Book Review - February 2006
Need for Drastic Action
a review of two books
by Carol Van Strum
Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profits, Jobs, and Security, by Amory B. Lovins, E. Kyle Datta, Odd-Even Bustnes, Jonathan G. Koomey, & Nathan J. Glasgow. 2004. Rocky Mountain Institute, $40.00
Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, by Lester R. Brown, 2006. W.W. Norton & Co., $16.95, paper
INTRODUCTION
Imagine a massive asteroid barreling through space on a direct collision course with Planet Earth. Astronomers who discovered it decades ago and raised warnings were ignored. The thing was too far away, no one else could see it, and there were more immediate things to do, like fight wars and make profits. Only when the asteroid is finally visible in the day-time sky does anyone take notice; not even politicians can ignore it now, but it may be too late to do anything about it.
At this critical juncture, the forgotten astronomers present an emergency plan to save the planet. We have the technology to deflect the asteroid, they say. It will cost $161 billion, one-sixth of the world's total military budget, and require total restructuring of the global economy at record speed, because the mechanisms for preventing disaster must be in place within months.
With the asteroid looming larger every day, would world leaders forget their quarrels and unite against a common threat? Could global industries be re-tooled and mobilized in time? Would people alter wasteful lifestyles to save the planet? Tune in for the next exciting episode.
The very real disaster now threatening our planet - and ourselves - is every bit as devastating as that fictional asteroid, but this disaster is of our own making. Inflated by fossil energy, the combined pressures of overpopulation and overproduction have overwhelmed the planet's capacity to regenerate the stuff of life: food, fresh water, and livable atmosphere.
The scientists and economists who saw it coming decades ago were ignored. Now the threat is visible and growing larger every day. Our impact on the Earth has reached asteroidal proportions, manifest in a runaway cascade of heat waves, crop failures, droughts, perfect storms, rapidly melting icecaps and glaciers, plagues, mass extinctions, rising sea levels, the collapse of fisheries and forests. Like rats in an overcrowded, fouled cage, humans turn on each other, annihilating not only their competition, but also themselves, along with the very resources they are fighting over.
Like the fictional astronomers, intrepid scientists and economists have devised emergency plans to save the planet. Winning the Oil Endgame and Plan B 2.0 stress the urgent need for drastic action to avert catastrophe. We have the necessary technology and knowledge to do so. It will cost $161 billion, one-sixth of the world's total military budget, and require total restructuring of the global economy at record speed, because the mechanisms for preventing disaster must be in place with a very few years.
Can this be done? Is it even possible? As the authors of both books point out, it's been done before. Within a few months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the entire U.S. economy was converted to wartime production; manufacture and sale of cars for private use were banned, house and highway construction was halted, as was driving for pleasure. Rationing of strategic goods, including tires, gasoline, and fuel oil, was imposed. From toy factories to corset manufacturers, American industries shifted to production of aircraft parts, ships, and weapons, during the next three years producing 229,600 aircraft and more than 5,000 ships.
"This mobilization of resources within a matter of months demonstrates that a country and, indeed, the world can restructure the economy quickly if it is convinced of the need to do so," writes Lester R. Brown.
Winning the Oil Endgame and Plan B 2.0 present an overwhelming case for such mobilization on a global scale, and the feasibility of doing so. Both should be required reading for every legislator, CEO, and stockholder; hopefully, recorded versions can be made for the illiterate among those ranks.
Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profits, Jobs, and Security,
by Amory B. Lovins, E. Kyle Datta, Odd-Even Bustnes, Jonathan G. Koomey, & Nathan J. Glasgow. 2004. Rocky Mountain Institute, $40.00; Order from RMI at www.rmi.org; free download (for personal use) of book and detailed technical annex at www.oilendgame.com.
