Biofuels and the Green Resistance

Now that Al Gore has his “green” Oscar and George W. Bush has closed a deal in Brazil by which American will burn up the cane fields in the name of environmental salvation, it is time to get serious about the realities of biofuel. Clearly research into biofuels is necessary, but few people are aware yet how this research will be carried out, how constrained ideologically it will be, how corrupting an influence it might become on American universities, and how dangerous its products might be to the ecology of the planet. Fortunately, a movement is a foot on the campus of UC Berkeley that may create a wave of resistance to and awareness about consequences of a biofuel economy, especially one governed by oil companies.
The still nascent Stop BP movement began as a response to British Petroleum’s offer to fund a secretive half-billion dollar bio-energy laboratory on the University of California at Berkeley campus. Ostensibly, the idea is to genetically engineer plants to yield more ethanol, but other likely projects include research into better burning ethanol. BP learned awhile back in New South Wales that high ethanol content burns out engines. They learned this from their customers who were livid to discover the damage after they had breakdowns and stopped buying BP products. But such incidents now seem to serve BP’s interests since they make the issue of biofuel research seem pressing, thus helping them push research deals through quickly and out of sight.

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