1. Corporate U: Industry's reach into academia renews fears of undue influence. Big Oil funds biofuels R & D at UC Berkeley
2. Al Gore: I used to be a cornaholic
3. U.S. corn ethanol "was not a good policy" - Gore
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1. Corporate U: Industry's reach into academia renews fears of undue influence
By Suzanne Bohan
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 11/21/2010 12:00:00 AM PST
Updated: 11/22/2010 09:24:24 AM PST
http://bit.ly/etccvS

Stanford University researcher Thomas Jaramillo is overseeing a million-dollar research project that explores ways to create liquid fuel from sunlight and carbon dioxide. A Stanford colleague, Yi Cui, has nearly $2 million to research solar energy and high-energy batteries.

UC Berkeley researcher Jamie Cate is part of a multimillion-dollar effort to determine how to make an alternative fuel out of crops such as switchgrass.

For all three projects, the money is coming from Big Oil, and the research is at the core of a growing debate about whether the work carries the taint of corporate influence.

"We're all proposing to do the science exactly how we would want to, without any constraints," Jaramillo said.

"I have lost zero freedom," he said, echoing the views of Cui and Cate.
Not everyone agrees.

The author of an October report offering a blistering assessment of such arrangements said, "Every researcher says that. And I think it's true."

But Jennifer Washburn, author of "Big Oil Goes to College," a report from the Center for American Progress, said the oil industry deals pose a far more nuanced threat to academic freedom than overt pressure on researchers.

Instead, the funding can steer the overall research agenda, while tacitly discouraging criticisms of it. And that can ultimately influence -- and limit -- the kinds of products and services that reach the public, according to an expert on corporations' influence on academic research.

"There's a more subtle aspect of this that's harder to get your hands on, but I think is clear," said Lawrence Busch, a sociologist from Michigan State University who was hired by UC Berkeley's academic senate to head an evaluation of a five-year, $25 million contract UC Berkeley signed in 1998 with pharmaceutical company Novartis to research advances in plant genetics. That evaluation concluded that the deal "compromised the mission of the university" and played a role in the 2003 tenure denial to microbiologist Ignacio Chapela, an outspoken critic of the Novartis contract.

After international outcry over the decision, Chapela was granted tenure in 2005.

Change in research

Over the past three decades, Busch said, there has been a shift in university research priorities to patentable objects. Using agricultural science as an example, he said this trend left behind such research as crop rotation, plant row spacing and farm management.

"This is very, very important to maintaining a robust agriculture," he said. "But this has been pushed to the side, because it doesn't yield products. It yields recommendations."

Busch noted that the Energy Biosciences Institute, which is funded by a record $500 million, 10-year grant from British oil giant BP and opened on the UC Berkeley campus 2007, is focused on creating patentable products in the form of biofuels. "I've got nothing against patentable objects," Busch said. But, he asked, does the existence of a large, industry-funded research institution "overshadow any other alternatives" to biofuels for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, such as energy conservation or improved transportation and urban planning?

"I don't have the answer to that, but it's a very important question," Busch said.

In addition to UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the University of Illinois are part of the Energy Biosciences Institute. Numerous campuses vied to win the $500 million BP deal, and it's the largest corporate grant ever bestowed on a university. Its mission is developing "advanced biofuels" using crops such as miscanthus and switchgrass, which can grow with limited water and on marginal lands.

Biofuels are among the most controversial of alternative fuels, in part because the new biofuel crops could pose potentially significant environmental problems. Some skeptics, such as Brian Tokar at Vermont's Institute for Social Ecology, say biofuels' benefits are being exaggerated, because they'll most easily fit with existing liquid fuel infrastructures and require no changes in consumer consumption patterns.

Money flows in

Jamarillo and Cui won research grants from the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford. It's paid for with a $225 million grant over a decade from ExxonMobil -- the largest contributor -- and from General Electric, Schlumberger and Toyota. Its goal is developing energy technologies that are environmentally benign and cost effective.

The oil industry research grants have been increasing as public support for energy research and development has waned.

Aside from a 68 percent spike in energy research and development funding from the Department of Energy in 2009 -- a trend not expected to continue under the next Congress -- federal support for energy research and development has steadily declined since its peak in the 1970s.

Still, between 2000 and 2007, the latest year for which data is available, oil companies made modest gains in research and development spending, although most of that was directed at enhanced oil and gas recovery, not clean energy development. Nonetheless, the multimillion-dollar deals forged with universities for energy research over the past decade have been a boon to the cash-strapped campuses.

