Transcript: A Conversation With Lester Brown
STEVE WEHRENBERG: Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll take your seats – or stand if you prefer, but –
Welcome to the Energy Conversation. My name is Steve Wehrenberg. I’m with the Coast Guard and sort of a co-founder of this business we find ourselves standing in right now. I’m very pleased to be able to introduce our speaker this evening. I, of course, as is my habit, have a couple of administrative remarks before we get started, something you have to bear with. It’s sort of – part of getting a $10 meal, I suppose.
First of all, a couple of thank-yous. I want to thank DOD and the 26 federal departments and agencies who participate in this. DOD has been a primary funder and supporter since we started and this is, what, our third year now. Mitzi, we’re in our third year of this conversation and it only gets better every time. Of course – (applause) – why, thank you.
And on that note, I’ll thank CNA and, of course, Mitzi Wertheim, without whom we would not be standing here at all. So thank you, Mitzi. That applause was for you. I’d also like to – and everybody else, you’re absolutely right – I’d also like to thank (Micente ?), working on some of our communications issues and, of course, the hotel staff here at the Doubletree which as, of course, our meal continues to improve as time goes by. So it’s –
I want to sort of alert everybody to the fact that Carbon Nation is filming for their production this evening. So if you plan to say anything erudite, this would be a good opportunity. If you plan to say anything else, you might want to think it over. (Laughter.) So that – I will point out to everyone that on the way in you saw, perhaps on the front desk out there somewhere, something called Rhumb Lines, which is available. And it is a naval communication and I will have to quote it directly here by saying that “Conserving energy is an all-hands effort.” Certainly, that’s something we believe here and it’s something, I’m sure, all of you are willing to support.
Energy conversation is, of course, being integrated into most organizations, the way they think and the way they behave. So we are absolutely thrilled to see that. The next energy conversation will be on May 12th. We’ll have – that’s a change from what was originally suggested. That is reflected on the website for registration, right. Okay. And that will be John Mizrock from the Department of Energy who will be speaking about gigawatt renewables. That should be pretty exciting to most of the folks here in the room – gigawatt renewables.
Well, at any rate, one of the things that has been most on my mind, as we’ve gone through this now up to our third year of the conversation, is that we’ve looked at a number of the parts and it is sort of interesting to see that about a year and a half ago, I guess, we had somebody in from the Department of Agriculture talking about the impact of biofuel production on agriculture and on food production. And that was about 18 months ago, I think, and now it’s become quite clear to all of us that that seems to be a problem of some sort.
We are great believers here in connecting the dots. Certainly, everything, as John Muir said so eloquently, everything is connected to everything else, and we don’t want to lose sight of that. I think we’ve begun to shift into that way of thinking. I know we’ve talked about – of course, we’re here about energy, but we’ve talked about the connections between energy and water, water and energy, energy and food, food and energy, and minerals, and so on and so forth.
So we’re starting a conscious effort to try to begin to connect the dots of the many things that we’ve seen and this would be a continuation of that notion of connecting the dots. Certainly, we’ve recognized, or at least I’ve recognized, and I’m sure many of my colleagues have, that all the things that we’ve talked about so far, whether energy or water or land or food or minerals or whatever, is all – it seems to be in finite supply and yet, demand continues to grow at an exponential rate. That strikes me as being an issue of some concern. And we are probably rightly concerned in being here and enjoying this conversation and engaging in this conversation.
It is my distinct pleasure and honor to introduce Mr. Lester Brown to you this evening. Lester is the author of Plan B 1.0, 2.0 and now 3.0. His book is, of course, available for you at the desk next to the front door. However, I’m going to bust on him here and tell you it’s also available online. So, uh-oh, now I’m in trouble – and free of charge, I might add. So, yes, it’s the online signature we’re working on. That’s a technical problem for all of us, so – but we’re getting there. But he will sign this. Yes, he will sign this hard copy for those of you who are old-fashioned and like that hard copy. I’m the poor bloke who buys ten copies just before Lester puts it – makes it available online for nothing. So for me, it’s just a labor of love and a donation and I’m proud to be able to do it.
I’m not going to spend a lot time talking about Lester here. I could spend the rest of the evening, but you’d rather listen to him than me, I’m sure. The Washington Post has called him one of the world’s most influential thinkers. If I could say anymore than that I would, but my goodness, how could he get any better than that? I will say one thing that he’s particularly proud of and that is that he is nationally ranked fourth in the 10-miler. So you know, everybody’s got to be proud of something; so nationally ranked fourth in the 10-miler and he’s no longer 20. Is that correct, Lester? Okay, within your age group, I’m sorry. (Laughter.) Yes, as I said earlier, we’re all graying eagles, aren’t we? Yes.
Well, on that note, please let me introduce our esteemed speaker, Mr. Lester Brown. Lester? (Applause.)
LESTER BROWN: Thank you, Steve. Is it possible to remove this computer, do you think or is it serving some useful function?
MR. WEHRENBERG: Mike, we don’t need it up here, do we?
MR. BROWN: I’m of the “Let’s pitch the thing out the window school,” but it’s not mine, so –
Now, that I’ve established my high-tech credentials, Steve, thank you very much. Mitzi, thanks for the invitation. I’ve been looking forward to tonight, as I think about security and the need to redefine it. Some of you may remember a study that was published in, I think, the last year of the Carter administration, the Global 2000 Report looking toward the end of the century. How many remember that report? The senior author of that report is here tonight. Gerry Barney, where are you? Gerry Barney, Global 2000 Report. (Applause.)
I’m also particularly indebted to Gerry because when we were working with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to start the Worldwatch Institute in 1974, Gerry was our program officer at the RBF and was responsible for the $0.5 million start-up grant that got the Worldwatch Institute going.
There are many people here tonight I would – could recognize, people who’ve made major contributions in various ways, but I will forego that. I would mention one other person and that’s Harriett Crosby, who is sitting down here, who’s the head of the Fairview Foundation. Harriett is an amateur masseuse and she once told me that she could put a person to sleep in 15 minutes. And I said, well, Harriett, I don’t in any way want to diminish your skills, but in 15 minutes, I can put a room full of people to sleep. (Laughter.)
I gave a luncheon talk today and one of the people in attendance was Mort (Kaplan ?) – do I have the last name right – the first head of the Internal Revenue Service. And we were sort of comparing notes to see who had seniority in terms of being in Washington. And Mort had come to Washington on January 1st, 1961, as one of the early Kennedy appointees preparing to take over the IRS. I had actually come to Washington in June of 1959 to join the Foreign Agricultural Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The difference between Mort and I was that he came into the top of the IRS and I was a GS-7 in the Foreign Agricultural Service, but I was in another sort of U.S. Department of Agriculture alumni meeting. We’re going back and comparing notes and there are not many people who go back to the Eisenhower years, but I am one of those. So I’ve had – I’ve been watching Washington now – been part of Washington for just about half a century. There’s been an enormous change during that period.
When you have a new book, it’s hard to get away without a book story, and I’ll again go way back to tell a book story. Some of you will remember the name Liz Carpenter. She was Mrs. Lyndon Johnson’s social secretary, a very talented woman, a great after-dinner speaker, one of the best I’ve ever heard actually, with her Texas sense of humor and also one of LBJ’s speech writers.
