Transcript: Biofuels, at What Cost?

    MITZI WERTHEIM:  Good evening.  Can I – can we sort of stop the table conversations so we can get on with our program?  For those who don’t know me, I’m Mitzi Wertheim.  I’m one of the many in the team that put on this event.  And this evening, we have the privilege of having Admiral Bill Burke, who is in charge of the Assessment Division at the Department of the Navy, N-81, for those of you who understand the codes.  He’s driven lots of boats; he’s a submariner.  But I thought I would let you know the things he’s done on land.

    He worked as the assistant deputy and the House liaison for the Navy office of legislation.  He was on the joint staff, working on training doctrine and association divisions.  And he was the assistant deputy director for combat terrorism at one point.  And he is now – oh, and then he was the executive assistant to the vice chief of naval operations from June ’04 to June ’05.  Adam Siegel got him to come to our meeting in November and he’s really gotten – he’s been a wonderful supporter of ours ever since.  So let me introduce Admiral Bill Burke.  Bill, thank you for coming.  (Applause.)

    ADMIRAL WILLIAM BURKE:  Thank you, Mitzi.  What she left out was I’m an all-around good guy.  (Laughter.)

    MS. WERTHEIM:  That’s true!

    ADM. BURKE:  I don’t know how you forgot that part, Mitzi.  I have the pleasure of introducing our speaker tonight.  But before I do that, a couple of administrative announcements – first of all, we need to thank CNA, and Mitzi is a part of CAN, for their support of this endeavor.  Mitzi, thank you very much.  (Applause.)

    MS. WERTHEIM:  And Sarah.

    ADM. BURKE:  Oh, and, of course, Sarah.  She’s probably got her mouth full right now.  There she is, picking up her plate.  Sarah does lots of work for the energy conversation and works with Mitzi.  Hotel staff put together a nice dinner for us so thank you very much to the hotel staff.  Please turn off your cell phones.  These nametags you have get recycled so please don’t go home with them; turn them in at the end of the evening.  And then, before I talk about tonight’s speaker, let me just say that the next event is February 11th and John Marburger, the president’s science advisor, will be the speaker. 

    Now, one of the things I was asked to do was to try to put tonight’s speaker in context a little bit.  And given that I met him about five minutes ago, it’s going to be a challenge.  But let me – (chuckles).  DOD uses about half of 1 percent of the world’s oil supply.  And we also have in DOD a number of energy targets that we’re routinely meeting and those are reducing energy consumption.  So my sense is, we’re doing pretty well.  And from being in a position where we actually exercise some of that energy consumption and seeing that first hand, I think we are doing well. 

But, as the president said in the State of the Union address a year or so ago, we’re addicted to oil.  And so, DOD, as much as anybody, is addicted to oil.   We propel our ships with it and we propel our planes with it.  And our aircraft use about two-thirds of what we use in DOD.  And it’s hard to come up with a near-term solution that’s going to be anything but oil. 

So let me get on to our speaker, who is Glenn Prickett.  And Glen is the executive director of the Center for Environmental Leadership and Business.  And he’s the senior VP for business and government relations of Conservation International.  And I had the chance to look on the website over the weekend and found it fascinating, all of the things that this organization is into.  Glenn has a B.A. in econ and poli sci from Yale, so I hope you don’t hold that against him.  But Conservation International is a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the Earth’s biodiversity.  And I think anything, you know, if you’re interested in biodiversity, that’s great.  If you’re interested in getting off oil, that’s great, too.  Ultimately, they lead to many of the same things. 

You know, this is a group that probably recycles very well.  The Center for Environmental Leadership and Business is a part of the organization that engages leading global corporations and government, which helps governments worldwide strengthen their policies and build capacity to conserve diversity.  Glenn has also worked for USAID, where he was chief economic advisor and with the international program of the Natural Resource Defense Council.  So with that, please give a warm welcome to Glenn Prickett.  (Applause.)

GLENN PRICKETT:  Well, thank you, Admiral Burke.  I really appreciate that kind introduction.  And I just really want to salute the Department of Defense and CNA and Mitzi Wertheim for putting this program together.  I actually have not come to these energy conversations before.  This is my first one.  And somehow, I had not met Mitzi before last fall, which, the more I reflected on it, the more amazing I found that, because when I started talking about this program and about her, it seemed like just about everyone I knew in Washington already knew Mitzi.  So I felt like I had sort of been kept out of a very interesting club over the years.  But when I learned about the energy conversation series and what the Department of Defense is doing to reach out and to connect with a whole range of constituents around energy/environmental issues, I was very impressed.  And it’s certainly something that I and my colleagues at Conservation International will benefit from. 

So I’m thrilled to be here and it’s an honor to speak with you.  And I’m really looking forward to being part of the conversation not only tonight, but in the future.  I should also say, on a personal note – and I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but I feel like I have to – I have to say, my father is absolutely thrilled that I’m here.  (Laughter.)  And I’ll tell you why that is.  My father was a naval aviator.  He left the Navy as a commander, but he flew anti-submarine warfare.  And then, he ended up – so he started his career with the Navy and he ended up his career doing research and development for an investor in the electric utility and, along the way, became a passionate environmentalist and conservationist. 

So my whole conservation career I really owe to him.  But when I mentioned that there’s actually a group sponsored out of the Department of Defense that is bringing – building bridges between the energy community, the environmental community, and the defense community, he was just tickled.  And when I tell him that it was a Navy admiral that introduced me, he’ll be even more excited.  So personally, I’m really thrilled to be here. 

So the subject that Mitzi and Sarah have asked me to talk about is biofuels, at what cost?  And I will talk about biofuels and what cost there might be.  But this was really sort of a subterfuge on Mitzi’s part to try to start with a theme that I think probably drew everybody in the room, and that’s energy and biofuels, but then really try to connect it to a broader set of issues around the environment and around economic development.  And there’s a wonderful quote that I keep in my head all of the time.  And the Sierra Club had this on its letterhead for many years; they may still.  I think there may be someone here from the Sierra Club tonight, so you could tell us.  But it was a quote from John Muir, the famous 19th century naturalist, who started the Sierra Club, among other things.  And it says, when you try to pick out any single thing in the universe, you find it hitched to everything else.

And that’s always how I’ve thought about the work I do in conservation.  And I think it’s certainly true of the energy and particularly the biofuel issue that we’re here to talk about tonight.  And it’s remarkable for me at Conservation International and I know for many of my colleagues and from many of you who have thought about these energy and environmental connections over the years to see the incredible interest there is around the world, not just here in Washington or here in the United States, but around the world in how do we resolve our energy challenges?  How do we resolve our energy challenges in a way that’s environmentally responsible?

When I started out in this field about 20 years ago, with a few of you that I see here in this room, I don’t think we could have filled a room like this talking about a topic as obscure then as biofuels and their impact on the environment.  So it’s incredibly gratifying to see the outpouring of interest.  And it’s certainly true everywhere we go. 

Just a word on Conservation International – we were started 20 years ago by a group of conservationists who, at the time, were considered a little bit crazy.  All of their work was outside of the United States; it was an international group of conservationists.  And they came to the realization that to do conservation, to protect biodiversity, to protect rainforests and coral reefs and all of the species of plants and animals that are there, you had to do that in a way that made economic sense for the communities that were in and around those ecosystems.  And they came to that realization because all of their work at the time was in developing countries, starting in Latin America and Central America and South America.

And that was a bit heretical for the environmental community 20 years ago, a time at which you typically had environmentalists over here and people who thought about economic development on the other side of the room.  But they pursued that course and that really was sort of the key piece of the DNA, if you will, around Conservation International.  Twenty years later, we’re now a much larger organization.  We work worldwide in about 45 countries.  Still, all of our field efforts are outside of the United States and really focused on the developing world.  And our real approach, you know, our secret sauce, if you will, is how do you do conservation of nature and natural resources, ecosystems, species?  But how do you do that in a way that creates economic value for the societies that call those ecosystems home so that the people in those communities and those nations benefit economically from conservation. 

So for that reason, we have been drawn very much into the biofuels debate and, more generally, into the climate change debate.  And it is a debate.  You’ll have a lot of environmentalists who are becoming increasingly concerned about the issue of biofuels and the impact that biofuels could have on the environment.  We come at it from a very pragmatic perspective.  And first and foremost, we recognize that outside of the United States, the development of biofuels is a very exciting possibility and a very interesting opportunity for poor, developing countries. 

Brazil, obviously, has already developed the sector to become, along with the United States, the world leader in bioenergy.  Other developing countries are looking at that success and thinking about moving in the same direction.  I spent a lot of last fall in Asia, in Indonesia and the Philippines and Cambodia, in particular.  Both Indonesia and the Philippines are moving very rapidly to develop, to continue to develop their agricultural sector for bioenergy.  So it’s a very exciting economic prospect and we recognize that at Conservation International.  And everything I’ll cover in the next few moments on the bioenergy question is kind of rooted in that fundamental reality that in developing countries, biofuels will be a very attractive strategy for rural development, for economic growth, and for both increasing exports and decreasing imports of energy supplies. 

