December 07/January 2008

Power Shift
Ted Glick

Franklin Roosevelt and My Father
Bill Moyers

Mobilizing to Save Civilization
Lester Brown

Feed Your Brain
Jurriaan Kamp

Are You Getting Enough Sun?
Kim Ridley

Old McDonald Had a Farm … and He Got Arrested?
David E Gumpert

Four-Seasons Harvest
Eliott Coleman

The Health Benefits of Tea
Jody Woodrull

Safe, Green, Non-Toxic Toys

You Can Change The World
Guy Finley

The Power of the Horse/Human Connection
Patricia Broersma

Toxic Toys Banned in Europe Are Still Legal In The U.S.
Mark Schapiro

Films of the Future
Siskiyou Film Fest

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

BACK TO TOP

Mobilizing to Save Civilization

By Lester Brown

In a world facing new evidence almost daily of global warming and its
consequences, a quick and decisive victory is needed in the battle
to cut carbon emissions and stabilize climate. A rapid shift to
the most energy-efficient technologies would provide just
such victory—generating momentum for even greater
advances in climate stabilization.

Lester Brown is President of the Earth Policy Institute. This piece is excerpted from his latest book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.

In Plan B we include a comprehensive plan for reversing the trends that are challenging the planet with more than a dozen measures to cut world carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020, but we exclude the oft-discussed option of carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration at coal-fired power plants. Given the costs and the lack of investor interest in the technology, there is reason to doubt that carbon sequestration will be economically viable on a meaningful scale by 2020. Plan B also does not count on a buildup in nuclear power. Our assumption is that new openings of nuclear power plants worldwide will simply offset the closing of aging plants, with no overall growth in capacity. If we use full-cost pricing—requiring utilities to absorb the costs of disposing of nuclear waste, of decommissioning the plant when it is worn out, and of insuring the reactors against possible accidents and terrorist attacks—building nuclear plants in a competitive electricity market is simply not economical.

Perhaps the quickest, easiest, and most profitable way to reduce electricity use worldwide—thus cutting carbon emissions—is simply to change light bulbs. Replacing the inefficient incandescent light bulbs that are still widely used today with new compact fluorescents (CFLs) can reduce electricity use by three fourths. The energy saved by replacing a 100-watt incandescent bulb with an equivalent CFL over its lifetime is sufficient to drive a Toyota Prius hybrid car from New York to San Francisco. Although a CFL may cost twice as much as an incandescent, it lasts 10 times as long. Each one reduces energy use by the equivalent of 200 pounds of coal over its lifetime.

Shifting to CFLs in homes, to the most advanced linear fluorescents in office buildings, commercial outlets, and factories, and to LEDs in traffic lights would cut the world share of electricity used for lighting from 19 percent to 7 percent.

In a world facing new evidence almost daily of global warming and its consequences, a quick and decisive victory is needed in the battle to cut carbon emissions and stabilize climate. A rapid shift to the most energy-efficient lighting technologies would provide just such a victory—generating momentum for even greater advances in climate stabilization.

Other potential energy savings can be achieved by reducing electricity for standby use—that consumed when the appliance is not being used—which the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, in an analysis of potential energy savings by 2030, put at the top of the list. As of 2007, the estimated share of electricity used by appliances in standby mode worldwide is up to 10 percent of total electricity consumption.

Climate change is a global phenomenon requiring a global response. Among industrial countries Japan is already leading this kind of response with the most dynamic system for upgrading appliance efficiency standards, the Top Runner Program, where the most efficient appliances today set the standard for those sold tomorrow. With this program Japan planned to raise efficiency standards between the late 1990s and the end of 2007 for individual appliances by anywhere from 15 to 83 percent, depending on the appliance. This is an ongoing process that continually exploits advances in efficiency technologies.
Worldwide efficiency standards for all household appliances that are determined by the most efficient models on the market today should set the standard for those sold tomorrow using Japan as a model. The standards would be raised every few years to take advantage of the latest technological gains in efficiency. The principal reason that consumers do not buy the most energy-efficient appliances is because the improved design and insulation increase the upfront costs. If, however, societies adopt a carbon tax reflecting the health care costs of breathing polluted air and the costs of climate change, the more efficient appliances would be economically much more attractive.

More-Efficient Buildings

In the United States, buildings—commercial and residential—account for 70 percent of electricity use and over 38 percent of CO2 emissions. Worldwide, building construction accounts for 40 percent of materials use. It is often assumed that increasing energy efficiency in the building sector is a long-term process. But that is not the case. Retrofit of an older inefficient building can cut energy use by 20–50 percent. The next step, shifting entirely to carbon-free electricity, either generated onsite or purchased, to heat, cool, and light the building completes the job. Presto! A zero-carbon building.

