Lee Lynd.

Photo: Joseph Mehling/Dartmouth

More recently, Lynd has been putting his technical expertise to the test in the marketplace. In 2005, he cofounded Mascoma, a cellulosic biomass-to-ethanol company that has just completed its second round of venture funding with support from Vinod Khosla and other investors. (Lynd serves as chief scientific officer.) In April, Lynd and a colleague announced that they had developed a new, cost-effective method for pretreating cellulosic feedstocks at low temperatures for conversion to ethanol and other marketable byproducts.

Along with his laboratory research, Lynd has advised policy makers on how to advance biofuels, serving on an advisory committee to the Clinton administration, coauthoring studies with the Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental organizations, advising the National Commission on Energy Policy, and testifying before Congress. Grist spoke with Lynd recently about the prospects for his pet project.

How close do you think we are to producing cellulosic ethanol on a large scale?

I think it’s quite likely that we’ll see construction start on cellulosic ethanol plants in the United States in 2007. How quickly cellulosic ethanol displaces large fractions of our petroleum use will depend on investments and on how quickly the industry grows.

What are the major technical challenges that remain to be solved?

Most of the steps to convert cellulose to ethanol are technically well understood. The big obstacle is overcoming the recalcitrance of cellulosic biomass — it’s much harder to break up than corn is, because cellulose has a different biological function. Corn’s role is to store nutrition above the ground during the growing season. Lignocellulose is made to hold up the plant, so its function is structural, not nutritional, and it has to withstand extreme temperatures underground during the winter. And plants have evolved to resist microbial attack, so they’re harder to attack by nature.

So how do we get at that energy?

The route most people envision is using enzymes or microorganisms to convert the carbohydrate part of the plant into sugars that can be fermented. Eventually we’re going to have microorganisms that grow directly on cellulose and produce the products we want. That’s a bona fide breakthrough opportunity that could come in the near or the long term, depending on how aggressively it’s pursued. There are a lot of opportunities to reduce production costs if we can make progress on pretreatment, and [progress] on biotech to develop microorganisms that can convert cellulose to sugars and ferment it. I’m optimistic.

Have Congress and the Bush administration provided enough funding and policy direction to get us from here to there?

If we do the things that were authorized in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, it would represent a very, very substantial investment and would be a huge step in the right direction. But there’s a huge difference between authorization and appropriation, so realizing that promise means that Congress has to deliver the funding. Also, there is some guidance in the energy bill about the importance of open solicitation and peer review that’s important to engage the potential genius out there and move this thing forward.

Are there steps to promote cellulosic ethanol that could be enacted as part of next year’s farm bill?

In general, it would be nice if cellulosic ethanol didn’t have to compete against subsidized crops as people make choices about what to plant.

A lot of production plants, storage systems, and fueling pumps are being put in place now to expand use of corn ethanol. Will it be straightforward to convert these facilities over to cellulosic ethanol at some point? If it won’t, is there a risk that some of this investment will either be wasted on a transitional fuel or lock us into long-term reliance on corn ethanol?

My hunch is that it will generally be cheaper to retrofit a corn ethanol plant than to build a new one from a greenfield site. And there’s increasing willingness to look beyond corn, even from the entities that have traditionally invested in it.

A large fraction of the new investment in corn ethanol is technology that’s owned by farmer cooperatives, not primarily by the big corn processors like Archer Daniels Midland. The farm community is more ready to listen to ideas about biofuels now than it has ever been because of the price of oil, national interest in energy, and the entry of the venture-capital community. They don’t want to be left out, and if they have to change to new fuels, they’ll change.

What do you see as the most promising cellulosic ethanol feedstocks — switchgrass, fast-growing trees, or other sources? Would it make sense to focus federal R&D on a few choices, or should we pursue lots of options at once?

I think we can let the market work out the feedstock conversion side. But we’re very under-invested in everything to do with cellulosic biomass feedstock production. We need to do more to develop new crops and cropping systems.

Cellulosic ethanol is getting a lot of buzz from big-name investors like Vinod Khosla and Richard Branson.

In the past year, high oil prices have convinced the venture-capital community that there will be a market for this technology. Now they see it as one of the most attractive investment magnets out there. That’s a new climate, and I’m still adjusting to it myself. But government funding is also useful — it can leverage private money, and federal agencies can clear up lingering issues like growing corn for food versus for fuel, or whether ethanol produces a positive energy balance.

You clearly think the U.S. can and will transition from corn ethanol to cellulosic fuels. What else do you say about ethanol to people who are concerned about environmental impacts?

