The previous two posts have focused on the global and academic implications of agrofuel research, using UC Berkeley’s Energy Biosciences Institute as a springboard.
This penultimate article in the series examines the domestic and foreign policy implications.
While BP freely acknowledges they plan to use research developed with their $500 million grant to UC Berkeley’s Energy Biosciences Institute, EBI Director Chris Somerville has repeatedly claimed the work will be used to fuel the United States from unused marginal farmlands east of the Mississippi.
What he doesn’t mention is that the land in question was created during the Depression’s Dust Bowl era by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal to preserve imperilled farmland.
The Conservation Reserve Program [CRP] is the most recent incarnation of a program created to prevent the disastrous soil erosion that accompanied the economic collapse and leant the era the name “the Dirty Thirties.”
While Somerville has repeatedly said most crops for domestic agrofuel production would be grown “east of the Mississippi [where] there is adequate rainfall to grow very highly productive species,” Berkeley’s chief academic partner in the EBI is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), in the heart of America’s farm belt.
While EBI backers say the farmlands will be marginal for food crops, the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations raised alarms when then-President George W. Bush’s that Acting Secretary of Agriculture Chuck Conner announced that he would open up some of the country’s most environmentally sensitive protected lands to farming because of the push for agrofuels.
Conner’s department allowed, even forced, farmers to withdraw from the CRP without incurring the then-mandated penalties.
Farmers had enrolled 34 million acres of easily eroded land in the CRP program, acreage the environmentalists said also provided critically needed wildlife habitat.
As a result of the changes, farmers have been forced to withdraw land from the CRP, as subsidies paid them for preserving the land were withdrawn nationwide.
All this to enrich the investors of major corporations and allow the American obsession with the energy-hungry automobile to continue.
There’s another reason, of course, one that originates in a five-sided building created by the same U.S. Army officer who later headed the Manhattan Project, Leslie Groves.
While Groves drove the Pentagon’s development of nuclear power, it was an Air Force four-star who spearheaded the military’s role in the development of agrofuels, Gen. Charles F. “Chuck” Wald, and has emerged as a leading player in the corporate world since his retirement three years ago.
Wald was instrumental in formulating the military’s strategy for control of Eurasian oil supplies in time of war, and was deeply involved in the creation of Africom, the Pentagon’s newest command, which took shape in the year after his retirement, and is focused on securing that continent’s energy resources.
On May 18, 2007, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [LBNL] hosted the International Low Carbon Fuel Symposium, which included representatives form the U.S., Germany and Great Britain. Three men sat at the head table when the session opened: then-LBNL Director and current Secretary of Energy Steve Chu, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Gen Charles F. Wald, USAF retired.
With “our national security dramatically influenced by the demand for oil,” Wald told the gathering, the best solution is development of alternative fuels. Under Wald’s military tenure, he emerged as the Pentagon’s leading advocation of plantation-grown fuels.
And California’s own Governator added his own endorsement, declaring the solution to planet-heating carbon emissions would be found “by unleashing the power of market forces,” assuring his listeners that “a vibrant market in alternative fuels and alternative vehicles, alternative engines, gives customers a great choice, gives different choices, and that empowers the customers, of course, to say no to those high fuel prices, to say hasta la vista, baby.”
Only one voice raised serious concerns to the agrofuelish euphoria, the European environmental regulator who had issued the initial call that lead to the conference in the Berkeley Hills.
“There are real issues about diversity and protection of the environment,” said Axel Friedrich, then-program director for transportation issues and noise reduction for the Umwelt Bundes Amt, Germany’s federal environmental agency.
Conner’s department allowed, even forced, farmers to withdraw from the CRP without incurring the then-mandated penalties.
Farmers had enrolled 34 million acres of easily eroded land in the CRP program, acreage the environmentalists said also provided critically needed wildlife habitat.
