Ivy League Universities Pushing Oil Industry Agenda With No Accountability
Harold Hamm isn’t the kind of guy you’d expect to be name dropping Ivy League schools. Born in Oklahoma, his education ended with his graduation from high school. Which didn’t stop him from becoming a multi-billionaire by building his own oil and gas fracking company, Continental Resources — a company that bills itself as “America’s Oil Champion.”
So for a self-made man from oil country, it wasn’t surprising to see a PowerPoint slide with the bullet points “Rigs, Rednecks, and Royalties” during his presentationthis June at the annual Energy Information Administration conference in Washington, D.C. Although when he referred to the oil producing sections of the U.S. as “Cowboyistan” it didn’t get the laugh he was probably expecting.
What was a bit surprising was to see him touting the work of Columbia and Harvard to support his argument to lift the ban on exporting crude oil produced in the US.
“There have been a dozen studies so far, everyone of them come[sic] out with the same thing – lower gasoline prices….These are not folks who write about our industry all the time. We’re talking Columbia, we’re talking Harvard…”
Now, Hamm’s attempt to distance Columbia and Harvard from the oil industry was probably a clever tactic and not based on ignorance. Hamm has probably spent more time in D.C. this year than some members of Congress.
From the EIA conference to multiple appearances before congressional committees, Hamm has been pushing to get the oil export ban lifted.
Either way, he is wrong to say that Columbia and Harvard don’t write about the oil industry all of the time.
At Columbia University there is a rather new division of the school that does just that called the Center on Global Energy Policy(CGEP).
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