The gas industry is sneaking into kids’ science classes
The Switch Energy Alliance markets its free classroom materials as “objective.” But they are backed by the fossil fuel industry, a HEATED investigation shows.
As a science teacher, Helen is trained in practicing skepticism. So perhaps it was only natural that, at this year’s Wisconsin Society of Science Teachers Conference, she detected the distinct odor of B.S.
She was attending a presentation by the Switch Energy Alliance, a group that provides free energy and environment lesson plans to teachers and students across North America. The presentation’s content seemed innocent enough: Switch representatives were demonstrating how to build an electricity circuit using Play-Doh and batteries.
But Helen thought it was weird how often Switch representatives kept mentioning their work was “objective” and “non-partisan”—a couple times in that presentation, and then twice more in other presentations that weekend. So she asked the Switch representatives: Who are your funders?
According to Helen (not her real name, as she’s not authorized by her school to speak publicly) the Switch representatives did not answer directly. They only insisted they were not funded by “Big Coal.”
Unsatisfied, Helen asked HEATED to look into the group. And after a thorough investigation, we can report that Switch is not funded by Big Coal. But it is funded by some of the country’s largest methane gas companies—a fact that Switch does not mention on any of its public-facing material.
In other words, the Switch Energy Alliance presents itself as a neutral science education nonprofit, but is actually a gas-funded program designed to shape young people’s understanding of fossil fuels before they have the tools to recognize propaganda.
To see that propaganda for what it is, you have to look past the Play-Doh circuits, and into the lesson plans.
The gas giants behind Switch
Switch is not a household name. But it is not marginal, either.
According to the group, more than 16,000 teachers and 85,000 students across the U.S. and Canada use Switch Classroom, its free online platform of energy and environmental science lesson plans, videos, labs, and quizzes. The group says more than 1.7 million activities have been completed on Switch Classroom.
Switch is also part of Clever Library, one of the largest K-12 education technology platforms where teachers can find vetted digital learning tools. Its lessons cover methane gas, coal, oil, environmental impacts, wind, solar, and AP Environmental Science. They are designed for students from grades 4 through 12, and are created with the help of a teacher advisory council—a network of science teachers in the U.S. who help create content, advise the curriculum, and attend teacher conferences to promote Switch’s materials.
Tax filings reviewed by HEATED show that Switch in 2023 received a $200,000 grant from The Ovintiv Foundation—the non-profit arm of one of North America’s largest oil and gas producers. It also received a $3,000 grant from Shell USA’s grant-making organization.
Switch is also listed as a grantee of Energy Corps, a non-profit financed by some of the country’s largest gas companies, including Boardwalk, Alegacy, Next Decade, and Spotlight Energy Company.
Switch’s board also has deep ties to the oil and gas industry, including former executives and geologists from BP, BHP Billiton Petroleum, Cobalt, Howard Energy Partners, and other fossil fuel companies.
But the group’s backbone is founder Scott Tinker, a geologist and PBS television personality who worked for oil companies before becoming the Texas State Geologist in 2000. Since then, Tinker has remained embedded in the oil and gas world, leading Texas’s Bureau of Economic Geology, serving in petroleum geology organizations, and joining the board of Howard Energy Partners.
His public brand is not climate denial, but a reasonable-sounding argument that fossil fuels are simply too necessary and too embedded in modern life to move away from quickly. That argument is also embedded in Switch’s lesson plans.
We reached out to Switch Energy Alliance to ask about the group’s funders and why they’re kept private; the contents of their lesson plans; and Helen’s exchange with the group’s representatives. The group did not respond. Energy Corps also did not respond to HEATED’s request for comment.
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Teaching kids to accept oil as inevitable
Across Switch’s curriculum, the pattern is consistent. Fossil fuels are introduced as the practical backbone of modern life. Their harms are acknowledged briefly, often in softened or incomplete terms. Then students are steered back toward the same conclusion: oil and gas are necessary; renewables may be cleaner, but they are limited; and the climate crisis itself is never clearly named.