The private US Green Building Council (USGBC) is well known for its certification and rating program called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). This voluntary certification program sets standards so high that it has eclipsed the US government Energy Star certification program for buildings.

The certification process for new buildings begins with site selection, then moves on to energy efficiency, water efficiency, materials used, and indoor environmental quality. In site selection, certification points are awarded for locating the building close to public transport, such as light rail or buses. Beyond this, a higher certification depends on provision of bicycle racks and shower facilities for employees. To be certified, new buildings must maximize the exposure to daylight, with minimum daylight illumination for 75 percent of the occupied space.

Thus far LEED has certified 748 new buildings in the United States, with some 5,200 under construction that have applied for certification. In 2001 a global version of the USGBC, the World Green Building Council, was formed. As of August 2007 there were LEED certification projects in progress in some 41 countries. Also at the international level, the Clinton Foundation announced in May 2007 its Energy Efficiency Building Retrofit Program. This program, in cooperation with C40, a large-cities climate leadership group, brings together five of the world’s largest banks and four of the leading energy service companies to work with an initial group of 16 cities to retrofit buildings, reducing their energy use by 20–50 percent. Each of the banks—ABN AMRO, Citi, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, and UBS—is committed to investing up to $1 billion in this effort, enough to easily double the current worldwide level of energy saving retrofits. The world’s four largest energy service companies—Honeywell, Johnson Controls, Siemens, and Trane—will do the actual retrofitting. And, most important, they agreed to provide “performance guarantees,” thus ensuring that all the retrofits will be profitable—banks and energy service companies will make money, building owners will save money, and carbon emissions will fall.

On the architectural front, a climate-conscious architect from New Mexico, Edward Mazria, has launched the 2030 Challenge. Its principal goal is for the nation’s architects to be designing buildings in 2030 that use no fossil fuels. Mazria observes that the buildings sector is the leading source of climate emissions, easily eclipsing transportation. Therefore, he says, “it’s the architects who hold the key to turning down the global thermostat.”

Restructuring the Transport System

While the future of transportation in cities lies with a mix of light rail, buses, bicycles, cars, and walking, the future of intercity travel over distances of 500 miles or less belongs to high-speed trains. Operating at speeds up to 190 miles per hour, Japan’s bullet trains carry almost a million passengers a day. On some of the heavily used intercity high-speed rail lines, trains depart every three minutes.

Once high-speed links between cities begin operating, they dramatically raise the number of people traveling by train between cities. When the Paris-to-Brussels link, a distance of 194 miles that is covered by train in 85 minutes, opened, the share of those traveling between the two cities by train rose from 24 percent to 50 percent. The car share dropped from 61 percent to 43 percent, and CO2-intensive plane travel virtually disappeared. In the Plan B economy, CO2 emissions from trains will essentially be zero, since they will be powered by green electricity.

In the United States, the need both to cut carbon emissions and to prepare for shrinking oil supplies calls for a shift in investment from roads and highways to railways. Today the threat of climate change and the insecurity of oil supplies both argue for the construction of a high-speed electrified rail system, for both passenger and freight traffic. The relatively small amount of additional electricity needed could come from renewable sources, mainly wind farms.

Three initiatives are needed in the United States. One is a meaningful gasoline tax. Phasing in a gasoline tax of 40¢ per gallon per year for the next 12 years (for a total rise of $4.80 a gallon) and offsetting it with a reduction in income taxes would raise the US gasoline tax to the $4–5 per gallon prevailing today in Europe and Japan. Combined with the rising price of gas itself, such a tax should be more than enough to encourage a shift to more fuel-efficient cars. The second measure is raising the fuel-efficiency standard from the 22 miles per gallon of cars sold in 2006 to 45 miles per gallon by 2020. Third is a heavy shift of transportation funds from highway construction to urban transit and intercity rail construction.

A New Materials Economy

In nature, one-way linear flows do not survive long. Nor, by extension, can they survive long in the expanding global economy.

The potential for sharply reducing materials use was pioneered in Germany, initially by Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek in the early 1990s and then by Ernst von Weizsäcker, an environmental leader in the German Bundestag. They argued that modern industrial economies could function very effectively using only one fourth the virgin raw material prevailing at the time. Schmidt-Bleek, who founded the Factor Ten Institute in France, showed that raising resource productivity even more—by a factor of 10—was well within the reach of existing technology and management, given the right policy incentives.

