Present at the Future (13 page)
Read Present at the Future Online
Authors: Ira Flatow
And while Gore doesn’t preach the gospel in his film, the congregants see the message, clearly, in their own hearts and minds. “They are beginning to understand it as a religious issue,” says Bingham, who has been preaching about the environment this way for more than ten years. “We have always preached and taught that this is not a political issue. This is a moral issue, and it’s a spiritual issue because how we respond to climate change is going to define what it means to be human today. How are we going to treat fellow walkers of the planet? What kind of a future are we leaving for our children? We can take this out of the political arena and make it a religious issue.”
EVANGELICALS IN THE FOLD
For the past 85 years, evangelical Christians have been making themselves heard, loudly protesting the teaching of evolution in biology classrooms, favoring the teaching of the biblical account of creation. Only recently have they become vocal in support of the environment, which is welcome news for the Reverend Bingham. “As far as the evangelicals, they are getting a huge amount of attention because they represent an enormous population in America. And the fact that they are now talking about “creation care” is quite wonderful. It may be just what we need to turn this whole thing around and get people all over the country that are sitting in the pews to respond to climate change in a religious and responsible way.”
But Bingham says it won’t be easy for evangelicals to unite with environmental scientists. “I know that just from the evangelical perspective, that’s probably a huge challenge for them because evangelicals are taught from the very beginning to be suspicious of science—when they are talking about the difference between intelligent design and evolution. So now we’re asking them to accept what the scientists are saying, and I believe that that’s going to be one of the largest or biggest challenges for the evangelical community.
“I always say that the scientists are today’s prophets. I mean, they are Hosea and Isaiah and Jeremiah, and we need to believe them. There is enough consensus in the scientific world that there’s no reason for us not to accept what the scientists are telling us.”
VOTING THEIR CONSCIENCE
Bingham doesn’t believe in lobbying members of Congress. But she does support political initiatives and ballots in states that aim to clean up air pollution and foster energy conservation. She encourages people to vote their moral and religious convictions.
“We are called to serve each other and serve the poor. And the poor people are disproportionately affected by dirty-burning power plants because they most often live near them. And again, it’s a so
cial justice issue, and it’s why religion needs to be involved in this discussion of solutions.”
In fact, Bingham believes that her “interfaith power and light” program can serve as a model for other social issues, such as health, “because if we’re going to be pro-life, we really believe that we ought to be pro-healthy-life. If there are 187 toxic chemicals in the cord blood of babies, we know that we are not producing healthy children. And I think that the religious community has a role here too. Look at abolition of slavery and women’s right to vote and educate, and look at the civil rights movement. Once the religious voice was involved and people started seeing this from a moral perspective, things changed.
“When there’s a major cultural change that needs to happen, if the religious voice is not there, it won’t happen. And I believe that’s going to happen now. I think our time is here.”
Most problems have either many answers or no answer. Only a few problems have a single answer.
—EDMUND C. BERKELEY
Having a root canal done is less painful than talking about energy. In the 35 years that I have been covering science and technology, no topic has been more confusing to follow, more filled with politics, more frustrating. Want an everyday example? Just look at the over
night spikes in the price of gasoline. It jumps from one week to another. Oil companies make record profits. But if you ask why this is fair, why consumers should be paying so much more at the pump while the oil companies rake in the dough, they’ll offer a jumble of confusing graphs and convoluted explanations that make sense only to other energy “experts.”
In fact, I had a sense of déjà vu when in 2006 I asked a petroleum industry representative the same question I had asked in the 1970s, during the Arab oil embargo: I asked her to explain again, 30-plus years later, what accounted for that spike in gasoline prices. She offered virtually the same undecipherable explanation I had heard decades earlier. And when I told her it made no more sense now than it had then, she said, “That’s my story.” She might just as well have added, “And I’m sticking to it.”
So as we peer into the energy crystal ball for a glimpse of where our energy future lies—will we be able to cut our “addiction to oil” with alternative energies?—your guess is as good as the experts’. Who knows? My advice is to listen to what Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein: “Follow the money.” Energy is really big business. If the measure of success was the excellence of our products, we’d all be watching tapes on Betamax systems and using Macintosh computers. But money speaks louder than words and ideas.
Any change to our oil addiction will take years, if not decades, to bear fruit. And such changes, at least in the United States, may well hinge on what the person in the Oval Office feels are important to his or her goals. Remember, as a warrior battling the oil embargo, Jimmy Carter was very proud of the solar panels he put up on the roof of the White House. He started America down the road of energy conservation, with an effort to rally the troops against foreign oil with the battle cry “Conservation is the moral equivalent of war.”
But no sooner had he gotten the ball rolling than along came the next president, Ronald Reagan, who, in one of his first acts, ripped the solar panels off the roof of the White House. Take that!
So much for alternative energy! So much for what you think we should be doing. Who knows what the next resident of the White House will think about George W. Bush’s energy policy and what that person will do to change it. Incidentally, at just about the same time that Carter had realized that our reliance on foreign oil was an albatross, Brazil began a national program to convert its cars to burn alcohol instead of gasoline. Brazil has become so highly successful at doing that, planting and harvesting sugar cane (at the expense of the rain forest, unfortunately), that at the time this book was written, Brazil was virtually energy independent, no longer a fossil fuel–based economy. Thanks to flex-fuel cars. Brazilian drivers can choose to fill their tanks with 100 percent alcohol or a blend of alcohol and gasoline. And because they grow their fuel, they can replenish their source every year.
Imagine if the United States had gone down that road—and stayed on it—where its economy would be today.