But Liz wrote a book after her White House years called Ruffles and Flourishes, and she was on a book tour and one night by chance met her former White House colleague in a hotel lobby in Atlanta, Arthur Schlesinger. And she said – Arthur said, gee, Liz, that was a great book of yours. I really enjoyed it. Who wrote it for you? She said, well, I’m glad you enjoyed it, Arthur. Who read it to you? (Laughter.)
Late last summer, when we were researching and writing Plan B 3.0, there was a raft of reports on ice melting. You may remember some of them. There was one that said that the – there was a loss of Arctic Sea ice. An area had disappeared that was twice the size of Britain in one week. Scientists were astounded by this. They just didn’t think that much ice could go so fast.
And then a couple of weeks later in early September, reports were coming from a team that was researching ice melting in Greenland, and they were focusing particularly on one of the glacial outflows from the Greenland ice sheet on the southwest coast called the Ilulissat glacier. Ilulissat is probably an Inuit name, but this glacier was three miles wide, a mile thick, a mile deep. And instead flowing at 100 meters or 200 meters a year, it was flowing at two meters an hour.
So periodically, huge chunks, three miles wide, a mile high and several hundred yards thick, would break off and slide into the ocean. And when that happened, there was such a release of pressure from the weight – these chunks of ice weighed billions of tons – that there would be a seismic response, sort of a mini earthquake. And again, scientists had never seen anything like this before.
I mean, it was interesting that the IPCC report purposely did not include the effects of such ice melting on sea level rise because they didn’t know how to model it. It wasn’t – we haven’t had enough experience to see how to do this. And what we’ve learned since that report came out – the final version just a year ago, or the final part of it just a year ago – is that ice is melting at an unprecedented rate, whether it’s the Arctic Sea ice or the Greenland ice sheet, or the West Antarctic ice sheet, which some scientists think could break up even faster than the Greenland ice sheet, partly because, as you may know, the West Antarctic ice sheet is not actually on the continent of Antarctica. It’s supported by a number of islands.
So as the temperature of the sea water rises, it melts from underneath at the same time that the air temperature, the rising air temperature, is melting on top. So it could break up much more quickly than the Greenland ice sheet because of that. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, sea level would rise 23 feet. If the West Antarctic ice sheet were to break up, sea level would rise 16 feet. Together, that’s 39 feet. A 30-foot rise in sea level would produce over 600 million rising-sea refugees.
Or consider the reports coming last year from the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau. These are the glaciers whose ice melt sustains the flow of the major rivers in Asia during the dry season. In India, it’s the Gangroti glacier – G-A-N-G-R-O-T-I, a huge glacier nestled in the Western Himalayas, and it provides most of the flow of the Ganges River during the dry season.
The risk is that as it shrinks – and if the trend of recent years continues, will eventually disappear, probably in a matter of decades – the Ganges could become a seasonal river flowing only during the rainy season, not during the dry season. I’ve tried to imagine what the Gangetic Basin, with its 406 million people would look like, how it would function if the Ganges was not running for part of the year. And I can’t sort of – I don’t have a program for running that through to see what it would translate into.
In Asia – sorry, in China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has just finished a 25-year study of the glaciers in Western China, which are the only glaciers in China – many of them on the Tibetan Plateau. They pointed out that some of those glaciers are now melting at 7 percent a year and these are the glaciers that feed the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers.
The Yellow River could also become a seasonal river, flowing only during the rainy season. This is of particular interest to me because of its effect on food security. We forget that China and India are the world’s two leading wheat producers. China is number one; India is number two; we are number three. With rice production, China and India are in a class by themselves. There’s no one even close to them. What happens to the glaciers and the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau would directly affect the grain harvest and the food security of China and India.
I will be in China and India in early June. We now have the first sort of wave of foreign language translations of Plan B 3.0 starting to come off the press. So in an around-the-world trip, I’ll be doing the Japanese edition, Korean, Chinese, Hindi, Turkish and Italian. They just happen to be the first ones, so we put them together in a package of launches. But while in China and in India, I’m going to do my best to link the melting of the glaciers and their future food security, and the fact that these are the two countries that plan to build most of the new coal-fired power plants in the years ahead.
It’s ironic that the two countries whose food security will be most directly affected by rising CO2 levels are the countries that just happen to be planning to build most of the new coal-fired power plants. So I see my job as connecting the dots for them, to see the link between the melting glaciers, their food security and the coal-fired power plants they’re planning to build.
This situation is particularly interesting because we have never had such a massive projected threat to food security as we’re looking at here with these melting glaciers. And this is not based on – these projections are not based on an abstract climate model. They are based on the hard data of the melting of these glaciers over the last few decades and particularly, the last several years and the acceleration of that melting.
Now, it might be tempting in this country to say, well, those glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, that’s – they’re China’s problem. Well, they are China’s problem, for sure. Those are China’s glaciers. But in a sense, they’re our glaciers too because in an integrated world food economy, if China’s grain harvest is shrinking because the river flows are shrinking, then we’re looking at China coming into the world market for grain big time – just as it has for soybeans.
A decade or so ago, China was self-sufficient in soybeans. Today, it imports 70 percent of its supply, imports six times as many soybeans as Japan, which is the number two soybean importer – massive importer of soybeans. If China turns to the world market for grain imports on a massive scale, it will come to the United States, because we are the major grain exporter.
Imagine 1.3 billion Chinese competing with us for our grain supply, driving up our food prices. Now, it would be tempting to say, don’t worry, we’ll simply restrict exports. But China is our banker today; China is holding nearly a trillion dollars. Each month, when the Treasury Department auctions off securities to help finance the deficit, much of it to pay for the war in Iraq, the Chinese are the big buyers. China is our banker now. And the geopolitics of that, combined with climate change and the changing food situation, might be worth a novel. If one were a novelist, this would be fascinating material.
So these are some of the linkages that we have to begin thinking about as we look at these issues. In looking at climate change, we did not need to go beyond ice melting in our analysis last summer to see that civilization is in trouble, and we need to begin thinking about how to stabilize the situation before it spirals out of control.
In looking at the need to cut carbon emissions, we did not ask the question, what – or how much of a cut in carbon emissions is politically feasible? That’s what political leaders ask. They always ask that question, and many of them have concluded that we need an 80-percent cut in carbon emissions by 2050.
We concluded, asking the question, how much and how fast do we need cut carbon emissions if we want to have a chance at least of saving the Greenland ice sheet and at least some of the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau? And when you ask that question, you conclude that we’ve got to cut carbon emissions 80 percent, not by 2050, but by 2020. And this is all almost a wartime mobilization to do this.
As I look at the world today and ask myself what are the important indicators we should be watching, the ones that will tell us something about our future, the one that I end up with is a number of failing states in the world. I think that will tell us more about our future than any other indicator I can think of.
Failing states – the list of failing states has been growing longer year by year. Foreign Policy publishes the results of an annual analysis by the Carnegie Endowment and the Fund for Peace on the number of failing states and their ranking and so forth – very interesting. They do it each year. They’ve done three so far. The fourth will be out in another couple of months.
