BioFuels forum, Brenneman Article

Last Tuesday our Sierra Club group held its forum on Biofuels. The program can be downloaded here (it includes the speakers' bios and club policy statement on biofuels). The event was a success, both in terms of people appearing to be genuinely grateful for us putting on the event, and in terms of the speakers remaining more or less respectful of eachother. Helen Burke, the person who organized and moderated the forum, did a great job. She has been active in Berkeley (environmental) politics for a long time and was able to pull in some high-powered speakers. Too bad we didn't have more people attending. We sent out an email to about 3,000 Sierra Club members in the Eastbay. About 135 people attended the event.

The most interesting discussion in my opinion focussed on the area of balancing food production vs. energy production. Professor Chapela had some very poignant slides depicting deforestation in Indonesia (as seen from google satellite), which he attributes to the growing of palm oil (I recommend reading the article on palm oil production in Mongabay.com). However, he did not effectively link the Indonesian deforestation problem to the attempts of the Berkeley EBI to develop "better" biofuels in North America from weeds like miscanthum (a relative to sugarcane). This weak argument trying to lump all biofuel production in the same "bad" bucket actually makes me less likely to oppose the EBI, because it is in my opinion not an honest argument. Someone as smart as Chapela (I do think he is smart) cannot really think that the EBI is trying to promote palm oil production in Indonesia. So I would regard that argument as quite sensationalistic.

Then, in the weekend Berkeley Daily Planet, Richard Brenneman has written yet another article looking at the links between some of the lead scientists involved in the UC Berkeley Energy Biosciences Institute and BP (the grant provider). His article appears well-researched and probably is the basis of a stronger argument against the EBI on ethical and conflict-of-interest grounds. Yet I'm still not sure if I can simply dismiss the EBI as a get-rich-quick scheme on the part of the University and people like Kiesling and Somerville. If those guys simply wanted to get rich, why would they bother putting themselves through all the public scrutiny which they surely must have expected when they signed on to the EBI idea?

So I am still unconvinced of arguments by either side that this institute at Berkeley is either "good" or "bad". The two things I am sure of are, (1) I would probably rather have the research occur in a semi-public environment like the EBI at Cal, than completely in the private sector and (2) english, art, history and all other humanities professors and graduates are only going to be feeling more and more marginalized by industry deals like this...