The big challenge in cities everywhere is to recycle the many components of garbage. Advanced industrial economies with stable populations, such as those in Europe and Japan, can rely primarily on the stock of materials already in the economy rather than using virgin raw materials.

Turning to Renewable Energy

Just as the nineteenth century belonged to coal and the twentieth century to oil, the twenty-first century will belong to the sun, the wind, and energy from within the earth. In Europe, the addition of electrical generating capacity from renewable energy sources in 2006 exceeded that from conventional sources, making it the first continent to enter the new energy era.

The Plan B goals for developing renewable sources of energy by 2020 are based not on what is conventionally believed to be politically feasible, but on what we think is needed to prevent irreversible climate change. This is not Plan A, business as usual. This is Plan B—an all-out response proportionate to the threat that global warming presents to our future.

Wind: A worldwide survey of wind energy by the Stanford team of Cristina Archer and Mark Jacobson concluded that harnessing one fifth of the earth’s available wind energy would provide seven times as much electricity as the world currently uses. In 1991 the US Department of Energy (DOE) released a national wind resource inventory, noting that three wind-rich states—North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas—had enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy national electricity needs. Advances in wind turbine design since then allow turbines to operate at lower wind speeds and to convert wind into electricity more efficiently. And because they are now 100 meters tall, instead of less than 40 meters, they harvest a far larger, stronger, and more reliable wind regime, generating 20 times as much electricity as the turbines installed in the early 1980s when modern wind power development began. With these new turbine technologies, the three states singled out by DOE could satisfy not only national electricity needs but national energy needs.

One of the early concerns with wind energy was the risk it posed to birds, but this can be overcome by conducting studies and careful siting to avoid risky areas for birds. The most recent research indicates that bird fatalities from wind farms are minuscule compared with deaths from flying into skyscrapers, colliding with cars, or being captured by cats.

Although there are NIMBY problems (“not in my backyard”), the PIMBY response (“put it in my backyard”) is much more pervasive. Among ranchers in Colorado and dairy farmers in upstate New York, the competition for wind farms is intense. A large, advanced design wind turbine can generate $300,000 worth of electricity in a year. Farmers, with no investment on their part, typically receive $3,000–10,000 a year in royalties for each wind turbine erected on their land.

A corn farmer in northern Iowa can put a wind turbine on a quarter-acre of land that can produce $300,000 worth of electricity per year. This same quarter-acre would produce 40 bushels of corn that in turn could produce 120 gallons of ethanol worth $300. Since the turbines occupy less than 1 percent of the land in a wind farm, this technology lets farmers harvest both energy and crops from the same land. Thousands of ranchers in the wind-rich Great Plains will soon be earning more from wind royalties than from cattle sales.

Plan B involves a crash program to develop 3 million megawatts of wind generating capacity by 2020. This will require a near doubling of capacity every two years, up from the doubling every three years for the last decade. It will mean 1 megawatt for every 2,500 of the world’s projected 2020 population of 7.5 billion people. Denmark—with 1 megawatt for every 1,700 people—is already well beyond this goal. Spain will likely exceed this per capita goal before 2010 and Germany shortly thereafter.

This climate-stabilizing initiative would require the installation of 1.5 million 2-megawatt wind turbines. At $3 million per installed turbine, this would involve investing $4.5 trillion over the next dozen years, or $375 billion per year. This compares with world oil and gas capital expenditures that are projected to reach $1 trillion per year by 2016.

The idled capacity in the US automobile industry is sufficient to produce the wind turbines. The Spanish firm Gamesa, a leading wind turbine manufacturer, recently set up operations in an abandoned US Steel plant in Pennsylvania.

The world desperately needs a new automotive energy economy, a new source of fuel. The foundation for this has been laid with two new technologies: the gas-electric hybrid cars and advanced-design wind turbines.

Now that hybrid cars are well established, it is a relatively small step to manufacturing plug-in hybrids that run largely on electricity. Even more exciting, recharging batteries with off-peak wind-generated electricity would cost the equivalent of less than $1 per gallon of gasoline.

Another major source of stability will come from the shift to plug-in hybrids, since the vehicle batteries become a storage system for wind energy. With a smart grid, motorists could profitably sell electricity back to the grid when needed during peak demand. In effect, the shift to plug-in hybrids, with their electricity storage capacity and backup tank of gasoline, buffers the variability of wind energy, enabling it to become the centerpiece of the Plan B energy economy.