Of course, for those of us here in this room, particularly in Washington, D.C., as the Admiral mentioned earlier, it’s also a very interesting prospect for the issue of energy security.  How do we wean ourselves off of that addiction to oil?  How do we diversify sources of energy?  We’ll probably never be entirely free of oil.  Certainly, we won’t be anywhere near free of oil in the next several decades.  But how do we begin to diversify our sources so we’re not as dependent on politically risky areas of the world for our, for the bulk of our fuel and energy supplies.  So certainly, from an energy-security standpoint, biofuels is a very interesting challenge.  And, while I don’t know all of you in this room, I would bet that many, if not all of you, are probably drawn to this conversation down the dimension of energy security and energy alternatives.  And that certainly is a very valid reason to have the conversation.

And finally, what’s really come along quickly in the last few years is the environmental dimension of all of this and the hope and the idea that biofuels could not only help to diversify our sources of energy, not only help to drive economic development and deal with rural poverty around the world, but also be a source of healing for our natural environment, a way to clean up some of the environmental problems associated with energy development and energy use.  So that’s the aspect of it that I’m going to dwell on the most over the next few minutes.  But I just wanted you to all know that from our perspective at Conservation International, we fully recognize that this is a multidimensional problem. 

The environmental question is not an easy one.  And I’m not going to put myself forward as the ultimate scientific authority on this.  In fact, I would point out – there are a couple of colleagues here in the room that I really hope will have a chance to speak and that I hope you’ll have a chance to meet starting with an old friend who I met probably one of the first days I came to Washington, Barbara Bramble with the National Wildlife Federation in the back of the room.  Barbara is working very hard on this issue.  Thanks, Barbara, please stand. 

She, actually, has put together with her colleague Richard Forrest, who is here in the front of the room, something really interesting called the sustainable biofuels wiki.  And if you don’t know what a wiki is, you can get in line right behind me because I didn’t know what a wiki was until about, I don’t know, six months or a year ago.  But Wikipedia, you probably know, is the – is where we all go now instead of the Encyclopedia Britannica to learn just about anything about anything.  Well, the concept of a wiki is that it’s open source and that the experts, which could include all of you here in this room, help build the knowledge base online about sustainable biofuels.  So Barbara and Richard are the keepers of the wiki.  I think there’s a brochure about it outside, but they and we are trying to build a community of knowledge around biofuels, their impact on the environment, and sustainability. 

So I’d encourage you all to check that out.  Barbara is also on the board of the Roundtable for Sustainable Biofuels, and I’ll come back to that in a minute, but it’s a really interesting gathering of NGOs like Conservation International, National Wildlife Federation, the energy and agricultural industries – so everyone from Shell to Bunge a large agrobusiness company – are part of the roundtable as well as governments in the industrialized world and the developing world that are struggling for sustainable solutions to biofuels.

But I mentioned the environmental dimension of biofuels is a challenging one.  Certainly, there are possible advantages to biofuels.  The underlying concept is that by harvesting, you know, by converting plants to energy, yes, you release CO2 into the atmosphere in terms of the issue of global climate change, but you also sequester it as you grow the plant.  So the ideal is that we reach some sort of net balance in terms of the CO2 that we emit when we burn fuel and the CO2 that we sequester in the plants and in the earth when we grow the feedstock.  So from that standpoint, there’s great interest in biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels as a way of lowering the amount of greenhouse gases that we’re putting into the atmosphere. 

The challenge, when you step back from the biofuel environment question and you think about the underlying agriculture and environment question is something that most people actually don’t realize, and that is that agriculture globally has been a major source of environmental degradation, globally, for quite awhile.  We tend not to think of it that way, and I apologize for those of you who are already expert on these questions.  But I want to speak, for a moment, to the folks in the room who may not be as knowledgeable or expert on the environmental issues.  We tend to think of the energy industry or the mining industry or heavy manufacturing as the source of our environmental problems.  And in terms of air pollution that we might encounter in cities, that certainly has been the case.

But when you look globally at what is happening to the environment, agriculture is at the root of a lot of the changes that we’ve seen whether it’s the use of water – and fresh water is becoming of great concern in many parts of the world where it’s scarce and declining.  Seventy percent of the world’s water is used in the agricultural sector – or whether it is greenhouse gases themselves.  Most people – and I’ll touch more broadly on this in a moment, but most people think about greenhouse gases and climate change as just an energy issue.  But 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions actually come from the burning and clearing of forests, which largely is driven by agriculture.  Add on top of that another 14 percent of greenhouse gas emissions – carbon dioxide and methane – that come from agriculture and livestock operations around the world.  That’s from the nitrogen oxide that goes into the atmosphere when nitrogen fertilizers are applied.  That comes from the methane that comes from the gases that come out of both ends of livestock in the field.  That comes from the methane that comes out of rice paddies around the world.  So agricultural and land use is at least a third of global greenhouse gas emissions.

And finally, agriculture is increasingly responsible for a lot of water pollution and contamination around the world as agro-chemicals are applied in an increasingly intensive way and up in water bodies.  So if you look in this country, for example, at the Gulf of Mexico, we have a large and growing dead zone, a condition of the Gulf of Mexico where concentrations of nitrogen have become too high and it’s eliminating life in that body of water.  You see a similar nitrogen problem in many estuaries around the world.  So we’re in a context where agriculture itself is an environmental issue that we need to manage. 

From the standpoint of a conservation organization, when you think about biofuels, essentially you’re thinking about adding to the expansion of agriculture around the world.  And that could be either exacerbating what is already a challenging situation or it could help to heal and ameliorate that situation.  So from our perspective, whether biofuels is on a net basis a good thing for the environment or not really depends on how carefully all of us – starting with governments, but including our conservation organizations, our science organizations, our businesses – work together to think carefully and plan strategically about the expansion of agriculture, particularly the expansion of biofuel feedstocks.  And that is really the approach that Conservation International is taking.  

We’ve begun to work with now, with some real active interest and partnership with the U.S. government coming from the Department of Energy, from the State Department.  We’ve begun to work in partnership in countries like Brazil, like Indonesia.  Those are the two areas where we are starting to basically help governments at a national level and at a state and provincial level think through the potential environmental impact of expansion of sugarcane, of oil palm for biodiesel, and even begin thinking about second-generation biofuel technologies, cellulosic ethanol technologies.  On the one hand, that is very exciting because it allows the biofuel industry not to focus on food crops.  So you begin to remove some of the food/fuel pressures that have been much in the news. 

But even cellulosic ethanol, whether it’s jatropha or switchgrass, in this country, could lead to some of these same environmental problems in that it is itself a planted crop.  So you could see continued expansion of agriculture, which could continue to drive deforestation in sensitive habitats, could continue to use water, which could be a problem in certain areas.  So the approach that our organization is taking is to work with governments, as I mentioned, starting in Brazil and Indonesia to pull together what we know about the land and nature resource suitability of certain areas for agricultural expansion, particularly for biofuel feedstocks. 

So we’re working in Indonesia in the provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra, on the island of Sumatra, also in Papua.  These are areas, Sumatra and Indonesia, already a very heavy center of expansion for oil palm.  That cultivation is accelerating now as Europe, in particular, is interested in biodiesel, for which oil palm is one of the most efficient feedstocks.  So you’re seeing a further increase in biofuel production in Indonesia.  Unfortunately, historically, much of that has come at the expense of the Indonesia rainforest, home to the orangutan, to the Sumatran tiger, probably more importantly, also, forests that provide critical benefits to poor communities that live in and around them. 

So we’re working with the government of Aceh, for example, which, of course, was so hard-hit by the tsunami just a few years ago.  Fascinating governor now – some of you may know him or know of him.  At any rate, he’s been profiled in the media quite a bit.  He was actually the leader of the Achenese rebels that fought against the government of Indonesia so long and created such a – together, created such a security and humanitarian challenge in that part of the world.

I actually spent some time with him during the Bali negotiations in December.  I was there with Tom Friedman, the columnist from the New York Times, and we were traveling around, interviewing people at the conference.  We went out into the field.  So we spent some time with the governor.  He told a fascinating story about how he went from being a rebel to being the governor.  He said he was in jail – he’d been arrested by the Indonesian government – when the tsunami hit.  He said, quite literally, the jail was destroyed by the tsunami and he walked out.  (Laughter.)  And in the sort of intervening chaos and complete transformation of that part of Indonesia, he emerged as the governor and has actually been the best thing that’s happened to that province and has taken the – you know, come out of the incredible tragedy that the tsunami was for Aceh and really built, for the first time certainly in the 10 or 15 years that I’ve been going back and forth to Indonesia, a politics of hope in that province.  And one of the things that he’s very focused on is, how do we – how does he and his government and his province ensure that they have sustainability for their economic development? 