In the “Oil” lesson plan, Tinker gushes about the fuel.
“For 100 years, oil has made the world go ’round. Literally,” Tinker tells students before offering a limited account of oil’s environmental harms: “Many small, and a few large, oil spills. Smog, local air pollution, and CO2 emissions come from the tailpipe.”
He then frames oil’s biggest problem not as its central role in driving the climate crisis, but as the fact that it is “our only transport fuel.” The solution, according to Tinker, is to “diversify into other transportation fuels.”
“So oil is a miracle fuel that built the prosperity of the 20th century,” he concludes. “Our success in the 21st will depend on expanding oil supply, increasing efficiency, and diversifying into other options.”
“[The lessons] seemed to attempt to derive legitimacy through acknowledgement of a set of issues, but then put forward those issues in such a slanted manner that one thinks one’s getting an objective perspective that is completely divorced from reality,” said Julie McNamara, the federal energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Painting methane in an overly green light
Switch’s lesson about methane gas is even more revealing. Gas is described as a “versatile, abundant, and cleaner, but not totally clean” energy source that “could help all of us reduce our carbon emissions.”
That framing reflects the industry’s preferred story: that gas is a cleaner fossil fuel, and therefore a reasonable step toward a cleaner future. But it leaves out that methane, the main component of gas, is itself a powerful greenhouse gas; that gas leaks across the system; and that more investment in gas can lock in fossil fuel infrastructure for decades, delaying the transition to more climate-compatible energy.
The lesson’s sharpest criticism is reserved not for gas itself, but for fracking. “Environmentalists are mostly positive on gas, but not so much on hydraulic fracturing,” Tinker says.
That is not true in any meaningful sense. Many environmentalists oppose expanded gas use precisely because gas remains a major driver of climate pollution, regardless of how it is extracted.
“They really seem to just try to bunch it all up and put it into some manageable framing without acknowledging the far broader use issues that persist no matter how you get it out of the ground,” McNamara said.
Overemphasizing limits of renewables
The pattern flips when Switch turns to renewables. In lessons on wind and solar, Tinker acknowledges their environmental benefits, but spends disproportionate time on their limitations—especially land use and reliability.
While those are real issues, McNamara said the emphasis creates a “very biased perspective,” particularly because local opposition to renewable energy projects is already heavily shaped by misinformation.
“So much of how one views the world is shaped by how one first learns about it,” she said. “To have something brought into schools and put forward as an objective scientific resource that is so wildly biased in favor of fossil fuels … threatens to bring a whole new generation along that will take time to broaden perspectives and horizons.”
Climate change? No way
Perhaps the most glaring omission is the most basic one: Throughout the lesson plans we reviewed, Switch never once used the term “climate change.”
There were references to warming temperatures, photos of polar bears on melting ice, and acknowledgments that burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide. But the curriculum did not clearly connect fossil fuel emissions to a warming planet.
That missing “why” could give students and teachers a “very skewed view” of what science actually is, said Wendy Johnson, a science education specialist at the National Center for Science Education.
“The point of science is to be able to explain how the natural world works using evidence,” Johnson said.
But Switch’s lessons often present information without giving students the evidence, data, or causal explanations needed to understand it. Johnson said she had “major concerns” with Switch’s AP Environmental Science materials, which she said are not aligned with current science standards and do not contain scientific evidence to support many of their claims. She estimated the AP lessons cover only about 5 percent of the required material.
Johnson was especially concerned by the way Switch treats carbon dioxide emissions. In the “Environmental Impacts” lesson, Tinker says: “Some countries are talking about reducing carbon dioxide emissions, how much and what effect that will have on the atmosphere, warming, and energy production is yet to be seen.”
“That is blatantly false,” Johnson said.
Scientists know that reducing carbon emissions is essential to limiting global temperature rise. But Switch’s framing makes that basic scientific reality seem unsettled, speculative, or politically debatable.
