Meeting the Challenge

How can we do it now?

Lester R. Brown

How could the climate-stabilizing measures in Plan B cut carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent by 2020? This initiative has three major components—raising energy efficiency, developing renewable sources of energy, and expanding the earth’s tree cover. We cannot cover all the details in the book in this space. For more amplification, buy the book or go to the website www.earthpolicy.org

Raising Energy Efficiency

The world needs to reestablish a balance between carbon emissions and nature’s capacity to sequester carbon. We must halt the rise in atmospheric CO2, stabilizing it below 400 parts per million (ppm), up only modestly from the 384 ppm in 2007. Such a basic restructuring of the economy, in time to avoid catastrophic climate disruption will be challenging, but how can we face the next generation if we do not try?

For reference, world electricity generation totaled 18.5 trillion kilowatt-hours in 2006. Of this, two thirds came from fossil fuels (40% from coal, 6% from oil, and 20% from natural gas), 15% from nuclear, 16% from hydropower, and 2% or so from other renewables. (The average U.S. home uses roughly 10,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, so 1 billion kilowatt-hours is enough to supply 100,000 U.S. homes).

Since coal supplies 40% of the world’s electricity but accounts for over 70% of the electrical sector’s CO2 emissions, the first priority is to reduce demand enough to avoid constructing any new coal-fired power plants. Indeed, we must phase out coal-fired power plants. This may appear to be a novel idea, particularly to energy planners in countries such as China and India, but it is not, for example, in Europe. Germany has cut coal use 37% since 1990 through efficiency gains and by substituting wind-generated electricity for that from coal. The United Kingdom has cut coal use 43%, largely by replacing it with North Sea natural gas.

In early 2007, some 150 new coal-fired power plants were planned in the United States. Then public opposition began to mount. California, which imports 20% of its electricity, prohibited the signing of any new contracts to import electricity produced with coal. Several other states, including Florida, Texas, Minnesota, Washington, and Kansas, followed, refusing licenses for coal-fired power plants or otherwise preventing their construction.

Banning the Bulb

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.

Over its lifetime, each standard (13 watt) CFL will reduce electricity bills by roughly $30. And though a CFL may cost twice as much as an incandescent, it lasts 10 times as long. Since it uses less energy, it also means fewer CO2 emissions. Each one reduces energy use by the equivalent of 200 pounds of coal over its lifetime. Less coal burning means reduced air pollution, making lighting efficiency an obviously attractive option for economies plagued with polluted air, such as California, China and India.

The world may be moving toward a political tipping point away from inefficient light bulbs. In February 2007 Australia announced it would phase out the sale of incandescent light bulbs by 2010, replacing them with CFLs. Canada soon followed, saying it would phase out incandescents sales by 2012.

In mid-March, a U.S. coalition of environmental groups joined with Philips Lighting to launch an initiative to shift to more-efficient bulbs in all of the country’s estimated 4 billion light sockets by 2016.

The European Union (EU), with 27 member countries, announced in March 2007 that it plans to cut carbon emissions 20% by 2020, with part of the cut coming from replacing incandescent bulbs with CFLs. In the United Kingdom, the civic group "Ban the Bulb" has been vigorously pushing for a ban on incandescents since early 2006. Further east, the Moscow city government is urging its residents to switch to compact fluorescents.

Brazil, hit by a nationwide electricity shortage in 2000–02, responded with an ambitious program to replace incandescents with CFLs. As a result, an estimated half of its light sockets now contain these efficient bulbs. In 2007, China—working with the UN Global Environment Facility—announced a plan to replace all its incandescents with more efficient lighting within a decade.

In addition to switching bulbs themselves, huge energy savings can be gained just by turning lights off when not in use. There are numerous technologies for reducing electricity used for lighting, including motion sensors that turn lights off when spaces are unoccupied, such as in washrooms, hallways, and stairwells. In cities, dimmers can be used to reduce street light intensity, and timers can turn off outside lights that illuminate monuments or other landmarks when people are asleep. Dimmers can also be used to take advantage of day lighting to reduce the intensity of interior lighting.

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% to 7%. This would save enough electricity to avoid building 705 coal-fired power plants. By way of comparison, today there are 2,370 coal-fired plants in the world.

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.

Lifestyle Changes

Although we strongly recommend increasing energy efficiency—doing what we do with less energy—there is also a huge potential for cutting carbon emissions through conservation by not doing some of the things we do, or doing them differently. For example, in the summer of 2006 Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan announced that in order to save energy, Japanese men would be encouraged to not wear jackets and ties in the office. This meant thermostats could be raised, thus reducing electricity use for air conditioning while maintaining the same comfort level.