How many failing states before civilization itself begins to unravel? And when we look at civilization today, we’re looking at a global civilization. It no longer makes sense to think of our future in terms of individual countries. We either are going to make this – we're going to make it together or we’re going to fail together.
What I’ve noticed in looking at the failing states is that the weaker governments are simply not able to deal with the problems they’re facing. There is a growing backlog of unsolved problems that are affecting the weaker states in the world. They include continuing rapid population growth, deforestation, soil erosion, over-grazing, converting grassland into desert, falling water tables, a whole series of problems that are becoming more and more difficult to manage, not to mention the challenge of building more and more schools as more youngsters come of school age.
And now we’re looking at a couple of major new threats, new sources of stress. One is peak oil, and the rising prices associated with the immanency of peak oil. Some geologists, if you follow this, know that – some geologists think oil has already peaked last year or the year before. Others think it could be in the next few years, but most geologists now see peak oil as being not too far in the future, if it hasn’t already occurred.
Peak oil is – in some sense, may be a historical event. I mean, we may – future historians may look back before peak oil and after peak oil. We have spent our lives living in a world where oil production is increasing. I mean, there are occasional blips, but basically, oil production is increasing.
After peak oil, things will change in ways we cannot now even imagine. After peak oil, no country gets more oil unless another gets less. During our lifetimes, everyone’s been getting more oil, but then the post-peak oil world would be very different – going to put enormous stresses on governments. We went through our rapid development with a period of cheap oil. That will not be an option for developing countries now attempting to develop rapidly.
The second major stress is the rise in food prices, the rise in world grain prices, associated with the massive shift of grain in the United States into the production of fuel for cars. From 1990 up until a few years ago, the world demand for grain was increasing on average about 20 million tons per year. Last year, it increased by about 50 million tons and this year, we projected it will increase by close to 50 million tons again. The difference between 20 million tons a year increase and 50 million tons is the 30 million additional tons of U.S. grain going into fuel for cars. Last year, 18 percent of the harvest –18 percent of last year’s grain harvest going to fuel; this year, it may be close to 28 percent.
But it’s not a solution to our food – to our oil dependence problem. I mean, in an effort to reduce our oil insecurity, we have created, or at least contributed importantly, to global food insecurity. And I don’t think we’ve quite realized it yet. We’re now in a situation where the price of grain is tied to the price of oil. If the food value of a commodity is below the fuel value, the market will move that commodity into the energy economy. We used to have a food economy and an energy economy. They’re now beginning to fuse.
In this new situation, as the price of oil goes up, the price of grain will follow. As oil went from $60 a barrel to $100, grain followed it up. If oil goes to $140, grain will follow it up. The reason for that is we can always convert grain into fuel if it's more profitable to do so.
We’re looking at an emerging competition between 860 million people in the world who own cars and the two billion poorest people in the world competing for the same grain supplies. This is an entirely new political, economic, and moral issue. We’ve never faced it before. And there’s no international office or agency to mediate this competition between automobile owners, whose average income is about $30,000 a year, and two billion poorest people in the world, whose incomes averages less than $3,000 per year – an entirely new situation and a potentially dangerous one.
I think both peak oil – rising oil prices and rising food prices are going to contribute to an increase in the number of failing states.
Plan B, the response to these problems, has four principal components – one, to stabilize climate; two, to stabilize population; three, to eradicate poverty – and stabilizing population and eradicating poverty are closely related. And the fourth is the restoration of the earth’s natural system: soil, aquifers, forests, et cetera.
How do we cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020? Well, on the demand side, we launch a systematic worldwide effort to raise energy efficiency. Now, we keep behaving as though we’ve already done it, but we’ve really scarcely begun to tap the potential for increasing energy efficiency. Example: light bulbs, incandescence – if we were to shift to the most efficient lighting technologies available on the market today, which in most cases are compact fluorescents, we could reduce world electricity demand by 12 percent. That would enable us to close 705 of the world’s nearly 2,400 coal-fired power plants.
Adam, are you going to have them turn the lights off?
MR. : (Off mike, laughter.)
MR. BROWN: There’s an enormous potential for raising energy efficiency. Today, 40 percent of the world’s electricity is generated from burning coal. In the new energy economy, 40 percent of the world’s electricity will come from wind. We’re including in Plan B 1.5 million wind turbines in the Plan B energy economy of 2020; 1.5 million wind turbines, two megawatts each, three million megawatts of wind-generating capacity; 1.5 million wind turbines. We have about 100,000 wind turbines in operation in the world today.
So we’re talking about a 15-fold increase; 1.5 million wind turbines is a lot, but it’s small compared with the 65 million cars we make each year. This is one and a half million wind turbines over the next dozen years.
We could probably assemble those wind turbines on existing assembly lines of closed automobile plants in the United States. We could probably do it for the world. I haven’t done the calculations, but I think it probably could be done – not a big deal.
Wind has enormous potential. I’m going to talk a bit about solar and geothermal and tidal and wave, but the cost curve with wind is ahead of most of the other renewable sources of energy, probably a decade ahead of the growing cost curve for solar, for example.
Some exciting things happening now – the state of Texas, Rick Perry, Republican governor, has put together a package of wind-farm development firms and two companies to build transmission lines to link a huge wind-farm complex in West Texas and another in the Texas panhandle with the load centers in Texas, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Galveston, and so forth; 23,000 megawatts – think 23 coal-fired power plants. This is huge, enough to satisfy the residential needs of 12 million of the 22 million people who live in Texas.
One of the major investors is Boone Pickens, oilman. I think he’s 84 years old now. He’s investing $10 billion in a 4,000-megawatt wind farm in the Texas panhandle. Someone asked him, why are you, an oilman, investing all this money in wind? He said, I’ve gotten tired of oil depletion curves.
And when you think about it, when you invest in a new oil field, you know that investment is good for some decades, maybe a few generations, two or three, and that’s it; or if you invest in coalmines, the seams eventually run out. But the exciting thing about building wind farms and the wind infrastructure is that that investment can last forever. You have to replace the bearings and the turbines and so forth or something. There’s a component, but how exciting to know you’re investing in an energy source that’ll last as long as the earth itself?
Maine – two culturally very different states, Texas and Maine. The governor of Maine, a Democrat, appointed a commission to look at the wind potential in Maine. This commission concluded – a bipartisan commission concluded that Maine could develop 3,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity. That study was put in the form of a – it must have been a resolution and was unanimously passed by both houses of the Maine legislature just a few weeks ago. But we’re beginning to see some big-time thinking.
I think Steve was mentioning that Amory Lovins was here a month ago. Amory was being interviewed by Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer for The New Yorker who did the profile of Amory that appeared just about a year ago in The New Yorker. And one of the questions she asked Amory was – she asked him about thinking about – about thinking outside the box. Amory said, “There is no box; there is no box.”
And that’s where we need to be today because whether we realize it or not, we all tend to think inside our boxes, our boxes defined by our experience and education and so forth.
Another example, someone was asking me before dinner about China. We all know about the Chinese building a couple of new coal-fired power plants each week, but China’s doing some other things. They’ve been gearing up to develop their wind resources, and in each of the last two years, starting from a low base, they’ve doubled their wind-generating capacity. This year will probably be the third year in a row.
