Editorials

Editorial: Lemmings Jump Into Bed With Big Oil

By Becky O’Malley
Friday February 09, 2007

One of my favorite cartoons of all time—I think it was in the New Yorker—shows a stream of little men in stovepipe hats and knee britches hurtling off a cliff. An observer off to one side says to another, “Flemings…” The message? (Do cartoons have messages?) Even Flemings, the sober inhabitants of Flanders, what is now the northern part of Belgium, pictured in britches in late Gothic and early Renaissance paintings, could be gripped by the kind of mass hysteria that sometimes causes little animals (lemmings) to jump off cliffs during frantic migrations. Never mind the natural historians who say that lemmings have gotten a bad rap in this story, that they’re not committing suicide but just fall by accident—the image is compelling, and it certainly applies to human behavior all too often.  

Searching the Daily Planet archives for the word “lemmings” produces quite a few usages by our correspondents and columnists in the spring of 2002, all referring to the inexorable push toward invading Iraq. The revived Planet started just about the same time as the second Iraq war, and our community of readers and writers at the time wasn’t fooled for even a minute by the claims of WMDs. It’s remarkable that all kinds of important people in Washington and the rest of the country, from Senators down to newsies, were fooled into rushing to support the invasions, lemming-like. 

Recent news from Washington has been better. Congressional Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi, and even a few Republicans, have finally figured out what we in Berkeley have known all along—it’s a phony war started on false pretenses which is leading nowhere. Even the Washington press, notably slow off the dime, is catching on. 

The new critical attitude is spreading to other arenas—Thursday’s news had Sen. Barbara Boxer questioning the bona fides of Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency, which comes as no surprise to many of us around here. 

We’ve asked the same question repeatedly in these pages: why does it take so long for people in power to figure out what those of us on the ground know from the git-go? Why, more often than not, do political leaders and big media join together like lemmings to endorse unwise endeavors which small fry like us have questioned from the start? 

Last week’s announcement of the pact between British Petroleum (now coyly known as BP) and the University of California at Berkeley conjured up new images of lemmings going over cliffs. The press and the pols fell all over each other in their rush to endorse it. BP has been engaged in vigorous greenwashing of its environmentally dubious activities since at least 2002, documented by the Times of London among others, but you’d never know it from the first day stories about the project in major news outlets. 

Four hundred million dollars for commercially controlled research puts a heavy thumb on the UC scale. Many environmental scientists, including those whose opinions appeared in the Planet’s coverage of the story, have serious questions about the long-term sustainability of the kind of biologically-produced fuels which the UC-BP deal promotes. What would happen, for example, if a UC Berkeley researcher wanted to study the global effect of clearing tropical rainforests in order to grow soybeans for auto fuel? Would BP pay for it? 

And how about the close-to-home local-scale environmental effects of building yet another big lab on the Hayward fault in an over-crowded urban area, which is what’s planned to accommodate BP’s needs? Politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Don Perata are such avid cheerleaders for the deal that they’ve offered $30 million more in California tax dollars to add a special structure next to LBL to house it. Tom Bates and Loni Hancock appeared on the platform along with UC and BP at the press conference announcing the pact. 

Political leaders and the press have the responsibility of acting as watchdogs for the public interest, but all too often they act like lemmings instead. Even research scientists are all too often dazzled by large sums into joining endeavors that they ought to be asking a few questions about. UC professors Miguel Altieri and Ignacio Chapela are to be commended for taking a skeptical stance about this one.  

There are many more reasons to worry about the accelerating privatization of the research done at what used to be the best public research institution in the world, even if the outcome of the research is socially desirable. In fact, the outstanding successes predicted in the hype about the deal might turn out to be the worst case of all. Until very recently research results from public universities quickly entered the public domain. What if the true key to unlocking the auto fuel potential in plants is discovered in this project, but Big Oil has patents locking it up for private gain? Are there safeguards against that? 

We’ll be interested to see how long it takes for others in government, the press and academia to start asking some of these hard questions.