in public records reviewed by WWNO, including a contract between the Center for Energy Studies and the Bracewell law firm, representing Gulf Coast Sequestration. That company wants to store millions of tons of carbon dioxide underground in southwest Louisiana. It asked the center to use the project as a case study for the economic impact of a carbon capture industry on the Gulf Coast. Climate advocates Corinne Salter and Jill Tupitza, who started a group and podcast called Climate Pelicans, and Cheyenne Autin discuss divestment in fossil fuels in November 2023 at Louisiana State University’s Baton Rouge campus. Tarun Kakarala / The Reveille The contract suggests that some of the report’s conclusions were reached even before the study began. The researchers said they planned to “underscore the transformative nature of CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) on the Louisiana economy.” LSU’s final report ultimately listed all of the financial reasons the Gulf Coast should welcome the projects like this one — while barely mentioning the economic risks, such as the cost and financial viability of  carbon capture facilities. WWNO showed the report to several researchers familiar with sponsored research. All of them shared concerns over the prescriptive nature of the research proposal or the terms of the contract itself. LSU allows research sponsors to give feedback on drafts before they’re published. Sponsors are also allowed to stay anonymous — meaning, the public doesn’t know who funds the research. “It gets a D grade and it’s not quite an F,” Supran said, noting that in this case, the funder was disclosed. “ The fact that this report just touts the economic benefits of this specific company funding the report — it kind of makes you wonder if it’s worth the paper it’s written on.” The report’s authors declined to comment. Twilley defended the contract, saying its terms are standard throughout the university and that researchers are allowed to propose hypotheses.  The contract is not illegal nor does it constitute research misconduct such as using fake data or plagiarizing. But according to one elected official, reports like these, which carry the credibility of a university without the scrutiny of peer review, could influence public policy. “The research plays a significant role in determining whether or not we’re on the right or wrong course,” said Davante Lewis, a public service commissioner in Louisiana. His commission regulates services in Louisiana including the electric utilities. Lewis said he counts on such academic reports to provide a fair and comprehensive picture of an issue. But, as more industry money enters research, he said he was concerned, noting, “Oftentimes we have seen where money drives facts, not facts drive money.” Burnishing their reputations Besides funding LSU’s energy institute, oil and gas interests also pays for things everyone likes, such as health programs, tutoring and even halftime kicking contests with football fans. Supran says he and other researchers have a working theory that while oil and gas companies pour big money into big research institutions such as MIT and Stanford to give them credibility, they spend money at regional universities in states including Louisiana and Texas to build a compliant population. “It doesn’t take a genius to imagine that that money may be used to burnish the reputation locally of those companies and foster a vibrant recruitment pool,” Supran said. Geoffrey Supran, an associate professor at the University of Miami, tells members of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee at a May 1, 2024 hearing that his research has found “widespread infiltration of fossil fuel interests into higher education.” U.S. Senate Budget Committee Voss says the oil and gas industry’s support of benefits for the state are “one of the few things that it actually has right.” On the flip side, he added, “I think it protects the industry from criticism, because it makes people feel like they’re a part of the community.” But the heavy presence of oil and gas on campus can have a chilling effect on people and groups who don’t support those industries. Jill Tupitza, now a marine scientist in California, was a graduate student at LSU when she and fellow graduate student Corinne Salter started Climate Pelicans, an advocacy organization that worked to get LSU to stop investing in fossil fuels. When they started questioning the ties between LSU and fossil fuels, they were met with resistance. “Immediately, doors were shut,” Tupitza said. One administrator told her, “‘I can’t tell you what to do, I can’t punish you for going further. But I would strongly recommend that you stop asking questions about this,’” she recalled. “So that, obviously, that made us double down.” The group led marches and a petition drive urging climate divestment. They started a podcast that explored topics including environmental justice and false climate solutions. Tupitza said the LSU Foundation stonewalled the group’s requests for information about how much money it had invested in fossil fuels and refused requests to attend meetings about the foundation’s $700 million endowment. Later, the foundation told Tupitza that less than 4% of its holdings were invested in fossil fuels And then, while Tupitza and fellow graduate students were writing “Divest from Fossil Fuels,” in pink chalk in front of the foundation building, they were arrested on graffiti charges.  Those charges were eventually dropped. School rules prohibit writing on the sidewalks with chalk, but it is not an arrestable offense. Tupitza described her arrest as “a huge scare tactic.”.  Supran says LSU isn’t unique in its hesitation to cut ties with the oil and gas industry.  “I think it’s fair to say that for the most part, there has not been careful deliberation about the costs and the benefits of these ties, but rather a head down, and aggressive, solicitation of as much funding as they can receive from anyone.” Voss predicts that if conditions worsen in an industry known for its booms and busts, its support for LSU will disappear. And as climate change worsens, it will make it harder for businesses and people to stay in Louisiana, which is already near the top of U.S. states when it comes to population loss.  “In many ways, higher education is sitting upon a house of cards, and relying upon oil and gas is incredibly risky — as it always has been.” Instead, he said, “I think that LSU could and should be a really critical voice in climate change and environmental justice in Louisiana. I do worry that in failing to do so and by being so heavily tied up in oil and gas interests, it actually puts the university in a worse position.” This is Part 2 of a two-part investigative series exploring the relationship between the fossil fuel industry and Louisiana State University. This story was reported by a partnership with WWNO/WRKF, the Louisiana Illuminator and Floodlight. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Oil and gas money shapes research, creates ‘echo chamber’ in higher education on Mar 29, 2025.

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