"It's not really a donation. The company might as well have spent it in its own privarte reseach laboratory," said Jennifer Washburn, a fellow at the New America Foundation and author of University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education.

What's more, "BP is also getting extraordinary access that is worth far more than $500 milion," Washburn noted.

The sum is further dwarfed by considering the costs of global warming.  Last year, the Stern Review-produced for the British government-estimated that the benefits of action to counter global warming exceed costs by $2.5 trillion annually.  Since oil companies have effectively delayed such action for at least a decade, they have arguably imposed costs of roughly $25 trillion on the rest of the world-5,000 times the amount BP is putting into EBI.

Dr. Paul  Baer, ecological economist and research director of  EcoEquity, a research and advocacy organization, suggested  that Stern's numbers are speculative but definitely plausible.  "There's no doubt that now we'll have to work harder-that is, spend  more-to reach the same target for emissions reductions," said Baer, who received his PhD at UC Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group. "And because of the delay, some targets may now be out of reach, potentially  committing us to levels of warming with catastrophic impacts-like  the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet-whose costs can't be fully  measured in dollars."

The project has run into a storm of protest, raising issues of corporate greenwashing, subverting the university's values and mission, and even the question of whether biofuels might be "worse for the planet than petroleum," as British journalist George Manbiot argued in a March 27 aritcle in the Guardian, citing a rapid increase in deforesting the Indonesian rainforest due to "the planting of palm oil [trees] to turn into biodiesel for the European market."

Manbiot goes on to note, "But it gets worse. As the forests are burnt, both the trees and the peat they sit on are turned into carbon dioxide. A report by the Dutch consultancy Delft Hydraulics shows that every tonne of palm oil results in 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, or ten times as much as petroleum produces."

On its website, the student group Stop BP-Berkeley (stopbp-berkeley.org) highlights sustainability and related concerns for social justice: "We are already experiencing major problems with cultivation of biofuels and GMOs, from deforestation in Brazil, Indonesia and other countries, to displacement of traditionally farmed lands. A switch to a global biofuel economy could be disastrous for our food supply, especially in the third world."

Pratap Chatterjee director of CorpWatch also warned about the limits of fuel-centered solutions, saying "A single person/single car 'solution' contributing to to sprawl only will reduce dependence on fossile fuels by 10 to 20 percent. It will be dwarfed by the number of new people buying cars."

"It's really about a giant techtonic shift in how we transport ourselves and live our lives.  That's what needs to happen and that's not addressed at all in the [EBI] proposal.."

While BP's research aims at significantly improving the efficiency of biofuel production, there is no guarantee it will overcome the negative "side-effects"-environmental and social costs that could be as bad in their own ways as fossil fuels have been over the last 100 yearrs, including the loss of cropland that increase death by starvation among the world's poor.

The size and structure of the proposed UCB/BP partnership, known as the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), worries critics in part because it would tend to marginalize the sort of critical analysis that might show the whole idea is badly mistaken, or at best significantly oversold.

"What's remarkable about the proposal is the degree to which commerical viability, short-term viaivblity and narrow research applciation is going to be guidiong the research fron the getgo," warns Washburn.  "It feels much more like a commerical research project, rather than an academic research institutue that's truying to find truly longeterm solutions to our global energy crises," she added.

Washburn pointed to an exchange at a contentious meeting of UCB's academic senate, in which one of the prospective EBI scientists said that we can't fail because of the urgency.  Another scientist adamently disagreed, pointing out that scientists constantly fail

"If you go in thinking there's only one path, you're not a real scientist," Washburn paraphrased him.

The EBI proposal is not without precedent, but the two most obvious precedents are both troubling-a controversial $25 million UCB partnership with biotech firm Novartis struck in the late 1990s, which ended in controversy, and an ongoing corporate-sponsored climate center at Stanford University that's been used to cast doubt on the scientific consesus about global warming.

The UCB/Novartis partnership and controversy resulted in a 2004 Michigan State University study whose set of recommendations appear to have been ignored in the current case.

"You have to wonder whether the folks at UC Berkeley read ths report, or whether they just used it as a paper wieght on top of other reports," said John Simpson of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, a public policy watchdog organization.

"This really dwarfs the Novarits/Bekerley deal," added Washburn, whose book grew out of her study of that earlier deal.

"Berkeley has really pulled out all the stops.  They've drawn up an agreement that gives BP rather extraordinary control over an entire academic research center... that will involve some 25 labs," Washburn added.

Among the recomendations of the MSU study were:

(1) Avoid industry agreements that involve complete academic units or large groups of researchers.

"You can't get by recommendation number one," Simpson remarked.  "Its doing the exact repetition of what they're saying got them into trouble."  Not only would the EBI combine the work of 25 labs from three departments, the University would build a new $40 million facility to house it separately from other university research.

"You get a mindset saying, 'We can't do this because it might upset this fincial patron,'" Simpson pointed out. It's not even a matter of conscious bias when everyone's working under one roof, under the same corporate sponsor.

