Fossil fuel companies are systematically embedding themselves in the lives of Australian children, from schools and early childhood centres to museums, sports clubs and community organisations, in a carefully cultivated effort to normalise their presence and downplay their central role in driving the climate crisis, a major new investigation has found. The report, From Cradle to Career: Fossil Fuel Industry Presence in Australian Childhood Settings, published by the independent organisation Comms Declare in June, is the first national study to map the scale and nature of fossil fuel industry engagement with children. Drawing on publicly available information, it identified at least 260 fossil fuel-linked programs and partnerships across Australia, but warned that the true number is likely far higher because many sponsorship deals and educational “partnerships” disclose little or no information about the amount of funding provided, the educational content produced, how many children are reached, or the extent of industry control. The report also documented a substantial financial investment in shaping young minds: more than $54.5 million is funnelled through just six programs in schools, educational institutions and child-centred initiatives, including classroom resources, lesson plans, educational activities and career pathway programs. That figure does not include countless smaller sponsorships, equipment donations and volunteer programs that are difficult to track, meaning the true scale of industry influence is almost certainly much greater. The investigation has landed at a time when Australians are confronting increasingly severe bushfires, floods and heatwaves, and when high-school students have repeatedly taken to the streets to demand systemic climate action. Against that backdrop, the report raises serious concerns about the motives behind fossil fuel companies’ generosity toward children, and has prompted renewed calls from Greens Senator Steph Hodgins-May, researchers and educators for a parliamentary inquiry and for fossil fuel companies to be barred from classrooms altogether. The report’s authors argue that these programs are not simply acts of community goodwill but carefully targeted efforts to secure the industry’s social licence to continue extracting and burning coal, oil and gas for decades to come.
One of the most detailed examples in the report concerns Shell’s Australian gas business, Shell QGC. The company has provided more than $10 million to Queensland Museum programs since 2015, including children’s “educational” initiatives and classroom resources for teachers. Yet the report found that these resources systematically omit crucial information about the causes of climate change. For instance, materials explaining the role of carbon dioxide in ocean acidification fail to mention that the carbon dioxide comes from burning fossil fuels. Instead, the resources promote carbon capture and storage (CCS) as an unproven “solution” for mitigating climate change, while downplaying the need to phase out fossil fuel extraction and use. The Queensland Museum website once hosted Shell-branded educational activities that were later deleted, including one that asked students to “design your own [CCS] technology.” CCS has been widely discredited as an expensive, unreliable and unproven technology that cannot deliver the emission reductions required to meet global climate goals; nevertheless, governments and fossil fuel companies continue to insist that it works, using that false promise to justify expanding fossil fuel production. The pattern identified in the report is that educational resources funded or provided by fossil fuel companies contain only a limited discussion of the contribution that burning coal, oil and gas makes to climate change. Instead, they strongly emphasise adaptation, false solutions and individual consumer choices. This approach is the opposite of the popular high-school climate movement, which grew rapidly after the Black Summer bushfires and has focused on the need for systemic change to stop runaway global warming. By shifting attention onto individuals and technological fixes, corporate educational materials obscure the fact that a small number of extraordinarily profitable companies are responsible for a disproportionate share of global emissions, and that governments have the power to regulate them. The report warns that allowing fossil fuel companies to design and deliver classroom content is akin to letting the tobacco industry write health curricula, because it gives the polluter the power to frame the climate problem in ways that protect its own interests.
Another striking case study is Woodside, one of Australia’s largest oil and gas producers. A Woodside-branded resource titled “The Carbon Cycle and You” seeks to blame everyone equally for the climate emergency. It tells students: “While we often think that greenhouse gas emissions are only from industrial activities, we all contribute to the global carbon footprint.” The materials then direct students to consider whether they can change the way they travel to school as their personal contribution to limiting global warming. The report argues that this is a blatant attempt to obscure the fact that the production and burning of fossil fuels are the primary drivers of climate change, and that Woodside itself plays a significant role. Woodside’s North West Shelf gas extension, approved by the federal government last year, will generate an estimated 87.9 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions annually for 40 years. That is the equivalent of driving 35 million petrol cars every year, and is more than Australia’s entire agricultural emissions in 2024, which were 79.2 million tonnes. Meanwhile, Woodside’s STEM in Schools program in Western Australia sends volunteers into classrooms to deliver science activities that promote oil and gas exploration. One activity involved primary school students pretending to be an “exploration company” and modelling oil drilling using bread slices, sprinkles and Vegemite. Such activities may seem harmless and even playful, but the report says they are designed to familiarise children with fossil fuel extraction and to build positive associations with the industry at a formative age. This kind of educational engagement is not simply corporate philanthropy; it is strategically crafted to recruit the next generation of employees, allies and passive accepters of fossil fuel expansion. The message children receive is that oil and gas are natural, necessary and benign parts of everyday life, rather than the primary drivers of a planetary emergency that demands urgent and fundamental change.