He told a story about growing up as a villager in Aceh.  And he would see trucks driving by every day with trees logged from the rainforest.  And, as he put it, he didn’t see – his community didn’t see any benefit from those trees.  They all went down to Medam, the nearest major provincial center, and they all got exported.  So he’s very focused now on, as Aceh rebuilds, which it must.  As Aceh develops, as Aceh expands it agricultural production, its oil palm production, very excited about biofuels as a potential source of economic growth.  How do they do that in a way that doesn’t destroy the forest, that actually helps to rebuild some of the natural systems, because one of the tragedies that he’s very aware of and that we were painfully very aware of was that the loss of life in Aceh and in other parts of South and Southeast Asia as a result of the tsunami and the damage to those economies, was much greater than it would have been had the coastal ecosystems – the mangrove forests, the coral reefs – not been almost entirely converted into shrimp farms, into coastal tourism development, things that, at the time, made great economic sense. 

What they realized too late after the tsunami was that those systems actually played a role; they actually buffered those coastal communities from the impacts of storms and storm surges.  And the waves – actually, this is documented – where those natural habitats remained, the wave from the tsunami broke much farther or much less – didn’t go as far inland as it did in areas that had been converted.  So the governor is very committed now to yes, developing the biofuel economy and the agricultural economy, but also maintaining and rebuilding ecosystems. 

So we’ve actually got a team of Conservation International scientists working with partners there, doing a very interesting GIS analysis project where we’re compiling both basic agronomic data about land suitability for palm oil, for coffee, for cocoa and a handful of other crops.  And we’re overlaying that with the biological information that we’re generating about where are the forests that are critical for watershed protection, to keep clean water flowing in the rivers.  Where are the forests that are critical for endangered species of wildlife and of plants?  We’re aware of the forests that are critical for buffering communities against coastal storms.

We’re compiling all of that into a GIS system to help identify strategically which areas should be expanded for biofuel production.  So that’s just one example of the work we’re doing and the approach we’re taking.  And we think there’s a great opportunity for government agencies in the U.S., private companies in the U.S., NGOs in the U.S., to work with our partners in strategic countries like Indonesia, like Brazil to develop the biofuel sector in a sustainable way, that gets them the economic growth and development they’re looking for, helps to maintain the environment, which is so critical for their own people and for the world in terms of the CO2 emissions that can come from destruction of those ecosystems. 

And I would mention – and this is certainly not my area of expertise – but we believe there is a security dimension to this as well.  Certainly, in a country like Indonesia where you have a potentially politically volatile situation where you see fundamentalists Islamic groups making great inroads into what historically has been a very moderate, Islamic society, we certainly want to see rural communities made better off as a result of our energy policies and our energy decisions, not potentially worse off from some environmental negative effects that they could experience which could create a situation in which those fundamentalist organizations could make further inroads.  I’ll actually come back in a moment to a very hopeful story from Indonesia on the other side of that equation. 

So that’s the approach that we’re taking to biofuels.  I think I’m going to leave a little bit the biofuels subject for now and move more generally into a topic that was a big focus at Bali and is something that, until Bali, we felt most people didn’t recognize.  And it’s important we spend a few moments on it.  And I alluded to it earlier, and that’s the connection between forests, biodiversity, agricultural, natural resources, and climate change.  And, as I mentioned, most people, certainly in this country, think about climate change as an energy issue.  And we should, you know. How we power our buildings is globally the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions.  The fuel we put into our cars and vehicles is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. 

But actually, the destruction of rainforests and other natural habitats is globally a far more significant source of greenhouse gas emissions that lead to climate change than transportation.  In fact, globally, the transportation sector, all of the world’s car, trucks, buses, trains, ships, et cetera, accounts for about 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.  That’s actually, coincidentally, about the same number as agriculture itself.  Deforestation and loss, change of – conversion of other habitats is responsible for about 20 percent.  So, in fact, more than twice as much of all the world’s cars and trucks – I think the cars and trucks come out to about 8 percent – more than twice as much of that is coming out of the destruction of forests and habitat.  

And the challenge is, that deforestation is happening for very understandable reasons.  You have poor societies, developing countries, who see that as their solution to poverty and their ticket to economic development and economic growth.  And they don’t see a lot of alternatives, frankly.  It’s nice that the world depends on their forests to keep carbon in the ground, but, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t, you know, written a check lately to a developing country for the carbon services they’re providing.  Hopefully, a few of you have.  If you’re enlightened, you may be personally offsetting your CO2 emissions.  But certainly as a global society, we’re not compensating the developing countries for that global service that they’re providing by maintaining their forests. 

So we were very excited at Bali.  And those of you who follow this issue and followed the Bali negotiations will have seen that, for the first time, really, in the international discussion of climate change, the importance of forests and land use was put firmly on the table as something that the world needs to deal with.  And deforestation, loss of habitat in these societies isn’t just a problem for the climate.  Certainly, that’s what connects you and me sitting here tonight to that problem that can seem very remote and very far away, but if you look at what’s happening in those countries, you see incredible costs to those changes: costs in terms of less water being available to downstream communities that depend on those forests for their watersheds, costs in terms of some of the storm damage I mentioned earlier in Indonesia, costs in terms of more flooding and loss of life. 

Philippines – tragically, we see regularly in the media: terrible mudslides and floods.  It’s not coincidental that Philippines is down to less than 5 percent of its original cover of natural forest.  So a lot of what ends up as floods and terrible mudflows, mudslides lower down is a result of the deforestation happening in the mountains.  I touched on the issue of water.  Our organization does a lot of work in China; I’ve spent quite a bit of time in China over the years.  The mountain of southwest China, the Himalayas, and farther east into the Tibetan area are really the water tower of Asia and are the headwaters of all of the major rivers of South and Southeast Asia.  So they’re providing sustainable water for billions of people. 

Those forests, until very recently, were being eliminated at a rapid rate.  To their credit, the government of China has actually put a logging ban in effect because they realized the connection between some of the terrible flooding they were experiencing and deforestation.  But rebuilding those degraded areas is going to be critical to maintaining sustainable, reliable flows of fresh to the downstream communities.  When you think about a climate change future, that challenge gets even more extreme as you think about retreating glaciers, less snowmelt available for water.  So rebuilding those forest ecosystems becomes incredibly important.  So the inclusion of forests and land use on the agenda at Bali is incredibly important not only for the global good, in terms of dealing with the climate change issue, but also for the ecological integrity of those developing countries. 

So what happened at Bali?  And what happens next?  And again, apologies for those of you who were there or are following this process on a daily basis, but I’m guessing that not all of you are.  Of course, at Bali, the big headline was that the world actually agreed to a climate-change agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in the year 2012.  So there’s now agreement, including the United States and the major developing countries, which was the challenge.  Those countries, all countries have now agreed to negotiate goals and targets for reduction of CO2 emissions in the post-2012 period.  That was the big headline.

The second headline, which was, again, very important for our organization, was an agreement that the conservation of forests, the restoration of forests and other ecosystems has to be a central part of that agreement.  And then, the third headline – and this one has gotten far less attention, but it’s certainly no less important, arguably, as important for a lot of the security interests that our communities pursue around the world.  And that’s the issue of adaptation.  Poor countries of the world are going to be in a much tougher position to adapt, to respond to the climate-change impacts that they face than we will in this country.  Communities that are already at the margins in terms of their agricultural or other livelihoods will be harder hit by droughts, floods, water shortages, coastal storms and floods, shifts in habitat for plants and animals that provide important inputs to their agriculture, whether it’s natural pollination or whether it’s natural pest control. 

The world finally agreed in Bali to implement something that was built into the U.N. framework convention on climate change, but never activated.  And that’s something called the adaptation fund.  So we are now actually going to tax ourselves on some of the carbon trading that already is going on under the Kyoto protocol and invest that in a fund that will be managed by the Global Environmental Facility, a program of the World Bank and the U.N. development program and the U.N. environment program to help developing countries adapt to the impacts of climate change.  So that was another big deal that came out of Bali. 

And this, collectively, is all referred to as the Bali roadmap because we now have an 18-month, two-year negotiating process to try to create that post-2012 agreement.  The goal is to have it all done by the end of 2009, two more annual conferences from now.  So that’s very exciting that the world is now focused on a negotiating agenda.  The challenge is – and this is where I want to come back to sort of Mitzi’s exhortation to me tonight, which is to talk about systems and how there are no silver bullets, no single solution to this.  And this something is something Tom Friedman and I talked about a lot when we were in Indonesia. 

So from my perspective, when you look at what we created in Bali, it’s as if we took a great big whiteboard and we began to fill in some things.  And mainly what we filled in were national capitals because really, the people you had in Bali were mainly, by and large, and officially, the delegations were representatives of national governments.  You had a few non-governmental entities on those delegations; we at Conservation International had actually about six of our field scientists actually sitting with the government delegations. 

But those were really the ones that were in the room doing the official business.  There were a lot of us there also having a conference on the side, where we learned a lot from each other.  But the official work at Bali was really an effort of national governments.  So you really have a great, big, white piece of paper with – you’re starting to fill in some national capitals.  But if you’ll bear with me on the analogy, you would have no way of knowing, from looking at that piece of paper, and you really didn’t get a strong sense if you were there in the rooms in Bali, about what’s in between those national capitals and those national governments.  You wouldn’t know that there are villages and towns and streams and rivers and oceans, let alone would you know really how to get from one place to another on the roadmap. 