(3) Encourage broad debate early in the process of developing new research agendas.

"They seem to have chosen a particular road of biofuel as a solution and comitted to a particular alternative, rather than keep that road  open and encourage discussion," Sampson said.

(6) Assess institutional obligations and commitments to reliable production and communication of regulatory science.

"I don't see how they paid any attention to anything in nubmer 6," Sampson said. "To be able to serve as an honeast broker for regulatory science-this [EBI proposal] would put them completely in a position where they oculd not do that."

Simpson was similarly critical of how the EBI proposal stacked up against the other recommendations as well. But UC Berkeley spokesperson Bob Sanders simply dismissed the study outright.  "That is Larry Busch's personal viewpoint," Sanders said, referring to MSU's principle investigator, "but we don't agree with that."

Busch responded, saying, "A team of scholars led by me did a detailed study at the request of the [UCB] Academic Senate.  The study was bid competitively, carried out according to conventional protocols for this type of study, and took over a year to complete.  It involved interviewing a wide range of persons with widely varying views both at Berkeley and elsewhere, reviewing many internal documents and memos as well as external critiques and analyses, poring over the agreement itself, and drawing conclusions.  I would hardly call that merely 'Larry Busch's opinion.'"

As if to underscore their disregard for the UCB-Novartis experience, and any need to learn from it, the EBI proposal prepared by the UCB team states, "The EBI... will serve as a model for the type of large-scale academic-industry partnerships that will play an increasingly important role in solving the major global problems of the 21st century."

"If this is the model, it spells trouble," Washburn responded.  "Universities must remain committed to their primary functions--education, disinterested research, critical inquiry and the broad dissemination of new knowledge.  These are critical to the health of our democracy and our nation's ability to remain economically competititve.  If universities continue down this path--effectively turning themselves into commercial contract research organizations for industry--they will wind up killing the goose that lays the golden eggs."

The Stanford precedent is equally worrisome.  In 2002, Stanford University signed a $225 million, 10-year research agreement with ExxonMobil and other corporations-after which it ran ads on the New York Times op-ed page, announcing the alliance.  One ad read, "Although climate has varied throughout Earth's history from natural causes, today there is a lively debate about ...the climate's response to the presence of more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere." The ad carried Stanford's official seal and was signed by the Stanford professor leading  the project.

There is, in fact, no scientific debate questioning the consensus that humans are causing global warming.  A study published in Science magazine, December 2004, by UC San Diego historian of science Naomi Oreskes, found that of 928 peer reviewed articles on global warming published between 1993 and 2003, "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."

In response, movie producer Steven Bing-whose father once chaired Stanford's Board of Trustees-recently withdrew a gift of $2.5 million, the last installment of a 10-year, $25 million bequest.  Bing was the chief financial backer of Prop 87, which ExxonMobile spent heavily against.  By defeating Prop 87, companies like BP and ExxonMobile avoided extraction taxes (which are charged by every other oil-producing state) and could instead spend part of that money on public "gifts" brining them good PR as well as future sources of new revenue-such as biofuels-as oil production inevitably declines.

BP also sought good PR from its $25 million contribution to LACMA, with its solar panel-topped "BP Pavilion."

Solar energy may still be just a tiny sliver of BP's business: "BP invests less than 1% of its annual budget in solar and other renewable energy sources-a smaller amount than it spends yearly on public relations and advertising," notes LA-based artist-activist Mark Vallen, has written about all this on his blog at art-for-a-change.com.  But the need for good PR has grown much considerably in recent years, as the London Guardian noted last Novmeber.

"Federal regulators have accused BP of price gouging. Its corroded pipelines have been leaking in Alaska. A BP oil spill has polluted the coast of California. Civil rights activists are picketing its petrol stations. To cap it all, a young woman, Eva Rowe, has forced a humbling apology from the company for shocking safety lapses that caused its Texas City oil refinery to explode last year, killing her parents and 13 other people."

More than 1,700 lawsuits have been filed by injured Texas City workers, with 1,250 claims being settled out of court, greatly limiting bad PR.

Vallen has written about all this on his blog, calling attention to a British group of artists and environmental activists called, Art Not Oil.  Their website (artnotoil.org.uk) explains their mission:

"Art Not Oil is an annual event aimed at encouraging artists to create work that explores the damage that companies like BP and Shell are doing to the planet, and the role art can play in counteracting that damage.

"It is designed in part to paint a truer portrait of an oil company than the caring image manufactured by events such as the BP Portrait Award, The Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year, and other 'cultural activities' of the oil multinationals which also happen to divert public attention away from their actual activities. Climate chaos is set to have a catastrophic effect on all of us, while hitting the poorest hardest. The companies most responsible are profiting handsomely, yet they're still welcome it seems in many of our most prestigious public galleries and museums."

Valen himself writes, "It is unquestionably time to establish a similar organization in Los Angeles - either that or get used to calling LACMA - The Oil Museum."