Once the rockets are up, who should care where they come down? The problem of responsibility ascription for the negative consequences of biofuel innovations

Shortly after the turn of the new millennium, liquid biofuels for the transport sector were endorsed by official bodies in Europe and the USA as a most welcome contribution for solving the problems of energy scarcity, climate change and rural poverty, but have since become the target of so much criticism and controversy that the present situation looks like a virtual stalemate. In more recent years, research policy circles in Europe have become enamored by the idea of ‘Responsible Innovation’ (RI) or, in its more expanded version, ‘responsible research and innovation’ (RRI). This new approach for the social management of emerging technologies and innovations promises to address or avoid the sort of deep conflicts that have afflicted the trajectory of biofuels. Thus the question automatically arises if the promotion and development of biofuels might have been organized as an exercise in Responsible Innovation and whether this could have made a difference. As this is a counterfactual question (like the notorious ‘what if’ questions in historiography), it is impossible to come up with a straightforward and conclusive answer based on empirical research alone.¹ Nonetheless, we will attempt to arrive at a plausible answer to this question by creatively combining theoretical considerations and empirical information on the initiation and implementation of biofuels policies. But first we will present a conceptual scrutiny of the twin ideas of RI and RRI.

As the expression ‘Responsible Innovation’ and its expanded version are still of recent coinage, they should properly give rise to some wonder and surprise. This new combination of words duly invites the question to what extent innovation can actually be ‘responsible’ and what sense of ‘responsibility’ might be implied in this connection. To explore this question, we start by turning to the classical authors Max Weber and John Dewey to give a provisional specification to the notion of responsibility, which can serve as a baseline for our discussion of Responsible Innovation in the area of biofuels.

For Weber as well as for Dewey responsibility means being accountable for the foreseeable consequences of one’s actions and implies an honest and serious attempt to actually foresee those consequences to the best of one’s ability and knowledge. Both hold that good intentions are not enough for responsible conduct. Weber famously distinguished between an ‘ethic of responsibility’ (Verantwortungsethik) and an ‘ethic of conviction’ (Gesinnungsethik). Within the former, “one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one’s action” (or as the German original reads: “man [hat] für die (voraussehbaren) Folgen seines Handelns aufzukommen”), within the latter, in religious terms, “[one] does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord” (Weber 1968, p. 175). Weber unreservedly opted for the former. In a similar vein Dewey held that “our chief moral business is to become acquainted with consequences” (Dewey and Tufts 1908, p. 464). While Weber’s and Dewey’s view of responsibility as being accountable for the foreseeable consequences of one’s actions might not be spectacular—rather it seems quite a common-sense conception that is also shared by recent authors who write about the social responsibility of scientists (e.g. Douglas 2009; Forge 2008)—nonetheless, this fairly minimal and seemingly innocuous conception still proves to have real bite when used to critically examine the contemporary approaches to Responsible Innovation.

It is generally agreed that innovation is a collective process that involves many different actors and often exhibits unexpected twists and turns in its trajectory over time. The ultimate societal and environmental consequences of a particular innovation are therefore virtually unpredictable. This radical uncertainty of innovation processes, which partly springs from their collective character, is also duly recognized by advocates of Responsible Innovation: “The unpredictability of innovation is inherently linked to its collective nature” (Stilgoe et al. 2013, p. 1569; cf. Ozdemir et al. 2011). The puzzle, then, is what ‘responsibility’ could still mean under such circumstances. Following Weber and Dewey, one would be inclined to call research and innovation ‘responsible’ if and only if their protagonists are willing and able to take accountability for, or “stand up for”, the societal and environmental consequences of their endeavors (remember Weber’s phrase “aufkommen für die Folgen”). If there is practically no way to predict or foresee such consequences, however, all talk about responsibility in this context would seem to be groundless and misleading. Matters become even more complicated when we realize that innovation as a collective process partly occurs through economic transactions on the market.²

In the traditional liberal conception of the market system it is quite customary to relieve economic actors from any responsibility for the more remote consequences of economic competition and technological and commercial innovation. When harmful consequences are brought about cumulatively through the mediation of (perhaps a long series of) market transactions, they are often considered inevitable and excusable and not an appropriate occasion for invoking anybody’s remedial responsibility (Miller 2001, p. 458). So when one supermarket A drives supermarket B out of business “by offering a better service to customers”, we would probably be inclined to agree that in that case supermarket A bears no special responsibility to compensate supermarket B for the economic damage the latter incurred through A’s actions.