But beyond that, they’re beginning to think big term. They’re beginning to think like Boone Pickens. They have a plan for China three 10,000-megawatt concentrations of wind-generating capacity. I think one is in the northeast. One is in central China and one is maybe in the southeast, but huge wind-generating complexes. This is not their wind energy development program, but this is one of the bold components of that program.
So it looks to me as though – just to back up a bit. China can double its wind generating – sorry – China can double its electricity generation from wind alone – enormous potential there. The United States, we could run our entire economy with wind energy and not come close to tapping the full potential. Wind is an enormous resource.
Solar – there are three ways, principal ways, we use solar energy. One is – and this is the oldest – rooftop solar-water heaters. At the beginning of the last century, these were very popular in Florida, for example, but then they eventually disappeared as cheap electricity came in. The leader today in the manufacture of rooftop solar-water heaters is China. Indeed, it's manufacturing more than the rest of the world combined.
It all began maybe a dozen years ago, when a young engineer with one of the state oil companies, who had an obsession with solar energy, designed a rooftop solar water-heater for his home. And then his friends and relatives saw it and they wanted one. So he made some more and then he realized he could start a business. He started manufacturing rooftop solar-water heaters and now has 5,000 sales outlets in China, and at least a few other, a few hundred other companies that are imitating what he has done.
His basic sales technique was to take a collector, a solar collector, into a village, not put it on the rooftop, but just set it up in the village square, put some water in it, and ask a villager for an egg. Dropped the egg in the water, 10 minutes later, pull it out and it would be hardboiled. The villagers got it.
As of the end of 2007, there were 40 million homes in China getting hot water from rooftop solar-water heaters, and that’s projected to reach by the government 110 million by 2020, which would be enough to probably provide the hot water for 400, maybe 450 million Chinese – a huge success story, hardly known outside China.
Another solar story, Algeria. We don’t usually think about Algeria as being on the cutting edge of anything, but with solar thermal power plants, Algeria is moving to the fore. They’re planning to build 6,000 megawatts of solar power plants, solar thermal power plants, in the desert. This is mirrors concentrating sunlight on a vessel containing water or some other liquid to generate steam to produce electricity.
Their plan is to export solar energy in the form of electricity via undersea cable to Europe. They know their oil will be gone one day, and they plan to replace it with exports of solar energy. They point out that the Desert of Algeria has enough solar energy to run the world economy, to power the entire world economy.
I mention these examples just to give a sense of what – of the thinking that’s beginning to emerge in the renewable energy field. I could go on for hours, but I just wanted to – and using Texas and Algeria and China as examples are not where you would necessarily look for a sort of cutting-edge thinking and investment with solar technologies.
Geothermal energy – the harnessable geothermal energy in the world has increased dramatically over recent decades, not for geological reasons, but for technological reasons because the technology is used in the oilfields to extract oil, particularly from old fields, where it’s much more difficult to get out. A lot of those technologies can be used to extract the energy from geothermal, underground geothermal heat. And the geothermal resource – I can’t remember how many zeroes there are in the size of that resource, but it dwarfs in the upper – I don’t know – 800 feet of the earth's surface. There’s an enormous amount of geothermal energy.
Iceland, for example, has largely backed out coal as a home-heating fuel, now heating 90 percent of their homes with geothermal energy. And this is not one of the milder climates in the world.
Indonesia, over 500 volcanoes – 130 of them active – has enough geothermal energy to easily run the entire economy. As you know, their oil production is falling. I think their exports have now disappeared, but they haven’t begun to tap the geothermal potential.
When we talk about decarbonizing the world economy, dramatically cutting carbon emissions, one of the first things that people think of is what about cars in the United States? Well, that’s a good question. U.S. gasoline use exceeds that of the next 20 countries combined. Now, that sounds like it must be a mistake, but unfortunately, it’s not. We have close to 30 percent of the world’s cars. We drive them further on average than the cars in the rest of the world. And they’re much less efficient than the cars in the rest of the world. So you put those three things together, and you get a big chunk of the world’s gasoline.
The exciting thing is that two technological advances over the last decade or two have set the stage for developing an entirely new automotive fuel economy in the United States and indeed, in the world. The first of these technologies is hybrid cars, the Toyota Prius. Once you have hybrids, it’s a short step to plug-in hybrids.
If you take a Prius – any Prius owners in the group? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight? Not bad. If you take a Prius and add a second storage battery and an extension cord basically, so you can plug it in at night, recharge both the batteries while you’re sleeping, modify the software that governs the electric gasoline relationship a bit, so you use electricity more, we could do most of our short-distance driving, commuting to work, grocery shopping, almost entirely with electricity.
There’s now a race between Toyota and GM to see who gets to the market first with a plug-in hybrid. With Chevrolet, it’s the Volt. It’s not a true hybrid. It is essentially an electric vehicle with a small gasoline engine as a backup to generate electricity and recharge its batteries when needed. They expect it’ll have a range – I don’t know – maybe 60 miles. But using typical American driving habits, based on a survey they did, they conclude that the Volt will get 151 miles per gallon because most of the time you won’t even use any gasoline. You’ll just be using electricity.
Toyota, I think, is going to try to get a jump on GM by modifying a Prius, converting it into a plug-in hybrid. But the fact that they’re competing is the good news. There are three other companies, major companies, that plan to come to market with hybrids. But if we move quickly to plug-in hybrids and at the same time, invest in thousands of wind farms across the country feeding cheap electricity into the grid, then we can run our cars largely on wind energy at a gasoline equivalent cost of under a dollar a gallon – extraordinary potential with technologies now in the hand.
We can cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020. How do we get from here to there? What are the mechanisms? If I were to pick one, it would be restructuring the tax system. Lower income taxes raise the carbon tax – no change in the amount of tax we pay. April 15th would be exactly the same. We would just change what it is we tax.
When Sir Nicholas Stern, formerly chief economist at the World Bank, completed the study that he was asked to do by the UK government on the future costs, calculating the future costs of climate change, he began that study and launched it with a statement saying that climate change is a result of a massive market failure. And by that, he meant that our failure to incorporate the cost of climate change in the price of gasoline and coal-fired electricity and so forth was distorting the economy and creating a future cost that the next generation would have to pay.
The challenge is to get the market to tell the environmental truth.
Some of you – in fact, probably all of you – will remember a U.S. corporation called Enron. In the late 1990s, it was probably on the covers of more business magazines than any corporation in the United States. At one point, it was ranked seventh in value, in corporate value – a huge success, quarterly earnings report always going up; earnings setting a new record every quarter. It was the darling of Wall Street.
And then in late 2001, some outside accountants began looking at Enron’s books. And what they discovered was that Enron had developed some rather ingenious techniques for leaving costs off the books. And when the audit was completed, they discovered that Enron was worthless. Its shares that had been selling for $96 were suddenly selling for pennies. It was bankrupt.
We are now doing exactly what Enron did and on a far larger scale. We are leaving costs off the books. And we appear to be doing well on the short run, just as Enron appeared to be doing well in the short run, but in the long run, it catches up with you. And that’s what we have to recognize today.