"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."1
That we need to do something about the wedded catastrophes of oil shock and climate change is obvious, but few practical, doable solutions have been proposed. Winning the Oil Endgame is one of the few. Drawing on their wealth of scientific, economic, and environmental expertise, the authors have compiled a detailed, comprehensive instruction manual for revitalizing American industry during the transition to an oil-less economy.
In economic terms alone, the benefits of developing a self-sufficient energy supply are mind boggling. In 2003, oil imports cost Americans 10 billion dollars a month. From 1975 to 2003, 2.2 trillion dollars of American purchasing power and reinvestment potential were sent abroad for oil imports. Add to this the trillions of dollars spent on military readiness to secure the foreign sources of those imports, and the bottom line is inescapable: the oil that once fueled the phenomenal growth of our economy has now become a black hole sucking it dry.
Because 70 percent of all U.S. oil consumption fuels transportation, Winning the Oil Endgame primarily addresses comprehensive changes in automobile, truck, and aircraft design and manufacture that would double the efficiency of oil while innovative propulsion technologies and domestic bio-fuels come on line. Even using the most conservative data available, the authors find that, "surprisingly, it will cost less to displace all of the oil that the United States now uses than it will cost to buy that oil."
Endgame presents an integrated four step program for curing oil addiction:
- The adoption of ultralight vehicle and aircraft designs already in development would nearly double efficiency as well as improve safety and performance;
- Accelerating production of super-efficient vehicles and airplanes through creative business models and supportive public policies, combined with energy efficient buildings and factories, would rapidly reduce oil use by more than 50 percent.
- The simultaneous growth of an already technologically advanced domestic bio-fuels industry would replace another 25 percent of U.S. oil needs;
- In conjunction with renewable energy sources, applying currently available efficiency techniques to natural gas use would free up enough gas to displace remaining oil use.
Lest this sound like pie in the sky, the authors present detailed economic and technological analyses for every move of the oil endgame. The bottom line is more than impressive. In less than two decades, the annual net economic benefit of displacing fossil oil would be $70 billion. The auto industry would be hiring thousands of workers instead of laying them off. Net farm income from growing bio-fuel crops would increase by tens of billions of dollars a year, and the bio-fuels industry would add more than 750,000 new jobs. All this and clean air, too, as well as a 25 percent reduction in carbon dioxide levels. Most astonishing of all, the authors point out, it does not depend on federal support or legislation.
If displacing oil is so profitable, why isn't it being done? The answer is, it is being done, but not by us. Japanese and European automakers have left the once-proud American auto industry in the dust with gas displacing innovations, and are poised to corner the entire global market. Since 1970, U.S. automakers have lost nearly half their domestic market share to foreign competition and today depend on federal protection, such as tariffs, to stay in business at all.
"Reliance on lawyers and lobbyists to try to avert competition and regulation has long restrained American automakers from exploiting their extraordinary engineering prowess," the authors note. Endgame requires what amounts to a paradigm shift in business attitudes and strategy: instead of buying legislation to maintain an obsolete, unprofitable, oil-driven technology, automakers could profit handsomely by meeting the challenge of oil-free transport as a great business opportunity. Their survival depends on making this shift rapidly. Winning the Oil Endgame offers them a free blueprint - and an instructive look at what good old Yankee ingenuity, cured of its habit and off welfare, could accomplish.
A Cautionary Interlude
A Do-It-Yourself manual for American industry, Winning the Oil Endgame details immensely profitable business opportunities in maintaining our current life-style with guilt-free, pollution-free vehicles for all. Not mentioned is an even greater opportunity presented by such a dramatic shift in business practice: the prospect of applying the precautionary principle to every move in the process to ensure than it doesn't trade one problem for a host of others.
Replacing steel with ultra-light, ultra-strong plastics to double vehicle efficiency, for example, needs thorough examining before an entire industrial sector adopts this innovation. The time to discover whether any stage of its manufacture or use involves hazards to workers, environment, or consumers is now, before huge profits and capital investments dictate resistance to safe alternatives.
