An interview with the founder of Worldwatch and Earth Policy Institute

[Guest guest]

You're a Good Man, Lester Brown

An interview with the founder of Worldwatch and Earth Policy Institute

By David Roberts

06 Mar 2006

There are few titans remaining in the environmental world -- figures that

command respect not only inside the movement but in the larger global political

milieu as well. Lester Brown is one of them. In 1974, he founded the Worldwatch

Institute, one of the first think tanks to focus on the global environmental

situation (its agenda-setting yearly reports, State of the World, remain

required reading among the green set). In 2001, he left Worldwatch to start the

Earth Policy Institute, a small outfit dedicated to envisioning an " eco-economy "

and figuring out how to get there.

 

 

Lester Brown.In 2003, EPI released Plan B, a book synthesizing research on the

earth's multiple converging ecological crises and laying out a step-by-step plan

(including a budget -- if you're curious, it's $161 billion) for how to

transition to a sustainable path. Reception was enthusiastic; mogul Ted Turner

was one of many influential figures to buy dozens of copies to send to friends.

 

Late last year saw Plan B 2.0, a revised, expanded edition incorporating the

many developments -- good and bad -- of the intervening two years. In addition

to your local bookstore, the book is available in its entirety as PDF or HTML on

EPI's website.

 

Brown's been globe-trotting since the book's release, promoting the plan. Weeks

before I met with him, he spoke to world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, at the

World Economic Forum, at the invitation of founder and executive director Klaus

Schwab. He and I met in a small cafe in Seattle and, over omelets, discussed

biofuels, plug-in hybrids, China, the Bush administration, and sudden,

unpredictable social change.

 

 

--

 

 

What was the genesis of Plan B?

 

 

Our goal was to give a sense of what an environmentally sustainable economy

would look like. If you don't know where you want to go, there's a good chance

you won't get there. And within the environmental community there was no global

vision.

 

 

Do you envision regular two-year updates?

 

 

Things are happening fast enough now, in terms of new opportunities, new

technologies, new success stories, new problems developing, new understandings

of climate change, and so forth. So I'm beginning to think this is going to be

an every-two-year effort.

 

 

Even since this book came out, Goldman Sachs got in the wind-energy business big

time. A year ago it bought Horizon, which was a small company building wind

farms, and now that company has 5,000 megawatts of generating capacity under

construction or in the planning stage. That's equal to 17 typical coal-fired

power plants.

 

 

What trend in the world is most alarming?

 

 

One is climate change and the other is population growth.

 

 

On population growth, close to 3 billion people will be added between now and

mid-century, the vast majority in countries where water tables are already

falling and wells are going dry. That's not a happy situation.

 

China's growth is illuminating, but it's just that they're growing faster than

most of the rest of the world. In that sense they're doing us a favor: they're

telescoping history so that we can see what the future looks like.

 

 

You discuss nuclear energy very little in the book. What are your thoughts on

it?

 

 

I've tried to love nuclear, but I haven't been very successful. I don't think

it can get beyond the economics. If we insist that utilities bear the full cost

of nuclear power -- and that's something we need to do -- they have to set aside

money for decommissioning and include that in the rates. That would cost as much

or more than construction. They have to deal with the waste issue. And they have

to find an insurance company that will insure them.

 

 

There are other questions as well. If we decide to go nuclear, do we mean all

countries can have nuclear power? Do we have an A-list and a B-list? If so, who

makes that list? Who enforces it? Looking at Iran and North Korea right now, I'm

not sure we're very good at that.

 

 

Do you consider biofuels a permanent solution or a bridge?

 

 

I think we're going to need almost all agricultural resources to produce food.

We keep forgetting the water issue, which is a sleeper. Half the world's people

live in countries where water tables are falling. We may wake up one morning and

there won't be enough grain to go around, and not enough water to produce enough

grain.

 

 

We've always been concerned about the effect of high oil prices on

food-production costs, and those are very real, given the oil intensity of world

agriculture today. But more important is the effect of high oil prices on the

demand for agriculture commodities. Once oil gets up to $60 a barrel, it becomes

profitable to convert agricultural commodities into automotive fuels. In effect,

the price of oil becomes a support price for agricultural commodities, and

therefore food prices. If at any point the food value of the commodity drops

below the fuel value, the market will move that commodity into the energy

economy.