As recently as three to five years ago, most environmental advocacy groups were at best ambivalent about biomass fuels. That’s changed pretty dramatically. Organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Union of Concerned Scientists are saying that cellulosic ethanol is at least as promising as a hydrogen strategy for the future, and that it offers game-changing environmental benefits, manageable technology, and no showstoppers if we have the will to develop it. All of us who are providing input on this issue have to be careful that we don’t get too attached to our old analyses.

Even as organizations ranging from Consumers Union to the Cato Institute cast doubt on the environmental value of corn-based ethanol, facilities designed to make it are popping up by the dozen throughout the Midwest. Meanwhile, cellulosic ethanol — which can be derived from just about any plant matter — draws near-unanimous environmental raves. Trouble is, the technology required for producing it economically still hasn’t quite emerged. Thus, like the kid in the back seat on a long family car trip, investors and other interested observers have for years been demanding to know, “When are we gonna get there?” Over and over again, the response has been, “In a while.”

Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

Photo: iStockphoto

Over the past year, however, things have started coming into sharper focus. In early July, U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman announced a plan for making ethanol cost-competitive at $1.07 per gallon by 2012 and displacing 30 percent (60 billion gallons) of annual U.S. gasoline use by 2030. Currently, U.S. drivers use 140 billion gallons of transportation fuel a year, of which 3 percent (4.5 billion gallons) is corn-based ethanol.

Can the United States produce enough plant matter to make this much biofuel? A 2005 study [PDF] by the U.S. Departments of Energy and Agriculture, nicknamed the “Billion-Ton Study” — referring to energy feedstocks, not the size of the report — says that with the right policies we could generate more than 1.3 billion tons of biomass a year by mid-century, when large-scale bioenergy plants are likely to be in operation.

That’s seven times more than today’s output, with about one-fourth coming from sustainably produced forestry products like fuel wood, logging residues, and wood-pulping waste. The rest would come from agricultural products, but corn plays a lightweight role in this scenario: Grain represents only about 6 percent of total inputs, dwarfed by crop residues and perennial crops like switchgrass and fast-growing trees.

Production costs are the main drag on cellulosic ethanol today. DOE estimates that it costs about $2.20 per gallon to produce cellulosic ethanol, twice the cost of ethanol from corn. Cellulosic plants yield less ethanol than corn per ton of feedstock, and enzymes that break down cellulosic plant tissue cost 30 to 50 cents per gallon of ethanol compared to 3 cents per gallon for corn. To commercialize the industry by 2012, production methods and materials need to become better, faster, and cheaper.

Learning from Termites

The biggest technical hurdle in making cellulosic ethanol is what researchers call “recalcitrance” — the tough, woody fuel sources aren’t broken down as easily as the simple sugars in corn. There are three basic steps to cellulosic ethanol production: pretreating the material to break cellular bonds, converting cellulose to sugars, and fermenting the sugars into ethanol. The challenge is to do this as efficiently as termites, which turn wood pulp into lunch with help from some 200 species of microbes living in their guts.

DOE is investing $250 million to set up two new Bioenergy Research Centers that will apply biotechnology to producing cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels. Biotech can torque up the process in two ways: by engineering microbes that excel at breaking down plant fiber, and by optimizing plants for use as energy crops. Just as agricultural scientists have engineered corn, wheat, and other commodities to maximize food production for 50 years, energy researchers aim to develop biofuel feedstocks that have high yields, don’t require high amounts of inputs like water and fertilizer for growth, can be raised sustainably, and are relatively easy to process into fuel.

In a step toward this goal last September, an international research team that included DOE scientists published the complete DNA sequence of the black cottonwood tree, a member of the poplar family. The black cottonwood is only the third plant and first tree to have its DNA sequenced. By analyzing the genetic makeup of fast-growing plants like poplars, DOE aims to develop energy crops that can be adapted for different climate and soil conditions across the nation.

This approach could draw states outside of the Midwest into the biofuels game. For example, New York is working to commercialize willow trees for biomass energy, with support from DOE and USDA. According to DOE researchers, energy crops like poplar, willows, silver maples, and switchgrass could be grown for energy use over most of the nation.

Promoting diverse bioenergy crops across the nation would dilute the political clout of corn and soybean interests that dominate biofuel discussions today, and broaden support in Congress beyond the Midwest. And if USDA and DOE are correct and cellulosic ethanol can soon be produced for just a dollar per gallon, the price tag will give service-station owners incentive to install pumps and tanks for E85 — a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.