Urban planner Richard Register recounts meeting a bicycle activist friend wearing a T-shirt that said, “I just lost 3,500 pounds. Ask me how.” When asked, he said he had sold his car. Replacing a 3,500-pound car with a 22-pound bicycle obviously reduces energy use dramatically, but it also reduces materials use by 99%, indirectly saving still more energy.
Dietary changes can also make a difference. We have learned that the energy differences between a diet rich in red meat and a plant-based diet is roughly the same as the energy-use difference between driving a Chevrolet Suburban sports utility vehicle and a Toyota Prius gas-electric hybrid. The bottom line is that those of us with diets rich in livestock products can do both ourselves and civilization a favor by moving down the food chain.

Developing Renewable Sources of 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. Meanwhile, in the United States electrical generating capacity from wind increased 27% in 2006, while that from coal decreased slightly.

The Plan B goals for developing renewable sources 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 business as usual. This is an all-out response proportionate to the threat that global warming presents to our future.

Can we expand renewable energy use fast enough? We think so. Recent trends in the use of mobile phones and personal computers give a sense of how quickly new technologies can spread. For example, between 1986 and 2007, more than 2 billion people became cell phone users worldwide.

Harnessing the Wind

Wind is the centerpiece of the Plan B energy economy. It is abundant, low cost, and widely distributed; it scales up easily and can be developed quickly. Oil wells go dry and coal seams run out, but the earth’s wind resources cannot be depleted.
In 1991 the U.S. 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.

From 2000 to 2007, world wind generating capacity increased from 18,000 megawatts to an estimated 92,000 megawatts. In early 2008 it will pass the 100,000-megawatt milestone. Since 2000, capacity has been growing at 25% annually, doubling every three years.

The world leader in total capacity is Germany, followed by the United States, Spain, India, and Denmark. Measured by share of national electricity supplied by wind, Denmark is the leader, at 20%. Three north German states now get more than 30% of their electricity from wind. For Germany as a whole, it is 7%—and climbing.

Denmark is now looking to push the wind share of its electricity to 50%, with most of the additional power coming from offshore. In contemplating the prospect of wind becoming the leading source of electricity, Danish planners have turned energy policy upside down. They are looking at using wind as the mainstay of their electrical generating system and fossil-fuel-generated power to fill in when the wind ebbs.

One of the early concerns with wind energy was the risk it posed to birds, but this can be overcome by conducting site studies 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.

Other critics are concerned about the visual effect. When some people see a wind farm they see a blight on the landscape. Others see a civilization-saving source of energy. Although there are NIMBY problems (“not in my backyard”), the PIMBY response (“put it in my backyard”) is much more pervasive. Within U.S. communities, for instance, among ranchers in Colorado or dairy farmers in upstate New York, the competition for wind farms is intense. This is not surprising, since 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.

At the moment, growth in wind electricity generation is primarily constrained by wind turbine manufacturing capacity. 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. Manufacturing such a huge number of wind turbines over the next 12 years sounds intimidating until the initiative is compared with the 65 million cars the world produces each year. 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.

Wind turbines can be mass-produced on assembly lines. Indeed, the idled capacity in the U.S. automobile industry is sufficient to produce the wind turbines to reach the global goal. Not only do the idle plants exist, but there are skilled workers in these communities eager to return to work. The state of Michigan, for example, in the heart of the wind-rich Great Lakes region, has more than its share of idled auto assembly plants. The Spanish firm Gamesa, a leading wind turbine manufacturer, recently set up operations in an abandoned U.S. Steel plant in Pennsylvania.

Whereas fossil fuels helped globalize the energy economy, shifting to renewable sources will localize it. We anticipate that the energy transition will be driven largely by mounting concerns about climate change, by climbing oil prices, and by the restructuring of taxes to incorporate the indirect costs of burning fossil fuels. 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 question is no longer whether we can develop a climate-stabilizing energy economy, but whether we can develop it before climate change spins out of control.

Expanding the Earth’s Tree Cover

Deforestation is a major contributor to CO2 emissions. We’re not content with just halting deforestation. We want to increase the number of trees on the earth in order to sequester carbon. The reforestation of wastelands will fix more than 950 million tons of carbon each year. Thus the Plan B goals are to end net deforestation worldwide and to sequester carbon through a variety of tree planting initiatives and the adoption of improved agricultural land management practices.