That ambiguity is not an accident, said Simon Enoch, a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. It is a familiar fossil fuel industry tactic: presenting climate change as a debate in which every scientific fact must be counterbalanced by the economic benefits of oil and gas.
“We don’t do that for any other science,” Enoch said. “Right?”
The fossil fuel playbook for shaping kids’ reality
Switch is just one example in a long history of fossil fuel industry groups seeking to shape how the next generation perceives climate change and energy.
For decades, oil and gas interests have worked to get industry-friendly messages into U.S. classrooms. In 2017, the Center for Public Integrity reported that the American Petroleum Institute was targeting K-12 schools as early as the 1940s; that API-backed lessons reached millions of classrooms by the 1950s; and that the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board, a state agency funded by oil and gas producers, had spent more than $40 million over two decades on K-12 education materials with “a pro-industry bent.”
The tactics have varied over time— from Exxon-backed Disney comics in the 1980s to classroom booklets, games, puzzles, videos, and STEM programming today—but the message has remained consistent: Fossil fuels are essential, modern, and compatible with environmental responsibility.
The goal, Enoch said, is to put industry-friendly messages into the mouths of people students already trust—their teachers.
“You [the industry] want to put your words into the mouths of somebody that has a lot of legitimacy and credibility,” he said. “That’s why the fossil fuel industry has always been interested in schools as a venue to get their ideas into the consciousness of these developing young students.”
It’s not hard to understand why the materials spread. Many teachers are underpaid, overburdened, and trying to teach one of the world’s most urgent subjects with little support. A 2022 survey from the North American Association for Environmental Education found that 74 percent of teachers believed climate change would have a major effect on students’ futures, but 60 percent felt unconfident teaching it.
That vacuum is what makes industry-backed lessons so powerful. They do not just mislead students about energy. They shape what students are taught to see as realistic. So by the time students are taught the full reality of the climate crisis, the logic of climate delay may already be embedded in their brains—shaping not only what they believe to be true, but the future they believe to be possible.
If you made it to the end of this investigation, you understand why this work matters.
Fossil fuel influence does not always look like a lobbyist walking into a statehouse. Sometimes it looks like a free lesson plan, a friendly classroom presentation, or a group insisting over and over again that it is simply being “objective.”
That is the kind of influence HEATED exists to expose. And to keep doing it, we need more reader support.
If you’ve been reading for a while, value this work, and have the means, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. It truly means the world.
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I feel super lucky to have been following Emily Atkin and HEATED for years, and stories like this are exactly why.
As the father of two young daughters, I want schools helping kids build critical thinking skills, not quietly steering them toward a predetermined conclusion.
The part that bothers me most isn’t that oil and gas are discussed. Any honest look at human progress has to acknowledge the enormous role fossil fuels have played in building the modern world. The problem is when industry-funded materials present themselves as objective while leaving out key context, minimizing tradeoffs, or obscuring who is paying the bills.
That’s not education. That’s influence.
And unfortunately, this isn’t new. Industries have been trying to shape public opinion through classrooms, advertising, and public relations for generations. The tactics evolve, but the playbook is familiar.
What gives me hope is that today’s students are smart. Give them the evidence. Give them competing viewpoints. Teach them how to evaluate sources, incentives, and claims. Let them wrestle with complexity.
The future my daughters inherit will require nuance, systems thinking, and the ability to hold multiple truths at the same time. We don’t need curated narratives. We need transparency.
Thanks for continuing to shine a light on stories that many of us would never otherwise see.
There's plenty more of this sort of "sneak" messaging, not to mention direct and dark money influence peddling and lobbying. Emily's article sent me to Gemini with the query: "What organizations, scholars, researchers, and individuals investigate the money being spent in the U.S. by the fossil fuel industries on educational programs, reports, "grassroot" organizations, and political actors and law makers at every level?" I followed up with another clarifying query. I'm working on checking further and cleaning the results up and send it on to Emily, not that much of it will be news to her (she's listed under "Investigative Journalism Outlets").