The ability to offer locally produced fuel would provide further cachet to station owners. Currently, there are fewer than 1,000 E85 stations in the nation, mostly in the upper Midwest, so few drivers have reason to buy flex-fuel cars and trucks — or opportunity to fill them with ethanol. In short, growing new energy crops could turn ethanol from a regional into a national fuel.

(Don’t) Subsidize This

Both corn and cellulosic ethanol got major boosts from the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which required fuel suppliers to use 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2012, with each gallon of cellulosic ethanol counting as 2.5 gallons toward the standard. In 2013, the 2.5-to-1 ratio ends, but by then, refiners will be required to use 250 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol annually.

The Energy Act also authorized more than $4.2 billion in grants, loan guarantees, and production incentives for cellulosic ethanol over the next decade. “The numbers are reasonable, but our spending on biofuel programs so far falls short of the rhetorical passion and imagination that we’ve seen,” says Jason Grumet, executive director of the National Commission on Energy Policy. “What’s been appropriated is probably adequate to support one or two facilities, but banks will probably want to see more than one or two cellulosic ethanol plants before they start funding them, so we’re not on the large-scale-growth path yet.”

Many observers argue that cellulosic ethanol would be more competitive in the long term if producers avoided relying on state and federal subsidies to expand the industry. In this view, with fossil-fuel prices on the rise and the ecological cost of relying on them becoming ever more obvious, an efficient fuel source like cellulosic ethanol can survive — even thrive — without a nudge from the government. Relying on subsidies only opens the industry to charges of political cronyism — and makes investors nervous that the governmental goodies won’t survive the next big vote.

For now, however, subsidies aren’t going away. In fact, they’re increasing. A recent report [PDF] from the International Institute for Sustainable Development estimated that biofuels receive $5.5 billion to $7.3 billion in subsidies every year, and that this support will rise as high as $11 billion per year by 2012. Most of these subsidies are linked to output, not to market demand. But even Energy Secretary Bodman acknowledges that ethanol may not need its current 51 cents per gallon tax credit extended after it expires in 2010, although he says it will probably need some federal support to attract long-term investment.

In the Meantime

Even though cellulosic ethanol still leans on government support, private investors are showing increasing confidence in it. Venture capitalists like Richard Branson, Vinod Khosla, and Bill Gates are touting it as the next killer app, and Fortune 500 companies are getting into the game. For example, DuPont is working with DOE to make ethanol out of corn stover (leaves and stalks), and Chevron recently announced joint cellulosic ethanol fuel ventures with DOE and the University of California at Davis.

“We don’t view biofuels as competitors to oil and gas. We view them as part of what the world has to do to diversify the fuel supply,” Chevron vice president Don Paul said at a DOE/USDA renewable-energy conference in October. “Somewhere out there in 2025 or 2030, we’re going to need every molecule we can get.”

Paul projected that, within five years, large-scale cellulosic ethanol demonstration plants will be operating and farmers will be planting new energy crops. Just this month Broin Companies, the biggest dry-mill ethanol producer in the U.S., announced plans to convert a 50-million-gallon-per-year corn ethanol factory in Emmetsburg, Iowa, to a 125-million-gallon-per-year bio-refinery that will make cellulosic ethanol from corn fiber and stover. Broin has applied for matching funds from DOE and aims to complete the project by 2009.

Cellulosic ethanol’s environmental benefits may give it a boost in the marketplace. At that same conference, Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) Vice President Mike Walsh estimated that farmers who grow corn for ethanol could soon earn carbon reduction credits of 3 to 20 cents per gallon at CCX. Several state farm bureaus already earn and trade credits at the exchange for soil carbon management activities. The exchange hasn’t determined how to quantify greenhouse-gas benefits from ethanol, but it’s safe to predict that if corn ethanol is worth anything in carbon markets, cellulosic ethanol will be worth more, since corn is more carbon-intensive to grow than other potential energy crops.

It will be hard for cellulosic ethanol advocates to resist lining up for subsidies when work on a new farm bill starts next year. With a Democratic Congress in place, the 2007 farm bill will be a prime vehicle for renewable-energy initiatives. Congress will be looking at how to manage farmlands currently set aside for conservation, especially with ethanol investments driving up demand for corn. And farmers may not have reason to shift from corn or soybeans to energy crops like poplars or switchgrass unless Congress realigns existing subsidies.

Khosla and others have suggested indexing ethanol subsidies to the price of oil, so that biofuels would get less government support when oil prices are high and more when gasoline prices drop. Moving in this direction would signal that biofuels are ready to compete on their own strengths. And, says Grumet, Congress should stop directing biofuel funding to pet projects: “Half the federal support that’s been appropriated has been earmarked, and it’s hard to develop a coherent program without some central coordination. We need some deference to the scientific process.”