So the point I’m trying to make here is that while the official intergovernmental negotiating process is going to be absolutely fundamental to dealing with this issue, and I don’t want anyone to think I’m suggesting otherwise, on its own, that is not going to be sufficient to deal with the scope and the nature of this problem.  This is not something that we can send a few of our negotiators off to sit in a series of conference rooms and solve.  Nor, frankly, is it even something that we can sort of entrust to our congressmen to argue and pass a piece of legislation that’s going to automatically solve it. 

This is a systemic problem and we need to be attacking it in a systemic way.  We actually need to build an ecosystem, if you will, to resolve some of the challenges that we’re seeing to our ecosystem.  So, yes, we need the international treaty; we need the post-2012 agreement.  It needs to reconcile energy demands with the need to conserve natural resources.  But we also need to see much more engagement of provincial and state and local governments, not only in this country, but especially in the developing world.  And I would really encourage those of you who work internationally to think not only about supporting your partners at the national level, but really get into the field and work at the provincial, state, and local level.  We see that’s where most of the action is, whether you’re in Brazil looking at conservation of the rainforest and sustainable economic development, whether you’re in Indonesia looking at the same set of issue.  The real action, now, is at the state or the provincial level. 

But beyond that, we really need the private sector involved in a significant way.  This is actually what I do in most of my time at Conservation International, is work with colleagues on engaging business in conservation and sustainable development.  And until we have the business sector engaged, thinking holistically about this problem – so energy companies thinking not only about the next set of energy technologies, but also thinking about what are the impacts of bioenergy on natural systems?  What are the impacts of that on communities?  Until we have those companies involved, this isn’t going to scale.  And we need incentives for communities and transparency to have communities engaged in these activities. 

And I’ll just close on that talk about an ecosystem or a systems approach with an example of something that we’ve been involved with in Indonesia that’s extremely exciting to us and we see great hope if we can figure out how to scale it.  We started working in Sumatra.  I mentioned Sumatra earlier.  When I actually started in this field about 20 years ago, many parts of Indonesia were what we call at Conservation International wilderness areas, areas that were 70 percent or more covered with rainforests or other natural habits.  Today, most of Indonesia is what we call a hot spot; there’s less than 30 percent left.  And in places like Sumatra, there’s less than 10 percent of the original habitat left.  And that’s a problem for the orangutan and the tiger, but it’s really a problem for the people who live there. 

So we’ve been working very aggressively in that area to make funding available, to put our scientists into the field, do whatever it takes to help the governments in those societies turn around that balance where economic development, agricultural expansion had sacrificed biodiversity.  We began working in a place called Batangaris about five years ago and ended up in a very exciting situation where, in fact, an Islamic school in that area – it’s got about 15,000 students, very moderate, progressive Islamic school – recognized that the water that their students needed just for daily hygiene, but also for some of the religious rituals that they perform, the water that they needed was coming from the forest and the mountains above the village.  Those forests were actually gazetted for a logging concession by the national government.  So the school actually realized that if the government plan for logging of that area went ahead, they would be deprived of their water resources. 

The bupati, or the district head, the district administrator, just one notch down below the governor of the province, saw that, hey, this is a political issue.  If the government goes ahead with this logging program, that’s actually going to disadvantage the school, which is such an important part of my constituency.  At the same time, we had a energy company that was building a geothermal energy plant in the area, which they very rightly were building as a clean energy solution for Indonesia’s environmental, energy needs.  They realized that, hey, they actually need the water coming out of that forest, too, because the steam that they’re developing into energy actually depends on the aquifers being recharged on a regular basis.  And if the forests go away, the aquifers start to decline. 

There was a mining company, Newmont, gold mining, based in Colorado, that was building a gold mine.  They actually needed water, too.  So what the bupati was able to do with some support from Conservation International and some forward-looking folks in the national government was to put together a coalition of citizens, politicians, business leaders, scientists from Conservation International and other groups that together understood that the economic value of that forest was – and social value – was higher for that community than the economic benefit of the logging concession would have been for them. 

So together, the bupati and Conservation International went to – and by the way, I should mention, all of CI’s field programs are run by nationals of the countries where we work.  So this wasn’t someone like me going in and doing this.  This was an Indonesia who had spent, you know, many years working in the field in Sumatra – went together to the national government and said, we have a proposal for you.  We’d like to turn this forest into a protected area.  And we’re actually willing, we, the bupati, he said, our community is willing to put up some of our district budget to fund the creation of that protected area.  And our friends at Conservation International, we put our own financial commitment on the table.  So together, between the national forestry ministry, the district government, and Conservation International, we’ve created a reserve, a protected area in an area that would have been logged.  And it was built on a very sustainable political coalition of entities that realized that they had a self interest in protecting that forest. 

Now, they did that before there was a market for carbon.  They did that before the world was thinking about compensating developing countries for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  Imagine the power of that model if we can bring to that the international carbon market.  And, you know, we succeeded in Batangaris between the community and ourselves.  We’re not under illusions that we can do that everywhere because, in most cases, the economic drivers of deforestation and natural resource depletion just overwhelm what we and others can put up for conservation.  But if the world can begin to recognize not only locally, but globally, the services that those natural ecosystems provide, we think we could actually turn the tide. 

So the creation of a global market for carbon, an agreement on caps on emissions, an agreement on a very flexible mechanism that allows entities that want to reduce emissions to actually fund those emissions reductions elsewhere to make sure that that market can flow into forest conservation, we think it is necessary and maybe the only scalable solution that we see on the horizon to dealing with this challenge of deforestation and the loss of biodiversity and natural habitats.  There is a coalition that together we can build with these societies who see self interest in doing that.  They need our support.  To make that Batangaris model scalable across Indonesia, let alone across many of the developing countries, is going to require a concerted effort by all of our organizations.

So I just wanted to close on that thought.  Do politics matter?  Absolutely.  One of my friend Tom Friedman’s great sayings is, don’t change your light bulb; change your government.  If we’re really going to get to this absolutely, we need the right political solutions, but we also, in all of our organizations, can bring something to the effort that’s going to make a difference.  So, thanks.  I’ve gone on a little longer than I wanted to because I want this to be a conversation and I’m eager to learn from all of you, but I appreciate the time and really enjoyed being with you.  (Applause.)

ADM. BURKE:  (Applause.)

Glenn, would you take some questions? 

MR. PRICKETT:  Yeah, absolutely. 

ADM. BURKE:  Okay, Glenn will take some questions.  Please use this mike or that one to ask them. 

Q:  My name is Pat McArdle.  I’m with Solar Cookers International, and I had a question about the discussion at Bali on the 20 percent of C02 emissions caused by deforestation.  And I was wondering if there was any discussion at Bali on the fact that about half the world’s population still cooks over wood, dung, charcoal, that that’s one of the major causes – at least in Africa, of deforestation, the charcoal trade – and solutions to that problem for the very poor who are U.N. estimates consuming about a ton of wood per person per year.   And if they’re using charcoal, it’s about seven tons per year. 

MR. PRICKETT:  Yeah, no thank you for asking that question.  It’s an important one.  One of the – this is speaking personally – one of the concerns I had at Bali was that protection of forests hadn’t been on the agenda before, and so it was important that we talked about it, but that’s not the only issue, and issues about how poor people use natural resources and how to bring new technologies, for example dealing with overuse of fuel wood, and dealing with how do you help poor communities restore degraded lands?  How do you help poor communities with agro-forestry programs? 

There’s actually a risk that if we focus too much just on what’s called RED, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation, which is this new program we’re talking about to compensate developing countries to protect their standing forests, if that’s all we do, then we miss a huge part of the humanitarian challenge and of the climate solution, which is helping poor communities in already degraded areas to restore their forests and to use those forests more sustainably, with new energy technologies for example at a community level. 

So, I think we need to – I think the conversation veered a lot toward RED because that was the new issue.  I think in the official negotiations, there wasn’t as much discussion of a more integrated approach to land use, as there needs to be.  That said, on the side, there was this incredible conference that happened by all of us who weren’t allowed into the negotiating room, and a lot of these issues were discussed.  There was incredible richness of technical presentations and papers given, but the official process – you raise a really interesting point, and there’s not enough attention going into the rural poor and rural land uses in the official negotiations.  And that’s something that needs to be balanced. 

Q:  Hi, my name is David Freund.  I’m with the Energy Tree Group.  But I was wondering, your organization, it’s – what degree of funding you get from – do any corporations actually fund you directly?  Do corporations now really see the more holistic approach where, you know, if people over there are doing well, then everybody else is doing well?  Is that where most of your money comes from as opposed to foundations? 

MR. PRICKETT:  Not most; it’s a pretty, for our organization, it’s a pretty healthy mix.  We get actually about 8 or 9 percent of the funding from corporations, so it’s actually the smallest share.  The largest share is from foundations, 40 odd percent, and then the balance is from individuals and government agencies like AID or the Global Environment Facility.  But I would say, certainly companies, particularly global corporations, are really beginning to understand that their business is connected with the well-being of the environment and of, kind of the people in those places. 

