Hannah Holleman and Rebecca Clausen: Biofuels, BP-Berkeley, and the New Ecological Imperialism

(From 2008, very interesting in the context of recent events...)

Biofuels, BP-Berkeley, and the New Ecological Imperialism
by Hannah Holleman and Rebecca Clausen
Monthly Review

British Petroleum, Beyond Petroleum . . . Biofuel Promoter, Biosphere Plunderer. Regardless of what the BP abbreviation actually stands for, one thing is clear: this oil giant knows a good deal when it sees one. For a relatively small financial contribution, BP appropriates academic expertise from a leading public research institution, founded on 200 years of social support, to maximize its return on energy investments. These investments, in turn, are focused primarily on promoting the market for biofuel, the newest darling of those in power who stimulate change while maintaining "business as usual." This means working-class people in the core developed countries will subsidize the extraction of even more ecological goods from the developing world to serve elites, who never mind taking food out of the mouths of people to put gold in their pockets. Socializing the costs for private economic gain is not a new phenomenon in the capitalist system. However, this case represents a new twist in the combination of debunked science, ecological imperialism, and the sophistry of "sustainable development."

New Fuel, Old Barrels

In February 2007, BP announced plans with the University of California (UC) at Berkeley, in partnership with the University of Illinois and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to lead the largest academic-industry research alliance in U.S. history. The $50 million-a-year bone that BP will throw to Berkeley will create the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), primarily focusing its research on biotechnology to produce biofuels. "In launching this visionary institute, BP is creating a new model for university-industry collaboration," said Beth Burnside, UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor for Research (quoted in Sanders 2007). In light of the historic record of capitalist accumulation, this "new model" for university-industry collaboration looks like old wine in a new bottle: appropriate a social good (public university), privatize the property (intellectual development), and commodify the output (energy-intensive products). And in this instance, BP has recruited a public institution to be its profit-making subsidiary.

Appropriating Academia

This is not the first time UC Berkeley fed at the corporate trough, and as government expenditures for social goods continue to decline relatively, it is likely that it won't be the last. Berkeley entered into a research deal with the seed giant Novartis ten years ago, after which an external review of the UCB-Novartis interaction recommended avoiding such partnerships (Altieri and Holt-Gimenez 2007). Nevertheless, on November 15, 2007, BP, the UC Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced the signing of a controversial ten-year pact forming the Energy Biosciences Institute. The current deal with BP is ten times larger than the Novartis deal. A brief description of this BP partnership follows:

As part of its continuing drive to find longer term commercial alternatives to oil and gas, BP announced in 2006 that it would invest $500 million over the next 10 years to establish the institute, the first public-private institution of this scale in the world. The institute's emphasis on new fuels meshes with UC Berkeley's and Berkeley Lab's research aims to develop sustainable sources of energy and the University of Illinois' efforts to develop biofuel feedstocks. The three academic institutions formed a strategic partnership to submit to BP a proposal that was selected in February 2007 from among five international proposals. (Burress 2007)

As details of the final contract came to light, the public learned of how BP will gain profit-making technology and expertise by externalizing much of the cost of research and development. The benefits to BP include access to leading scientists and laboratories, first rights for patent negotiations, and the rubber stamp of academia and science on its new projects. The benefit for the university is purely financial, though at least one third of the money goes to BP's own private projects on campus. The benefit for the public is hard to find. Politicians, university officials, and pro-market pundits laud this public-private partnership, while those critical of the "prostitution" of the university, including experts on biofuels' social and environmental impacts, are marginalized. This is not surprising given the undemocratic nature of the process whereby the details of the deal were negotiated without any public input.

Private (Intellectual) Property

Jennifer Washburn, examining the corporate corruption of higher education, explains that the deal with BP will expand the control that private firms wield over university agendas (Washburn 2007). Indeed, as scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin point out in their most recent book, Biology Under the Influence (2007), so-called public-private partnerships are on the rise, and funding, an important factor in guiding research, is increasingly determined by the needs of private industry with the backing of governments. These "partnerships" are ideologically accepted and promoted, as were the earliest land enclosures and contemporary privatization schemes, as a natural and inevitable evolution of society's institutions.1 Debates concerning the cultural, political, and technological viability of market-based solutions to environmental and social problems are directly influenced by how science interacts with dominant ideology to mold and reinforce decisions that affect the world. The seemingly natural process of the degrading trends of capitalist development must be confronted.