A troubling failure of Endgame is its limited projections of fuel consumption and alternative domestic energy production, which do not adequately address the issue of open-ended economic and population growth. While increased production of domestic bio-fuels may displace fossil oil at current or near-future use rates without impacting soil and water quality or food production, at some point in an expanding economy the need for fuel will conflict with other and more sustainable uses of land. Indeed, since publication of Endgame, this has already begun happening. Sugar prices have nearly doubled in 2006 due to increased demand for sugar-based ethanol, which commands a higher price than sugar for food, and Brazil, the world's largest sugar exporter, now diverts more than half its production to ethanol. Sugar has now "moved from being a food crop to being an energy crop," says Pichai Kanivichaporn, director of a sugar company in Thailand, which plans to double its production to meet ethanol demand.
"The market's sugar high raises a dilemma that could apply to other commodities such as corn and palm oil," reports the Wall Street Journal. "Farmers world-wide are rushing to increase production in anticipation of a bigger global appetite for such alternative fuels."2
The promise of an abundant, cheap, non-polluting energy supply is hollow if continually expanding energy needs destroy our ability to feed ourselves.
The conflict is as old as industrial production itself. Iron and steel, the backbone of England's dawning industrial empire, were for many centuries smelted in furnaces fueled by charcoal. Plying a trade little changed in 5,000 years, forest-dwelling colliers chopped wood and slow-cooked it in sod-packed mounds, tending the fires day and night for weeks to produce each precious batch. By 1700, despite royal decrees and laws to preserve woodlands, most of England's forests had vanished into its smelters and foundries, and iron production was stalled by declining sources of increasingly expensive fuel.
In 1720, charcoal was displaced almost overnight by the invention of a rapid, cheap way to cook --or "coke" - abundant fossil coal into high energy fuel. Over the next century, England's annual iron and steel production, which had peaked at 25,000 tons fueled by charcoal, soared more than 300-fold to 7,750,000 tons, spurring the astonishing series of mechanical innovations that comprised the Industrial Revolution.
The displacement of charcoal by fossil fuel thus spared the remnants of England's forests, but at a cost still accruing today. The forest dwelling collier, his labor and skill devalued by cheap energy, became a creature of darkness, toiling thousands of feet underground to fuel the engines of industry and empire. Belching smokestacks blackened the skies, inaugurating centuries of pollution that would ultimately melt Antarctic icepacks and inundate New Orleans.
Ironically, the bio-fuel technology now offering a renewable, cheap alternative to expensive, dwindling fossil fuel is simply an improved version of the charcoal burners' ancient art, which so nearly stripped England's forests bare. We have gone full circle, and have a chance to do it right this time. The first and most important step is to accept that renewable does not mean inexhaustible. To ignore the natural limits that renewable energy sources place on economic growth perpetuates the free-lunch delusion that got us into our present fix.
Whether it is possible to maintain our current lifestyle sustainably - to have our cake and eat it, too - is admittedly beyond the scope of Endgame. Lester R. Brown addresses this question squarely in Plan B 2.0.
1 Hartford Courant, August 24, 1897 (attributed to Mark Twain).
2 "Why Sugar Costs More and More," by Patrick Barta. The Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2006, p. C1.
Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble,
by Lester R. Brown, 2006. W.W. Norton & Co., $16.95, paper.
An updated and considerably expanded edition of Brown's 2003 book, Plan B.
"Water is best," wrote Pindar some 2,400 years ago. "But gold shines like fire blazing in the night, supreme of lordly wealth."3 Scholars for centuries have pondered what Pindar meant by this line (and what the hell it had to do with a horse race, the subject of the ode). Lester R. Brown would have no trouble explaining it: water, the very source of life, is trumped by greed, the lure of shining, lifeless wealth. Pindar, in turn, would no doubt appreciate the grim irony of entire river systems poisoned with mercury and cyanide to extract gold from a reluctant earth.