The doctrines of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Responsible Innovation (RI) run counter to this conventional wisdom. In CSR there are for instance activists in the worldwide anti-sweatshop movement, who have been quite successful in convincing Western consumers and multinational companies that they bear some responsibility for the fate of far-away workers toiling in nominally independent subcontractor firms in the initial stages of the value chain of the international garment industry (Young 2004). In a similar vein the advocates of Responsible Innovation try to mitigate the possible social and ecological problems that arise from development of novel (technological) innovations.

Nonetheless, both these currents of thought are themselves far from clear about where to draw the lines in delimiting the scope of responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of new scientific and technological developments. Moreover, widening the scope of responsibility also dramatizes the epistemic problem concerning the limited predictability of the consequences of research and innovation.

Scholars in Responsible Innovation have tried to overcome this problem of limited predictability of the consequences of innovations by turning to methods of public deliberation and public participatory decision making. The basic idea is that by involving the public in the deliberation and decision-making about an innovation project from the earliest stages on, and being “responsive” to their “concerns”, we can compensate for our limited predictive capabilities (Stilgoe et al. 2013). This way it would also be possible to evade David Collingridge’s well-known control dilemma, which holds that early on a new technology is not amenable to social control because at that stage the consequences are still unclear, while later on, when the consequences become manifest, the technology is so much entrenched that it can no longer be steered in a desirable direction (Collingridge 1980).

The trick is to use the “societal concerns” about possible future effects of an innovation as expressed by the public in the present (real-time) as a stand-in for the virtually unforeseeable future consequences and then to feed those “concerns” back into the on-going research and development work (Fisher 2005). When the innovators are genuinely responsive to the public’s concerns, they should be able to curb these possible future negative effects.

Various forms of foresight and forecasting figure prominently in the armamentarium of Responsible Innovation—indeed, ‘anticipation’ is considered one of its central dimensions, next to ‘reflexivity’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘responsiveness’ (Stilgoe et al. 2013)—but the meaning of these words seems to deviate from their normal sense. As David Guston clarifies, “anticipatory governance involves a rejection of prediction but an embrace of an approach to foresight we call anticipation, which casts multiple, plausible futures as objects for deliberation rather than a single predicted future as an object of pursuit” (Guston 2010, p. 434). What is fed as an input into public deliberation and decision-making about technology development is thus not a forecast of the future, but a menu of visions of various possible futures, which can then be taken into account in the processes of research and innovation.

At the start of the new millennium liquid biofuels for the transport sector were hailed both in the USA and in Europe as a welcome climate-neutral solution for the problem of energy supply. By mandatory blending of bioethanol and biodiesel obtained from agricultural crops with petrol and diesel, a modest initial impetus could be given for a necessary transition towards a future ‘bio-economy’, which would no longer be based on fossil resources. In due course these so-called ‘first-generation’ biofuels would be followed by more advanced (‘second-generation’ and even ‘third-generation’) biofuels.³

However, the honeymoon period for the first generation of biofuels was not to last for long (Van den Belt et al. 2008, pp. 37–72). Their reputation received a severe blow in the year 2007 when it appeared that the competition of the increasing production of biofuels with food production (“fuels versus foods”) was one of the underlying causes of the rise in food prices that led to food riots among the urban poor in several developing countries. The following year the journal Science published two quantitative studies (Fargione et al. 2008; Searchinger et al. 2008), which suggested that the large-scale cultivation of biofuel crops might on balance increase rather than decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by inducing (direct and indirect) changes in land use. Environmental NGOs that had initially supported the switch to biofuels, now turned against it. Developmental NGOs joined the opposition on the grounds that a boom in biofuels would endanger food security and lead to land grabbing and the further marginalization of vulnerable groups in developing countries. Proponents of biofuels (encompassing biotech companies, farmers and researchers) often admitted that the first generation of biofuels is far from perfect, but pinned their hopes on the development of more advanced generations, which would fulfill the promise of climate neutrality after all and mitigate or even eliminate any competition with food production. In their view the first generation, however problematic, is an indispensable stepping stone towards later generations and cannot be skipped.

