Mar 7, 2006 (From the CalCars-News archive)
CalCars-News
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Grist Magazine: Environmental News and Commentary
a beacon in the smog (tm) ©2006.
Main Dish: Hard-Hitting News, Thought-Provoking News and Inspiring Interivews
You're a Good Man, Lester Brown
An interview with the founder of Worldwatch and Earth Policy Institute
By David Roberts
06 Mar 2006
There are few titans remaining in the
environmental world -- figures that command
respect not only inside the movement but in the
larger global political milieu as well. Lester
Brown is one of them. In 1974, he founded the
Worldwatch Institute, one of the first think
tanks to focus on the global environmental
situation (its agenda-setting yearly reports,
State of the World, remain required reading among
the green set). In 2001, he left Worldwatch to
start the Earth Policy Institute, a small outfit
dedicated to envisioning an "eco-economy" and figuring out how to get there.
In 2003, EPI released Plan B, a book synthesizing
research on the earth's multiple converging
ecological crises and laying out a step-by-step
plan (including a budget -- if you're curious,
it's $161 billion) for how to transition to a
sustainable path. Reception was enthusiastic;
mogul Ted Turner was one of many influential
figures to buy dozens of copies to send to friends.
Late last year saw Plan B 2.0, a revised,
expanded edition incorporating the many
developments -- good and bad -- of the
intervening two years. In addition to your local
bookstore, the book is available in its entirety
as PDF or HTML on EPI's website.
Brown's been globe-trotting since the book's
release, promoting the plan. Weeks before I met
with him, he spoke to world leaders in Davos,
Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum, at the
invitation of founder and executive director
Klaus Schwab. He and I met in a small cafe in
Seattle and, over omelets, discussed biofuels,
plug-in hybrids, China, the Bush administration,
and sudden, unpredictable social change.
Q: What was the genesis of Plan B?
A: Our goal was to give a sense of what an
environmentally sustainable economy would look
like. If you don't know where you want to go,
there's a good chance you won't get there. And
within the environmental community there was no global vision.
Q: Do you envision regular two-year updates?
A: Things are happening fast enough now, in terms
of new opportunities, new technologies, new
success stories, new problems developing, new
understandings of climate change, and so forth.
So I'm beginning to think this is going to be an every-two-year effort.
Even since this book came out, Goldman Sachs got
in the wind-energy business big time. A year ago
it bought Horizon, which was a small company
building wind farms, and now that company has
5,000 megawatts of generating capacity under
construction or in the planning stage. That's
equal to 17 typical coal-fired power plants.
Q: What trend in the world is most alarming?
A: One is climate change and the other is population growth.
On population growth, close to 3 billion people
will be added between now and mid-century, the
vast majority in countries where water tables are
already falling and wells are going dry. That's not a happy situation.
China's growth is illuminating, but it's just
that they're growing faster than most of the rest
of the world. In that sense they're doing us a
favor: they're telescoping history so that we can
see what the future looks like.
Q: You discuss nuclear energy very little in the
book. What are your thoughts on it?
A: I've tried to love nuclear, but I haven't been
very successful. I don't think it can get beyond
the economics. If we insist that utilities bear
the full cost of nuclear power -- and that's
something we need to do -- they have to set aside
money for decommissioning and include that in the
rates. That would cost as much or more than
construction. They have to deal with the waste
issue. And they have to find an insurance company that will insure them.
There are other questions as well. If we decide
to go nuclear, do we mean all countries can have
nuclear power? Do we have an A-list and a B-list?
If so, who makes that list? Who enforces it?
Looking at Iran and North Korea right now, I'm
not sure we're very good at that.
Q: Do you consider biofuels a permanent solution or a bridge?
A: I think we're going to need almost all
agricultural resources to produce food. We keep
forgetting the water issue, which is a sleeper.
Half the world's people live in countries where
water tables are falling. We may wake up one
morning and there won't be enough grain to go
around, and not enough water to produce enough grain.
We've always been concerned about the effect of
high oil prices on food-production costs, and
those are very real, given the oil intensity of
world agriculture today. But more important is
the effect of high oil prices on the demand for
agriculture commodities. Once oil gets up to $60
a barrel, it becomes profitable to convert
agricultural commodities into automotive fuels.
In effect, the price of oil becomes a support
price for agricultural commodities, and therefore
food prices. If at any point the food value of
the commodity drops below the fuel value, the
market will move that commodity into the energy economy.
I don't think we yet quite grasp the effect of
$60-a-barrel oil on food prices, because the
capacity to distill ethanol and produce biodiesel
is not yet large enough to really have an impact.