Worth watching is the path that individual states take. Many of them, such as California and New York, are not waiting for Washington, D.C., to satisfy the dictates of the lobbyists. Instead, they are moving ahead independently, as California did to set automobile energy efficiency and greenhouse gas pollution standards. And as New York does to develop ethanol, not from corn—which yields very little net energy—but from willow trees. More on that later…
And Texas, of all places, has taken the lead in developing wind energy. By installing more and more wind turbines, Texas has now surpassed trendsetting California as the number one installer of wind-energy megawatts. If there is a story about individual states taking up the alternative energy slack, it is in wind energy. From New York to Kansas, from California to Massachusetts, state after state is realizing that it can slowly narrow its dependence on foreign oil by installing wind generators. And farmers are finding that they can make a huge profit by leasing their land to utilities that will install wind turbines on their acreage. Farmers can’t get them built fast
enough, and they can be installed very quickly, in a matter of weeks. The only problem the farmers face is what to do with their excess wind-produced electricity. With no national electric grid to tap into, farmers in the Midwest, in states such as Kansas, are left with surplus power potential. All dressed up with no place to go. Why not extend the grid to these homegrown energy producers? Ask your local politician.
So with your indulgence, I will attempt to tiptoe through the energy minefield and concentrate as much as possible on the science and technology. But be ready to ingest, along with the ABC’s of energy, a hearty helping of politics and personal opinion. Energy is what drives everything, so it reaches into every aspect of our lives. Everyone has a stake, business and personal, in its future. But without a unified direction, without leadership to unite the disparate priorities, we will continue down a road of conflicting ideas and personal interests.
The grass stretched as far as the eye could see, and hundreds more miles beyond that. An ocean of grass—deep enough to swallow a horse and rider—swaying and singing in the steady wind of the Great Plains.
—OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY
In sports, they say, “Let’s go to the videotape.” In science, they say, “Let’s look at the research.” In both cases, it’s a call to cut through the rhetoric and take a closer look at the facts. And the fact is that the United States is rushing headlong into turning its crops, especially corn, into fuel. Lester Brown, an economist who’s president and founder of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, calls it a stampede.
“The U.S. started the grain-to-ethanol program back in the late ’70s after the two hikes in the world price of oil. And up until recently these biofuel programs—either ethanol or biodiesel—have been supported and driven by various incentives. For example, the 52-cent-a-gallon tax subsidy for ethanol production in the United States.
“But as the price of oil has climbed over the last year or so, it has become hugely profitable to convert agricultural commodities into fuel, and since everything we eat essentially can be converted either into ethanol or biodiesel, we’re seeing an emerging competition now between the ethanol distilleries in this country, for example, and feed lots and food processors. And this is quickly becoming worldwide because of the prominent position the U.S. plays in the world food economy.”
Market forces have taken over, says Brown, “so we’re getting this stampede, almost a gold rush sort of mentality for investors wanting to build ethanol distilleries because they’re so profitable. No one is really in control now. The market is driving the process.”
Take Iowa, he says, our leading corn-producing state. “If all of the distilleries now in production plus those under construction and in the planning stages are completed, it will take the entire corn harvest of Iowa just to operate them.
“I don’t think most people realize how much grain it takes to run an automobile,” notes Brown, “but the grain required to fill a twenty-five-gallon SUV [sports utility vehicle] tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year. So if we’re looking at filling the tank every two weeks or so, then we’re looking at one SUV consuming the grain in the form of ethanol that would feed twenty-six people for a year. It doesn’t take a lot of cars running on ethanol before you really begin to encroach on the food supply. I’m not saying let’s close down the ethanol distilleries. What I am suggesting is that we need to take inventory. I think the first thing we need to do is for the administration to quickly do a tally of how many ethanol distilleries are in operation, under construction, and in the planning stage and then see how much grain that’s going to take.
“The big risk is that we’ll be using so much grain for cars in this country that there won’t be enough for the rest of world, and the world depends heavily on us. So this competition between food and fuel is becoming very real, and the world is simply not prepared for it.”
Secondly, says Brown, our best bet for developing ethanol is not to use food crops to produce it but to use other plants that we don’t eat, such as “switchgrass or some agricultural residues or wood chips that will not compete directly with the food supply.”
Food-based biofuels can meet but a small portion of our appetite for oil and gas for our cars and trucks. “If we were to convert our entire grain harvest in the United States into ethanol to run cars, it would supply something like sixteen percent of our total fuel needs.” What’s the solution? Make fuel out of plants—or parts of the plant—that we don’t eat.
CELLULOSIC BIOMASS
The fibrous, woody, and generally inedible portions of plants are called cellulosic biomass. They contain cellulose, hemicellulose, and a component of the plant cell walls called lignin. It’s all that woody stuff that we would normally throw away, and there’s lots of it. It’s the stalks and leaves of corn left behind after you take the cob. It’s the tree limbs or vegetation removed to reduce forest fire hazards or the brush you clear from your ranch or backyard. It’s the wood chips or sawdust from lumber-and paper-processing mills that normally get thrown away. It’s wood or paper products and the grass clippings and food scraps you put into your compost heap.
All of it can be converted into a variety of high-value fuels: ethanol, biodiesel, methanol, hydrogen, or methane. And much of it can be renewed—grown again—and harvested in fields or even vacant lots.
“If you get your ethanol from cellulose, it’s just a really exciting big winner on both sides,” says Dan Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory and codirector of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. “We have a huge amount of biowaste in this country.” For example, sawmills, says Kammen, waste a lot of wood. About a third of the material from a tree ends up on the cutting-room floor.
“All that stuff is potential crop matter. Lots of the residues from different farm products are also potential products. And so we’ve got already in this country a very large resource of unused cellulose that we could make into ethanol without even converting one
more acre of land into a bio-energy crop. We haven’t even begun to explore how much of our current waste stream we could put into this.”