No Free Lunch in Crop-Based Biofuels

Like the Aesopian rhetoric used under capitalism to promote war and imperialism in the name of democracy, the way in which the 10-year plan to "research" (aka promote) biofuels blatantly dismisses potential ecological damage is unsettling. There is no evidence that biofuels can actually satisfy the energy appetite of capitalism -- they have so far only helped to destroy both ecological and social relationships. This critique does not only come from those who suffer the immediate consequences of biofuels' advance, but also from ecologists within UC Berkeley's ivory walls. Dr. Miguel Altieri, agroecologist, explains:

By promoting large-scale mechanized monocultures which require agrochemical inputs and machinery, and as carbon-capturing forests are felled to make way for biofuel crops, CO2 emissions will increase not decrease. The only way to stop global warming is to promote small-scale organic agriculture and decrease the use of all fuels, which requires major reductions in consumption patterns and development of massive public transportation systems, areas that the University of California should be actively researching and that BP and the other biofuel partners will never invest one penny towards. (Altieri 2007) 2

The damages from biofuel production are growing. For instance, a recent UNEP/UNESCO report projects the loss of 98% of Indonesia's forests by 2022, due in large part to land cleared for plantations of palm trees to produce biofuel (Nellemann and Virtue 2007: 6). Indonesia is home to one of the largest rain forests in the world and a repository of a great deal of the world's biodiversity. Along with deforestation, habitat destruction, decreased biodiversity, and increased industrial mono-cropping and agricultural inputs (including fertilizer, herbicide, genetically modified seed, and water), we see the removal of sensitive lands from conservation programs and more water pollution.

So, BP-Berkeley project's claim of ecological concern raises many questions.3 Not least is BP's own track record of environmental destruction. And "alternative" fuel represents only the most publicly discussed venture of the new institute. Other research endeavors include: "the conversion of heavy hydrocarbons to clean fuels, improved recovery from existing oil and gas reservoirs and carbon sequestration" (Brenneman 2007). Given this research agenda, it is easy to see why environmentalists, farmers, and other critics around the world understand that the main thing "green" coming out of the EBI will be money.

To Read the rest of the Essay

More resources:

Now compare to the BP corporation's current attitude concerning the devastating Gulf oil spill:

Yves Smith: "On BP’s Many Forms of Less Than Artful Dodging."

Scott Saul: A Body on the Gears -- On Mario Savio

A Body on the Gears: On Mario Savio
By Scott Saul
The Nation



In the fall of 1964, with the Free Speech Movement roiling the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, 21-year-old Mario Savio felt, with some pride of ownership, that "this little place had become...one of the central places on the planet." Four years later, Savio was falling off the map--living a few miles from campus in the West Berkeley flats, working on the assembly line of an electrical parts firm and caring with his wife for their infant son, who'd been born with severe developmental problems. The man the New York Times had dubbed "the archangel of student revolt" was finding shelter in quiet anonymity. Even the FBI, which named Savio one of fifteen "key activists" in early 1968 and investigated his bank accounts, phone accounts and workplace, concluded in a report that maybe he wasn't such a key activist anymore.

Yet the distinctiveness of Mario Savio--the particular tone and accent he lent to the New Left in its first years--is disclosed in a small set of details from this same FBI report. Savio, it seems, had taken to listing his phone number under false names (or what the Bureau called "aliases") in order to avoid harassing calls. In the phone book, Mario Savio was by turns José Martí, Wallace Stevens and David Bohm--which is to say, a late-nineteenth-century Cuban revolutionary-exile and poet who admired the US tradition of free speech yet scourged American imperialism; a Modernist poet who married philosophy and imagination ("We seek/The poem of pure reality, untouched/By trope or deviation, straight to the word"); and a theoretical physicist who, after helping Robert Oppenheimer develop the atomic bomb, defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities and lost his professorship at Princeton as a result.

The assortment of names plots the wide arc of Savio's ambitions and identifies the tensions he struggled to master. Savio was a revolutionary and civil libertarian, logician and poet, scientific observer and self-aware partisan--and in his heyday a virtuosic extemporizer who seemed not so much to perform all these identities as to incarnate them. He was, in short, an icon of possibility for his generation of student activists; and so it's a great historical riddle, tinged with pathos, why he was, in Berkeley in 1964, the lightning rod of his time and, almost immediately afterward, a man who couldn't conduct the energy he'd summoned.