One, I know that one of the previous speakers in this program was Charles Zimmerman with Wal-Mart who manages energy for that company.  We’ve been really excited to partner with Wal-Mart over the last couple of years, and they’re probably the most visible, biggest company that’s really gotten – gone green in the last couple of years.  And most of what people see around that initiative is focused in the stores and in the compact fluorescent bulbs and things that you buy in the stores, which is incredibly important. 

They’re also doing something which a lot of – they haven’t really talked much about and people don’t realize – they’re looking at all of their merchandise supply chains, including agriculture.  They’re the world’s largest grocery store by far and they have actually one of their sustainable value networks they’ve brought together is around sustainable agriculture and how can they provide incentives in their supply chain for more sustainable agriculture practices?  They’re doing the same with fish and jewelry.  That’s just one example; a lot of companies are beginning to see the connections between what happens in the environment and their bottom line. 

I think, Barbara, you were next? 

Q:  I don’t want to take much time, but Glenn was kind enough to mention the round table on sustainable biofuels, and I want to just let you know what it is and that I have flyers that describe it.  It’s an international multi-stakeholder process that’s developing consensus standards for the sustainable production and use of biofuels from all sorts of different kinds, feed stocks, places, around the world.  And in the United States there are a couple of possibilities for your actual participation, your direct participation.  This is kind of an electronic process.  We’re trying to see if we can do it without meetings, try not to send people around the world and use up all the greenhouse gases just going to meetings. 

So, a lot of this is online.  The Wiki that Glenn mentioned is one of the major communication platforms for the development of the principles, the criteria, and then eventually the indicators that will be directly applicable to the United States.  There are working groups on issues like environment, like greenhouse gas emissions, and you all are welcome to join.  A lot of it’s done by phone calls, telephone conference calls, and on this Wiki, actual, direct opportunity to edit the text of the standards and to say why and to comment on what the other members are doing and there’s a steering board that is reflected on this, so you can see who the actual members of the steering board are.  I’m on it, but it’s mostly not NGOs.  There’s a lot of business, academic experts, participants in the biofuels industry. 

So, I have these.  I will be at the back, but I do want to just mention one issue that’s going to be seen much in the coming months, which is that the impact of biofuels production, most of the kinds of issues that we’ve started to talk about, that you’ve all heard about, the water and the possible uses of different kind of fuels for bio energy refineries, may not be the major impact of biofuels on the atmosphere.  There’s a tremendous amount of potential deforestation associated with any expansion of the agricultural frontier, and that produces greenhouse gases, it doesn’t save them.

So, unfortunately, all of us who have been kind of positive and enthusiastic about the potential for biofuels, we now realize we’re going to have to place them not on arable land and maybe only use waste products, but that debate is going to be hot and heavy over the next few months; you all can be part of it and take one of these if you’re interested.  Thanks very much.

MR. PRICKETT:  Yes, thanks, Barbara.  Over to this side. 

Q:  Hi, Peter Rhode.  I write for Energy Washington.  I’m going to ask two question if that’s okay.  First one is, you mentioned buying carbon credits.  My understanding is that avoided deforestation doesn’t meet the standards for a credit.  Is there any process under works to monetize avoided deforestation because I mean, four years before 2012 and a post-Kyoto treaty, I mean there goes the other 30 or half the other 30 percent of the Indonesian rainforest? 

MR. PRICKETT:  That’s a really good question and thank you for that.  So, the –sort of the global process underway is the post-2012 agreement and that hopefully will extend the carbon market that exists today, which by, I think the most estimate was the global market for carbon in the year that just ended was about $60 billion, so this is already a big market and it’s projected to grow ten fold at least over the implementation of the post-2012 agreement.  Ultimately we want that market to be flowing in part into forest conservation. 

But even in advance of forest – avoided deforestation or forest protection being eligible for U.N. credits, if you will, there is what’s called a voluntary market for carbon, which is stimulated by companies or institutions that want to offset their carbon emissions without any regulations requiring them to do it.  And they do that for a variety of reasons: they want good reputation and public relations, they want to learn by doing, they want to know enough that they can enter the policy debate and speak knowledgably, and sometimes it’s because they just want to do the right thing, if it’s a non-profit organization, university, or church.  That market is about $100 million, so it’s much smaller, but what’s interesting is in that market, about a third or more of that is going into forest conservation. 

So, what that suggests, to us at least, is that if you allow forests into the market, if you allow them to compete, they’re pretty competitive.  People are very interested in forest conservation as a CO2 reduction strategy, in part because it’s cost-effective.  It’s relatively inexpensive compared to some renewable energy technologies, for example, that are quite a bit more expensive per ton CO2 but it’s also something that people can identify with and relate to, the idea of protecting endangered habitat, protecting threatened species, providing water for poor communities, you know, intuitively it makes a lot of sense.  So, there’s a lot of interest in the voluntary market; the challenge is, it’s just not big enough and that’s why ultimately we need the regulations to be able to scale it. 

One of the concerns that’s come up in the voluntary market, and it’s actually now being raised by the federal commission that regulates consumer products.  I’m just forgetting the name –

MR. BURKE:  FDC.

MR. PRICKETT:  FDC, thank you – is, well how do we know what we’re buying here?  Could we have some bogus credits being sold, which is a real issue either intentionally or even unintentionally?  You could have projects that mean well but actually don’t deliver carbon over time.  We’ve actually been part of something called the Climate Community and Biodiversity Alliance, which has actually developed a standard for forest carbon projects, which is now being picked up by a lot of entities that are trying to create and sell carbon credits. 

So, under that forest, excuse me, that Climate Community and Biodiversity standard, you can be assured that you’re not only getting real, permanent CO2 reductions, but you’re also getting community benefits and biodiversity benefits.  And there are other standards out there dealing with other sectors.  So, if you are looking to offset your emissions voluntarily, be sure that you find a quality standard like the CCB standard associated with it. 

Q:  The second question is a little more complicated.  You mentioned Brazil, you mentioned Indonesia, you mentioned the overlays looking at environmentally sensitive areas and areas that may be open for expansion of palm oil plantations, how much of that work is applicable to developing the indirect land use, the life cycle analysis, for carbon dioxide and the indirect land use that’s become part of federal law now for biofuels?

MR. PRICKETT:  You’ll – and I’m looking at my friend and colleague Chris Dreigesack (ph) who’s with Conservation International, who is really the genius behind our biofuels work, and I won’t hold it against you, Chris, if you don’t get the answer to that right away, but say a little bit more about the indirect, so I get where you’re coming from?

Q:  The energy law that just passed put various thresholds on carbon reductions for various types of biofuels, 20 percent for corn, 40, 50, 60 percent for cellulosic and so on.  And it looks at not only direct carbon emissions from the life cycle for whatever biofuels, but also indirect, including what they call, I think the term, substantial land use issues.  So, I mean, if you’re wiping out rainforests in Indonesia or Brazil to grow palm oil or – and it seems to me the work you’re doing would form a good basis for a methodology for measuring the land use issue when you’re doing a life cycle carbon analysis. 

MR. PRICKETT:  So this – thank you – so this goes right to the point Barbara was just making – Barbara Bramble with the National Wildlife Federation – and this is something that the round table on sustainable biofuels is looking at very much, which is the indirect effect of biofuel expansion in two ways, both indirect in that you have emissions coming out of the conversion of areas for agriculture, which tend not to get picked up in most analyses of the net CO2 balance of biofuels, but you also have displacement. 

So, if you go and you take an area that’s already producing one crop and you switch that to producing palm oil for bio diesel or sugarcane for ethanol, the land use you displace is probably going to go somewhere else.  So, you’re actually going to see a knock-on effect of agricultural expansion somewhere else for the crop that you displaced, and that’s going to have a set of CO2 emissions associated with it also from the land use change and from the agricultural operations themselves.  So, those also have to get factored into the equation. 

So, this is actually one of the projects, Barbara, the – I believe of the round table to kind of create the whole boundary of the system for how do you measure the net CO2 balance from a biofuel.

Q:  Okay, I guess the question was, the work you’re doing, is that applicable to developing a standard for measuring indirect land use?

MR. PRICKETT:  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Q:  Thank you. 

Q:  Hey, Glenn, Jeremy Karnowitz with the Keystone Center.

MR. PRICKETT:  Glad you’re here, Jeremy.

Q:  Yeah, nice to see you.  I just had a quick question for you, I know – my goodness – I know a lot of the focus, your focus has been international, but turning domestically, if you think about, you know, building on the last comment, if we’re going to quintuple the amount of biofuels in this country, thoughts about whether that comes out of marginal lands or CRP lands, and what that means for – on the biodiversity side?  And sort of, also second piece of that is whether, in fact, that’s something that’s going to be – whether we are going to grow those crops domestically or whether we are going to, in order to get five times as much biofuel, is if we’re going to go to Indonesia and ask them to drain more peat bogs to get more palm oil? 

MR. PRICKETT:  Yeah, no thank you, and I should say for those of you who don’t know Jeremy Kranowitz, he’s with the Keystone Center’s energy program here in DC and doing an absolutely fabulous job, and full disclosure, I’m on the board at the Keystone Center, so I’m very proud of what Jeremy’s doing. 