In other words, if we shut up and let the researchers drive, we may get there in five years.

Coturri Winery in Sonoma County, Calif., could be a poster child for socially responsible business: The family-owned company farms organically, produces critically praised wines on a small scale, supports a local moratorium on genetically modified plants, and donates to nonprofit causes. But according to the Natural Capital Institute’s responsible-investing database, Coturri wouldn’t pass muster with at least 45 socially responsible funds, because these plans screen out companies that produce alcohol.

Big chairs to fill.

Many of the same funds hold shares in energy companies like BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Occidental Petroleum, whose business centers on feeding the world’s fossil-fuel habit. Other favorite holdings of socially responsible funds have mixed corporate citizenship records: Microsoft has been accused of antitrust violations, Wal-Mart undercuts local businesses and discourages employees from unionizing, and Merck faces multiple lawsuits charging that it marketed Vioxx knowing the painkiller was linked to heart attacks.

Few people would contend that corporate social responsibility is a bad idea in principle — although Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman argued in a widely cited 1970 essay that “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” In practice, however, as these examples suggest, CSR raises as many questions as it answers. Can shareholders and the public distinguish meaningful initiatives from public-relations ploys? Can voluntary actions ever make enough of a difference to substitute for regulation? How do you rate corporations that take progressive steps in some areas but lag in others? And does CSR improve companies’ financial performance?

The Market for Virtue
by David Vogel, Brookings
Institution Press,
222 pgs., 2005.

In The Market for Virtue, University of California business professor David Vogel performs a reality check. Although many academics, executives, fund managers, and advocates believe socially responsible policies give corporations a competitive edge and increase profits, Vogel finds no clear-cut business case for virtue. In his view, reams of studies looking for a connection between doing well and doing good have measured corporate actions in too many different ways to draw broad conclusions about the results. He’s not out to torpedo the “real and substantive” concept of CSR, but he argues that the model needs some tough love.

While his analysis is generally balanced, Vogel does seem eager to point out ways in which CSR initiatives have fallen short: for example, he acknowledges that Forest Stewardship Council certification has become “a kind of global benchmark for forest-management policies,” but then spends several pages detailing the limits of FSC’s impact on tropical deforestation.

On the positive side, Vogel believes that CSR initiatives have led to higher wages and less use of child labor in developing countries. But he says it is harder to measure CSR’s environmental impact because there is less international agreement about what constitutes sustainability. He also notes that most corporate actions to protect the environment have taken place in the U.S. and Europe, and charges that the CSR movement has had relatively little to say about pollution in the developing world beyond some specific cases like forestry and oil and mineral production.

Vogel sees merit in production improvements and energy-efficiency gains at companies like Ford and BP, but notes that “when green strategies … rely on market demand for environmentally sensitive products, the limits of corporate environmental responsibility come into stark relief” — since consumers readily buy green products only when they confer benefits (like better flavor from organic food) that justify higher prices.

The Company We Keep
by John Abrams,
Chelsea Green,
313 pgs., 2005.

Ultimately, in Vogel’s view, CSR makes sense for some companies some of the time — niche firms such as Ben & Jerry’s that make it part of their identity, or larger companies like Nike that adopt policies in response to consumer boycotts and campaigns — but regulation is the only tool that impacts all companies all of the time. “If many companies believe that greenhouse-gas emissions should be reduced and that it is possible to do so efficiently — as they apparently do — then these same companies should support national legislation that forces all firms to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions in an efficient and cost-effective manner,” Vogel writes. “Otherwise, self-regulation will remain largely ineffective.” Presenting this as an either-or choice oversimplifies the issue, since many CSR advocates also support strong regulations and mandatory targets, but this book raises serious questions about what we can expect from CSR alone.

If The Market for Virtue burns like a shot of bourbon going down, The Company We Keep by John Abrams is a cool chaser. Abrams’ construction business, South Mountain Company, has been building houses on Martha’s Vineyard for 30 years, and has developed a vision that would ace any CSR test. Abrams’ central message is simple: “[S]mall enterprises, if driven as much by principled practice as by profit, can produce workplace satisfaction, support good lives, and help shape strong communities.”