But it's exploding all over the world. Up until a
year or two ago, all the government programs here
[in the U.S.], in Europe, and in Brazil were
driven by government subsidies. In Brazil there
are no more subsidies. Ethanol investment is just
exploding; it's entirely a market-based operation.
There's enormous investment in this country in
ethanol distilleries and biodiesel refineries.
Most people aren't even aware that on Jan. 1 a
year ago, we adopted a $1-a-gallon subsidy for
biodiesel. But we're setting up competition
between supermarkets and service stations for the same commodities.
There is a very attractive alternative
automotive-fuel model: gas-electric hybrids with a plug-in and wind energy.
Q: Is it scaleable quickly enough?
A: Oh yeah. There's a lot of momentum building
behind plug-in hybrids. There was a conference
organized [a month] ago in Washington on
plug-ins. It was organized by the Environmental
and Energy Study Institute, the NGO that
organizes these things for Congress. [Sen.] Orrin
Hatch [R-Utah] left the Alito hearings to come and make a statement.
The interesting thing about the plug-in effort is
that the neocons and the environmentalists are
both supporting it, and that's a unique
combination. There were more neocons speaking at
the conference than environmentalists; they want
to break dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
Q: What are your thoughts on this idea of
breaking our dependence on Middle East oil?
A: Middle East oil accounts for 15, at most 20
percent [PDF] of our oil. But it's far more
important to other parts of the world, and we're
all in this together. We have to think about it broadly.
One of the attractive features of moving toward
gas-electric hybrids and wind power is that we
have the infrastructure already in place. In Plan
B, the original, I talk about a hydrogen
fuel-cell automotive-energy economy. And that may
come, but it's a generation down the road. With
the gas-electric hybrids, you need gasoline
service stations and you need an electrical grid. We have both.
It's relatively easy to increase wind-generating
capacity tenfold. The companies are there, the
technologies are there -- it's just a matter of
incentives. We might not even need many of those
now. We could start doubling each year.
One of the neat things about the gas-electric
hybrid plug-in is that the batteries in the
vehicle fleet become a storage facility for wind
energy. And there's a tank of gasoline as
additional backup. So it's really an ideal
marriage, a great way of rapidly exploiting wind.
And wind is such a huge resource.
Q: Is there a reason that you seem so much more
enthusiastic about wind than solar?
A: It's mostly timing. If you look at the cost
curves, wind is roughly a decade ahead of solar. It's just a matter of time.
Q: One knock you often hear on environmentalists
is that they care more about flora and fauna than
human beings. But it strikes me that your book is
extremely humanist, centered on human welfare.
A: One of the strengths of the book is that it
integrates economics and the environment in a
socially responsible way. One of the important
developments of the past year was Jared Diamond's
book Collapse. He legitimized the discussion of
early 21st century global civilization, in terms
of where we're headed and what the prospects are.
You can talk about that now in a way that you couldn't before.
Q: How do you maintain your optimism?
A: Social change comes rapidly and unexpectedly sometimes.
The Berlin wall coming down was essentially a
bloodless political revolution in Eastern Europe.
There were no articles in political science
journals in the '80s that said, hey, keep an eye
on Eastern Europe, big change is coming there.
But one morning people woke up and realized the
great socialist experiment was over.
What if we'd been sitting at this table 10 years
ago and I had said, "I think that the tobacco
industry is going to cave"? It was the most
powerful lobby in Washington. It controlled
committee chairs. But there was a steady flow of
articles on smoking and health over a period of a
few decades, along with persistent denial. The
industry just lost its credibility.
The two things looming large are oil -- security
of supply, disruptions around the world, a vague
notion that China's out there now competing for
it, the price of gasoline, the price of home
heating oil -- and the climate issue, the steady
drumbeat. Every week or two another major study
comes out, nailing down another piece of the
climate puzzle. People are beginning to feel uncertain now.
Q: Is it frustrating to you that people seem to
need human enemies, human bogeymen?
A: To a very substantial degree that's a
cultivated anxiety. It doesn't exist in Europe,
or elsewhere, the way it does here. They're
concerned, but they're not preoccupied with it.
And if I had to make a list of the top 10 threats
to our future in the world, terrorism would be on
the list, but it would be in the lower part of the list.
All this leads me to sense that we're moving
toward one of those thresholds that are hard to
define, at least until you cross them. Among the
manifestations are the 100 mayors -- maybe more
than that now -- who've signed on to the Kyoto
Protocol. This is a grassroots political revolution.
I don't think we realize yet what Katrina is.
