“Misleading and untrue claims have been made by some protesters about the Science Museum and the sponsor of Energy Revolution: The Adani Green Energy Gallery,” the museum wrote in an email last week to those who had questioned why it was advertising a company whose directors are wanted for fraud in the US.

“The gallery focuses on the urgent energy transition the world needs to see and its sponsor, Adani Green Energy, is a major renewable energy business. The Science Museum has not received sponsorship from any other Adani companies.”

From the outset, I should state a personal interest in this email. The “some protesters” the museum refers to include my wife, who works for the NGO Culture Unstained, which calls out fossil fuel firms laundering their reputations through cultural institutions. And I don’t take kindly to the spin doctors of Britain’s reputation laundry calling her a liar, while taking money from alleged fraudsters, coal miners and other scumbag capitalists.

Let’s start at the start. The Adani Group is one of India’s biggest conglomerates, with most of its $36bn revenue coming from coal. Already, this is bad: coal is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels, and the world must stop burning it. Adani, which is named after its founder and chairman, the billionaire Gautam Adani, is also closely associated with India’s far-right governing party, the BJP. 

Adani has been diversifying in recent years, and now – in partnership with the Israeli arms company Elbit Systems – makes military drones likely being used by the Israeli government to commit genocide in Gaza. In 2023, Adani led a conglomerate which bought Haifa port – Israel’s main sea port – from the Israeli government.

It’s not surprising that a company actively engaged in burning the planet, genociding Gaza and propping up a nasty regime would want to buy some positive reputation. And you can see why it would choose the Science Museum as its preferred supplier – with 3.8 million visitors and 650,000 school visits a year, there are plenty of opportunities to get its name in front of people and make itself look good. 

It gets something else, too. We know that at least one previous sponsorship deal has included a gagging clause: in 2021, documents extracted by Culture Unstained through freedom of information requests showed that the museum had signed a sponsorship agreement with Shell for an “Our Future Planet” exhibition, in which it agreed not to “make any statement or issue any publicity or otherwise be involved in any conduct or matter that may reasonably be foreseen as discrediting or damaging the goodwill or reputation” of Shell. 

Discussing the future of the planet while intentionally avoiding talking about the oil supermajors who are principally responsible for the climate emergency, but also paying for your exhibition, is, in my view, lying by omission.

Similarly, the deal with Adani obviously distorts the museum’s capacity to talk honestly about climate breakdown. Because coal companies need to be shut down, not valorised.

The Science Museum’s defence is that it isn’t the Adani Group in general that it is advertising, but its renewable energy subsidiary, Adani Green. There are two problems with this.

First, Adani Green is – as the name implies – obviously, part of the Adani Group. Any fuzzy feelings generated by the company’s adverts will obviously transfer onto the wider company, and is clearly intended to. “We’re not all bad, we have a green wing,” the firm is saying. 

But a coal company with a green wing is like someone claiming to be on a diet because they’re eating salad with their burger. It’s like Harold Shipman banging on about the lives he saved as a doctor. Adani can build as many solar farms as it likes, but until it stops mining for coal, it’s still a climate criminal. It just wants us to talk about the former, not the latter – and that’s what the Science Museum is helping it to do.

Second, one reason there has been a new round of controversy about Adani sponsoring the Science Museum is that in November, US prosecutors charged Gautam Adani, his nephew Sagar Adani, who is director at Adani Green, and six others with bribery and fraud.

The charges specifically relate to Adani Green, whose directors are accused of conspiring to pay bribes worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Indian officials to secure contracts for renewable energy projects (the Adani Group denied the allegations as “baseless”). It was in the context of these charges that activists protested outside the museum last month, and in that context that the museum issued its bizarre email, insisting it is only sponsored by Adani Green, and not other parts of the conglomerate.

It’s been clear for a while now that much of British civil society is happy to launder the reputations of the world’s oligarchs, billionaires and related gangsters. But few do so quite as brazenly as the Science Museum Group. The consequence is that hundreds of thousands of school children every year are presented a story about the environmental disasters engulfing our civilisation that is stripped of the malign corporations who are to blame. Companies like Adani and Shell – and formerly the oil giant Equinor – don’t spend money for no reason. They write cheques to the Science Museum because they know they get something in exchange: a laundered reputation, and silence about their crimes from an institution which should be screaming about them.

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