You're a Good Man, Lester Brown

There are few titans remaining in the environmental world -- figures that command respect not only inside the movement but in the larger global political milieu as well. Lester Brown is one of them. In 1974, he founded the Worldwatch Institute, one of the first think tanks to focus on the global environmental situation (its agenda-setting yearly reports, State of the World, remain required reading among the green set). In 2001, he left Worldwatch to start the Earth Policy Institute, a small outfit dedicated to envisioning an "eco-economy" and figuring out how to get there.

In 2003, EPI released Plan B, a book synthesizing research on the earth's multiple converging ecological crises and laying out a step-by-step plan (including a budget -- if you're curious, it's $161 billion) for how to transition to a sustainable path. Reception was enthusiastic; mogul Ted Turner was one of many influential figures to buy dozens of copies to send to friends.

Late last year saw Plan B 2.0, a revised, expanded edition incorporating the many developments -- good and bad -- of the intervening two years. In addition to your local bookstore, the book is available in its entirety as PDF or HTML on EPI's website.

Brown's been globe-trotting since the book's release, promoting the plan. Weeks before I met with him, he spoke to world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum, at the invitation of founder and executive director Klaus Schwab. He and I met in a small cafe in Seattle and, over omelets, discussed biofuels, plug-in hybrids, China, the Bush administration, and sudden, unpredictable social change.

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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.

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.

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.

We've always been concerned about the effect of high oil prices on food-production costs, and those are very real, given the oil intensity of world agriculture today. But more important is the effect of high oil prices on the demand for agriculture commodities. Once oil gets up to $60 a barrel, it becomes profitable to convert agricultural commodities into automotive fuels. In effect, the price of oil becomes a support price for agricultural commodities, and therefore food prices. If at any point the food value of the commodity drops below the fuel value, the market will move that commodity into the energy economy.

I don't think we yet quite grasp the effect of $60-a-barrel oil on food prices, because the capacity to distill ethanol and produce biodiesel is not yet large enough to really have an impact. But it's exploding all over the world. Up until a year or two ago, all the government programs here [in the U.S.], in Europe, and in Brazil were driven by government subsidies. In Brazil there are no more subsidies. Ethanol investment is just exploding; it's entirely a market-based operation.

There's enormous investment in this country in ethanol distilleries and biodiesel refineries. Most people aren't even aware that on Jan. 1 a year ago, we adopted a $1-a-gallon subsidy for biodiesel. But we're setting up competition between supermarkets and service stations for the same commodities.

There is a very attractive alternative automotive-fuel model: gas-electric hybrids with a plug-in and wind energy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.