Water bubbles through Plan B 2.0. Water, the forgotten, defiled, overdrawn lifeblood of both the planet and the global economy. The first half of Brown's book is excruciating to read, a catalogue of the limitless damage a fossil-based, ever-expanding economy has wrought on a once-bounteous planet. From climate change to soil depletion and toxin-induced chronic disease, the most appalling and little recognized devastation has been to our supplies of fresh water, upon which our food and survival depend.
World-wide, fossil energy used to pump non-replenishable fossil aquifers boosted agricultural production unsustainably during the last half of the 20th Century. Many of the world's biggest grain producing areas, including America's top grain producing states, now face plummeting water tables. As water tables drop, crop production falls as well, and pumping water from ever-deeper aquifers increases production costs. At the same time, diversion of rivers for irrigation as well as for urban and industrial use has left many rivers high and dry. The Colorado River, the Nile, and China's Yellow River are now drained dry before they reach the sea. On every continent, many lakes once fed by year-round river flows - Lake Chad in Africa, Asia's Aral Sea, the Sea of Galilee, California's Owens Lake - are shrinking rapidly or have vanished altogether.
As Brown emphasizes, because it takes so much water to produce food, the economics of water use do not favor food production. "For example, while it takes only 14 tons of water to make a ton of steel worth $550, it takes 1,000 tons of water to grow a ton of wheat worth $150." Add to this the insatiable demand for water in the world's cities, and it's no surprise that a California farmer can make more selling his water to Los Angeles than he can growing crops. The accelerating diversion of dwindling water supplies to expanding industries and exploding urban populations results inevitably in less food being produced to feed those populations.
As if running out of water were not enough, reckless industrial practices and population growth have poisoned what water is left, contaminating both fresh water supplies and the entire marine ecosystem with biological and chemical wastes. In industrial nations such as the U.S., the staggering rise of chronic illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, asthma, and hyperactivity disorders is linked to industrial toxins in air and water. In less developed regions such as Africa, the stresses of overpopulation and widespread hunger are intensified by rapid spread of infectious diseases from disposal of human wastes into water sources.
The first part of Plan B 2.0 establishes unequivocally that overpopulation and overproduction have demanded more of Earth than she has to give. To continue on our present course is to plunge with eyes wide open into the fatally interlocked spirals of global warming, global water depletion, global food shortages, economic havoc, escalating competition for shrinking resources, and inevitable wars and violence triggered by desperation. The second part is Brown's emergency plan to reduce and stabilize population growth while simultaneously developing sustainable ways to feed, house, and employ that population.
Because the warnings of the disaster now plainly visible were for so long ignored, Plan B 2.0 requires nothing short of a massive, global emergency contraception and education program, along with the total revamping of global and local economies at wartime speed. Brown's detailed analyses make clear that the plan is doable. Indeed, many of its elements are already in practice in other countries, with stunning success. In America, however, embarking on Plan B will mean abandoning ideologies and profit-driven priorities to meet a common threat. Whether we allow the vested interests of corporations and their puppets to delay or prevent a plan to save the planet is up to us.
Not that Plan B is perfect, but it's the best and most practical remedy proposed, and some of its more glaring difficulties can certainly be worked out. For example, despite the appalling list of water pollutants he cites, Brown strongly promotes herbicide-dependent no-till agriculture to control erosion and water loss. No-till planting requires repeated applications of fossil-energy-derived herbicides, which contaminate water, poison wildlife and soil organisms, and contribute to the rising incidence of chronic disease. Similarly, proposals to restock deforested areas with genetically engineered crop trees are a recipe for disaster to the diversity and sustainability of a healthy ecosystem.
In these inadequacies, however, Plan B 2.0 offers yet another tremendous opportunity to apply the precautionary principle to every step we take, lest our cure cause more grief than the disease.
3 Olympian Ode: Hieron of Syracuse, race for single horse. Pindar, c. 476 B.C.:
To Top of Page
BOOK REVIEWS