Don’t stop making sense: Lester Brown testifies tirelessly, but is anyone listening?I don’t agree with everything Lester Brown says, but the man generally talks good sense. Which means he’s absolutely marginalized in today’s key policy debates. If people in Congress would quit protecting client industries and squriming over polls and just listen to straight-talking Cassandras like Brown, we might stand a chance of averting climate/food disaster.
Of course, they might listen to Brown if their constituents demanded it. But I fear that Brown’s policy-wonk prose and penchant for charts—both of which I admire—don’t get him much traction with The Public.
Well, Brown’s got another iteration of his “Plan B” series out, called Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. The hyperbolic subtitle won’t likely move many units—not many people stop to listen to the guy with the “end is nigh” sandwich board. But I do hold out hopes that at least some Congressional staffers and mid-level agency functionaries might read Brown. Maybe some of his insights—and urgency—will percolate upwards.
In his latest version of Plan B, Brown focuses on food security, which he calls civilization’s “weak link” as we move into an era of climate change. From a “fact sheet” (PDF) released along with the book:
• The tripling of grain prices from 2006‐2008 was trend‐driven (unlike event‐driven surges in the past). Among the trends are the annual addition of 80 million people, 3 billion people moving up the food chain, and one fourth of the U.S. grain harvest being used to produce fuel for cars. On the supply side are falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures, all making humanity more vulnerable to food shortages.
• Some 175 million Indians and 130 million Chinese are fed with grain irrigated by overpumping wells. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Yemen face similar challenges due to groundwater depletion.
• After decades of nutritional gains, the number of hungry people has jumped from 825 million in the mid‐1990s to over 1 billion in 2009. Combined with rising food prices and intensifying competition for land and water, this trend has opened a disturbing new chapter in the politics of food scarcity.
Intense stuff. Brown gave a telephone press conference Tuesday to outline the findings in his new book. David Roberts will not be pleased with the message Brown delivered on the climate bill that’s about to be debated in the Senate: Brown repeatedly argued that a carbon tax, and not cap-and-trade, should be the basis of climate policy.
In a Q&A after his presentation, I asked Brown what he thought about farm-policy reform. Much to my delight, he went on an extended jag about the utter absurdity of the U.S. goverment’s $5 billion/year ethanol program—how silly it is, given the serious nature of climate change, to counter it with the frivolous policy of turning grain into liquid fuel for internal-combustion engines. While he went on, I tried to interrupt to ask what he thought of cellulosic ethanol. He didn’t seem to hear me, but i can see why he didn’t even consider cellulosic in his response. First of all, it doesn’t exist at commercial scale, and remains, as it has for decades, at least five years away.
Moreover, if it’s dumb to think you’re going to power a 211-million-strong fleet of internal-combustion engines, designed for energy-rich petroleum, by turning corn sugar into alcohol, than it’s downright insane to think you’re going to achieve that by turning stuff like corn cobs and grass into ethanol fuel. How many corn cobs will it take to offset significant amounts of petroleum, which represents the compressed energy of millions of years of rotting biomass?
Clearly, it makes much more sense to change the nature of car engines. And that’s what Brown calls for. Like lots of smart people, he’s pushing for a switch to electric cars, combined with a greening of the power grid. (He also advocates real investments in trans-city speed trains and inner-city light rail.) In terms of farm policy, Brown’s vision means “phasing out the ethanol subsidies” (yes!) and putting in place incentives for midwestern farmers to install wind turbines on their land. Brown envisions a new kind of midwestern farm with grass-fed cattle wandering amid wind turbines.
That would mean less land devoted to corn but also less demand for corn—by slashing ethanol production and switching from corn-fed to grass-fed beef, U.S. corn consumption would decline dramatically.
Imagine the environmental knock-on effects. Less corn planted would mean dramatically less nitrogen and phosphorous runoff into streams—meaning healthier waterways clear down to the the nutrient-choked Gulf of Mexico. And less synthetic nitrogen fertilizer to turn into nitrous oxide—a greenhouse gas with something like 300 times more heat-trapping energy than carbon.
