Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative and BP End 25-Year Partnership

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Carbon Mitigation Initiative co-founders Robert Socolow, left, and Stephen Pacala made headlines in 2024 for their Science paper on “stabilizaiton wedges,” later cited in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications, Princeton University

The Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI), housed within the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton, will end its 25-year partnership with BP at the end of 2025, when the fossil-fuel company’s latest five-year contract to fund the initiative concludes. The decision, which marks the end of one of the University’s most high-profile corporate research partnerships, was reached mutually, according to ecology and evolutionary biology professor Stephen Pacala, the program’s director and co-founder.

While BP provided financial support, CMI researchers decided how the funding was allocated. Pacala said that “it just didn’t make sense” to continue the partnership with BP, and that their priorities stopped aligning. “They were the company out in front of everyone else. That’s what made it work,” he said. Pacala added that it was clear that BP was no longer going to be in the vanguard of petrochemical companies when it comes to understanding and preparing for a nonemitting future. BP did not respond to a request for comment.

Founded in 2000, CMI develops carbon mitigation strategies through an interdisciplinary approach including scientists, engineers, and policy experts. Projects included work on climate change and the carbon cycle; carbon capture, utilization, and storage; and ways to achieve net-zero emissions.

The partnership has long drawn criticism. After Princeton’s Board of Trustees voted in 2022 to divest from fossil-fuel stocks and sever ties with Exxon Mobil and Dominion Energy, it continued the relationship with BP through CMI. Hannah Reynolds ’22 of Divest Princeton, an activist coalition of faculty and alumni, often in collaboration with students in Sunrise Princeton, said that “Princeton has not been consistent in its response to how fossil-fuel companies conduct business.” Lynne Archibald ’87 of Divest Princeton, said that she is “extremely relieved” for the partnership to be over. “We thought that this was a real stain on Princeton's reputation, and in the bigger world,” she said.

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The collaboration also came under scrutiny in Washington, D.C. In 2021, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability launched an investigation into fossil-fuel companies’ ties with universities and other institutions. Documents revealed in 2024 showed that BP considered funding research at Princeton and Imperial College London as part of a campaign to spotlight the “role of gas as a friend to renewables,” even as the company privately acknowledged its climate risks. The report noted that such efforts were a part of a broader strategy to “establish funded partnerships with academic institutions to enhance their credibility.” The probe ended when Republicans took control of the chamber in 2022.

Pacala explained that while there will be some disruption, the program will continue. “To be clear, it's not like a contract or a grant, which is the sole source for some project in some labs,” he said. Individual investigators will adjust to the funding changes.

Pacala and Robert Socolow, a professor emeritus of mechanical and aerospace engineering who co-founded CMI, introduced the concept of “stabilization wedges” in a 2004 Science paper as a framework of thinking about how to reduce global carbon emissions over the next 50 years using existing technologies. A 2021 review of 16 mitigation strategies found that the world is on track to achieve only about 1.5 of the seven wedges needed to stabilize emissions, or 14 required for net-zero emissions by the middle of the 21st century.

The ending of the partnership comes amid broader cuts to climate-related funding at Princeton. In June, the Department of Commerce announced that it would end approximately $4 million in funding for Princeton research related to climate change, citing a lack of alignment with the Trump administration’s priorities.