Oystein Dahle, former vice president of Exxon for Norway and the North Sea – Dahle, D-A-H-L-E – said a number of years ago – this was after the collapse of the Soviet Union – he said, socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth. And I think he summed up in those two sentences a rather basic point.
The challenge is to restructure the tax system. Cap and trade, fine to move ahead with it, but it’s too slow. It’s cumbersome and its accountability at the international level, I think, is going to be a very difficult thing to deal with.
I mentioned earlier that in doing the things we need to do – incidentally, part of the carbon-cutting exercises is a massive tree planting effort, planting billions of trees around the world, much as South Korea has done, as Costa Rica has done, and as New Zeeland is doing, planting trees to sequester carbon.
I mentioned moving at wartime speed. Things can change very quickly sometimes. If one had conducted a poll on December 6, 1941, and asked the American people, should we go to war or not, probably 95 percent would have said no. If you repeated that question on December 8, 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, probably 95 percent would have said yes, we’ve got to go to war. Things can change very quickly sometimes.
On January 6th, 1942, one month after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt gave the State of the Union Address, in which he laid out U.S. arms production goals. He said, we’re going to produce 45,000 tanks, 60,000 planes, 20,000 anti-aircraft and artillery guns and six million tons of shipping. Keep in mind, the enormous logistical challenge of fighting two wars on the far side of two oceans by an economy that was just coming out of the Depression. People were staggered by these numbers and there was a lot of skepticism about whether the country could possibly do this or not. No one had ever seen numbers like this before, not in Nazi Germany, not in imperial Japan. These were huge.
But what Roosevelt and his colleagues realized was that at that time, the largest concentration of industrial power in the world was in the U.S. automobile industry because even during the Depression, we were making two or three million cars a year. So after his State of the Union Address, he called in the leaders of the industry and said, because you guys represent such a large share of our industrial capacity, we’re going to rely heavily on you to help us reach these arms production goals. And they said, Mr. President, we’re going to do everything we can, but it’s going to be a stretch producing cars and all these arms too.
He said, you don’t understand. We’re going to ban the sale of private automobiles in the United States. And that’s exactly what happened. From the beginning of April 1942 until the end of 1944, nearly three years, there were no cars produced in the United States, essentially no cars produced in the United States. And we exceeded every one of those arms production goals.
We needed enormous numbers of planes, fighters, bombers, reconnaissance planes, troop transports, cargo transports; hence, the 60,000 target. In the end, we produced 129,000 planes. If you can – even today, it’s difficult to imagine producing such a huge number of planes.
If you saw the Ken Burns series on war, last September I think it was, you may have seen the Willow Fleet plant, Ford plant, 78 acres under, producing B-24s, I think it was, on assembly lines. It was amazing what happened and how quickly we restructured the U.S. industrial economy. It didn’t take decades; it didn’t take years. We did it in a matter of months.
From that, it seems to me, we can see what the possibilities are with the – when we become convinced of a need to change. We haven’t had a Pearl Harbor yet on the climate front. We’ve had a lot of mini events that are beginning to worry us, but not a game changer in a major sense. That may come.
The final point is that what we’re looking at now is not saving the planet. What we’re looking at now is saving civilization. In World War II, it was preserving democracy in a world where many democratic states had fallen. Today, it’s the future of civilization itself that’s at stake.
And I’ve been working over the weekend on the food situation. I remember the Sumerians and the buildup of salt in the soils that undermined their food system and eventually led to their decline and collapse, or the deforestation and soil erosion that undermined the food system of the Mayans, eventually contributing to their decline and collapse. And then I began asking myself, could food be the weak link again in our modern civilization? And as I think about it, and I won’t go into details, but it’s possible it could.
There are a number of trends now converging. I’ve mentioned some of them, but not all of them. I haven’t mentioned water, for example, on the supply side as an emerging constraint. But the challenge to us is to realize that saving civilization is not a spectator sport. We all have to get involved. We all have a stake in this.
It means becoming politically active within our organizations and in society at large. And by politically active, I don’t mean – just mean volunteering in presidential campaigns or what-have-you. I mean trying to change the system, and the tax system is the place to begin if you really want to make a difference. If we don’t restructure the tax system, we may not make it, but it means taking on some of the important issues.
There’s an extraordinary grassroots movement now in opposition to the new coal-fired power plants. There are other issues from recycling to other coal-fired power plants here in Virginia being proposed now, and more and more people organizing to oppose them. But it means becoming politically active, picking an issue or two or three and working on them hard.
We’ve got to change things in a hurry. People ask me what can I do? They expect me to say change your light bulbs and recycle your newspapers. Those are important. We’ve been doing a lot of those for some decades now. We’re at the point now where we have to change the system, restructure the economy, so that economic progress can continue.
The one thing that’s very clear to me is that business as usual can no longer take us much further. Business as usual is a decline and collapse scenario. That’s not the road we want to be on. Steve, thank you very much. (Applause.)
MR WEINBERG: (Off mike.) We have time for questions, probably for – as long as you want to stay.
MR. BROWN: We should have 20 minutes anyhow.
Q: Thank you so much for your talk tonight and I felt that you covered so many valuable areas and in particular, that of the accounting system. How do we account for what we do and is it accurate? And even with all the things that I essentially 100 percent agree with you, I’m still left with a little bit of an uneasy feeling because of the amount of energy that we may end up using one way or the other.
And as far as how earth systems work, it hardly matters what kind of energy we use ultimately. We have to solve this global warming thing, but ultimately, are we going to actually be able to step back from our total energy use, so that we fit in with the living system as a whole and make that accounting right? And I’m wondering what you think about that.
MR. BROWN: One of the things that is sort of surprising when you begin analyzing these issues is you discover the enormous potential. Let me give you one simple personal example. I’ve mentioned this in the book. A guy in California wearing a T-shirt says, I lost 3,600 pounds; ask me how. And when you ask him, he says, I traded my car in for a bicycle. (Laughter.)
And then – it sort of hits you. That’s an enormous saving. Not all of us can do that, but a lot of us can, and that’s one way of making huge difference. The bicycle has, what, 22 pounds worth of aluminum and rubber and so forth, and a car, 3,600 pounds, a huge difference there in the energy embedded in those two technologies, not to mention the energy savings.
I don’t have a car; I have a bicycle. I hardly even use the bicycle anymore, but when I do, I estimate I get about seven miles per potato. (Laughter.) So it’s fairly efficient and the reality is I probably consume that many calories extra anyhow, so it’s a way of dealing with it.
I think it’s going to take some fundamental rethinking of lifestyles and it’s going to involve things from the personal sort of decisions I just mentioned to the realization that during the last century, we saw the globalization of the world energy economy as the world turned primarily – turned to oil as the principal energy source.
And the problem with that, as we all know, is that much of the oil was concentrated in a very small part of the world in a few countries. So the dependence and the vulnerability of that system is obvious. But as we move toward renewable sources of energy, wind and solar and geothermal, we’re going to see a reversal of that process and we’re going to see the localization of the world energy economy. That’s what we’re beginning to see now and it’s going to be very different. And the localization of the energy economy is going to reshape the overall economy. This becomes clear in agriculture.
