Center Split by Debate Over Alternative Fuels

A hotly contested debate over the use of biofuels as a solution to the world’s energy crisis has surfaced at a recently established campus center, which brings experts from various fields together to improve transportation sustainability.

The Joint Center for Transportation Sustainability Research was established within UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies in May 2006, said civic and environmental engineering professor Samer Madanat, director of the institute.

The center consists of six campus research groups, each specializing in one of several fields, including energy and resource use, transportation, and metropolitan studies, Madanat said.

Despite the center’s youth, it has established a seminar series on transportation sustainability and has also begun a major research effort to understand the effectiveness of biofuels both domestically and abroad, Madanat said.

Controversy over the use of biofuels is widespread, and two of the center’s members, UC Berkeley professors Dan Kammen and Tad Patzek, disagree about the effect of ethanol production and use.

While both agree that countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on oil, Kammen and Patzek advocate different methods for accomplishing these goals.

One method is pushing for investment in the development of cellulosic ethanol—derived from trees, switchgrass and landfill wastes—over corn-based ethanol, said professor Dan Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory and co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment.

Cellulosic ethanol has much more energy than corn-based ethanol and can not only offer an alternative to gasoline but can also cut greenhouse gas emissions, Kammen said.

However, Patzek, a geoengineering professor, said developing cellulosic ethanol will create more problems than it solves.

Investments in the production of ethanol will harm the environment by polluting water, causing soil erosion and destroying habitats, Patzek said.

“We are so preoccupied with our absolute enslavement to transportation fuels that we don’t even think anymore about the terrible things we do to our environment,” Patzek said. “The real issue is to use substantially less energy for transportation.”

To be more energy efficient, Patzek said, society must rearrange cities so people are closer to their jobs, increase public transportation, develop agriculture for local use and implement a progressive tax on gasoline.

However, changes in American lifestyles would require a lot of time and effort and probably would not be accomplished for another 10 to 15 years, Patzek said.

Bringing these different viewpoints to light will help provoke further discussions among academics regarding possible solutions to the energy crisis, Madanat said.

“The way that scientific debates are conducted and settled is through the peer-review process,” Madanat said.

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