In recent years much of the debate about biofuels has concentrated on the details of the regulatory regime aimed at stimulating and channeling the deployment and development of these alternatives for fossil transport fuels. Both the US government and the EU rely on mandatory blending targets as their primary policy instrument. Thus, the European Commission Renewable Energy Directive of 2009 envisages that 10 % of all transport fuel must come from renewable sources (mainly biofuels) by 2020. The EU also sets out some minimal sustainability criteria. Biofuels must achieve greenhouse gas savings of at least 35 % in comparison to fossil fuels, cannot be grown in areas converted from land with previously high carbon stock such as wetlands and forests, and cannot be obtained from high biodiversity areas like primary forests. In 2012 the European Commission (EC) issued a proposal to amend both Directives with the aim of limiting the use of first-generation biofuels to only half of the 10 % target for 2020 and to stimulate a more rapid development and deployment of second-generation and third-generation biofuels (EC 2012).

The Commission touched upon a very sensitive issue when it also suggested in 2012 that providers and EU member countries should report on emissions that might be caused by “indirect land use change” (ILUC).⁴ The issue of ILUC is a bone of contention among the various parties, meeting all the criteria of a “wicked problem” (Palmer 2012). While environmental and developmental NGOs insist on the need to actually include (and not just report about) ILUC estimations when determining which fuels may count as renewable, industry representatives denounce their use because they claim there is no proper scientific methodology on which they might be based. At the time of writing, the ILUC issue and the problem of how to promote the development of second-generation biofuels, are still unresolved within the European institutions.

When it comes to the indirect social and environmental effects of the production and use of biofuels we see an ongoing discussion on both whether there are such problems and which actor(s) should carry responsibility for these issues.

ILUC effects have been controversial ever since the quantitative study by Tim Searchinger et al. was published in 2008. Searchinger and his colleagues concentrated on the indirect effects of expanding the area of biofuel crops. They calculated that a planned increase of US corn ethanol production of 56 billion liters in 2016, diverting 12.8 million ha of US cropland from food and feed production and inducing the cultivation of an extra 10.8 million ha of land elsewhere and on other continents, would nearly double GHG emissions over 30 years and increase greenhouse gases for 167 years. They thus conclude: “Use of good cropland to expand biofuels will probably exacerbate global warming in a manner similar to directly converting forest and grasslands” (Searchinger et al. 2008, p. 1240).

Not all actors in the biofuel debate have been keen to accept the findings of the Searchinger report. In Europe representatives of the biofuel industry have been complaining about the unfavorable investment climate resulting from the current political indecision in Europe, resulting from the research on ILUC effects. For instance, Robert Wright, secretary-general of ePure, the association of the European ethanol industry, laments that the “ILUC cloud” hanging over the industry and the Commission’s policy turn have destroyed investor confidence: “For investments to take place we need stable, clear and long-term policies and no policy u-turns” (Wright quoted in Maler 2014). In a similar vein the Danish biotech firm Novozymes, which has a strong interest in the development of second-generation biofuels (because it specializes in making enzymes, which will be needed if cellulose is to be broken down), opposes accounting for ILUC effects. As a company spokesman explains: “ILUC is a controversial concept. The belief behind the concept is that the displacement of other land-using activities, caused by biofuels expansion, contributes to greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere—and this should be factored into the lifecycle analysis of biofuels. As such, ILUC cannot be calculated but only modelled, and variations in models show very different figures. It is therefore also very difficult to base legislation on it” (Amrani 2015; Novozymes, n.d.).