Someone said peak oil will be the end of the 3,000-mile Caesar salad – lettuce from California coming to the East Coast. That’s not going to be happening indefinitely. We’re going to learn to eat cabbage more in the wintertime and lettuce less, for example, because we can grow cabbage here and it stores readily.
But we’re going to see fundamental changes in diets. There’s going to be a lot more locally grown food, maybe even people beginning to think in terms of victory gardens a la World War II, when people began planting food in their gardens to help increase the food supply. All these things we did for – the term was “the war effort.” The war effort, it was used over and over again to justify a whole host of activities.
So I think it’s possible to enjoy an even higher quality of life with scarcely a fraction of the resources that we use today, but we haven’t really begun to think it through yet. We’re still riding this wave of consumption. What did President Bush say after 9/11? Someone asked what should we do as citizens? Go shopping; go shopping. It’s a consumer-oriented response to things.
So I think there’s enormous opportunity for reestablishing a sustainable relationship between us and the earth’s natural systems and resources, but it’s going to take a huge, huge effort by all of us.
This side.
Q: (Off mike.) Are we going to have to see social unrest in the streets, economic upheaval on a large scale? What’s going to change our society to move in this direction when you have policy leaders on both sides of the aisle who are reluctant to get up and do much of anything?
MR. BROWN: It’s a good question and I see signs here and there of political leaders willing to change in major ways. Example – at a talk at a renewable energy conference in Reno, Colorado, last August, Harry Reid said that he was opposed not only to building the three new coal-fired power plants proposed in his State of Nevada. He said he was opposed to building new coal-fired power plants anywhere in the world. This is Harry Reid.
I mention that because it’s one of the first sort of major steps I’ve seen a leader in Washington take on this issue. There are different models of social change. There is what I would call the Pearl Harbor model, when there’s a cataclysmic event that suddenly changes everything. What might that be in the environment? Well, maybe if some big chunks of the West Antarctic ice sheet started to break off and it became clear that this was the beginning of the end of the West Antarctic ice sheet, and if in a period of a few years, we saw a one-foot rise in sea level. Now, it doesn’t sound like a lot, but just realizing it was happening and then it was a prelude for much more to come, I think would scare the bejesus out of us. It would really get us thinking about things.
The other social change model is what I call the Berlin Wall model, where opposition to the socialist form of government had been building in Europe for decades. And then people woke up one morning and realized that the great socialist experiment was over. The one party political system and the centrally planned economy, was finished. Even the people in power knew it was over. So with the minor exception of Romania, there was no effort to suppress the revolution.
We had a political revolution in Eastern Europe that was symbolized by the Berlin Wall coming down, but the form of government changed in every country in Eastern Europe, and did it without bloodshed. I’m not talking about changes in political parties. I’m talking about the form of government changed in a very fundamental way. So there, we crossed the threshold. You could call it the tipping point, if you want to use the sociologists’ language, where things change.
It may be a combination of the two. It seems to me that very clearly over the past year or two, we’ve seen some basic change in thinking on the issue of climate change. If we’d been here three years ago and I’d said, I know this guy who does a PowerPoint presentation on climate change. He wants to make it in into a movie and thinks it’s going to be a box office success – but it happened. And beyond that, he got a Nobel Peace Prize for it. So change can come quickly and a lot of people have been influenced by that film all over the world.
Things are changing, and I sense that we’re moving toward a tipping point in this country on the climate issue. And the principal manifestation of this is the growing opposition to coal-fired power plants.
A year ago this month, the Department of Energy released a study – I've forgotten the title, but the subtitle was, as I recall, “The Resurgence of Coal-Fired Power.” And what the study was pointing out was after the last 10 or 15 years, we’ve been building mostly natural gas plants in the United States. But the price of natural gas has gotten so high, that’s not feasible anymore. So utilities slide back to coal-fired power plants because that’s what they know.
That study included a list of 151 planned or proposed coal-fired power plants. Of that 151, 59 are now off the list, either because they were refused licenses by state regulatory agencies, or because the local grassroots opposition was so strong that the utility just decided to quietly drop them. Another 48 of the 151 are being challenged in the courts and these challenges are being remarkably successful.
Q: (Off mike.)
MR. BROWN: Let me finish, okay? We’re getting there. Then we have another 40 proposed plants that haven’t gotten to the permitting stage yet, so they can’t be challenged. But it’s not just the grassroots. Wall Street is literally turning its back on the coal-fired power. Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, three major investment banks together announced that they would no longer lend for coal-fired power plants unless the utilities could demonstrate that they would be economically viable after the government imposes restrictions on carbon emissions. And what this means is that until the government does that, there’s no way of demonstrating economic viability because no one knows what they will be. This is basically, I think, the beginning of the end of coal-fired power.
Now, let us assume that we, by the end of this year, have something approaching a de facto moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, which is now a distinct possibility. The situation is similar to smoking on planes. Most of you will remember there was a period when smoking on planes was restricted to the section in the back of the plane. And that went on for some years and eventually, it was eliminated altogether. The rationale that was used to restrict smoking to a limited area of the plane is the same rationale that was used to eliminate it altogether. The same thing, I think, will happen with coal-fired power plants. That is the rationale that’s been used to oppose building new ones, once it succeeds, will then be – will shift to closing down existing ones.
You shake your head. Things change very fast sometimes when societies reach these political tipping points. Okay?
Q: (Off mike) – like it or not.
MR. BROWN: What you have to keep in mind – the question is really about the intermittency of wind power?
Q: (Off mike.)
MR. BROWN: No problem. I mentioned earlier – I didn’t mention earlier – I mentioned we have a lot of –
MS. : Excuse me, who are you?
Q: (Off mike.)
MS. : No, no, no, but we’re recording this and we want to know who asks the question, so just please state your name.
Q: (Off mike.)
MR. BROWN: Where were we on the question? Oh, when we close coal-fired power plants, remember, we’re investing in efficiency. Remember, we can close a lot of those plants just by changing the light bulbs in places like this and make money in the process. We’re not talking about sacrifice.
And then we begin looking at wind energy and one of the questions that comes up, of course, with wind energy is the wind doesn’t blow all the time; it’s intermittent. But what you discover is that the larger the grid, and the more wind farms you have, the more stable the supply becomes. No two wind farms have identical wind profiles. So the more wind farms you have, the more stability you have until, if you have a large enough grid with enough wind farms, then you have base-load wind power.
We tend to think of a single wind farm, but in this new economy, we’re going to have thousands of wind farms. Some will be offshore, some onshore, some in the Great Plains, some in mountain passes. They’ll be all over the place in a great variation of conditions. And then you begin to get stability in the system.
So it’s not a matter of turning off the lights or freezing in the dark as people use to say. It’s entirely possible to build a new energy economy that does not destabilize the earth’s climate – no question in my mind on that.
Q: (Off mike.)
Q: This one works? I’m Mitzi Wertheim. I’m a social anthropologist by training, but I want you to explain something technical to me because I don’t understand it. It’s my understanding that electricity, as it goes through the grid, diminishes and has to get recharged. So if you have wind-generated electricity, and there are particular portions of the country where we have good wind, primarily in Texas, and there – how do you get 40 percent of our energy for our electricity distributed across the country when you lose so much in transmission? Is your assumption that we’re going to be using – what am I thinking of – superconductivity as a way to transmit it?