But the "Big Oil" report delivers a critical assessment of the inadequate shields from corporate influence that it said UC Berkeley and Stanford, along with eight other campuses around the country, accepted in exchange for oil industry funding for alternative energy research. The 10 contracts totaled $883 million over a decade.

Yet the Stanford and UC Berkeley researchers said they're excited to be working on a new type of fuel that could help wean society off fossil fuels, and bolster energy security by easing reliance on oil purchased from politically unstable regions. And, Cui said, interacting on occasion with industry scientists is valuable.

"We get out of the ivory tower and into the real world," he said.

Working with a company that can most readily bring these new fuels to market, and thus more quickly help reduce carbon emissions, is also gratifying, said Chris Somerville, the director of the Energy Biosciences Institute. Academic researchers can also influence the research direction for novel fuels, he said.

"We're working to steer entrenched interests into an alternate way of working," Somerville said. "I feel this is a kind of activism that's very suitable for Berkeley."

In addition, the funding is urgently needed, he said, and it helps train a new generation of scientists.

Reviews in question

Both Stanford and UC Berkeley officials sharply criticized the Center for American Progress report, saying it focused too narrowly on contract language and failed to explore how the academic institutions use peer review to impartially select research proposals.

Though the contracts don't state that independent peer review of grant proposals is required, campus officials say that it's a long-standing practice woven into the culture of the campuses.

"That was one of the most shocking statements," Susan Jenkins, assistant director of the Energy Biosciences Institute, said of the report's finding that all 10 universities analyzed in the "Big Oil" report failed to include requirements for independent peer review in their contracts.

"We spend a lot of time and money on peer review," Jenkins said.

Academic institutions' reputations for quality research stems from the time-honored practice of seeking independent review by other academic researchers to arrive at impartial conclusions about the merit of research proposals and draft journal articles.

UC Berkeley, in its written response to the report, stated, "In the end, the most robust enforcer of academic freedom is the respect of UC Berkeley faculty for the academic tradition itself."

But Washburn countered that the only legally binding document is the contract, and that relying on unwritten rules to govern relationships with some of the most powerful corporations in the world isn't sufficient.

"In virtually any industry, if two industry groups were establishing a 10-year research partnership, you can bet your bottom dollar that those contracts would be loaded with details about the precise nature of the collaboration," Washburn said.

"Why is it that a flagship public university would not exercise the same rigorous contract standards?" she said. "It's a good idea to both safeguard the academic mission and also to be much more transparent with the public about the nature of these alliances."

University leadership also ceded too much control to their industry sponsors, she asserted, by allowing them to vote on what research is funded.

Who's in charge?

At the UC Berkeley energy institute, the first round of approval for research proposals passes through a committee that, as of September, included two BP representatives on the 13-member panel, according to the "Big Oil" report.

Jenkins, assistant director of the institute, said it uses a system for evaluating grants modeled on the one practiced by the federal National Science Foundation, which funds basic research.

But Washburn took issue with the comparison.

"It's really appalling that they would say that the process that they've laid out at (the institute) is comparable to the NSF," she said. Grant proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation would not include screening by industry representatives.

After the initial approval, the projects are sent out for independent peer review to academics, Jenkins said.

Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project uses a two-tiered independent peer review process for screening initial grant proposals. But the "Big Oil" report notes that a five-member management committee, which includes four voting members representing the industry sponsors and a nonvoting Stanford representative, must request peer review of proposals. Though it's now standing practice, the report stated that there's no guarantee that the system "will be applied consistently" to submissions.

After passing through the initial approvals, final authorization for project grants at the UC Berkeley institute is decided by a committee of four university researchers and four BP representatives.

At Stanford, the final votes are cast solely by industry representatives. But officials with both campuses said that, in practice, industry sponsors have approved every proposal vetted by academic committees.

"In reality, everything takes place by consent," said Sally Benson, director of Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project.

"I do think that the university should be the bastion of independent thought," Benson said. "I hold that value and I think everybody here does. I don't see what we're doing here is in any way in conflict with that."

Concerns about industry influence in academia stretch back decades, and include objections to university research collaborations with weapons developers and the tobacco industry, and still-present concerns about the influence of pharmaceutical firms over research direction and outcomes.
"It ebbs and flows," said Sheldon Krimsky, a professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts who studies science and ethics. "And recently it's on the ascendancy."

Like Washburn, he thinks corporate funding of academic research can be beneficial, with the right protections in place. Chief among them is not giving industry sponsors a say in which research proposals are funded. Instead, that discretion should be solely in the university's hands, he said.

