Reasons to be cheerful

Lester Brown tells Martin Wright why, at last, there’s cause for optimism.

For nearly four decades, in books like Seeds of Change (1970) and Who will Feed China? (1995) Lester Brown has been engaging with threats of ecological disaster – and pointing up potential solutions. Some of his predictions may have proven wide of the mark, but many of his concerns now look unnervingly prescient.

An advocate of wind and solar power since the days when most saw them as hopelessly fringe, he now believes we’ve reached a historical tipping point – one which will see a revolution in energy provision across the globe. And America, he says, could be the unlikely leader.

Coal is dead

In Europe, many are forecasting the return of King Coal as oil and gas hit the peak. In America, says Brown, it’s a different story. “A year ago, the Department of Energy published a list of 151 planned new coal plants… Today, 59 of those are off the list. Either they’ve been refused licences by state governments, or the utilities have quietly pulled out because of mounting local opposition. And meanwhile, another 48 are being challenged in the courts.”

Wall Street seems to be listening, too. “Citigroup and Merrill Lynch have urged their clients to get rid of coal stocks. And major investment banks [such as] JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley have said they will not [finance new] coal-fired stations – unless the utilities can demonstrate that the plants will be economically viable after the government imposes restrictions on carbon emissions.”

“Now, the problem with that [from the utility’s point of view] is that no one knows what the cost of carbon will be… so there’s no way you can demonstrate the plant will be viable.”

“I always look at Wall Street, see where the venture capital’s going”

But what about the much-vaunted CCS (carbon capture and storage) technology?

Hopelessly uneconomic, says Brown, citing plans for a US government-backed pilot scheme which has been scrapped in the face of soaring costs. “It was budgeted at around $900 million for a 175MW plant – not a large plant at all. Then in a matter of months it had spiralled to $1.6 billion, and was poised to go higher. And the Department of Energy just said, ‘Look guys, this is not economic’. I mean, $1.6bn for a 175MW plant – it’s off the chart! And they’d chosen a site where the underground storage was right there – it’s not as though they had to pipe carbon 300 miles to sequester it.” Small wonder that investors aren’t exactly queuing up. “I always look at Wall Street, see what the venture capital’s doing. And I just don’t see any going into this technology.”

“We’ve just seen the first big win in the fight to stabilise the world’s climate”

“It’s just possible that by the end of 2008 we’ll have something approaching a de facto moratorium on new coal plants in the US. We’ve crossed a tipping point on this issue, and it’s amazing how fast it has happened. This could be the first big win in the effort to stabilise the earth’s climate.”

Wind will be massive

Meanwhile, there’s some Texan-sized ambition going into wind power. “Rick Parry, the Republican Governor of Texas, is backing a plan to develop 23,000MW of wind power in the state. Just to put that into perspective, the entire capacity of wind worldwide has only just hit 100,000MW.”

Ambition on that scale “has a certain infectiousness”, says Brown. In Maine, the (Democratic) government appointed a bipartisan commission to come up with a recommendation for expanding wind power. It unanimously recommended installing 3,000MW. “That would put them way ahead of Texas in per capita terms– and would meet a [sizeable slice] of state electricity demand. This is huge stuff.”

It’s happening with solar as well. “California [led by Republican Governor Arnie Schwarzenegger] jumped out with a major solar programme, and now you’ve got Maryland and New Jersey planning to outdo it, adjusting for population size of course. And then there’s Charlie Crist, the Republican who replaced Jeb Bush as Governor of Florida. There were five major coal-fired plants slated for Florida. They’re history now. [Instead], he’s planning on building the largest solar thermal power plant in the world.”

Washington is irrelevant

“All this is happening in a country where the federal government officials, the ones who go to climate negotiations in Bali and so forth, haven’t got a clue what’s going on. I mean, it’s as though there are two different countries. Washington has no involvement in this at all.”

Indeed, Brown thinks that the climate policy vacuum in Washington may even have helped encourage local initiative. It’s not just at state level, either. “The mayors have stepped up and started doing things. Over 500have signed up to the goals of the Kyoto Protocol, and said, ‘We’re going to meet those, regardless of what Washington does’.”

Economics, not environmentalism

This is not all fuelled by green belief. “Governor Parry isn’t an environmentalist. He’s doing this because it makes economic sense. So is [Texan oilman] T Boone Pickens. He’s put $10 billion in a 4,000MW wind farm in the Texas panhandle. A journalist asked him: ‘Why all this investment in wind?’ And Pickens replied: ‘You know, I’ve got tired of oil depletion curves.’”

Sound business sense, says Brown. “Unlike the Texan oil fields, there’s no way they’re going to deplete the wind! So when you build the infrastructure – the wind farms, the transmission lines and so on – you’re basically there for the long haul. Sure you’ll have to replace parts from time to time, but once it’s there, it can last as long as the Earth itself.”

And once you make that decisive shift to renewables, he adds, you start benefiting from all kinds of positive feedback loops. “For example, in the US, we use [a huge amount of] freight fuel to transport coal. If you phase out coal, you have a dramatic drop in diesel fuel use, and an associated fall in carbon emissions. It’s the same with water. If you have wind farms in place of thermal power plants (whether coal, gas or nuclear), water demand drops precipitously.”

Day One in the White House

For the first time in American history, each of the main presidential candidates is committed to tackling climate change. So imagine it’s Day One in the White House. What should be top of the agenda? “Restructure the tax system so markets tell the truth,” says Brown. “Reduce income taxes, raise carbon taxes. There are a lot of things we can do, but if I were to pick one, I’d say that this is indispensable. If we don’t restructure the tax system, we’re probably not going to make it. It’s that important.”

“If we don’t restructure  the tax system, we’re not going to make it. It’s that important.”

“We’re all economic decision makers. As consumers, as corporate planners, as government policy makers or investment bankers, we are all guided by the signals in the market, by the price signals. The problem is that we have been getting really, really bad information from those signals, and so we’ve been making really bad decisions, which is why we are in so much trouble today. If we’d had an honest market a half century ago, we wouldn’t even have most of these problems.”

“And once you explain that this won’t mean any overall tax increase, you know what? Eighty, ninety percent of people will say: ‘Sure, why not?’.”

Lester Brown’s new book, 'Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization', is published by W.W. Norton & Co.

Martin Wright is Editor (at large) of Green Futures.

11 July 2008

Martin Wright

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