MR. BROWN: Right. Not assuming superconductivity, but there are – there is a technical potential for transmitting electricity over longer distance much more efficiently with DC, I think, than with AC now. I don’t know all the technical details, but I know it’s possible. But keep in mind that we’re looking at the Great Plains as a major source of wind, but we’re also looking at offshore wind power, which for the Eastern Seaboard would be an important source of electricity.
But we’re going to be building wind farms in all sorts of conditions in many parts of the country and keep in mind, wind is much more local than coal. Only two or three states produce most of the coal for the country. That’s not true for wind. And one of the positive feedback loops, as we phase out coal-fired power plants, is the realization that – I think it’s 42 percent of all the diesel fuel used in this country is used to move coal from coal mines to power plants. So if you phase out coal-fired power, then you’re saving an enormous amount of diesel fuel – I’m sorry, 42 percent of the diesel fuel used in the freight transport system.
So there are a lot of positive feedback loops that begin to kick in as we move in this direction, also enormous water savings. Wind doesn’t require any water, whereas the amount of water we withdraw now for cooling thermal power plants is roughly the same as water withdrawals for irrigation. There are differences in consumption, of course, because most of the thermal cooling water goes back into the system, albeit at a higher temperature.
Q: Hi, Peter Rohde. I write for Kiplinger’s. I just want to explore the food versus fuel issue a little bit. Corn prices have doubled probably in the last year, but rice prices have tripled just since the beginning of the year. How much of that is attributable to biofuels and is there a role for the second and third generation biofuels in the future?
MR. BROWN: Good questions. I think a lot of people were a bit surprised that rice prices took off so rapidly – have taken off so rapidly in recent months because we don’t think of rice and corn as being interchangeable. But if you go back and look at the historical records, say back to 1950, and there were three or four substantial price surges – grain price surges during that period, and you never get one grain going up dramatically without the others falling. \
And the reasons for that are substitution on both the demand and the supply side. On the demand side, wheat and rice are interchangeable in major countries like India and China, which happen to be the world’s two largest producers of each of those two grains. So on the food side, there’s a certain amount of capacity to substitute between wheat and rice.
And corn also is widely used as a food. In Sub-Saharan Africa, corn consumption there normally is double – exceeds that of wheat and rice combined. And then Mexico, of course, corn is a staple food. But then on the supply side, we have the substitution or the competition for land and water resources. If the price of one grain were to go way up, and the others didn’t move, then everyone would shift to that one grain, everyone who could – had the growing conditions to make the shift.
We’ve seen this with corn and soybeans in this country. Corn prices took off first because of the enormous growth in ethanol demand beginning a couple of years ago, but last spring, farmers decided to plant more corn and less soybeans, shifted a lot of the soybean land into corn. But then the price of soybeans went up. So this year, the shift is going back the other way. Land that’s been in corn is going into soybeans. Soybeans is $14 a bushel. So there is a certain amount of substitution and competition on both the supply and demand side that causes things to go together.
Now, rice is a little different from wheat and corn in that the rice – the rice that’s traded is a rather thin market; that is to say about only 7 percent maybe of the world’s rice enters international trade. So if anything influences that small amount one way or the other, it directly affects prices. And what we’ve seen is a politics of food scarcity emerging, where exporting countries – where food prices are rising everywhere.
So exporting countries of wheat or rice restrict, or even ban, exports to try to keep internal prices down, and that makes the situation much worse for the rest of the world. And with rice, it was Vietnam primarily restricting exports. It’s the number two rice exporter in the world. And then suddenly, as people realized that they might not be able to get rice, prices jumped dramatically.
Oh, the future of biofuels – the one thing that can be done in the short run to restore some semblance of stability in the world food economy would be to reduce the amount of grain going into fuel for cars in the United States and we can do that. We used to do that with grain production. If farmers wanted to be eligible for the support price, they had to reduce their grain acreage each year by a percentage determined by the Department of Agriculture in order to maintain a world balance in supply and demand. If they didn’t do that, they wouldn’t get the support price and they all did it because it was profitable to do so.
We could do the same thing with ethanol distilleries and say if you want to get the ethanol subsidy, this year you’re going to have to reduce the amount of grain you use in your distillery by 20 percent or 30 percent, or whatever we think it would take to restore stability to the world food economy.
The security costs of the unrest that’s developing around the world – we’re only at the beginning of this – could be very high for the United States, as well as for the rest of the world.
In terms of second-generation fuels, we hear about switchgrass or the use of crop residues or what-have-you. The problem with switchgrass or any other biofuel source that can be grown on marginal land is if it’s profitable, why confine it to marginal land? Why wouldn’t you produce it on prime land and get really high yields and earn a lot of money? So I’m a little worried about the – even the second generation biofuels that use cellulosic material. If they use crop residues, then that’s going to take organic matter from the soil that helps maintain soil structure and fertility.
So I’m beginning to think that we probably don’t – we probably need to be thinking about the other alternatives and plug-in hybrids is the obvious one to carry the load in the automotive fuel economy. Yes, sir?
Q: Adam Siegel, Energy Consensus. Thank you very much for the presentation. Greatly appreciate it. At times, I don’t know whether I should be a pessimistic optimist or an optimistic pessimist and I go back and forth with – if Amory talks, I’m on the optimist side. This evening, I ended up more on the optimist side than I thought, but with a question earlier about when or what would it take to have a tipping point, pushed me – when is too late or when do we need the tipping point in your mind, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, today, tomorrow? How far can we continue the slow change, rather than the major tipping point you talked to?
MR. BROWN: I ask myself that question frequently and I don’t know the answer. We’re moving into territory we’ve never been before with climate change, for example. It’s surprising how little we know about the mechanics of ice melting, for example, and what’s happened in the last year or two.
In thinking about whether to be optimistic or pessimistic, I was in California some weeks ago and someone came up to me and said, things have gotten so bad, I don’t think we can afford to be pessimistic anymore. And I think there’s some truth to that, but I’m also aware that social change comes very quickly sometimes. I’ve mentioned the Berlin Wall and Pearl Harbor and there have been other examples over time where change does come quickly.
And interestingly, it doesn’t usually begin in Washington. It begins with people and people organizing, whether it’s racial equality, equal rights for women, the environmental movement, the anti-smoking movement. None of those began in Washington. They began more at the grassroots and then built into something that changed Washington.
I find it fascinating right now when I talk with those who are involved in opposing new coal-fired power plants. I was giving a talk in Denver some weeks ago and a group of women cam down from Wyoming because – to hear the talk because they were very much involved in the opposition in Wyoming to coal-fired power plants. Now, you don’t usually think of Wyoming as being a hotbed of environmental radicalism, but here they were. So things change sometimes, and they change quickly and in ways that we can’t always anticipate.
So I keep looking for the change. Oh, the thing I started to say was that I’m intrigued by the contrast between the thinking, the psychology, the motivation of people working on – who are opposing new coal-fired power plants and the mindsets of the people in Washington who represent us in international climate negotiating conferences. There’re two entirely different worlds, but we know that in the past, it’s the grassroots thinking swelling up from the bottom that changes Washington. It’s been that way with every social movement that I can recall, for example. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen here.