 

I don't think we yet quite grasp the effect of $60-a-barrel oil on food prices,

because the capacity to distill ethanol and produce biodiesel is not yet large

enough to really have an impact. But it's exploding all over the world. Up until

a year or two ago, all the government programs here [in the U.S.], in Europe,

and in Brazil were driven by government subsidies. In Brazil there are no more

subsidies. Ethanol investment is just exploding; it's entirely a market-based

operation.

 

In The Same Vein

Corn at the Right Time

Ethanol is suddenly all the rage in D.C. and DetroitThere's enormous investment

in this country in ethanol distilleries and biodiesel refineries. Most people

aren't even aware that on Jan. 1 a year ago, we adopted a $1-a-gallon subsidy

for biodiesel. But we're setting up competition between supermarkets and service

stations for the same commodities.

 

There is a very attractive alternative automotive-fuel model: gas-electric

hybrids with a plug-in and wind energy.

 

 

Is it scaleable quickly enough?

 

 

Oh yeah. There's a lot of momentum building behind plug-in hybrids. There was a

conference organized [a month] ago in Washington on plug-ins. It was organized

by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, the NGO that organizes these

things for Congress. [sen.] Orrin Hatch [R-Utah] left the Alito hearings to come

and make a statement.

 

 

The interesting thing about the plug-in effort is that the neocons and the

environmentalists are both supporting it, and that's a unique combination. There

were more neocons speaking at the conference than environmentalists; they want

to break dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

 

 

What are your thoughts on this idea of breaking our dependence on Middle East

oil?

 

 

Middle East oil accounts for 15, at most 20 percent [PDF] of our oil. But it's

far more important to other parts of the world, and we're all in this together.

We have to think about it broadly.

 

 

One of the attractive features of moving toward gas-electric hybrids and wind

power is that we have the infrastructure already in place. In Plan B, the

original, I talk about a hydrogen fuel-cell automotive-energy economy. And that

may come, but it's a generation down the road. With the gas-electric hybrids,

you need gasoline service stations and you need an electrical grid. We have

both.

 

It's relatively easy to increase wind-generating capacity tenfold. The companies

are there, the technologies are there -- it's just a matter of incentives. We

might not even need many of those now. We could start doubling each year.

 

One of the neat things about the gas-electric hybrid plug-in is that the

batteries in the vehicle fleet become a storage facility for wind energy. And

there's a tank of gasoline as additional backup. So it's really an ideal

marriage, a great way of rapidly exploiting wind. And wind is such a huge

resource.

 

 

Is there a reason that you seem so much more enthusiastic about wind than

solar?

 

 

It's mostly timing. If you look at the cost curves, wind is roughly a decade

ahead of solar. It's just a matter of time.

 

 

One knock you often hear on environmentalists is that they care more about

flora and fauna than human beings. But it strikes me that your book is extremely

humanist, centered on human welfare.

 

 

One of the strengths of the book is that it integrates economics and the

environment in a socially responsible way. One of the important developments of

the past year was Jared Diamond's book Collapse. He legitimized the discussion

of early 21st century global civilization, in terms of where we're headed and

what the prospects are. You can talk about that now in a way that you couldn't

before.

 

 

How do you maintain your optimism?

 

 

Social change comes rapidly and unexpectedly sometimes.

 

 

The Berlin wall coming down was essentially a bloodless political revolution in

Eastern Europe. There were no articles in political science journals in the '80s

that said, hey, keep an eye on Eastern Europe, big change is coming there. But

one morning people woke up and realized the great socialist experiment was over.

 

What if we'd been sitting at this table 10 years ago and I had said, " I think

that the tobacco industry is going to cave " ? It was the most powerful lobby in

Washington. It controlled committee chairs. But there was a steady flow of

articles on smoking and health over a period of a few decades, along with

persistent denial. The industry just lost its credibility.

 

The two things looming large are oil -- security of supply, disruptions around

the world, a vague notion that China's out there now competing for it, the price

of gasoline, the price of home heating oil -- and the climate issue, the steady

drumbeat. Every week or two another major study comes out, nailing down another

piece of the climate puzzle. People are beginning to feel uncertain now.

 

 

Is it frustrating to you that people seem to need human enemies, human

bogeymen?

 

 

To a very substantial degree that's a cultivated anxiety. It doesn't exist in

Europe, or elsewhere, the way it does here. They're concerned, but they're not

preoccupied with it. And if I had to make a list of the top 10 threats to our

future in the world, terrorism would be on the list, but it would be in the

lower part of the list.

 

 

All this leads me to sense that we're moving toward one of those thresholds that

are hard to define, at least until you cross them. Among the manifestations are

the 100 mayors -- maybe more than that now -- who've signed on to the Kyoto

Protocol. This is a grassroots political revolution.