Abrams loosely structures the story of his employee-owned cooperative around the “cornerstones” of its business philosophy. They include supporting workplace democracy, choosing to grow very slowly, and celebrating the “spirit of craft.” The company works to integrate its homes with the landscape, and uses salvaged lumber, renewable energy, and green-building techniques to reduce projects’ environmental footprints. More broadly, Abrams and his colleagues are committed to fostering strong communities on Martha’s Vineyard by supporting efforts to build more affordable housing; as Abrams notes, the rush of wealth to the island in recent years has priced many middle-class workers, including town managers, out of the housing market.

The Company We Keep reads like a natural statement of real people’s views, not a public-relations effort. Abrams uses the term “bottom line” more loosely than the “triple bottom line” approach to CSR that aims to quantify corporations’ financial, social, and environmental performance — it’s a recognition that people want many things from their work, not an accounting technique. He makes the obvious but worthwhile point that profits do matter, since no business can make social contributions if it goes bankrupt (one of his friends jokingly calls South Mountain’s early money-losing projects “subsidized housing for the rich”).

This book fits environmentalism into a larger context of building healthy, diverse communities through “people conservation” as well as land conservation. Abrams chides CSR advocates for paying little attention to employee ownership, and urges readers to support small-scale and locally owned businesses because they shape the character of the places where they operate. South Mountain has committed to what Abrams calls “the business of place” by accepting projects only on Martha’s Vineyard, although the company has had many offers elsewhere. “After a quarter-century working on the Vineyard, our local knowledge is still increasing,” Abrams writes. “Even here, there is so much more to learn. Sometimes we slog through the tangles of information like a short-legged dog in deep snow.”

Taken together, these two books suggest that we should be realistic about what CSR can achieve: not every company has thoughtful leaders like Abrams, or operates in an island setting where competition is limited. At the same time, as Vogel points out, “Many companies would be willing to behave more responsibly if consumers, employees, and investors were willing to bear the additional costs of their doing so. But for the most part they are not.”

Still, as illustrated in The Company We Keep, CSR is an evolutionary process, not a fixed state. We can reward sustainable companies — or rather, sustainable actions, since no business is monolithic. If BP or Wal-Mart moves one step forward, it is OK to toast them. Preferably with Coturri zinfandel.

Beyond Oil by Kenneth
Deffeyes, Hill & Wang,
202 pgs., 2005.

After the Princeton University geologist offers this figurative toast, the discussion turns serious. In Deffeyes’ view, it’s well past time to start thinking about what will keep society running as oil supplies start to shrink. Contrary to supply-side optimists who believe innovation will keep oil and gas flowing, he espouses the view that there are only so many hydrocarbons in the ground and we’re running through them quickly. Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert’s Peak is one of several new books to tackle this topic, but Deffeyes does it from the no-nonsense perspective of a trained scientist.

The book is Deffeyes’ second look into the petro-future. His 2001 analysis, Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage, updated the methodology used by Deffeyes’ mentor, famed geophysicist M. King Hubbert, in a controversial but ultimately accurate 1956 paper that estimated oil production in the U.S. would peak in the early 1970s. In that book, Deffeyes applied Hubbert’s analysis to world oil production, and predicted that output would follow a similar bell-shaped curve, peaking in the first decade of the 21st century. In a closing letter to his 2-year-old granddaughter, the author advised, “Get into renewable energy. Look at a cornstalk the way a Chicago meatpacker used to look at a hog: sell everything but the squeal.”

Deffeyes’ analysis was not universally accepted, by any means, but it has been widely praised by energy analysts and other experts as a lucid presentation of the peak-oil perspective, thoroughly grounded in the facts. (For more on this debate, see the websites DryDipstick.com and HubbertPeak.com, neither of which he maintains or endorses.) Now the rock hound is back to consider what the U.S. can do if his and others’ predictions are right.

Although Deffeyes’ message in both books is serious, his tone tends toward the folksy and engaging. He delights in explaining how technical processes work and materials are formed, and he does it in an accessible way; you get the sense he’s the guy everyone in the office calls for help when their computer screens freeze up. Some readers will remember Deffeyes as the geologist who accompanied John McPhee across the United States for McPhee’s Basin and Range, explaining plate tectonics along the way. McPhee observes, “[H]is enthusiasms are catholic and he appears to be less attached to any one part of the story than to the entire narrative of geology in its four-dimensional recapitulations of space and time.” (It sounds overwhelming until you consider other, more prosaic moments; at one point, Deffeyes shows McPhee how to classify rocks by chewing on them.)

In his new book, Deffeyes recaps the Hubbert’s Peak calculation using a simplified method that involves only a few lines of algebra — and might even be clear to policy makers if they took the time to work through it. According to his calculations, we are fast approaching the point at which we will have produced half of all known worldwide reserves. Looking at trends in new “hits,” he does not expect big discoveries down the road.