One more. Yes, sir?
Q: Actually, I think Jerry should have the last – he should have the last question since he’s the author of the Millennium Report. So let him have the question.
MR. BROWN: He’s going to ask a tough one, I know. (Laughter.)
Q: I have a pretty tough question too, so – okay.
MR. BROWN: Does anyone have an easy question? (Laughter.) Go ahead.
Q: You said – I really appreciate what you’ve said this evening. You said that things happen very quickly or they can happen quickly, and that we haven’t had a Pearl Harbor on climate – on a climate event. We haven’t had a game-changer yet. And you’ve spoken briefly about peak oil, which is what I’ve been studying for years. And I think that is the one issue that would be the game-changer if, for example, the president of the United States came out and said that it just doesn’t appear that the world will ever reach 90 million barrels a day of oil production because of these various factors and that therefore, we need to make changes, go on a war footing.
That to me, I think, like Matthew Simons and I agree that peak oil will be the crisis that supersedes the climate crisis because it will hit us more quickly, probably more unexpectedly and economically as well.
So I’d like for you to sort of elaborate a little bit, given that you’ve been studying these issues much longer than I have, and what your perception would be if a leader of one of the industrialized nations, particularly the United States, would make a speech suggesting that we have reached, or it’s imminent and that we need to go on a war footing. What do you think the reaction would be? Would it be like Roosevelt’s speech in ’42? And what – and I am worried about Wall Street’s reaction. So anyway, I appreciate your comments.
William Clark (sp) of SunEdison.
MR. BROWN: Could you summarize your question in one short – (laughter.)
Q: (Off mike.)
MR. BROWN: Yes, the question is could peak oil, if it were acknowledged by our president, be a game-changer? It would really get things moving. It could be. There re more and more people, including oil people. I mentioned Boone Pickens. He’s one of the oil people who says, you know, this is it. We’re not going beyond where we are now, that peak oil is here. There are a number of oil people now beginning to say that, not necessarily the heads of oil companies, though they’ve changed their position substantially over the last year or two.
But, yes, if we had a leader who could not only make that point, but had the capacity to mobilize people. Roosevelt was very skillful at this. I could talk for an hour about all the things he had people doing. Everyone was involved, school kids, savings bonds. You'd get a quarter, you'd put them in and eventually, you had $18.75 worth and then you started on a new one. It was amazing. He had housewives saving bacon drippings, accumulating in a jar and at the community level, you could get them together. I don’t think most housewives even knew what the bacon drippings were for. It was to manufacture glycerin for explosives. We needed all the bacon fat we could get and people were doing it.
It gave them a sense of participation, of doing something, and that was the genius of the things we were doing for, quote, “the war effort.” You could write a book about those things. But it involved people and it made everyone feel as though they were part of it. That’s the kind of leadership we will need if the president announces that peak oil is, in fact, here, or it was last year, and we’re now going to have to begin to adjust our economic structure and our lifestyles and so forth in several different ways, and give a sense of what that restructuring would look like and then explain why it was important that we make the changes.
I think peak oil could do that, and particularly if associated with that, the price of oil very quickly went to $200 a barrel or something like that. People would suddenly realize that we’re in a new world and that’s what it would take to bring about the change. Jerry?
Q: Thank you, Les, and thanks for all the years you’ve been working on these issues and for your talk tonight. I’m Jerry Barney. I’m the chairman of a nonprofit organization called Our Task. And I wanted to come to this game-changer and the comment made earlier here about what is it going to take to get the social change underway?
And you’ve mentioned several things, but I want to just say that there are some of us here who have doubts that people of my generation are ever going to be up to making these changes. So Our Task is an international association, a network of young adults who are preparing themselves to look my generation in the face and say, hey, this ain’t working for me. And remember, they’re the ones who are going to inherit the planet from us.
And the – we’ve got active members now in over a dozen countries and I want to introduce one of them tonight, Angeline Cione, who’s here. At least stand up and say hello. (Applause.)
But I guess the key thing we’re working on this summer is an effort in this direction that’s kind of modeled on what the Global 2000 Study was, that methodology, but it’s putting together something we call the Youth Earth Plan. It’s the idea of this international network of young people about how to run the planet through the 21st century.
And I guess the question I’d like to put to you is one that we're struggling with is what can be the role – where can young people be listened to and be heard? And where can they express their passion and their fear that their parents and grandparents are running the planet in a ditch? (Applause.)
MR. BROWN: One of the things I have thought about is what happens if three years from now, scientists announced that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet has reached the point of no return? We can no longer save it. And I’ve wondered about the psychological effect of that. It could lead to a generational fracturing, a fracturing of society along generational lines. We know about social fracturing along racial and religious and ethnic lines, but never before a major fracturing along generational lines.
And the next generation would say to us, how could you let this happen? Why didn’t you do something when there was time? They’ll be able to look at the same scientific articles that we’ve been reading in recent years and that, I think, is one of the most troubling things for members of our generation, as you put it, to have to deal with, or to have the prospect of having to deal with. It will be a very painful, difficult thing because we won’t have any good answers. We won’t have any good answers and that’s why I think we’re going to need every effort that we can make.
You’re organizing young adults precisely for this purpose and I think we need – there are a number of other organizations represented here tonight, I know from talking earlier, who are working on this issue or these issues in one way or another. And I think it’s going to take all of us working as hard as we can. But I think we need to – when I said we have a stake in saving civilization, it’s not just for us. Most of us are parents or grandparents, and it’s these generations that we have to think about because for the first time, our generation has had the capacity to alter living conditions on earth in ways that were never possible before. And we need to have that in mind.
Okay, one more.
Q: (Off mike.)
MR. BROWN: If you accept the idea of having the market tell the environmental truth, then there’s going to be a very stiff carbon tax on the coal plant and the price of the electricity from the coal plant and that from the wind farm will not even be comparable. Wind will be so much cheaper. But we’re talking now about getting the market to tell the environmental truth.
There is no carbon tax on the wind farm. There is a carbon tax, a very stiff one, on the coal-fired power plant because coal is such an intense source of CO2. So I think the economics have already crossed. You may know that in three states, a year or so ago – I think it was Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado, a lot of people who had signed up for wind energy and were paying, say, 15 percent more for it, suddenly found that instead of a debit on their electricity bill, they had a credit because natural gas prices and the package of other energy sources than wind energy had moved above wind energy. So what had been more costly had become cheaper.
And that, I think, is the early sort of shift that we’re seeing here. And in my mind, a coal-fired power plant that pays all the costs of carbon sequestration and the cost of air pollution, the cost of mercury emissions and all these problems, if those costs are incorporated in the cost of the coal-fired electricity, the game’s over. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
MR WEINBERG: Ladies and gentlemen, as you’re on the way out the door, I will remind you of a couple of things – one, recycle your nametags, another part of our drive to serve by example. There are still some books on the table by the door and I understand that Lester Brown will be signing those books. So on the way out, make sure you grab one and donate to the cause.
Last but not least, the next energy conversation is May 12th, again, John Mizrock from DOE discussing gigawatt renewables. Thank you all for being here.
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