It’s a really good question and I’m not going to go too far into U.S. domestic ag policy because it’s not my area of expertise, and I hope there’s some folks in the room here who would want to join in this conversation.  One thing I would say is that I, again personal view, I think often we tend to segment this discussion too much, and so we’ll think about the biofuel future in the U.S. and the need for second generation cellulosic technology in the U.S.  This is going to be a global market, I mean, certainly there are some barriers in terms of tariffs and trade restrictions, but long term, this is going to be a global market.  So you know, as we increase our demand for biofuels, that’s going to be met globally, so we are going to see – and you’re already seeing it, the relationship between European demand for biodiesel and expansion of oil palm in Indonesia and the impact that’s having on the peat bogs is a real connection already. 

You know, I think it’s a great concern and it gets to the last question.  What are the indirect effects of expanding acreage for biofuel production, and does that mean we’re going to have to go into the conservation reserve program lands and other fragile habitat to meet the targets that we’re all talking about?  Sort of our view on that generally, again not specific to the farm bill or U.S. policy, but generally and the approach we’re taking in the countries where we work, is to say let’s be smart and think up front about spatial planning for biofuels and identify the areas that need to be protected.  So, I would say in the U.S. where you already have set-aside lands in the CRP and in other conservation programs, absolutely, let’s redouble those protections.  Let’s not open up those areas to expansions because they’re fulfilling real purposes, whether it’s wildlife habitat or repairing, you know, protection of streams and rivers. 

So, it’s – our view generally is that you need to think up front about which areas need to be protected and how do you raise the funding to do that on a sustainable basis before you start expanding production?  But that may not have answered your question, so I’d encourage anybody who’s more versed in the farm bill here to take that on also.  Jed?

Q:  Yeah, Jed Schilling with the Millennium Institute.  In looking at the various biofuels that you support and the programs, do you take into account the energy we turn on investment as to how much energy you get out of a program compared to how much you put in because, for example, the figures I’ve seen on ethanol in the U.S. is you get four gallons out for every three and half gallons you put in, so that you’re not getting very much net return, especially if you look at the impact on food prices and other things that come out of that.  So, how do you judge which ones are worth supporting in various places based on the energy return as well as the environmental impacts? 

MR. PRICKETT:  Yeah, I mean certainly, that’s a key issue and in principle you want to support the crops that are the most efficient in terms of energy production for the energy you put in.  And I would add the other natural resource inputs land and water, so you’re looking at resource productivity and not just energy productivity.  The challenge we see is that we’re actually dealing with some of the most efficient feedstocks, so I mentioned earlier that palm oil is one of the most efficient sources of energy you can find in bioenergy because it’s a small plant and the yield of oil per square inch of the plant is very high compared to other plants.

 So, even – yeah, I guess my answer to that is yes, you absolutely want to move toward the plants, the feedstocks with the best energy balance, but even there you’re going to have some remaining underlying environmental challenges that you have to manage: sugar, for example, much better in its energy balance than corn.  And fortunately in the Brazilian ethanol industry, most of the production is on land that was already deforested, you know, a hundred decades or a hundred years ago and left to its own devices.  The industry there is actually expanding pretty organically within that area, that footprint, in east and southeast Brazil that’s already been deforested. 

The government actually has some plans, well-meaning plans from a social perspective that are a little bit concerning from an environmental perspective to, with state subsidies, dramatically expand production outside of the southeast where most of the – and the northeast – where most of the sugar production has been, into the Cerrado grasslands and even into the Amazon and, you know, create mobile refineries that go around too process the sugar into ethanol.  So, that’s why our approach has been to work at the federal and the state level to say, before we unleash these sorts of programs, let’s do some spatial planning so we’re focusing on the right areas for development. 

Q:  Hi, Glenn, Suzanne Hunt.

MR. PRICKETT:  Hey, Suzanne. 

Q:  How are you?

MR. PRICKETT:  Good.

Q:  I’m wondering, with all of your experience working with governments and working with industry, what are your thoughts, and maybe audience members want to jump in, on the most important things that the military and the most important roles that the military can play in this realm? 

MR. PRICKETT:  Thank you, that’s a great question, and I would encourage more discussion on that because I’m a newcomer to this community, so my thoughts are pretty general at this point.  Certainly, the new Africa Command, which has expressed a real interest in sustainable development as part of its mission, you know, we’d love to, and I know others in the environmental community are already beginning to talk to that group about how to bring some of these principles to sustainable agriculture and sustainable energy development into the approach that AFRICOM takes in Africa. 

I think more generally, we’d love to explore more some of the security connections, some of the ones I alluded to between the energy environment situation in countries like Indonesia, countries in South America, countries in Central Asia, where you’ve got some significant livelihood issues that could come about from natural resource degradation, or on the flip side if you do biofuels right, you could see some real livelihood benefits and ecological restoration benefits, and could that play a role in reducing conflict and dealing with some of the threats we face on the security front?  So, I think there’s an analytical dimension that we should pursue in terms of environment energy policy and security policy, and then there’s probably an on the ground delivery component that we could pursue, particularly with the new Africa Command, would be my guess.  But it’s something we’d love to explore more. 

Q:  Don Erbach, the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers.  Do you have an estimate of how much bioenergy can be sustainably produced in the world or in the United States or anyplace else? 

MR. PRICKETT:  I’m going to defer that one to folks in the crowd who are more analytically inclined than I am to put a number forward.  I don’t have that number in my head.  I’ll, at the risk of volunteering my colleague who may not – Chris, I don’t know if you want to –

MS.    :  (Off mike.)

MR. PRICKET:  But I would – also, Barbara, I don’t know if coming out of the round table, there’s  a sort of a round table view on that topic?  Or Suzanne?  Suzanne’s also done a huge amount of work on this at World Watch Institute. 

Q:  I mean, there’s no really good answer, and how you define sustainable plays a big role, and what you consider a reasonable number for sustainable production, but two notes.  One is that tomorrow or the next day, the researchers at Berkeley are going to be releasing numbers that they’ve come up with, and it’s going to show just how fast the methodologies, the analytical methodologies are developing.  They’re going to come out with numbers showing that the indirect greenhouse gas emissions are potentially many times greater than anyone – greater than what people have been thinking about in the past. 


So, there’s so many – and a few months ago, a new piece of research came out saying that the nitrogen oxide emissions are much larger from fertilizer use than were previously thought.  And so, there’s just a lot of information that’s coming out, so all of this is evolving.  But I would say watch out for a government report that’s going to come out.  You’re probably familiar with the billion tons study that was done last year; the government is now, a number of agencies are collaborating to create a much more detailed version of that.  And the timeline is draft done in April, final done in June.  So, I think that that’s evolving, and I actually think that all this new debate that’s coming up is really helpful in, hopefully, putting some of the spotlight onto lightweight materials and hybrid vehicles and some of the other things that we’ve discussed in this forum in the past that deserve more attention. 

So, I didn’t really answer the question, but I think it’s changing too much to say, and I really don’t feel comfortable putting a number, but it would certainly help a lot of if we cut in half the amount of fuel we needed, which is easily doable.   

MR. PRICKETT:  In the back. 

Q:  Hear me? 

MR. PRICKETT:  Yeah. 

Q:  James Donnelly with CNA.  I’m kind of ignorant, but have maybe a silly question.  As far as the deforestation, how much is that, at least presently, attributed to like, population growth and versus say, for example, people just deciding that they can make some money by logging and stuff?  Do you have numbers for that? 

MR. PRICKETT:  Right, right, yeah.  It’s a good question.  I mean, I’ll come at it in a bit of a roundabout way.  One of our great successes globally that a lot of people don’t acknowledge is in many developing countries, with support from the international community, those countries have actually succeeded in reducing their fertility rates pretty substantially.  So, we’ve actually made a big dent globally over the last 20, 25 years on the population growth problem.  So, that’s not really the root of this.  I mean, certainly, population continues to grow but it’s growing at a much lower rate and, you know, I think the estimates have come down by between 50 and 100 percent of what the target population is going to be today compared to when I started in this field about 20 years ago.  So, that’s not the real driver.

You know, the real driver is steadily growing populations, but also both the need to alleviate poverty and rising living standards and economic development.  And you see a mix, where we see a mix in our work between true subsistence agriculture where you have poor populations just trying to feed themselves, and that certainly continues to be the case in very poor countries like Madagascar where, you know, very inefficient, unsustainable rice production has been the cause of most of the deforestation in Madagascar.  It’s down to less than 5 percent of its original forest and a lot of that is for subsistence, for subsistence use in a system that had been sustainable at much lower population levels isn’t sustainable anymore.

 But a lot of the large scale deforestation now, in places like Indonesia, like Brazil, and I keep coming back to those countries because along with the Congo, those are where the biggest blocks of forest are.  A lot of the deforestation there is driven, is being driven now by large scale commercial agriculture for oil palm, for other export commodities, so it’s really more a function of all of our growth globally.  I mean, it’s – a lot of that deforestation is being driven by conversion for agricultural commodities that are going to China, but of course a lot of the – when you think about the timber commodities going to China, a lot of it is going into wood products that we buy here in this country or Europe buys, so the global engine of economic development is basically finding these last areas and developing them for agriculture and other natural resources. 