Most of us had assumed the first climate refugees
would be from Tuvalu and the Maldive Islands. But
it's the U.S. Gulf Coast. There are a few hundred
thousand environmental refugees there -- climate refugees.
Q: One of the lessons of Katrina is how grossly
unprepared we were for something that could
easily be worse next time, or happen two places simultaneously next time.
A: The interesting thing about this current
administration is they don't seem to be
interested in governing, in trying to make things
work. FEMA's a classic case, symbolic of this entire government.
Q: Plan B seems deliberately apolitical.
A: I didn't want it to be a political tract. But
I could happily have weighed in on [politics].
When societies are in trouble, sometimes they
have a Nero and sometimes they have a Churchill.
One of the questions is how this administration
will respond to the mounting pressure to do something about these issues.
Q: However little competence they've shown in
other areas, they've certainly demonstrated an
amazing talent for avoiding moments of
accountability. It's like performance art.
A: It's a public-relations operation with a hidden agenda.
Q: Does anybody know the concrete political,
media, and advocacy steps needed to pull off a
fundamental transition to a sustainable economy?
A: In order for these changes to occur, we have
to cross a social threshold, and societies don't
cross those easily or quickly. Things have to
build up enough steam ... and then suddenly it just goes.
And when you cross them, it's not always clear
what the response will be; there's enough energy
driving things that it can go in many directions.
You can't plan that change. You can offer a new
model for an automotive fuel economy, and these
sorts of things, so when the time comes there'll be some sense of what to do.
Q: It's at least as possible that Americans will
react with retrenchment, defensiveness, trade
barriers, and military buildup -- an island mentality.
A: Right. It could happen that way. The reason
for doing a book like Plan B is to make it clear
that we're all in this together. If our
civilization goes down, it's not going to be
pieces of it here and there -- the whole thing's going to go down.
Q: Does it concern you that many of your book's
exemplary solutions come out of semi-authoritarian political situations?
A: I was looking for success stories, whether
it's breakthroughs in fish farming in China or
dairy production in India overtaking the U.S.
Wind energy in Western Europe. Solar-cell
manufacturing in Japan. Reforestation in South
Korea. I didn't look at the form of government to
sort out what would work. Carp polyculture's
roots go back 2,000 years; it doesn't require a one-party dictatorship.
I remember when the Soviets beat us into space
with Sputnik. A lot of Americans were despairing,
and said the Soviets have a command economy, they
can beat us at anything they want. But what that
system lacked was a free flow of information and
ideas, and in the end that's what really weakened
them. We were on the moon 10 years later, and now
it's been almost half a century and the Russians still haven't gotten there.
Q: Does it worry you that China's ultimate
success may be hampered in the same way, by
inhibited flow of information and political freedom?
A: The answer is, I don't know. They're having
great trouble. We tend to think of China as this
monolith: You have the party in Beijing sending
down regulations. But at the grassroots there are
no enforcement mechanisms. The Chinese EPA is at
most 600 people. That's a tiny organization. They
can't do anything about this in any meaningful
way. There are hundreds of thousands of factories
to be monitored. They're a long way from doing that.
Q: What's the most important thing for humanity to start doing?
A: Get the market to tell the ecological truth.
Calculate the cost of burning a gallon of
gasoline, for example, and incorporate the
indirect cost in the form of a tax. We're all
economic decision-makers -- consumers, corporate
planners, government policymakers, investment
bankers -- and we respond to market signals. But
the market's giving us bad information. I mean
grossly distorted information. So we're making
bad decisions and getting in more and more
trouble every day. Whether we can pull out of that or not, I'm not sure.
Q: What should I do? Talk to congressfolk? Write
a letter to the editor? Buy a hybrid?
A: Most of the people in audiences I'm talking
with have been asking themselves that question.
Recycle paper, buy a Prius, whatever -- lifestyle
changes. But we've reached the point where we
have to go beyond that. We now have to go for
systemic change; otherwise we're not going to
make it. That's why tax restructuring is so
important. (Incidentally, the Chinese authorities
are studying and working on a major tax restructuring just for this purpose.)
We're seeing signs that Republicans are beginning
to cross over on some of these issues, because of
the concerns of their constituents. We're getting
some major corporate crossovers. GE is now a
major player in wind energy. They are cranking up
300 turbines year before last, 600 last year,
1,200 this year -- they're just going. And
Goldman Sachs is beginning to invest heavily.
When I talk about Goldman Sachs, it changes the
way people think about wind energy.
Things may be starting to change.
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David Roberts is staff writer for Grist.