The fossil fuel industry’s influence extends well beyond corporate-branded worksheets and classroom visits. The report found that a number of fossil fuel corporations also fund organisations that provide professional development workshops for teachers. One example is the Teacher Earth Science Education Programme (TESEP), a registered charity that provides accredited teacher professional development and has publicly listed “partnerships” with Glencore Coal, Yancoal, Bengalla Mining Company and Energy Australia. TESEP has produced materials titled “Greening Coal,” which promote CCS and other dubious technologies, and is reported to have trained thousands of teachers and potentially reached millions of students. By training teachers, the industry multiplies its influence: a single workshop can shape the classroom content of dozens of educators, each of whom teaches many students over many years. Fossil fuel companies are also spending millions on advertising and branding through sports and community organisations. Woodside’s five-year naming rights deal with Surf Life Saving Western Australia, first signed in 2019 and renewed in 2024, means the long-running Nippers junior surf lifesaving program has been renamed “Woodside Nippers.” The 7,500 children who participate annually receive uniforms, caps and equipment emblazoned with Woodside branding, effectively turning them into walking billboards for one of the world’s most destructive fossil fuel corporations. The report argues that such an association with community sports is a deliberate bid to buy social licence for destructive projects. Fossil fuel companies are seeking the “normalisation of fossil fuel companies as trusted community partners and socially beneficial institutions.” The same motive is explicit in the corporate policies of Santos, which requires applicants for community funding to show how their funded activities will generate “awareness,” “positivity,” “goodwill” and reputational benefit for the company and the oil and gas industry as a whole. This is not accidental or hidden; it is an openly declared expectation that community funding must serve the company’s public image.
The report also reveals that fossil fuel companies particularly target regions closely connected to extraction and processing, such as the Pilbara, Kimberley, Gladstone, Western Downs, Hunter, the Cooper Basin and parts of the Northern Territory. In these communities, where the industry is often a major employer and donor, the line between corporate sponsorship and community survival has been deliberately blurred. The report’s authors point out that the under-funding of public schools creates an opportunity for fossil fuel corporations to exploit. With school budgets stretched and teachers often forced to source their own materials, apparently generous offers of free resources can be hard to refuse. Yet there is overwhelming public support for governments to boost funding and educational resources to schools. The vast sums that state and federal governments spend on fossil fuel subsidies — a staggering $16.3 billion in 2025–26 — could be redirected to provide schools with independent, science-based climate education materials. The political response to the report has been swift. Greens Senator Steph Hodgins-May has called for a parliamentary inquiry and said fossil fuel companies should be barred from classrooms. In a statement, she drew an explicit comparison with another industry that once sought to capture children: “‘Get them young’ was Big Tobacco’s strategy, and it appears the fossil fuel industry has copied the playbook from cradle to career.” She added: “Fossil fuel companies teaching children about climate change is like tobacco companies teaching health education or gambling companies teaching financial literacy.” The senator’s remarks echo a growing recognition that corporate-sponsored education is not neutral, and that allowing the polluting industry to write lesson plans is a recipe for misinformation. The report’s authors stress that this is not a question of individual teachers or schools being corrupt; rather, it is a structural problem in which governments have failed to adequately fund public education, creating a vacuum that corporate interests are eager to fill.
The revelations in From Cradle to Career are stark, but the report’s authors say they are unsurprising given the high-school-led movement that has in recent years forced public debate about fossil fuel companies’ roles in denying the systemic nature of the climate crisis. From the school strike for climate rallies to youth-led campaigns against new coal and gas projects, young Australians have shown they are not easily fooled by branded classroom activities or sports sponsorships. But the scale of corporate investment in childhood settings means the industry is playing a long game, seeking to ensure that by the time today’s children become voters, workers and consumers, they have absorbed an entirely false picture of the climate emergency. The report concludes that the ultimate goal of these programs is not education but normalisation: the acceptance of fossil fuel companies as trustworthy, beneficial and unavoidable elements of Australian life. The report’s release coincides with growing calls for governments to reject industry-sponsored educational content, strip fossil fuel companies of their access to schools, end the billions of dollars in subsidies, and properly fund public schools and independent educational materials. By contrast, the industry continues to insist on its own importance to the economy and to promote false technological solutions in place of the production cuts that climate science demands. The comparison with Big Tobacco is apt, because both industries understood that the most effective way to secure future market share and political licence is to get young people before they develop critical distance. As the climate crisis deepens and as extreme weather events become more frequent, the question is whether Australia will allow one of the principal causes of the crisis to write the educational story told to the generation that will inherit a warming world. The evidence gathered by Comms Declare suggests that the answer, for now, is that the industry has been remarkably successful in inserting itself into every stage of childhood — and that only decisive political action can reverse that troubling trend.