So, we’ve started to get a handle on the population challenge.  We know how to do effective family planning; that said, we’ve a bit taken our eye off the ball of that problem, at least here in this country in the last couple of years, so as I understand it, I’m not an expert, but the numbers are maybe starting to creep back up again.  But we know how to deal with that problem.  That’s not at the root of this environmental challenge. 

It’s really how do we manage our economic growth globally and help those countries plan in a smart way to protect and restore the forests?  I mean, our view is that there’s room for both, that there’s enough degraded land to, if we can bring it back into production, to meet a lot of the demand for agricultural products, whether it’s for energy or for the more conventional uses, without having to sacrifice what’s left of these fragile natural habitats.  It just requires smart strategy and interventions to do that. 

Q:  Adam Siegel, Northrop Grumman Analysis Center Energy Consensus, a question, hopefully it would make this fun, which is try to think of, what is a poster child of where biofuel is working very well in sustainability to provide a picture of where is it working well, and where, putting aside U.S. corn ethanol, where is it working horribly?  So, where is, you know, what is  a poster child image that we might leave with of where is it working well and where is it working poorly? 

MR. PRICKETT:  Boy, that’s tricky one.  I mean, there’s so many dimensions to sustainability.  And I’m tempted, from a purely land use environmental perspective to say the sugar ethanol industry in Brazil is actually pretty good relative to others because again, as I said, that land was deforested generations ago, sort of not our watch, so it’s not gobbling up rainforest.  It’s existing agricultural land, so you know, it uses a lot of water but it’s more or less as it has been, so from an environmental standpoint – and the energy balance is great.  It’s – correct if I’m wrong, but it’s something like eight to one, I guess, is the number people use on energy out for energy in for sugar ethanol. 

So, from an environmental standpoint, that – and Suzanne, Chris, Barbara, I’d love if you have other ideas – but I’d say that’s pretty good, that’s a pretty good picture from an environmental standpoint.  Now, on the social side, you may have seen an op-ed just in The New York Times a couple of days ago about some of the social conditions associated with sugar production in Brazil.  It’s not my area of expertise, but that would, in my mind, cloud a little bit the sort of perfect picture of sustainability that you’re asking me to paint. 

On the negative side, I would say what we’re saying in Indonesia with conversion of natural rainforest for oil palm and the resulting burning of the peat, and I didn’t – Jeremy alluded to it, but when you deforest much of the forest area, in Sumatra for example, you have underneath that are these very deep areas of peat, and those just keep burning.  And so, you have incredible CO2 emissions that come not only from the deforestation but the burning of the peat.  And in fact, together that led Indonesia to be the number three source of CO2 emissions over the last, in the last year, for which there is data.  I can’t remember which year that was, but that’s number three after the U.S. and China, just mainly because of the forest burning. 

And again, there you’re talking about habitat for the orangutan, the Sumatran tiger, communities that depends on those forests, so from an environmental standpoint, I would say that’s pretty bad.  On the other hand, oil palm has been a great economic boon to Indonesia and Malaysia, so on the social and economic side, there’s a plus there.  It’s hard to find a kind of unalloyed good biofuel and a bad biofuel.  But I don’t know, I would also bounce that one back to Suzanne and Barbara and Chris is they have any thoughts. 


Q:  Hi, I’m John Clark, retired mechanical engineer.  Some numbers relating to that potential: the solar energy incident on the USA per person amounts to 6,000 kilowatts.  The consumption in this industrial society amounts to 12 kilowatts.  The consumption required for a 2,000 dietary calorie food supply is 100 watts.  There is a huge difference between the potential of using solar energy, whether by biomass or any other method, and what we actually need to feed ourselves. 

Second point I think (I’d invite ?) a comment on – I risk here becoming the most unpopular person in the room, but nearly all the grain we now use and grow and consume in terms of land is used to feed animals to feed us.  That process is something like 10 times less efficient than us using the product, the grains themselves, so, anybody pushing for vegetarianism? 

MR. PRICKETT:  Yeah, no, it’s a very valid point.  On an institutional basis, Conservation International hasn’t taken up an advocacy position for vegetarianism, although many of my colleagues within Conservation International are quite strong advocates of that for the very reasons you cite.  I think, you know, just speaking for CI, we come at this very pragmatically, and I think everything you say is absolutely right.

 At the same time, we’re dealing with millennia of societal habits around what we eat and what we consume, so when it comes to the livestock question, what we’re trying to do is apply the science, the best science we can, and bring some economic resources to bear to help developing countries maintain their natural systems, their biodiversity, in the face of what is a global, huge uptake in demand for their resources and part – use in a very inefficient manner, as you suggest, but you know, our view is that what we can do is provide the science or the tools that we know can work to help these societies, you know, conserve what they’ve got. 

Ed Wilson has a really interesting analogy, Professor E.L. Wilson at Harvard is sort of the dean of conservation biology and he speaks about the bottleneck that we’re going through as  global society that with populations are growing, living standards are growing, we’ve got very little of the natural habitat left.  We have a couple of decades of bottleneck that we have to get through to a future where, hopefully, we’ll have more efficient technologies, where population has leveled off and in fact started to decline.  And so, our challenge is how do we help poor, developing countries get through that bottleneck and kind of husband what they have left of their resources.  But I think the points you make are very valid. 

Q:  Josh Messner, Applied Resources, Incorporated.  I understand from McArvin’s perspective, as long as you have a forest, as long as you have a tree, the tree is essentially, in my understanding, a tall carbon stack.  And as long as the tree is living, it’s absorbing more carbon and sustaining or holding it in itself.  I’m just wondering if there’s any – has there been any analysis in how much carbon is being locked up into man-made materials, and I’m not suggesting for a second that it’s equivocal to the forests that are being cut down, but it’s all temporary, right?

 My shirt is essentially made of carbon, and eventually it will biodegrade and release some of that back to the atmosphere, and some of it I suppose will go into the landfill or the ground that it’s in, but so is the tree as long as the tree lives for 100 years and then falls over and dies, it essentially does the same thing.  So, I just wonder if there’s any analysis of how much carbon, say, that we’ve locked into landfills or that we put into manmade materials, our homes, and again, what maybe percentage that would be versus deforestation?

    MR. PRICKETT:  Right.  No, no, no, it’s a good question and I actually don’t know that number.  A broader response to that:  I mean, certainly when you take down a forest, some of that is for timber and some of that gets locked up in the products that have a long life, but actually most of the deforestation globally is not ending up with timber that’s ending up in a piece of furniture in this room; a lot of it just gets burned and converted into agriculture. 

And even where you do have kind of sustainable management of forest resource, and you’re putting that in timber which is staying in a  piece of furniture somewhere, you have an incredible amount of CO2 in the soils and the root systems that ends up getting released, over time, into the atmosphere.  I can probably find the number for you; I don’t have it in my head in terms of the percentage that actually gets locked up in products coming out of those forests, that land use changed, but on the numbers I cited about CO2 emissions are on a net basis, the sort of land-use change on a net basis of CO2 going out versus CO2 being retained, either in the forests themselves or in the products associated with it, that have a long life.

Q:  Hi, Brian Laster (ph) with General Dynamics.

Coming from a business perspective, and I know that this speaks more specifically to the developed world, any time I’m running a business I want to analyze how much inputs cost and then find the lowest possible input, lowest possible costing input.  Do you feel that, perhaps, the biofuels consortium is hurting itself by emphasizing, let’s say, ethanol and biomass inputs instead of first emphasizing what’s right now considered waste output streams, such as methane or waste vegetable oil, and are there any voices that are expressing those concerns?

MR. PRICKETT:  Yeah, I mean, we are; I mean, our view is that, from an environmental sustainability perspective, you should be looking much more toward waste materials, whether it’s agricultural waste or other forms of organic waste that can be converted into energy sources.  So, you know, absolutely, from a sustainability perspective, yes, there are voices that are encouraging a move in that direction.

Again, I would encourage others who are involved in that to speak out on that. 

Q:  Brian Chester (ph), API.

Any comments on what the future of genetically modified crops may play a solution in any of the biofuel feed stocks?

MR. PRICKETT:  Right, right.  I think it’s certainly a – you know, speaking with the folks at Monsanto, at DuPont, they are very much focused on resource productivity and how to engineer the next generation of genetically modified organisms in the agricultural context to minimize water inputs, minimize need for chemical pesticides, fertilizers; breed drought-tolerant plants, maximize oil and, you know, energy yield from the plants.  So it’s definitely on the minds of the companies that are creating GMO technologies.  So, certainly from a societal perspective, that resource will be available. 

Obviously, there’s certainly a debate, driven by many in the environmental community, about what could be the unintended environmental impacts of GMOs in terms of, you know, traits jumping out of commercial crops into crops that could become invasive and, you know, weedy and dominant natural ecosystems, or concerns about the biosafety.  Could there be allergens that could be hazardous to humans?  There’s been a lot of debate about that, a lot of anticipations about what the environmental risks could be over the, you know, 10 years or so that these crops have been in the field in pretty large proportions.  There hasn’t been any actual evidence of those sorts of problems happening but theoretically, there’s still a debate about could there be some environmental downsides to GMOs.  So that’s certainly something we have to bear in mind, but the industry is very much focused on how do you apply those technologies for biofuel crops, and generally, how do you make agriculture more resource-efficient using genetically modified – you know, GMO technology.