Reaching a goal of zero net deforestation will require reducing the pressures to deforest that come from population growth, rising affluence, the construction of ethanol distilleries and biodiesel refineries, and the fast-growing use of paper. Protecting the earth’s forests means halting population growth as soon as possible, and, for the earth’s affluent residents who are responsible for the growing demand for beef and soybeans that is deforesting the Amazon basin, it means moving down the food chain. A successful deforestation ban may require a ban on the construction of additional biodiesel refineries and ethanol distilleries.

A leading Swedish energy firm, Vattenfall, has examined the large-scale potential for foresting wasteland to sequester carbon dioxide. There are 1.86 billion hectares of degraded land in the world, half of which, or 930 million hectares, has a decent chance of being profitably reclaimed. Planting 171 million hectares of this land to trees would sequester 3.5 billion tons of CO2 per year, or over 950 million tons of carbon.

Other tree planting initiatives under way include the worldwide Billion Tree Campaign launched in 2007, urban tree planting initiatives in many cities, the Great Green Wall being planted in China, and the Saharan Green Wall of Africa, as well as a big push to expand tree plantations within a number of countries.

Independent of the Billion Tree Campaign, in September 2007 New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clarke announced an impressive package of steps to cut carbon emissions, including expanding forested area by 250,000 hectares (617,000 acres) by 2020. This would roughly total some 125 million trees, or 30 for each New Zealander.

An analysis of the value of planting trees on the streets and in the parks of five western U.S. cities—from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Berkeley, California—concluded that for every dollar spent on planting and caring for trees, the benefits to the community exceeded two dollars. A mature tree canopy in a city shades buildings and can reduce air temperatures by 5–10 degrees Fahrenheit, thus reducing the energy needed for air conditioning. In cities with severe winters like Cheyenne, the reduction of winter wind speed by evergreen trees cuts heating costs. Real estate values on tree-lined streets are typically 3–6 percent higher than where there are few or no trees.

Planting trees is just one of many activities that will remove meaningful quantities of carbon from the atmosphere. One activity that involves a good use of wasteland is the planting in Africa and Asia of jatropha, a four-foot perennial shrub that produces seeds that can be used to produce biodiesel. This covers wasteland and sequesters carbon.

A number of agricultural practices can also increase the carbon stored as organic matter in soils. Farming practices that reduce soil erosion and raise cropland productivity usually also lead to higher carbon content in the soil. Among these are shifting from conventional tillage to minimum-till and no-till, the more extensive use of cover crops, the return of all livestock and poultry manure to the land, expansion of irrigated area, a return to more mixed crop-livestock farming, and the forestation of marginal farmlands.

Rattan Lal, a Senior Agronomist with the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University, has calculated the range of potential carbon sequestration for each of many practices, such as those just cited. For example, expanding the use of cover crops to protect soil during the off-season can store from 68 million to 338 million tons of carbon worldwide each year. Calculating the total carbon sequestration for the practices he cites, using the low end of the range for each, shows a potential for sequestering 400 million tons of carbon each year. Aggregating the numbers from the more optimistic high end of the range for each practice yields a total of 1.2 billion tons of carbon per year. For our carbon budget we are assuming, perhaps conservatively, that 600 million tons of carbon can be sequestered as a result of adopting these carbon-sensitive farming and land management practices.

Economic and Health Gains

For countries everywhere, particularly developing ones, the economic good news is that the Plan B energy economy is much more labor-intensive than the fossil-fuel-based economy it is replacing. For example, in Germany, a leader in the energy transition, renewable energy industries already employ more workers than the long-standing fossil fuel and nuclear industries do. In a world where expanding employment is a universal goal, this is welcome news indeed.

The restructuring of the energy economy outlined here will not only dramatically drop CO2 emissions, helping to stabilize climate, but it will also eliminate much of the air pollution that we know today. The idea of a pollution-free environment is difficult for us even to imagine, simply because none of us has ever known an energy economy that was not highly polluting. Working in coal mines will be history. Black lung disease will eventually disappear. So too will “code red” alerts warning of health threats from extreme air pollution.

And, finally, in contrast to investments in oil fields and coal mines, where depletion and abandonment are inevitable, the new energy sources are inexhaustible. While wind turbines, solar cells, and solar-thermal panels will all need repair and occasional replacement, the initial investment can last forever. This well will not go dry.