In keeping with his training, Deffeyes spends much of Beyond Oil considering “fuels from the earth” that could step up as a primary U.S. energy source in the next several decades, including natural gas, coal, tar sands, oil shale, heavy oil, uranium, and hydrogen (which, he notes, is really an energy carrier rather than a source). He assesses fuels from the perspective you would expect of a geologist: how to find it, where the good stuff is, and how to get it out of the ground. He says little about renewable sources such as wind, solar energy, or bio-based fuels, which he acknowledges are not his area of expertise. As a result, Beyond Oil is not a comprehensive energy blueprint, but it does offer a useful sense of how far drilling and excavation are likely to move us toward a new energy policy.

Geologists usually think in longer time frames, but as Deffeyes notes, “Because we ignored the earlier warnings about a global oil peak, an immediate investment in research and development is not an option. There is not enough time.” In his view, no fuel from the earth is a ready substitute for cheap, plentiful oil. He ranks some options, including coal-bed methane and tar sands, as useful but too small to make a major difference. Others, like oil shale, are currently too expensive to attract major investments. Nor, he says, is hydrogen a panacea: the cheapest ways to produce it use natural gas — which is increasingly expensive — or coal, producing lots of carbon that generally goes straight into the atmosphere. Using an electric current to make hydrogen from water produces only about 40 percent as much energy as it requires.

Looking farther out, Deffeyes sees brighter prospects. One is gas hydrates, crystalline solids created when mixtures of natural gas and water freeze. Large hydrate deposits — possibly containing more total energy than combined world oil, gas, and coal resources — are located at high latitudes under permafrost and in deep waters at the outer parts of the continental shelf. The key is engineering a way to extract them, which Deffeyes views as “an opportunity to become richer than Bill Gates.” He also supports a solution that’s a current pet project of Congress: using coal to produce synthetic natural gas or hydrogen, with the resulting carbon dioxide stored or injected into oil wells to enhance production.

For the moment, Deffeyes advocates a few technologies to help ease society down the back slope of Hubbert’s peak: high-efficiency diesel cars, coal plants with carbon capture and sequestration, wind power, and increased reliance on nuclear power, which Hubbert also endorsed. He rightly notes that, while tightening oil and gas supplies mainly impact consumers via electricity and gasoline prices, peak oil forecasts also have big implications for major industries: aviation lives and dies by jet-fuel prices, and agriculture relies on fertilizer derived from fossil fuels. The U.S. chemical industry is currently being driven overseas by steep domestic price increases for natural gas, a major chemical feedstock.

As oil and gas supplies tighten, Deffeyes predicts that prices will continue their volatility; since 2001, world crude oil prices have doubled, and the cost of natural gas has tripled in the last decade. This aligns Deffeyes squarely against the “cornucopians,” scientists and economists who argue that as commodities like oil become scarcer, prices rise, explorers have greater incentives to develop obscure resources that earlier were thought not to be worth the cost, and markets will stabilize. Deffeyes points out that the oil business has been reinvesting profits in research for decades: “Lots of wheels have already been invented. It is not at all easy, or cheap, to step in at this late date and generate major new innovations.”

Among peak-oil proponents, Deffeyes sits firmly at the pessimistic end of the spectrum. More optimistic observers believe the decline will not start for another 20 to 30 years; Economist correspondent Vijay Vaitheeswaran dubs Deffeyes and company the “Depletion Doomsday gang.” But (as Vaitheeswaran acknowledges) even if world oil production rises for one or two more decades, there are other good reasons — like geopolitics and climate change — to look past Hubbert’s Peak. Planning for the transition is more important than debating whether it will start in 2005 or 2025.

Deffeyes was a petroleum geologist for many years, and still has a real yen for the oil business. “As I drive by those smelly refineries on the New Jersey Turnpike, I want to roll the windows down and inhale deeply,” he admits in Hubbert’s Peak. Yet he is anything but a cheerleader for the industry, and his show-me-the-reserves assessment finds that oil companies will start coming up short very soon. While the Bush administration contends that enough technology and federal authority will keep oil and gas flowing, Beyond Oil argues that we’re already between a rock and a hard place. We just need to take a closer look at that rock.

Kevin Knobloch.

Photo: Richard Howard.

To date, the UCS statement has been signed by more than 5,000 scientists, including 48 Nobel laureates. UCS issued reports in February and July of last year that documented dozens of cases of alleged tampering with science, including many involving environmental policy decisions. Before the presidential election, the Bush campaign and White House representatives dismissed these assertions — and the fact that a number of prominent scientists publicly endorsed the Kerry-Edwards ticket — as partisan politics. But debates about science show no sign of fading in the wake of the elections. Notably, in mid-November the National Academy of Sciences issued a report criticizing the use of litmus tests in filling scientific advisory committees.