In the United States the findings of the Searchinger study have been severely criticized by the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) and the New Fuels Alliance, industry groups with an important stake in US biofuels production. They believed that Searchinger and his team underestimated the possibilities of technological progress in biofuels and agriculture generally and they also held that the inclusion of indirect effects like land use changes would necessitate the use of “very complex econometric models” (BIO 2008). The two industry groups suggested to cling to Standard Life Cycle Analyses (which exclude consideration of indirect effects) on the grounds that we do not have the sophisticated models to adequately deal with land-use changes (BIO 2008; New Fuels Alliance 2008). It can be readily admitted that adequately modeling land-use changes is extremely difficult, but the industry response is still remarkable. Their position actually amounts to turning a blind eye to such indirect effects, perhaps in the hope that they will not be there if we do not look for them.

Not surprisingly, the US biofuels industry declined any responsibility for increased GHG emissions through land-use changes. They also tried to lay this responsibility at the doors of governments, as the Biotechnology Industry Organization declared: “Indirect land use changes are a function of land use policy. Sustainable biofuels production must go hand-in-hand with sustainable land use policy” (BIO 2008). In other words, it is up to the governments of biofuel producing countries like Brazil, Indonesia or Malaysia to prevent that the pressure on land to meet the increased demand for biofuel will lead to further deforestation.

What the organization did not say is that such a policy, if it were in place, might reduce food production. As the Searchinger study observes: “Effective controls on land conversion would constrain the major source of new supply to meet increased biofuel demands, resulting in less additional cropland and higher market prices as markets seek equilibrium. In that event, more greenhouse benefits would stem in reality from reduced food consumption” (Searchinger et al. 2008, p. 1240; our italics).⁵ It seems that using land for the growing of biofuel crops competes with using land for food production or keeping it as forest or wilderness areas. There is in fact a “food-energy-environment trilemma” (Tilman et al. 2009). This trilemma can be evaded by biofuels from waste streams and from perennials on degraded farmland or from algae grown in the desert (there is not much carbon in the desert). The scope for such possibilities appears however rather limited (cf. Hansen 2014).

Land conversion due to the worldwide boom in biofuels may also have social consequences, e.g. in the form of indigenous peoples being evicted from their traditional homelands to make room for palm oil plantations or farmland for growing biofuel crops. In 2012 alone the organization Sawit Watch (Palm Oil Watch) reported 660 land conflicts raging over biofuels cultivation in Indonesia (EurActive 2012).

Who is to be held accountable for such consequences? In 2008 the European Parliament made a first attempt to take responsibility for these negative consequences as it proposed to include social aspects like land rights of local communities and fair remuneration of workers in the sustainability criteria for biofuels. However, it later decided against mandatory social criteria “because of the difficulty to verify the link between individual biofuel consignments and the respect of these particular criteria” (Levidow 2013, p. 217; quoting from a Commission document). An additional reason was the fear that mandatory certification for social standards, as a potential violation of global trade rules, could face challenges by producer countries before the WTO dispute settlement mechanism (ibid.). The upshot is that the responsibility for protecting indigenous land rights and workers’ rights, which may come under pressure as an indirect consequence of the increased European demand for biofuels, is not accepted by the European Union, but is put into the hands of the governments of the producer countries. From a legal and political angle, it is arguable that this is precisely where such responsibility properly belongs. However, in practice many governments in developing countries are not actively defending the customary land tenure rights or labor rights of vulnerable groups in society, but are more or less complicit in what has unofficially been termed ‘land grabbing’ to such an extent that a new massive global wave of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ is going on (White and Dasgupta 2010).

All this leaves us with an interesting but difficult philosophical puzzle about the proper distribution of responsibilities. When political institutions take the lead in designing a regulatory regime for the development and deployment of biofuels, it is natural to also grant them primary responsibility for the social and environmental consequences. However, this does not remove the responsibility of other parties like business companies, industry associations and civil society organizations, if only because they all take policy stances and are actively engaged in trying to influence the regulatory regime through lobbying (Miller 2001; Young 2011).

