Q: 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.
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.
Q: 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 forwind 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.
Q: 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 does Lester Brown stay optimistic about the future of the environment? What are Brown’s views on other countries and the environment? And what lessons will we learn from Hurricane Katrina? See page 3.