UCS President Kevin Knobloch is well-positioned to weigh in on the debate about politics and scientific integrity. Knobloch began his career as a journalist, then spent six years as a legislative staffer for former Sen. Timothy Wirth (D-Colo.) and former Rep. Ted Weiss (D-N.Y.). He was UCS’s legislative director for arms control and national security from 1989 to 1992, at the height of the controversy over whether a Star Wars missile defense system would work. After earning a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard, Knobloch served as director of conservation programs for the Appalachian Mountain Club before returning to UCS in 2000 and taking the helm as president in 2003.

Grist traveled to UCS headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., to speak with Knobloch about the next phase of the scientific-integrity debate and how nonscientists can get involved.

UCS’s July 2004 report refers to scientists feeling that they are being asked to violate the “ethical code of science.” Can you unpack that term?

It speaks to scientists’ obligation to report the findings of their research in an objective and unbiased manner, and for them to allow peers to examine and question their methodology — the whole culture of peer review and publishing your results. The code of ethics is violated when scientists can’t publish their results, or are prohibited from speaking at conferences, or are barred from making sure that decision makers have unvarnished access to what the best and the latest science has to say, even if the results are conflicting.

After the elections, White House Science Adviser John Marburger said that UCS and other critics, such as scientists who endorsed Kerry, risked undermining public support for science. His exact words were, “[I]f we’re not careful, the scientific community can become estranged from the rest of society and what it cares about.” What’s your response to that?

It’s regrettable that the White House science adviser would say something like this. The reality is that the science community was backed into a corner and had no choice but to speak up. This is not about the science community becoming political. This has everything to do with the fact that people who had the responsibility for protecting the integrity of science and of scientists in the federal government turned a blind eye and failed to do their jobs.

We’ve been very clear that this is not about public policy. As an organization, UCS does disagree with the Bush administration on a range of policies, but when we agree, we like to say so. While the Bush administration has had a dismal record on environmental protection, they have done a terrific job on cleaning up diesel pollutants, and that’s something that we applaud. But on the question of science, we have seen this administration systematically block decision makers from having unadulterated, unvarnished access to what the research has to say, and that’s just unacceptable.

UCS stood up and put a spotlight on this issue in a nonpartisan way — there are Republicans on Capitol Hill who are as alarmed as we are at what’s happening — but now there are veiled threats and some not-so-veiled threats of retribution against the science community.

Is that how you interpret what Marburger said?

Many scientists are interpreting it as a threat and are extremely unhappy that a scientist of his ability and reputation would choose to go down such a destructive path. What was worse was a statement by former Rep. Bob Walker, who is now a Washington lobbyist and has been deployed to speak for John Marburger and the White House. [Author's note: Walker, former Republican representative from Pennsylvania and chair of the House Science Committee, is now chair of Wexler & Walker Public Policy Associates.] At a forum sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Sept. 30, Walker said, “Science does itself a disservice when it mixes with politics in a way that can engender a pushback in the future.” We view that as a threat, and UCS will be spotlighting issues as they arise, and continuing to work with the science community, the professional societies, the National Academy of Sciences, and sympathetic leadership on Capitol Hill and in the agencies.

Former White House Science Adviser Neal Lane says that scientists originally asked UCS to get involved in assessing and addressing what was going on with science and the federal government. How did that happen?

We had been hearing throughout 2002 and 2003 from both government scientists and scientists outside the agencies who were alarmed. Many of these issues broke in the media — sometimes in Science or Nature or the trade press, sometimes they would make it into The New York Times or The Washington Post, but always as individual cases. So we started to pay increasing attention, and leading scientists across the country started to contact us and ask us to look into it.

Did any of them suggest that it was a systemic effort on the part of the White House?

A number of them felt that it might be, but we weren’t sure we could draw that conclusion. We pulled together a group of leading scientists in September [2003], and it was clear that the alarm level was very high. So we decided to do two things: first, attempt to organize scientists around a statement, which does charge systemic abuse — that is to say, widespread and, in key agencies, a very deliberate, top-down attempt to muffle, censor, and misrepresent science. A number of the original 64 signers, including Nobel laureates and National Medal of Science winners, had extensive input in shaping that statement.

