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Boulder Weekly “Frackademia” Investigation Reveals University of Colorado for Sale to Oil and Gas Industry

September 18, 2015

Boulder Weekly “Frackademia” Investigation Reveals University of Colorado for Sale to Oil and Gas Industry

Boulder Weekly, a Boulder, Colorado alternative weekly newspaper, has published a 10,000 word ”frackademia” investigation in a special edition of the newspaper.

The long-form investigation by Joel Dyer — based on thousands of documents obtained by Greenpeace USA — exposes the ongoing partnership between the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Leeds School of Business and the Common Sense Policy Roundtable (CSPR), the latter an oil and gas industry front group. The investigation reveals connections to Koch Industries, American Petroleum Institute, and Encana, among others.

University of Colorado, in this case, sat in the center of a tight-knit network of Colorado movers-and-shakers with ties to the oil and gas companies and public relations firms maintaining them as clients. That network is well-displayed in the LittleSis map created below by Greenpeace USA researcher Jesse Coleman and Boulder Weekly has created seven influence maps of its own.

The story begins in April 2013, when CSPR signed an agreement with University of Colorado for the latter “to provide unbiased, third-party research” on behalf of CSPR, as seen in the proposal obtained by Coleman. While self-serving as a principle, the research ended up as anything but “unbiased.”

The “Documents…reveal that the studies were conceived of, edited and strategically used by PR firms to influence fracking policy in Colorado, yet CSPR’s financial ties to the oil and gas industry were not disclosed to the media or in thepublished studies,” wrote Coleman in an article piggy-backing off of the Boulder Weekly investigation. “CSPR set priorities for the researchers, prioritizing oil and gas work. The studies were aimed at politically contentious topics, like local regulation over fracking wells.”

Other topics covered in CSPR reports done with University of Colorado’s stamp on them including the economic impact of a fracking ban, the economic impact of fracking in Colorado, an economic assessment of Colorado’s oil and gas prices and fracking and job creation in Colorado.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

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