- "So you're hitching yourself to the BP bandwagon?" "Hell yeah!"
- – two undergraduate students in poster forum for Chemical Engineering 144 in Stanley Hall, December 2007
What is the Energy Biosciences Institute?
The Energy Biosciences Institute (or EBI) was created by the largest deal in US (and possibly world) history between a corporation and a university. In February 2007 UC Berkeley and BP (formerly British Petroleum) announced that BP would commit $500 million to UCB, the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to establish a center for biotechnology research, development and deployment for energy production. The main focus of the research center will be on "next-generation biofuels", which are being touted as the solution to global warming, but will also include research on biological technologies that will increase fossil fuel extraction.
The EBI will introduce onto campus a large, sealed-off, private research lab for BP (in Morgan Hall at first), a base for 50 BP employees to work closely with university researchers, looking to develop the technologies with the most money-making potential. BP will get first pick of any new technologies — and it will also decide what gets researched, as it has an equal say with all of the academic partners combined on the governing bodies.
When people got wind of the deal, opposition quickly mounted, and the university went on the defensive. Students organized teach-ins where professors spoke about the problems with the project, and public demonstrations involving symbolic "oil spills" made of molasses and rainwater. Faculty members denounced the deal in public, and brought a motion in the Academic Senate against the way the Senate had been bypassed by the administration, giving faculty no chance to evaluate or vote on the proposed deal. Their motion was defeated by an opposing faction who defined "academic freedom" as the university's "right" to make any research deal with any bad actor, at any scale. However, EBI opponents quickly won the battle of public perception. Chancellor Birgeneau switched from talking about "this generation's moon shot" to saying that the EBI wasn't all that big, or that groundbreaking, really. The deal was reported in the media as "controversial" and as a question of how much influence big corporations should have in public universities, rather than as a chance for idealistic scientists to do good for the environment. However, the university did not back down.
The BP/Berkeley contract was signed in November 2007, but opposition continues, particularly to the planned building it is to occupy in Strawberry Canyon — one of ten the Lawrence Berkeley Labs plans to build over the next decade. Meanwhile, the university has continued entering into similar deals, such as the Joint Biosciences Energy Institute (funded by $125 million from the Department of Energy, best known for managing the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal), and a $10 million "sustainable research" deal with the Dow Chemical Company, which so far has brought us napalm, Agent Orange, and the chemical disaster of 1984 in Bhopal, India.
Next-generation Biofuels?
Most folks these days know about biodiesel and ethanol, two proposed plant-based substitutes for gasoline in our cars. The theory is that they are carbon-neutral fuels, since plants are part of the global carbon cycle — the carbon released when they burn was taken up from the atmosphere by the plant, so no net carbon is released. But remember: plants need land to grow. Biodiesel sold in Europe was recently calculated to be responsible for ten times more carbon than gasoline, since Indonesian rainforest is being razed to plant oil palms to meet the increased demand. This illustrates a fundamental problem with any plant-based fuel: planting fuel crops will compete economically with other uses of the land, reducing the amount of land for native habitat — and for food. By any estimate, the amount of land we'd need to replace our fossil fuel consumption with a plant-based fuel would be huge, putting first-world consumption in direct competition with third-world bellies and ecosystems.
Already the increased demand for biofuels is causing increased food prices around the world (mostly due to the use of corn for ethanol) and intense deforestation in Brasil (for sugar cane), Indonesia (for oil palm), and other places.
The proposed solution to all these problems is the promised "next-generation biofuels", which are still far enough out of reach that all kinds of wonderful things can be said about them. Foremost is the idea of cellulosic ethanol, which will be made by genetically engineered microbes out of the inedible portions of plants, supposedly removing the pressure on the world's food supply. Even if the technology comes to fruition, the dangers of releasing into the world those microbes engineered to digest cellulose are obvious, and only the most starry-eyed would claim that we'll be able to keep consuming as much energy as we currently do without continuing global ecological disaster.
However, this is precisely what UC Berkeley researchers will be working on, under the direction of BP — a technological "solution" that trivializes the social and ecological realities of the situation. The researchers will do high-profile, high-budget research to "save the world", BP will get to greenwash its image and possibly glean very lucrative patents, and the rest of us get no voice and business as usual, while support for research into real alternatives, like sustainable agriculture, dries up.
Technological Solutions
UC Berkeley has a long history of providing technological “solutions” to major world problems. The best-known example was supposed to end all wars: the nuclear bomb. Pushers of the EBI strove to highlight this connection, drawing parallels between the Manhattan project and the future research at the EBI.