In short, Brown’s work makes bracing reading for any serious policy maker. Perhaps Obama will read it on the plane on his way to Copenhagen to shill for Chicago’s Olympic bid? Sure is pretty to think so.
Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise
Lester Brown and I, diavlogging
The Copenhagen Conference on food security
Comments
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timhammond Posted 11:55 am
30 Sep 2009
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Spence Posted 3:42 pm
30 Sep 2009
There are a ton of engineering solutions to renewable lags, just like there have been engineering solutions for the last hundred years or so to deal with fluctuating energy demand. Even, say, a backup natural gas generator in case of total renewable drop off is a much better solution, and none of these possibilities actually require new technology. All of them are already proven.
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megansgreen Posted 6:54 am
01 Oct 2009
The problem is that our grid currently is set up for meeting demand as it happens- realtime, if you will, by burning more material to meet that demand. With wind and almost all renewables, there is a discrepancy between when the wind may be blowing and when the power is needed. Therefore, we have to develop some smart, efficient storage for that electricity to cover the gap. And the other side to this is to diversify. Similar to how you might diversify your investments, diversifying our sources will lead to more energy stability. For example, installing a wind turbine might net you power at night. Installing a solar panel only generates power during the day. Both together will give you better energy coverage, one can pick up the slack where the other leaves off- the more sources, the better. Combine that with energy storage technology...and you get the picture for how we can reduce our need for non-renewables.
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timhammond Posted 7:05 am
01 Oct 2009
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megansgreen Posted 8:57 am
01 Oct 2009
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amazingdrx Posted 9:42 am
01 Oct 2009
For instance, a farm biogas fuel cell generator backing up the local renewable grid, feeding on biogas from local farms and municipal sewage systems, and landfills, and using natural gas if biogas runs short. That's distributed generation that relies on stored biogas/natural gas.
With a national high voltage power grid that interacts with these local and regional grids, the power can be smoothed with almost no fossil fuel use. Only in emergencies would natural gas be needed.
Normal power outages due to storms, on the rise now with climate change, can be better dealt with if homes and buildings have backup batteries and their own solar panels. In a grid slamming hurricane, local gas stations and stores can still operate with their backup power. Katrina escapees could not buy gas or food, all the gas stations and stores depended on grid power to operate.
The storage method of the near future could be superconducting electromagnetic energy storage. It has been used by our local utility here to buffer papermill industrial loads for over a decade. Larger scale superconducting power rings that act like light speed flywheels are a distinct possibility now. The ceramic/metal superconducting material is supercooled to zero resistance, energy is added when sun shines, waves roll, or the wind blows. Then it is withdrawn electromagnetically as needed.
With a 300,000 volt direct current regional power grid, with these energy storing rings located along the route, absorbing the 300,000 volt power as needed and supplying it back to the grid as needed, the whole system acts like a huge distributed battery. That's oil, natural gas, and coal replacing power, with energy dollars going to local farmers and solar panel owning utility customers. Solar and wind are both good on farms, with big building roofs for solar and fields for large wind machines.
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timhammond Posted 11:38 am
01 Oct 2009
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roncastle Posted 3:13 pm
30 Sep 2009
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KimeenJan Posted 11:17 pm
30 Sep 2009
Acai Force Max
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amazingdrx Posted 8:43 am
01 Oct 2009
Organic agriculture and biodigestion of the waste stream to backup the grid with biogas and switch from GHG intensive chemical fertilizer to organic fertilizer that builds soil in order to store carbon is the way to actually reverse GHG concentration in the atmosphere. Renewable energy can halt the increase of GHG, but it takes a massive global switch to soil building organic fertilizer to stop the worst effects of the high levels of GHG already acumulated.