"The university should be very wary about that kind of external influence over the research that goes on at the university," Krimsky said.
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2. Al Gore: I Used To Be A Cornaholic
by Jess Leber  
November 23, 2010
Change.org: Environment
http://environment.change.org/blog/view/al_gore_i_used_to_be_a_cornaholic

It's no secret why taxpayers are still shelling out billions of dollars to the ripened corn-ethanol industry: the Big Corn lobby. Just as oil state senators defended BP during the height of the spill, lawmakers in heavy Ag states are similarly beholden-at-all-costs to the powerful farm interests who get them elected.

But for a politician to admit this? That is a rare moment of candor.

Granted, Al Gore has drifted about as far away from his former political post as a farmer-turned-glam rocker, but still, his strong reversal of his 1990s-era support for corn ethanol is striking. According to Reuters:

"It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for [U.S.] first-generation ethanol," the former vice president declared at a green energy business conference in Athens sponsored by Marfin Popular Bank.

"First-generation ethanol, I think, was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small," he said "It's hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going."

He linked his own support for the original program to his presidential ambitions.

"One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president."

Al Gore could be forgiven his early support for corn ethanol as an environmentally-friendly solution to get the U.S. off of foreign. Even many environmental groups were initially behind expanding the use of the fuel. But many have changed their tune, as, in the last few years, research increasingly has pointed to the large indirect carbon footprint of the fuel ”” essentially when we grow more corn to feed our cars, we need more land virgin land to feed our people (and the rest of the world). This leads to deforestation, often in tropical rainforest nations. In addition, the water quality and quantity impacts of growing corn fuel in the U.S. are also too large to ignore.

What's more, better alternatives to corn ethanol have emerged. It makes a whole lot more sense to support second-generation cellulosic fuels made from wastes, unwanted land, and non-food crops than it does to continue shoveling $6 billion a year to an industry that can already stand on its own.

There are just a few days left on the Congressional calender, and all Congress has to do is let the subsidies expire on schedule. This, however, requires they resist a last minute push from Big Ag””and unfortunately, it is unlikely that others will have the same revelatory moment as Al Gore.

As I wrote about previously ... an unprecedented coalition backs an end to the subsidies: environmentalists who now know better, like Al Gore; government waste watchdogs; free-market economists; segments of the food industry; and public health professionals, among others.

You can join in by signing onto a campaign sponsored by Sweeter Alternative, which represents the Brazilian sugarcane ethanol industry, in calling on Congress to let the subsidies expire this calendar year.
http://bit.ly/h6g1MJ
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3. U.S. corn ethanol "was not a good policy" - Gore
* U.S. ethanol consumes about 40 pct corn crop
* Impact on food prices "real"
By Gerard Wynn
Reuters, Mon Nov 22, 2010
http://bit.ly/c3CMHv

ATHENS, Nov 22 (Reuters) - Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore said support for corn-based ethanol in the United States was "not a good policy", weeks before tax credits are up for renewal.

U.S. blending tax breaks for ethanol make it profitable for refiners to use the fuel even when it is more expensive than gasoline. The credits are up for renewal on Dec. 31.

Total U.S. ethanol subsidies reached $7.7 billion last year according to the International Energy Industry, which said biofuels worldwide received more subsidies than any other form of renewable energy.

"It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for (U.S.) first generation ethanol," said Gore, speaking at a green energy business conference in Athens sponsored by Marfin Popular Bank.

"First generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small.

"It's hard once such a programme is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going."

He explained his own support for the original programme on his presidential ambitions.

"One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president."

U.S. ethanol is made by extracting sugar from corn, an energy-intensive process. The U.S. ethanol industry will consume about 41 percent of the U.S. corn crop this year, or 15 percent of the global corn crop, according to Goldman Sachs analysts.

A food-versus-fuel debate erupted in 2008, in the wake of record food prices, where the biofuel industry was criticised for helping stoke food prices.

Gore said a range of factors had contributed to that food price crisis, including drought in Australia, but said there was no doubt biofuels have an effect.

"The size, the percentage of corn particularly, which is now being (used for) first generation ethanol definitely has an impact on food prices.

"The competition with food prices is real."

Gore supported so-called second generation technologies which do not compete with food, for example cellulosic technologies which use chemicals or enzymes to extract sugar from fibre for example in wood, waste or grass.

"I do think second and third generation that don't compete with food prices will play an increasing role, certainly with aviation fuels."

Gore added did that he did not expect a U.S. clean energy or climate bill for "at least two years" following the mid-term elections which saw Republicans increase their support.

(Reporting by Gerard Wynn; editing by Keiron Henderson)