Today's biofuel boom is a reaction to one specific crisis that modern, industrialized society is facing: global warming. Industrialized biofuels are one proposed way to get around that particular crisis, but as they are envisioned, even if they help reduce carbon emissions, they will likely worsen many of the other problems associated with industrialized agriculture: global economic inequality, deforestation, topsoil depletion, soil salinization, loss of biodiversity, and water pollution. Industrialized biofuels will not threaten the profits of agroindustry, the auto industry... or of BP, if they control the technology.
Throwing our weight and resources at this particular capital-intensive solution diverts attention and funding from other solutions that address the root causes of the crisis, like decreasing consumption and localizing agriculture. BP is not interested in funding research that will allow or even encourage people to drive less. Nor will technology that allows small farming communities to become energy-independent allow them to continue to profit.
Democracy
The BP/Berkeley deal follows on the heels of an equally controversial one: the 1998 Novartis/Berkeley deal, in which a Swiss biotechnology company invested $25 million in UCB's Plant and Microbial Biology department, in exchange for first right to negotiate licenses to a wide range of that department's discoveries and inventions. Biologist Ignacio Chapela, an outspoken opponent of that deal, was ejected from the university, and had to fight for reinstatement (see the section on Chapela for details). When Professor Tyrone Hayes of Integrative Biology found that a Novartis product causes frogs to be born hermaphrodites, the company (renamed Syngenta) reportedly tried to buy him off and harassed him to stop him from completing his research and then to keep it from being published.
In 2004, an independent review of the Novartis deal was commissioned by the university's faculty and paid for by the university. That review recommended that the university "avoid industry agreements that involve complete academic units or large groups of researchers." The university's administration has never explained why that recommendation has been disregarded in the EBI deal, and faculty, students and staff aside from the top administrators have had no say in the decision. When students and faculty demanded open deliberation about the deal, the administration responded by holding patronizing forums to "inform" us about the deal, and did not answer direct questions or make any concession to democracy. Meanwhile, when a student called for a straw poll at the end of a College of Natural Resources forum on the subject, not one person in the room favored the proposed BP deal.
The EBI is the size of a Berkeley department, and it clearly will shift the balance of research at the university as a whole, towards high-tech entrepreneurial approaches to climate issues and away from small-scale community-oriented approaches and reduction. It involves 20 times as much money as the Novartis deal, and represents the shape of things to come at Berkeley: more "public-private partnerships", more product development and for-profit research, and less and less accountability to the public interest. Since the issues involved in the deal involve the overall direction of the university, and not just individuals' research choices, the decisions should be made by democratic deliberation among all the affected parties, not rammed through "at warp speed" (Vice Chancellor Beth Burnside's words) by a few excited administrators with dollar signs in their eyes.
In fact, since the BP/Berkeley partnership represents a clear choice of one vision of the planet's future over another, it is part of a much larger deliberation that must involve all of us on this planet. The EBI's technology and market research is designed to create a future of global corporate consumer car culture for the lucky and deprivation and wage slavery for the rest — if not actual slavery, as is found on some Brasilian ethanol plantations today. Another world has always been possible, an explicitly egalitarian, democratic, just and sustainable one. We can bring that future into existence, but only through the kind of public participation that has arisen in the World Social Forums, the globalization protests of 1999, 2000, and 2001, and the stunning outbursts of defiant self-determination recently seen in Bolivia, Argentina and Oaxaca.
Climate Justice
As the changing climate transforms from a fringe issue to a global economic crisis and corporations and governments scramble to seize control of the new energy economy, climate justice movements are sprouting around the world. Landless peasants organizing against slave labor on sugar-cane plantations that produce Brazilian ethanol, South Africans fighting to keep communal land from being taken for biofuel production, and Brits sitting in to stop a new runway at Heathrow airport are all part of the same movement: it is now clear that while the climate crisis is an environmental issue, what we do about it is a global justice issue. Like the Dineh (Navajo), Brazilians, South Africans and others fighting to prevent global corporate energy projects from destroying their communities, the Berkeley students and faculty who have organized against the EBI are defending our scholarly community against an attempt to destroy our cooperative, public-spirited search for knowledge in order to mine — for BP's profit — the shared expertise, intelligence and goodwill that we have created together. It is our responsibility — and a never-to-be-repeated opportunity — to create a sustainable and just new world, and corporations that have spent the last century promoting internal combustion, plotting the overthrow of foreign countries, and investing in propaganda to discredit climate change research can only stand in our way.