Lester does need someone to help him make these issues more palatable to the media. Dave and Lester are both wrong on pricing carbon, carbon taxes can't pass congress and neither will real cap and trade, as it will be interpreted by media talking heads as a "new" tax. Only fake, giveaway cap and trade (much like fake health insurance reform is a giveaway for the insurance industry) as has happened in Europe, where industry gets free permits to pollute, can pass congress.
That creates a new scam trading venue in carbon permits for international con men, a bubble making non-solution for GHG.
Given the recent revelations on fossil fuel and nuclear power subsidies, it's clear that diverting these subsidies to renewable energy, in the form of a national HVDC power grid project and subsidies for organic agriculture and waste stream fertilizer/biogas power generation is the tax and revenue neutral way to go. No new taxes, no new debt!
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amazingdrx Posted 11:01 pm
01 Oct 2009
A study reported on here on Grist by Gar Lipow explains why increasing the numbers of wind and solar sources in diverse areas all together with a grid tends to cancel fluctuations in energy input from different sources. That's where a national high voltage low loss power grid comes in. It statistically eliminates fluctuations without storage or backup.
Another way to smooth the power supply is to adjust demand. A distributed smart grid will do that as well. Those superconducting storage systems might not be needed very often, but their beauty is they can supply a huge amount of power quickly when it's needed.
The problem now is not scientific or technological, it is educational and political. People have no idea all these technologies are ready now and could be installed everywhere given a firm commitment of financial and political resources. If media stays in the dark and keeps viewers and readers in the dark, this new energy economy can't get going.
Keep talking about it.
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stv_57 Posted 6:22 pm
07 Oct 2009
First, Lester Brown deserves a wide audience. Plan B 3.0 was available as a free download, so maybe 4.0 is also. And you can also sign up for his e-mail list.
On the whole carbon tax vs. cap n trade issue: Al Gore makes the point that we need to shift the tax burden a little from taxing income almost solely to also taxing carbon and reducing income and employment taxes accordingly. His point is that it is easier to vote for a tax "shift" than a tax "increase". Without a carbon tax, or a cap n trade program with real teeth, none of the really effective carbon-reduction measures will get implemented at a meaningful scale.
Amazingdrx and megansgreen make some great points about improving the efficieny of the energy grid, and its great to hear about some of the new technology that is out there.
There are also other conservation/efficiency opportunities not related to renewable energy that can have significant impact. Peak load demand can be reduced by the consumer in their own daily energy use decisions. At least some utilities offer programs that allow you to pay real-time pricing for your energy. Since they pay more for electricity during the day, and less at night, under this program you can do the same. Running your dishwasher at night instead of at 3:00 on a hot summer afternoon saves you money and evens out the demand for electricity, which makes the grid easier to manage and more efficient. Discount programs are also offered that give the utility company the power to turn down or turn off your heaviest load appliances (such as air conditioners) when demand is high.
This may not seem like a huge environmental benefit until you consider that when a utility company pushes for another coal plant in your area, it's probably not because they are concerned about average electric use, it's probably because they are concerned about meeting the peak demand loads on hot summer afternoons. At most times of the day and year those facilities are sitting idle, or running half-speed.
The other point is that every watt you save at home or at work probably saves two or three watts at the power plant itself because of the inefficiencies of today's centralized power grid. This points out both the importance of wonky infrastructure issues like the smart grid, as well as the simple effectiveness of being smart and stingy about our own energy use.
And on something of a tangent, economics and environmentalism are often seen as being completely at odds with each other when in reality they are really part of the same thing. Or maybe to look at it another way, the "economy" is both wholly dependent on the larger natural environment while also powerful enough to inflict significant damage on it.
Every important economic issue is also an environmental one. Did the current economic crisis happen in an environmental vacuum? No. Maybe what was unsustainable environmentally was also unsustainable economically.
Lastly, why does our culture have such a reverential addiction to economic growth? Is bigger faster more forever really a sustainable choice? Is it really our only option?
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