Debaters trade barbs on biofuels

By Andrew FitzGerald

Energy specialists differed sharply and at times personally on the merits of so-called biofuels Wednesday night at Boston University’s 25th annual Great Debate.

The debate, which was chaired by B.U. College of Communication professor Robert Zelnick, featured four energy experts as well as two undergraduate debaters. All were posed the question whether biofuel and renewable energy sources should become critical parts of U.S. energy policy, but the argument focused heavily on biofuels, which power everything from cars to electrical plants using agricultural crops.

“Biofuels are an energy solution that are for the most part good and have the potential to be great,” said Brooke Coleman, founder of the Northeast Biofuels Collaborative, a nonprofit that advocates biofuel use.

From the negative side, Robert Bryce of the anti-biofuel magazine Energy Tribune decried the economic costs of ethanol subsidies, calling the federal ethanol funding that Congress recently extended this year “fiscal insanity.”

“Corn is perhaps the biggest and the longest-running scam in American history,” he said.

Coleman defended the subsidies as necessary in light of similar handouts to oil companies, adding that biofuels have revitalized once-foundering state economies in the country’s midsection, where most of the crops for biofuels are grown, pointing to the large number of Midwestern states that have balanced their budgets.

“Is this evil? I don’t think so,” he said.

Though they had fewer hard facts with which to back up their case, student debaters Neil St. Clair and Ashan Walpita took broader views of renewable energy. Arguing for the affirmative side, St. Clair used flourishing rhetoric to tout the benefits of biofuels as an integral part of a “dynamic competition” that used solar, wind and other alternatives to fossil fuels.

Walpita, a junior at B.U.’s School of Management, warned that biofuels would drive food prices ever-higher, threatening developing nations like his home country of Sri Lanka and destabilizing the world economy.

“We are going to see job losses and we are also going to see slower economic activity,” he said.

Using a highly emotional appeal, biofuel advocate Sean O’Hanlon stressed the high stakes – namely, global warming and pollution – of not switching from fossil fuels. He noted that his own 8-year-old son suffers from pediatric asthma.

Not to be outdone, American Enterprise Institute scholar Kenneth Green said he grew up with asthma himself.

“I, too, am adamant that we will not make asthma worse, but ethanol will,” he said.

At the end of the debate, the audience was told to stand to one side or the other of the hall to show which side had debated most convincingly. Though the event, which was modeled after the debates pioneered at Oxford and Cambridge more than a century ago, attracted only enough students to fill a less than quarter of B.U.’s Tsai Auditorium, the affirmative side still convinced enough attendees to win the night.

Zelnick thanked the participants for a spirited debate despite the poor turnout and promised as he had at the beginning of the debate that the debaters would soon “retire to a fine Boston restaurant.”