 

I don't think we realize yet what Katrina is. Most of us had assumed the first

climate refugees would be from Tuvalu and the Maldive Islands. But it's the U.S.

Gulf Coast. There are a few hundred thousand environmental refugees there --

climate refugees.

 

 

One of the lessons of Katrina is how grossly unprepared we were for something

that could easily be worse next time, or happen two places simultaneously next

time.

 

 

The interesting thing about this current administration is they don't seem to

be interested in governing, in trying to make things work. FEMA's a classic

case, symbolic of this entire government.

 

 

Plan B seems deliberately apolitical.

 

 

I didn't want it to be a political tract. But I could happily have weighed in

on [politics]. When societies are in trouble, sometimes they have a Nero and

sometimes they have a Churchill. One of the questions is how this administration

will respond to the mounting pressure to do something about these issues.

 

 

However little competence they've shown in other areas, they've certainly

demonstrated an amazing talent for avoiding moments of accountability. It's like

performance art.

 

 

It's a public-relations operation with a hidden agenda.

 

 

Does anybody know the concrete political, media, and advocacy steps needed to

pull off a fundamental transition to a sustainable economy?

 

 

In order for these changes to occur, we have to cross a social threshold, and

societies don't cross those easily or quickly. Things have to build up enough

steam ... and then suddenly it just goes.

 

 

And when you cross them, it's not always clear what the response will be;

there's enough energy driving things that it can go in many directions. You

can't plan that change. You can offer a new model for an automotive fuel

economy, and these sorts of things, so when the time comes there'll be some

sense of what to do.

 

 

It's at least as possible that Americans will react with retrenchment,

defensiveness, trade barriers, and military buildup -- an island mentality.

 

 

Right. It could happen that way. The reason for doing a book like Plan B is to

make it clear that we're all in this together. If our civilization goes down,

it's not going to be pieces of it here and there -- the whole thing's going to

go down.

 

 

 

I remember when the Soviets beat us into space with Sputnik. A lot of Americans

were despairing, and said the Soviets have a command economy, they can beat us

at anything they want. But what that system lacked was a free flow of

information and ideas, and in the end that's what really weakened them. We were

on the moon 10 years later, and now it's been almost half a century and the

Russians still haven't gotten there.

 

 

Does it worry you that China's ultimate success may be hampered in the same

way, by inhibited flow of information and political freedom?

 

 

The answer is, I don't know. They're having great trouble. We tend to think of

China as this monolith: You have the party in Beijing sending down regulations.

But at the grassroots there are no enforcement mechanisms. The Chinese EPA is at

most 600 people. That's a tiny organization. They can't do anything about this

in any meaningful way. There are hundreds of thousands of factories to be

monitored. They're a long way from doing that.

 

 

What's the most important thing for humanity to start doing?

 

 

Get the market to tell the ecological truth. Calculate the cost of burning a

gallon of gasoline, for example, and incorporate the indirect cost in the form

of a tax. We're all economic decision-makers -- consumers, corporate planners,

government policymakers, investment bankers -- and we respond to market signals.

But the market's giving us bad information. I mean grossly distorted

information. So we're making bad decisions and getting in more and more trouble

every day. Whether we can pull out of that or not, I'm not sure.

 

 

What should I do? Talk to congressfolk? Write a letter to the editor? Buy a

hybrid?

 

 

Most of the people in audiences I'm talking with have been asking themselves

that question. Recycle paper, buy a Prius, whatever -- lifestyle changes. But

we've reached the point where we have to go beyond that. We now have to go for

systemic change; otherwise we're not going to make it. That's why tax

restructuring is so important. (Incidentally, the Chinese authorities are

studying and working on a major tax restructuring just for this purpose.)

 

 

Spend Your $.02

Discuss this story in our blog, Gristmill.That means becoming politically

active. Each of us is going to have to define that in our own terms. Maybe it's

lobbying city council or representatives in Washington, letting them know what

we think, what we want them to do. If enough of us do that, change will begin.

 

We're seeing signs that Republicans are beginning to cross over on some of these

issues, because of the concerns of their constituents. We're getting some major

corporate crossovers. GE is now a major player in wind energy. They are cranking

up 300 turbines year before last, 600 last year, 1,200 this year -- they're just

going. And Goldman Sachs is beginning to invest heavily. When I talk about

Goldman Sachs, it changes the way people think about wind energy.

 

Things may be starting to change.

 

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