As a result of the changes, farmers have been forced to withdraw land from the CRP, as subsidies paid them for preserving the land were withdrawn nationwide.
All this to enrich the investors of major corporations and allow the American obsession with the energy-hungry automobile to continue.
There’s another reason, of course, one that originates in a five-sided building created by the same U.S. Army officer who later headed the Manhattan Project, Leslie Groves.
While Groves drove the Pentagon’s development of nuclear power, it was an Air Force four-star who spearheaded the military’s role in the development of agrofuels, Gen. Charles F. “Chuck” Wald, and has emerged as a leading player in the corporate world since his retirement three years ago.
Wald was instrumental in formulating the military’s strategy for control of Eurasian oil supplies in time of war, and was deeply involved in the creation of Africom, the Pentagon’s newest command, which took shape in the year after his retirement, and is focused on securing that continent’s energy resources.
On May 18, 2007, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [LBNL] hosted the International Low Carbon Fuel Symposium, which included representatives form the U.S., Germany and Great Britain. Three men sat at the head table when the session opened: then-LBNL Director and current Secretary of Energy Steve Chu, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Gen Charles F. Wald, USAF retired.
With “our national security dramatically influenced by the demand for oil,” Wald told the gathering, the best solution is development of alternative fuels. Under Wald’s military tenure, he emerged as the Pentagon’s leading advocation of plantation-grown fuels.
And California’s own Governator added his own endorsement, declaring the solution to planet-heating carbon emissions would be found “by unleashing the power of market forces,” assuring his listeners that “a vibrant market in alternative fuels and alternative vehicles, alternative engines, gives customers a great choice, gives different choices, and that empowers the customers, of course, to say no to those high fuel prices, to say hasta la vista, baby.”
Only one voice raised serious concerns to the agrofuelish euphoria, the European environmental regulator who had issued the initial call that lead to the conference in the Berkeley Hills.
“There are real issues about diversity and protection of the environment,” said Axel Friedrich, then-program director for transportation issues and noise reduction for the Umwelt Bundes Amt, Germany’s federal environmental agency.
“Clearly, they understand the problem, but you need to look at the effects 50 and 60 years down the line,” he said, noting that a British participant had said that efforts there would be evaluated only five years down the line.
“You have to address the whole transportation system as well, and you have to address what the impacts on land use will be” for people in the areas where crops are grown. “You have to look at the environmental impacts. And you have to look at other pollutants that may arise and at quality of life.”
One of the greatest concerns, he said, is that the likely sites of biofuel production are in lesser developed countries in areas with the greatest and most-threatened biodiversity.
“You have to look at all these things before you start, not afterwards,” he said.
He also noted that despite the claims of the governor and others at the conference, Germany has a much higher target for carbon reduction, 40 percent by 2020.
“Maybe that’s why they didn’t let me speak on one of the panels,” Friedrich said.
Friedrich was later ousted from his job by the government of German Chancellor Andrea Merkel.
The other participants echoed an unbounded optimism of an earlier age about what was then hailed as the globe’s energy panacea.
“Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter” declared Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) Chair Lewis L. Strauss to science writers in 1964, promising as well as the end of “great periodic regional famines in the world.”
The AEC, which like the Pentagon’s Manhattan Project relied heavily on UC Berkeley’s federally funded labs, was later renamed the Department of Energy.
Another voice from the past
Perhaps the most prescient warning about the new constellations of power emerging in the agrofuel sector came from President Dwight David Eisenhower, my grandmother’s pupil.
On his farewell address to the nation, delivered three days before the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, Ike delivered his most famous admonition:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
But the words that followed should be just as familiar to an informed electorate, and apply directly to the emerging power in Berkeley created by the fusion of interest between the Pentagon, a multinational oil corporation, and the world’s largest owner of seeds and GMO’s, Monsanto:
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system — ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
Failure to heed his warning can only lead to a further polarization of the globe, which will be the subject of my next post.
Next: This land is whose land?
