UC Berkeley needs binding standards for large contracts with corporations, to ensure all deals are in the public interest, with regards to delivering real environmental and social benefits for all people of this world. These standards would show that we are truly committed to sustainability, in the terms of our research efforts, and in the types of corporations we choose to deal with. These standards should be formulated through a democratic process involving students, staff, and faculty.

We believe that new energy research is essential, but needs to be conducted in the public interest, with the most just and sustainable technology as its goal.

We believe the record of the corporation involved must be thoroughly investigated to ensure our trust and the public interest will not be violated.

We believe the entire range of academic opinion on environmental and human impacts of proposed research must be openly considered.

1. The deal would include research to increase oil production from existing wells, and to expand coal use (EBI proposal, pages 49-50). These energy sources are not renewable, and not sustainable. However, this deal for "sustainability" research would subsidize fossil fuel research for BP.
2. The EBI would conduct research for a future where energy comes from large-scale, corporate-controlled agriculture with genetically modified crops. Alternative models of locally-controlled, organic, socially-just alternative energy systems are marginalized and disadvantaged by the EBI proposal.
3. There is significant scientific concern about the environmental and human impacts of biofuels. The cultivation of fuel crops in developing countries to meet demands for biofuels in Europe and the United States is already causing tremendous environmental devastation, and major increases in food prices for the world's poorest people. Large-scale corporate agriculture in the U.S. has also had devastating effects on local environments. While the proposed institute would have a few laboratories to study the human and environmental costs of biofuels, research from these labs would have no concrete effect on research in the rest of the institute, or on the products that BP would receive from it.
4. Social science research, vital to understanding and preventing further hunger and poverty from biofuels production, is heavily compromised in the proposal. The proposed social science research has a heavy focus on expanding energy markets and changing global intellectual property rights laws to enable this expansion (EBI proposal, page 56). The passing references to "costs and risks" only provide space for "compensatory mechanisms" (page 57). A social science research program concerned with social justice must look beyond the development of markets, and ways to offer compensation in case things go wrong.
5. The proposal relies heavily on genetically-modified crops, and presents them as uncontroversially beneficial. However, there is a huge body of evidence, for food crops especially, that they offer little or no benefits, and can be ecologically and socially damaging.
6. The deeply troubled corporate record of BP, including numerous convictions for environmental and human tragedies in the past decade, has not been considered by the administration in its rush to enter into a deal with BP. Although UCB has divested from corporations doing business in the Sudan, the deal would bring it into partnership with a company profiting in Iraq, and in Central Asian dictatorships. The deal would also place great trust and power in a company convicted numerous times of negligence in environmental stewardship and worker safety.

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