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Report as: spam offensive peter on 1/25/08 at 8am

Some people always look at the dark side of things. These research grants are mainly goodwill donations from companies flush with profits. If there are useful results, all the better. But the main goal is publicity and tax writeoffs.
Stanford has had many of these industry liason programs in the past 50 years and they have been mostly benign. Some have even made important discoveries such in genetic engineering and oil exploration.

Report as: spam offensive Morgan on 2/02/08 at 2pm

Although Orr may prefer to focus on a straw man (the worry that corporate sponsors actively censor particular papers or ideas) he has no answer for the far more insidious aspects of this program. The corporate sponsors have had an integral role from the very beginning in determining which broad areas of energy research are funded and which are not. This has meant that some areas for promising near-term innovations have been neglected. At the same time other research areas that have been deemed unlikely to yield substantial emissions reductions in a useful time scale have been nurtured. This is by far a bigger travesty, and much less transparent, because there is no individual censored idea to pinpoint. And it's important not to forget that the sponsoring companies - ExxonMobil in particular - have been actively using this program as a media "shield" that they point to anytime their backwards policy positions on global warming are criticized. The amount that ExxonMobil has spent publicizing this tiny fraction of the company's annual research expenditures is substantial. By allowing ExxonMobil to use Stanford's good name in its greenwashing campaign, Orr is implicated in ExxonMobil's ongoing efforts to subvert progress on the national and international climate accords necessary to enforce truly meaningful cuts in emissions.




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