The setting of ambitious blending targets for the use of biofuels in the US and the EU sets in motion a long train of causation, which arguably ends up with the further marginalization of vulnerable social groups in developing countries, the clearance of forests and peat lands and the conversion of grasslands into croplands, the loss of biodiversity and perhaps a reduction of food production and perhaps also a net increase in GHG emissions. However, this is not a train of (purely) physical causation, but (at least partly) of social causation, meaning that it occurs through the economic and political decisions of all the actors that make up the successive links of the chain. It would seem, therefore, that the US and European governments operating at the start of the chain could legitimately pass the responsibility for averting certain negative social and environmental consequences on to later links in the chain, to wit, to the governments in the developing countries where these consequences are bound to manifest themselves; after all, it is in the power of these latter governments to prevent these effects from happening by properly protecting nature and the rights of the population. But what if the governments in the developing countries refuse or fail to take up this responsibility? Does (part of) it then devolve back to the US and the EU governments? Could these governments justifiably have decided to pass on the responsibility to their Third-World counterparts in the first place on the highly plausible assumption that the latter would not take it up? After all, one important tenet of Weber’s Verantwortungsethik is that we take the world as it is, not as it ideally should be. And should we only talk about the responsibilities of political agencies in this context? What about the responsibilities of business companies, scientists, and civil society organizations?

In this connection it is interesting to note that the public authorities of the EU did not themselves take steps to ensure compliance with the (minimal) sustainability criteria the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) sets for biofuels, but actually relied on stakeholder platforms consisting of business organizations and NGOs to implement voluntary schemes for certifying “sustainable” biofuels (Richardson 2014). Thus the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) created in 2010 a voluntary add-on to the existing RSPO standard to enable producers to comply with the EU’s sustainability criteria (RSPO-RED). Similar schemes have been set up by other stakeholder platforms like Bonsucra (sugarcane-based biofuels from Brazil) or the Roundtable for Sustainable Biofuels. In 2012, the European Commission recognized several of these voluntary certification schemes. It can be argued that the public authorities in the EU have passed the practical responsibility for ensuring compliance with their sustainability criteria onto the private sector. Although ‘reformist’ NGOs like the Worldwide Fund for Nature are generally willing to participate in such stakeholder platforms, more radical environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth tend to keep aloof from them (Schouten et al. 2012). Radical NGOs point out that, by their very nature, certification schemes cannot deal with ILUC effects. Even if the certification standard went beyond the quite minimal EU criteria, it would still be unable to capture such effects (Richardson 2014).

The above discussion suggests that current views on Responsible Innovation might not offer us much guidance on how to set up an intelligent policy for biofuels. It seems that societal decision-making has got stuck in a stalemate where different actors favor conflicting policies and mutually block each other’s preferred options. The biofuels case amply illustrates the limited predictability of the social and environmental impacts of innovations, but does not bear out the expectation that being “responsive” to the expressed “concerns” of the public and civil society can somehow make up for this deficiency. Disagreement immediately resurfaces about which concerns are serious enough to be addressed and what constitutes an adequate and sufficient response. Policy-makers have indeed attempted to address concerns about biodiversity loss and enhanced greenhouse gas emissions by setting additional sustainability criteria, but these measures are themselves contested and have often been judged insufficient. Most revealing is the endless dispute about ILUC effects. The EU has commissioned no less than fifteen scientific studies on this topic, all with different and highly divergent outcomes (EurActiv 2015).

In order to get a clearer understanding of what responsible action could mean within the biofuel debate, we will further reflect on the concept of responsibility and connect this to Responsible Innovation in the biofuel debate.

In this section we will reflect further on the deeper roots of the difficulty of “responsible” innovation in the biofuels field. Besides the widely recognized uncertainty of innovation processes in general and the limited predictability of their effects, we think we should also point to the terrestrial reach of biofuel innovations, which are played out, so to say, in the global theatre of an economically and ecologically interconnected world. We will build on an article written by the American bioethicist Paul Thompson to elaborate on the economic aspect of this interconnected world and on an article by the Danish sociologist Janus Hansen to elaborate on the ecological aspect. These two aspects will then have to be combined. Proponents of biofuels generally hold that the dilemma of “food versus fuel” which still afflicts the first generation of biofuels will be overcome when the progress of technology allows us to switch to the more advanced second en third generations in the near and foreseeable future. Even the more comprehensive “food-energy-environment trilemma” will then likely be overcome thanks to gains in efficiency. Both Thompson and Hansen, however, offer arguments to the effect that the expected technological progress is actually unable to resolve the underlying ethical dilemmas.