Robert Cohen dedicates much of Freedom's Orator, his absorbing and even-keeled biography of Savio, to this very question, peeling back the layers of myth that have enveloped Savio and the Free Speech Movement while substantiating their achievement. By necessity Freedom's Orator is a dual biography of a man and his movement, and almost half the book follows less than four months of Savio's life, the pivotal fall semester of 1964. The FSM ran what we might call a textbook student-activist campaign in that interval--if we overlook the fact that the textbook didn't exist yet. President Nixon's 1970 Commission on Campus Unrest termed militant student protest "the Berkeley invention," and rightly so, since the FSM pioneered the use of civil rights strategies of direct action in a university setting, demonstrating how such disruptive tactics could mobilize a majority of students and even win the sympathies of a formerly passive faculty.

The FSM had the benefit of a cadre of experienced organizers, many seasoned like Savio in civil rights work, and a university administration that couldn't shoot straight. What began as a seemingly minor dispute over civil liberties on campus--could students hand out political literature on a twenty-six-foot strip of land owned by the university?--spiraled quickly into a battle royal in which the meaning of the university and American liberalism seemed to be at stake. The central events have since passed into '60s legend: the seizure of a police car, wherein thousands of students surrounded a police cruiser holding an arrested civil rights activist, immobilizing it for thirty-two hours while speaker after speaker used the car's roof as their podium; the December 2 sit-in, wherein almost 800 students were arrested after occupying Sproul Hall, the central administrative building, to protest disciplinary action against four movement leaders; and the December 7 Greek Theatre incident, wherein Savio walked onstage to speak to the assembled student body and was immediately grabbed at his throat and arms by police and dragged offstage--an administration fiasco that UC president Clark Kerr called "an accident that looked like fascism."

In all these events, Savio played no small part in the theater of protest. It was he who first mounted the roof of the police car, taking off his shoes so as not to dent it--a quite sincere act of decorum, though not one that prevented him from comparing the police to Adolph Eichmann (they all "had a job to do"). It was Savio who, before the sit-in, famously urged students to put their "bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and...make [the machine] stop"--updating Luddism for the age of the Organization Man. And it was Savio who, at the Greek Theatre, publicly offered his own body to the cause, making his "machine" speech seem much more than mere metaphor.

Savio's gift for decisive action earned him the admiration of many students but the queasy attention of many faculty and administrators: it was one thing to read Sartre and Camus in philosophy class and quite another to apply existential ideas of moral engagement to the Berkeley campus, which they considered a far cry from France under German occupation. Intellectual historian Henry May, who chaired Berkeley's history department at the time, offered this revealing assessment:

Always extreme but never sectarian, at times Messianic--and to adult ears--often skirting the edges of the ridiculous--Savio is the only leader who seems to represent a new genre.... In terms of religious and quasi-religious precedent, modern existentialism seems closer than Tolstoyan non-violence. What Savio was demanding [in his "machine" speech] was something like an existentialist acte gratuit, a gesture of self-identification.

Despite his condescension, May was correct to emphasize how a kind of existential humanism--one that saw alienation as a tragic face of modern life, large bureaucracies as the machinery of quiet death and individual rebellion as a profound form of self-fulfillment--suffused Savio's rhetoric. His "machine" speech turned on the sense that men and women, by their nature, revolt against being turned into "a bunch of raw materials," to be "bought by some clients of the university, be they the government, be they the industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone!" "We're human beings!" he ended emphatically.

Just a few years later, Savio's recourse to ideas of universal human nature would seem imprecise if not presumptuous: how could one person--especially a young white American college student, bound seemingly for a life of middle-class prosperity--speak for every man and woman around the globe? Then again, why not? At the time, Savio's language tapped into a deep reservoir of aspiration and emotion, calling together all those "people who have not learned to compromise, who for example have come to the university to learn to question, to grow, to learn." In some quarters, such people would be known simply as "nerds"--and in fact, one sociological study of Berkeley undergraduates in 1964 concluded that a key variable separating FSM supporters from their opponents was GPA. (More than half of those with a GPA of B+ or better were self-designated radicals, while only one-tenth were conservatives.) Savio's rhetoric allowed these young people to recognize themselves as a community with higher motives than liberals like Clark Kerr, who was not only the UC president but also the nation's foremost labor-management negotiator, and therefore an expert in the art of compromise. Savio's nerds, by contrast, were proudly impractical: they were those who would "die rather than be standardized, replaceable, and irrelevant."

To Read the Rest of the Review Essay

Nov 20th Student Occupation of Wheeler Hall at University of California-Berkeley

(via California Knows How to Party: No Business as Usual in UC System)