We also hired an investigative reporter and science writer named Seth Shulman, who talked to scientists involved in these episodes, uncovered primary documents, and wrote the report that we issued back in February [2004], which identified almost 30 cases of abuse. And then in July, we came out with a new round of signatures and cases.

What steps would UCS like to see the Bush administration take to address the concerns that you’ve raised?

Well, certainly an expression from the president that the integrity of science is an absolute priority. We have not had that, even as we have charged his administration with systemic abuse of science.

Has the president responded at all to these charges, or has it all been delegated to Marburger?

The president has not directly responded. When we had our first press conference, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, was asked about it in his daily briefing and he gave a rote response that the administration cared about science. More recently, the White House has deployed Bob Walker, which we think is regrettable.

We would like the administration to address these concerns directly, investigate the charges, and protect scientists in the federal government. [Reps.] Sherry Boehlert [R-N.Y.] and Rush Holt [D-N.J.] have proposed restoring Congress’s independent ability to conduct science analysis. [Author's note: The congressional Office of Technology Assessment was abolished in 1995, ostensibly as a cost-cutting measure.] Many scientists in the federal government do not have whistleblower-status protection, so we have proposed that when scientists feel their work is being suppressed, misrepresented, or chilled, they should be able to file a complaint with a science ombudsperson in their agency and get job protection. The ombudsperson would then investigate the charges and make a recommendation to the secretary.

Have you seen a lot of scientists in senior research positions leaving? Are you surprised that there haven’t been more public resignations?

This is not a partisan issue, but Sens. Kerry and Edwards spoke to this issue on the stump and pledged to restore the integrity of science in government, so I think a lot of scientists were waiting to see the outcome of the elections. The other thing is that when scientists stick their heads out of the foxhole and say that there are abuses going on, they do so at great risk of the kind of threats that we’re seeing today. It also makes it hard for them to get their next job unless they’ve already won their Nobel, even though they’re being courageous and desperately trying to do the right thing. That is why a number of the folks that we spoke to chose to speak off the record. It’s clear that they don’t feel protected within the government.

We are very worried that there will be a major exodus of scientists now. We’d like to prevent it, and that’s why we’re working to develop proposals for protecting government scientists. It can take decades to build up a world-class science institution like the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention], and in a few years you can decimate that capacity.

What’s the role for nonscientists in this discussion?

There’s a very important role for nonscientists who support the use of sound science in policy making. Virtually every case we’ve talked about in our investigation has real human impacts. Take the story about EPA’s research into the toxicity of mercury. At the same time that the White House was proposing a weak rule to clean up mercury from power-plant emissions and had crippled the new-source review program that required power plants to have state-of-the-art pollution cleanup equipment, EPA was preparing to release a study showing that 8 percent of women of childbearing age had sufficient mercury in their bloodstream to harm their as-yet-unborn children should they become pregnant. And before EPA could release that study, the Office of Management and Budget said, “Excuse me, but we need to review that,” and then the study disappeared. They sat on it for months on end, and it was only when someone at EPA leaked that research to The Wall Street Journal that it saw the light of day.

Citizens don’t have to be scientists or medical professionals or engineers to pay attention when these stories surface and understand the link to their lives — and then make sure that their members of Congress and the president and their communities know about it.

What issues should environmentalists watch most closely in the coming months for scientific accuracy?

Certainly, global climate change is one. You have the strongest consensus we have seen in the science community about global climate change since the conclusion that tobacco caused lung cancer. The vast majority of scientists who study the issue agree that global climate change is already under way, that burning fossil fuels is the primary driver, and that if we do nothing about it, we’re facing some very dire consequences. This administration has actively sought to insert uncertainty where there is none or very little, aided and abetted by some of the biggest climate polluters.

There are many endangered species cases in our reports. Implementation of the Endangered Species Act is controversial enough without deliberate elimination or suppression of what scientists are finding in their field studies. Toxics, like mercury and lead, are another issue that bears directly on people’s lives and where the science should be beyond reproach.

With stronger Republican majorities in Congress and the administration claiming a mandate, do you see prospects for positive action on this issue over the next four years?

Congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle and many within the administration want to protect the government’s scientific capability for the benefit of the public, and are deeply unhappy with the damage done during the last four years. We need to collectively take a deep breath and work to restore the confidence of scientists and elected officials alike. UCS would much rather be working to prevent nuclear terrorism, or to convince our government to be more proactive on reducing greenhouse gases, but everything else we’re working for is at risk if the individuals who are trying to undercut science succeed. My hope is that people in government will do the right thing and won’t attempt to smear this as partisan politics. It’s about as nonpartisan as you can get, and we can work together on solutions.