Why To Oppose the BP-Berkeley Deal

The largest deal in US (and possibly world) history between a corporation and university was announced in February 2007 between UC Berkeley and BP (formerly British Petroleum). BP would give $500 million to UCB and the University of Illinois to establish a research center to investigate applications of biology to energy production.

The proposed ‘Energy Biosciences Institute’ touches on many vital issues: human rights, environmental degradation, corporate control, academic freedom, education financing, genetic engineering, property rights. The institute's backers invoke the climate crisis to avoid dealing with these vital issues, but a broad range of students quickly organized opposition to the deal, through protests, forums, petitions, and news coverage.

BP is one of the world’s largest oil companies, and the proposed deal with Berkeley is a key plank in their greenwashing campaign. BP has been complicit in human rights abuses in a range of countries, has a poor safety and environmental record, and is under investigation for accounting fraud. The deal exposes how the public governance of the university & state are being rapidly eroded.

Biofuels remain controversial, as the land required could be enormous, and could displace food. Biofuel plantations have already displaced poor farmers and degraded land across the world from Brazil to Malaysia. The biofuels that BP intends to develop will probably depend on large monocultures of industrial farming with GMOs. Chris Somerville, the proposed director, for instance, stated “My personal conviction is that every plant used by humans will eventually be GM … a hundred years from know, yeah, I think everything will be GM.”

We oppose the proposed deal for three main reasons:

1. The undemocratic process by which it is being struck: The deal has been made largely "at the top", with most of the UC Berkeley community unaware it was taking place, and little opportunity for concerns or criticisms. A project of this scale will change the course of research on campus, and is explicitly against the recommendations given to UC Berkeley in the wake of the Novartis deal.

2. The social and environmental consequences of the research: The EBI agenda doesn’t explicitly consider the dimensions of social justice and ecological sustainability.

3. Increasing corporate control: Up to 50 BP employees working on campus will participate in developing and teaching classes, mentoring graduate students, and K-12 outreach. UCB shouldn’t take money from the same BP that spent money opposing a CA ballot measure to use gas tax to finance research on alternative energy.

what you can do:

• sign the petition at http://stopbp-berkeley.org/

• write letters to UC, and to CA and US senators and congress representatives
• come to a meeting
• put up flyers
• join the listserve
• talk w/ friends, family