Revealed: leading climate research publisher helps fuel oil and gas drilling

Elsevier, a Dutch company behind many renowned peer-reviewed scientific journals, including the Lancet and Global Environmental Change, is also one of the top publishers of books aimed at expanding fossil fuel production.

Several former and current employees say that for the past year, dozens of workers have spoken out internally and at company-wide town halls to urge Elsevier to reconsider its relationship with the fossil fuel industry.

Julia Steinberger, a social ecologist and ecological economist at the Université de Lausanne who has published studies in several Elsevier journals, said she was shocked to hear that the company took an active role in expanding fossil fuel extraction.

Of the more than 2,000 scholarly journals that Elsevier publishes, only seven are specific to fossil fuel extraction (14 if you count special publications and subsidiaries). Those journals include Upstream Oil and Gas Technology, the editor-in-chief of which works for Shell, and Unconventional Resources, which is edited by a Chevron researcher. It also runs a subsidiary book publisher, Gulf Publishing, which includes titles such as The Shale Oil and Gas Handbook and Strategies for Optimizing Petroleum Exploration.

Elsevier also provides consultancy services to corporate clients. For the past 12 years, it has marketed a tool called Geofacets to fossil fuel companies. Geofacets combines thousands of maps and studies to make it easier to find and access oil and gas reserves, in addition to locations for wind farms or carbon storage facilities.

James Dyke, assistant director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, was surprised that Elsevier would be working to contradict climate researchers in this way.