Q:  I have a question relating to manmade sources for carbon, relating to like, the blackers (ph) of Brazil, which are supposedly manmade by the Indians because the artifacts found with them, where they burned apparently trees and stuff to make charcoal, which was then mixed in with the soil and apparently stable, also known as chierro prienna (ph), apparently, in Portuguese. 

And the second concern is ethanol, there’s some problems.  Like, in one of the papers that was given out about the difficulty transporting through pipelines, water absorption, less energy potential.  What have you thought – or if you have, about butanol?  And I know BP and DuPont are working to make that, and some other companies, with proprietary methods.  The old methods, apparently, were not very productive of butanol.  Are you familiar with that?

MR. PRICKETT:  Yeah, I’ll take the second one first.  I’m not a technologist, and we don’t really have biofuel technologists, per se, at Conservation International so it’s not something we’ve looked into a lot, in terms of the relative advantages of the different energy forms. 

But on the first one, it’s something the scientists at Conservation International have been looking into and some of the finds that, you know, what we thought was just purely pristine, intact rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon actually has evidence that, in prehistorical times, the indigenous communities there were actually managing those areas fairly intensively and in fact, were enhancing the soil in the ways you indicate. 

And so, the rainforest that’s there is actually, you know, human influenced in a sense and in fact, there’s a lot of research going on, trying to figure out how you can apply that very, you know, basic technology to rehabilitation of degraded areas, whether it’s in Brazil or in other parts of the tropics, to try to basically regenerate some of what we consider to be the natural ecosystems in those areas.  So it’s a really exciting area of agricultural research, and of interest to science in terms of what – you know, where did the Amazon come from that actually had a human fingerprint on it. 

Q:  Yes, Bahri al Ariza (ph), with PolyTrade International Corp. 

I was going to ask – you haven’t mentioned anything about how would biofuels not getting enough power.  And also, I think the gentleman mentioned a little bit about the transportation because it’s mainly growing in the Midwest and you cannot transport it in the pipelines because it’s rusting.  And the government subsidy, I believe it’s up to 10 percent that the government gives, which proves that it’s not cost-effective and also, the amount of emissions that it creates, which is a very significant fact that people should really realize that.  And finally, that because it’s alcohol it’s actually bad for your engine.

MR. PRICKETT:  Yeah, and again my area of expertise is outside the U.S., so I’m not going to be too helpful on the specifics of the U.S. ethanol program but you know, again, as we discuss certainly from an environmental perspective relative to some of the other ethanol sources that we have around the world it’s – you know, the energy balance and the CO2 balance is not as favorable here.  But, that said, I leave it to others to get into some of the more technological comparisons of the U.S. corn ethanol energy versus others. 

Q:  My name is Janaki Alavalapati.  I’m a professor of resource economics at the University of Florida, and also I am a Jefferson Science Fellow at the Department of State.
I have two comments on earlier two questions about the greenhouse gas methodologies.  For those of you who are not familiar, there is an agency called Global Bioenergy Partnership; its secretariat is located in the FAO Rome.  And there is a specific taskforce which is working on coming up with a unified methodology to quantify greenhouse gas emissions, particularly accounting for this emphatic land-user things.  And hopefully, maybe by the end of this year or something, it is going to be finalized. 

The second comment is, I think there is a gentleman who asked about the storage of carbon in wood products and many human-made materials.  There is an agency called CORIM, which is Consortium on Research of Industrial Materials, it is at the University of Washington, Seattle.  That institute does a lot of research, actually; for example, compared to wood products versus concrete, close to 13 times more energy intensive, the concrete material.  So there is a peer-reviewed – lots of publications are there from agency.  If you are interested, I can guide you to that website.

I have one question.  In terms of greenhouse gas methodologies, energetic balance in terms of evaluating these biofuels, sure, we do have some kind of quantity to metrics.  But at the Department of State and also at the University of Florida, we are trying to get a good grip on some kind of metrics on biodiversity, if we have to come up with some kind of sustainable indicators to ensure sustainability of biofuels because you have traveled quite a bit in Indonesia and Malaysia, think of this roundtable on sustainable palm oil production; they are trying to adopt some kind of sustainable indicators on biodiversity.  Are they doing some kind of quantity to metrics?

MR. PRICKETT:  Yes.  It’s a challenging area because biodiversity – when you talk about biodiversity, you’re talking at several scales and so, one scale is species diversity, so there are metrics.  So, speaking for Conservation International, we’re very metrics driven so there’s a set of metrics around the persistence of threatened and endangered species, or the extinction of threatened and endangered species, and that’s one thing you want to evaluate any land-use against is, you know, could it lead to extinction of IDCN-listed threatened or endangered species.  Or, conversely, are you helping to maintain habitat and allow those species to persist?  But then, at another scale, you’re talking about ecosystems, tropical forests, coral reefs and all the species that are contained there, so the metric there is typically habitat fragmentation or habitat conversion.  So that’s an issue you need to look at.   

But then, within species diversity you have a scale of genetic diversity within species, so that leads you to a whole other set of metrics.  And one of the challenges in our field of biodiversity is that, as you already heard from just the minute or two I’ve spent on the question, the metrics is not simple because you have biodiversity and a variety of scales.  But what people tend to look at is species diversity, habitat integrity measured in fragmentation or conversion, and then also we look at connectivity and what we call sort of larger-scale biodiversity corridors and so, ensuring that you’ve got a large area of conservation to allow some of your larger species that require larger areas to persist.  So, area measures and species survival measures in terms of pure biodiversity metrics tend to be what the scientists look at.

But I know that is something at the roundtable, and the sustainable biofuels we’re looking at as well, as there are a couple of other roundtables on palm oil and on soy that are looking at the same questions.

Q:  Thanks, I’m Margaret Daley-Hayes (sp) with Evidence Based Research. 

And you offered a very felicitous story about the community in Indonesia, and my suspicion is that most situations don’t end up quite as felicitously.  Can you give us some sense of what arguments work, what incentives work, with governments, politicians, private sector entities that are trying to open up new forest areas and so forth, so that they can begin to take into account either the consequences of deforestation, water use, land use, and so forth?

MR. PRICKETT:  Yeah, no, and it’s – you’re right; it’s certainly not all positive out there.  But what we try to do at Conservation International in general is paint an optimistic picture of what’s possible and we have seen a lot of leaders, from the local level to the national level, take some real positive actions.

In terms of what arguments or what incentives work, what I described, which was really identifying the benefits that local communities derive from these natural areas or from biodiversity, is probably fundamentally the most important.  I’ll give another example of Madagascar, I mentioned it earlier:  Down to less than 10 percent of its original natural habitat, that’s been driven largely by what was at one time, culturally, a very sustainable practice of slash-and-burn agriculture now, because of scale, is not sustainable anymore.

The World Bank actually did some really interesting research that showed that deforestation was contributing to the declining rice production because of shortages of water available for rice production.  That really galvanized the president of Madagascar, Mark Ravalomanana, and he actually, as a result of seeing that information and hearing from groups like Conservation International and others, committed to tripling the protected area of forest in Madagascar and he’s personally very engaged in that now.  He’ll like, literally fly around and see areas being illegally logged and go back and call up his forest minister and say, get up there and you know, we need to deal with this.  So the economic argument of what’s in it for local communities is very important politically in those societies.  International support is essential; I mean, often what countries need to be able to set those areas aside, they need to be able to offset the opportunity cost. 

So, you know, Indonesia for example, the government’s not going to get the revenue from that logging concession that they otherwise would have gotten; how are they going to fill that hole in their budget?  So that’s where up to now, it’s been charitable contributions from organizations like Conservation International that have helped to turn that around, and we’ve actually had quite a bit of success of that because the opportunity cost is actually relatively low compared to what we’ve been able to pull together to fund that, but that’s where the carbon market becomes so important so that you get an international financial incentive that’s helping these countries offset the opportunity cost of production.  Aside from the local economic benefits, really engaging with communities on some of the non-marketable commodities they bring out of the forest for medicines, for food and fiber, and helping to maintain those cultural practices in the communities has been a big focus for us. 

So, I would say a set of social uses of the resource, economic, trying to measure the economic benefits that communities are getting, and then mobilizing international support.  That’s, you know, that’s sort of the beginning of the effective coalitions that we’ve tried to put together.

Well, I see I’ve worn you all out.  Thank you for those very good questions, and I said I look forward to being a part of the conversation.

(Applause.)

ADM. BURKE:  I’d just like to say, that was a wonderful presentation.  I think we learned a lot from it.  But I also am impressed by the audience: tremendous questions and I think you challenged Glenn a little bit.  But I was amazed that he could answer just about everything you threw at him.  Thanks again, Glenn.  (Applause.)

(END)

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