Solar: Several technologies are now used to harness the sun’s energy, including both solar thermal collectors and solar photovoltaic cells. Solar thermal collectors, widely used to heat water, are now also used for space heating. Solar thermal collectors, which concentrate sunlight to boil water and produce steam-generated electricity, and assemblages of solar electric cells are both used on a commercial power plant scale, with individual plants capable of supplying thousands of homes with electricity.

Perhaps the most exciting recent development in the world solar economy is the installation of some 40 million rooftop solar water heaters in China. With 2,000 Chinese companies manufacturing rooftop solar water heaters, this relatively simple low-cost technology is not only widely used in cities, it has also leapfrogged into villages that do not yet have electricity.
For the nearly 1.6 billion people living in communities not yet connected to an electrical grid, it is now often cheaper to install solar cells rooftop-by-rooftop than to build a central power plant and a grid to reach potential consumers.

Painfully aware that its oil and gas exports will not last forever, the Algerian government has created a company, New Energy Algeria, to manage the development and export of its solar energy. Its managing director, Tewfik Hasni, says “our potential in thermal solar power is four times the world’s energy consumption.” Construction of undersea cables linking the solar thermal–generating plants in the Sahara to Europe is planned for 2010–12. The great attraction of solar thermal generation in sunny climates is that it peaks during the day when air conditioning needs and personal power demands are also peaking.

Energy from the Earth: The heat in the upper six miles of the earth’s crust contains 50,000 times as much energy as found in all the world’s oil and gas reserves combined. Despite this abundance, only 9,300 megawatts of geothermal generating capacity have been harnessed worldwide. If the four most populous countries located on the Pacific “ring of fire”—the United States, Japan, China, and Indonesia, with nearly 2 billion people—were to seriously invest in developing their geothermal resources, they could easily make geo­thermal energy one of the world’s leading sources of electricity.

Plant-Based Energy: An analysis by the American Solar Energy Society indicates that burning cellulosic crops to directly generate electricity is much more efficient than converting them to ethanol. ASES estimates that the United States could generate 110 gigawatts of electricity from burning crops such as switchgrass and fast growing trees, roughly 10 times the current level. This projected growth assumes that the anticipated expansion in cellulosic crop production would be used primarily for electricity generation rather than ethanol production. We anticipate that the worldwide use of plant materials to generate electricity could contribute 200 gigawatts to generating capacity by 2020.

The World Energy Economy of 2020

Backing out of fossil fuels begins with the electricity sector, where the development of 5,153 gigawatts of new renewable generating capacity by 2020, over half of it from wind, would be more than enough to replace all the coal and oil and 70 percent of the natural gas now used to generate electricity. The addition of 1,530 gigawatts of thermal capacity by 2020 will reduce the use of both oil and gas for heating buildings and water.

In looking at the broad shifts from 2006 to the Plan B energy economy of 2020, fossil fuel–generated electricity drops by 90 percent. This is more than offset by the fivefold growth in renewably generated electricity. In the transportation sector, energy use from fossil fuels drops by some 70 percent. This comes from shifting not just to hybrids that run partly on electricity but to highly efficient plug-in hybrids that run largely on electricity from renewable sources.

Closely related to this overall energy restructuring are several indirect energy savings. For example, when coal is phased out as a power source the vast amount of energy used to extract the coal, bring it to the surface, and transport it—typically hundreds of miles by rail to power plants—is no longer needed. Some 42 percent of US freight is coal transported by diesel-powered locomotives.

Electricity will be much more prominent in the new energy economy. In 2020 it will be the principal source of energy for cars. For trains it will replace diesel fuel. Many buildings will be all-electric—heated, cooled, and illuminated entirely with carbon-free renewable electricity.

Just as renewable energy technologies are advancing, so too are those that will lead to a smart grid, one that uses smart meters, to constantly monitor not only electricity flows but specific uses at the household level. It gives consumers a choice between running a dishwasher during peak demand and paying 9¢ per kilowatt-hour for electricity and running it at 3 a.m. using 5¢ electricity.

Whereas fossil fuels helped globalize the energy economy, shifting to renewable sources will localize it.

It is encouraging to know that we now have the technologies to build a new energy economy, one that is not climate-disruptive, that does not pollute the air, and that can last as long as the sun itself.

The Earth Policy Institute is dedicated to building a sustainable future as well as providing a plan of how to get from here to there. Visit them at www.earthpolicy.org.