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A scientific idea can be both mainstream and valid & still serve a vested corporate interest’s need. We’ve seen tobacco, junk food, pharmaceutical, and fossil fuel companies selectively amplify such ideas with their funding dollars. I am not seeing critics engage much with passages like these.

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Also, the fact that carving out space for FFs was quietly baked into the mission of the center that produced it.

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Our reporting *does* revise the historical narrative around this paper, by adding a significant new dimension: The funder’s strong interest in amplifying the paper’s message, precisely because it envisioned a future that carved out massive space for fossil fuel companies & their products.

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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I am seeing some criticism that our wedges investigation offers a revisionist history because a) CCS was an idea before wedges and b) wedges didn’t single-handedly drive its prominence policy discourse. Both of which are true, and neither of which is contradicted in the article. But!

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Reposted by Maddie Stone

Many people are sharing this tour de force but you should follow @themadstone.bsky.social and check out her thread for additional background. Also follow @amywestervelt.bsky.social and @katieworth.bsky.social.

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Part of our reason for writing the series now is to spark these larger conversations in the midst of a bleak federal funding landscape, and as you note, corporate takeover of many areas of research.

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BP makes very clear in the documents I’ve seen that it supports this framework because it carves out a huge space for fossil fuels to remain in the energy mix for many decades to come. Would they have co-produced the knowledge if it said otherwise?

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I think one thing that has been fascinating for me is seeing the diverse range of opinions from academics on this subject. I am hoping our reporting sparks more conversation and reflection about what is acceptable.

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Your point about 2026 v 2004 standards is well taken and something I’ve thought a lot about in the context of the paper’s goals and technology set. Curious to know if you feel co authorship standards were substantially different at the time.

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As best I can tell from the documents I’ve seen, he was among the most engaged individuals aside from the authors. That engagement involved not just providing feedback on their paper, but coordinating Browne’s Foreign Affairs piece, and bringing wedge ideas into the company’s internal marketing.

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Also, whether a funder with a vested interest in climate policy outcomes should be offering involved and repeated feedback on a climate policy paper.

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Brett Favaro @brettfavaro.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Hi Bob! We do discuss that acknowledgement in the piece. Our reporting raises questions about whether that acknowledgment was enough for an individual who read and commented on multiple drafts, offered his own rewrite, and whose feedback substantially impacted the paper’s presentation of ideas.

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Reposted by Maddie Stone

Posted on LinkedIn by @globalecoguy.bsky.social: Actual versus projected buildout for solar power vs. carbon capture

Two-panel chart comparing actual performance versus modeled projections for two climate technologies, spanning 2010–2040.

Panel 1 — Carbon Capture Capacity (megatons)
Line chart. Y-axis: 0 to 4,000+ megatons. A single dark red line (actual carbon storage) runs nearly flat from 2010 to approximately 2025, remaining well below 500 megatons. Beginning around 2023–2025, a fan of teal/blue projection lines diverges sharply upward, with the highest trajectories reaching approximately 4,000–5,000 megatons by 2040 and the lowest remaining near 500 megatons. Actual performance is far below all but the most conservative projections.

Panel 2 — Solar Power (terawatt-hours)
Line chart. Y-axis: 0 to 2,000+ terawatt-hours. A single dark red line (actual solar electricity production) shows exponential growth from near zero in 2010, rising steeply to approximately 2,000 TWh by 2023–2024. A dense fan of teal/blue projection lines originates around 2023–2025 and extends to 2040, spanning a wide range from approximately 200 to 2,000 TWh. Actual solar production meets or exceeds the upper range of nearly all projections.

Implied contrast: Carbon capture has drastically underperformed projections. Solar power has dramatically outperformed them

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Hi Peter! That’s my fault, I had two two and fell off social media hard. Thank you so much for reading!

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But the degree of coordination between oil industry execs and scientists on this major climate policy paper raises serious questions about the access the oil industry has secured at elite universities across the country. Much more reporting on this topic to come!

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Pacala and Socolow have both told me BP had no control over the scientific content of the paper; that they only took feedback they found useful and discarded the rest.

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Another described it as a "joint project neither group could have done without the other" that "drove strategy".

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All of this was happening on the heels of Browne rebranding the company 'beyond petroleum' and BP trying to figure out what, exactly, that meant. In wedges, the company found an answer. One former chief scientist told me that wedges "gave us the menu of things we needed to be thinking about."

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The lay-friendly style of the Science paper, meanwhile, was the direct result of BP’s editorial feedback. Pacala himself told me he does not think he would written the paper in that way without a BP exec's harsh critique of the first draft. Browne, meanwhile, helped name the entire framework.

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Although the researchers say they always planned to publish their work, a meeting with BP CEO John Browne kicked off the writing in earnest.The first written wedges product was, in fact, a white paper for BP, focused on industry-friendly solutions like efficiency, gas, and CCS.

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Our conversations over the last six months revealed several things to me: Yes, BP did shape the paper in some pretty profound ways. Their funding brought the two authors together. The company encouraged their focus on CCS, and on policy-relevant work.

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But what about direct influence? My paper trail showed BP clearly *trying* to shape the wedges paper, but did the company succeed? To understand that, I reached out to Socolow and Pacala. Both, to their credit, gave me an extraordinary amount of time.

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It was also clear that BP saw value in that paper precisely *because* it said humanity could solve climate change without getting off fossil fuels, and set about to amplify that message.

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After about a dozen trips to that archive, I was pretty sure I had a big story. It was clear that BP execs had been deeply read in on the CMI’s most influential early work—a paradigm setting paper on how to address climate change.

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