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I recently read The Green Collar Economy, by Van Jones (with a forward by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.). I think President Obama must have read it too, since the ideas he’s been talking about lately for fixing the economy are basically the same as what Jones sets out in his book. This is a good thing, in my opinion. Here are the main points from this book:

• The US is spending about $1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion dollars by the US definition of “trillion”, or 1 billion by the British definition of “billion” — 1 million million either way) per year to subsidize the coal and oil industries. The book doesn’t give any documentation on how it got this number, but if it’s true, I can only ask: Why?
• Given that burning oil, natural gas, and coal contributes to global warming and other pollution problems, that the supplies of these resources is finite, and that dependence on foreign oil is a major security issue, we need to move towards not burning these fuels at all.
• We can replace the energy coming from coal and oil with geothermal, wind, and solar energy (see my previous post on energy for more on that idea), in conjunction with a move towards better efficiency and sustainable food production.
• The following public policy shifts are needed, in order to make this happen:
  • Stop subsidizing oil and coal
  • Introduce a “cap and trade” system that will cap carbon emissions in the US at current levels, decreasing the cap every year on a pre-determined schedule (so that industry can plan ahead), and set up a system for companies to trade their carbon cap credits.
  • Streamline electricity transmission rules, so that any electricity producer is guaranteed access to the local grid everywhere, while owners of transmission lines and local grids are compensated for their use (similar to the access to local telephone lines from the Telecommunications Act of 1996).
  • Modernize the electric grid, adding high-voltage long-distance trunk DC transmission lines, better control software, and battery storage facilities, so that solar and wind-generated electricity can be effectively generated when and where the sun and wind hit, and used when and where it is most needed. The estimated cost of this modernization is about the same as the 1-year oil and coal subsidy mentioned above, and as with the telecommunications modernization that led to our current Internet backbones, if access is guaranteed, private investment may pay for a significant portion of this cost.
  • Subsidize efficiency and sustainability, ranging from home and building lighting/heating/insulation improvements to mass transit to organic food production.
• Jones and Kennedy believe this will not only improve the environment, but also significantly improve the economy. They cite examples of Sweden and Iceland, which have both significantly reduced their use of oil and coal, and whose economies are booming as a result. Jones also points out that many of the “green collar” jobs generated by these programs would pay a decent wage, be attainable by people with a high-school education (with a little training), and be impossible to outsource (things like installing solar panels and weatherizing buildings have to be done here in the US).
• Jones also advocates for an approach that is based on principles of equal protection and equal opportunity: making sure that this environmental movement includes, protects, and creates jobs in lower-income areas as well as among the more affluent.

President Obama apparently wants something very much like this plan to be put into effect, and the economic stimulus plan being signed today contains at least some of these ideas. I’ll be interested to see what comes next.

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World leaders are finally realizing that we’re facing a food crisis: they’re currently having a meeting in Rome to discuss it, and UN chief Ban Ki-moon recently stated that we need to grow 50% more food by 2030 to satisfy needs (I believe this is a conservative estimate). This is not much of a surprise to me — I mentioned the upcoming food crisis in my earlier article on biofuels, and it’s also related to the energy situation I discussed before that . Both the energy and food crises-to-be are largely due to a combination of a world population that is growing quite fast (expected to double by 2050), and a rise in the standard of living in some parts of the world (people with higher standards of living tend to use more energy and consume more food). This growth is not sustainable, as far as I can tell.

It has been suggested that to make our way of life more sustainable, we ought to shop locally (see my previous blog entry for discussion). But yesterday I read an article in Science news, based on a study published in Environmental Science and Technology, that I thought made an interesting point: the type of food we eat has a much greater environmental impact than how far it has traveled to reach us, at least in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. The study authors looked carefully at all parts of the process by which we obtain food, and found that the bulk of the greenhouse gases (83%) came from food production, with only 7% from farm-to-store transportation. Therefore, switching to buying only locally-produced food doesn’t really address the bulk of the problem. Instead, we need to think about the production phase: we can get about the same reduction in greenhouse gases by replacing red meat and dairy products with chicken, fish, eggs, grains, or vegetables just one day per week, as we can by buying all of our food locally. This has other benefits as well, in terms of the food crisis: a lot of the grain we grow is fed to animals to produce a much smaller amount of meat and dairy products, so shifting to eating the grains directly can also help alleviate the food crisis. Maybe we’ll all need to become vegetarians soon?

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Lately, I have been hearing a lot of politicians promoting biofuels, mainly biodiesel and bioethanol. They seem to believe that biofuels are going to play a major role in solving our upcoming energy crisis, but logic and science do not support that idea. I gave a few reasons in my earlier article on the coming energy crisis, and an article I just read in Science News adds even more. Here are some thoughts:

• We need to generate more energy. The world’s population is growing, and per capita energy use is increasing as the developing world raises its average standard of living. Experts estimate we will need to approximately double the world’s energy production by 2050.
• Biofuels are really a means of transferring energy, not generating energy. Scientists who carefully calculate the energy used in planting, fertilizing, harvesting, transporting, and refining biofuels find that it takes nearly as much (or in some cases more) energy to create the biofuels as the biofuels contain. So, we can use biofuels as a means of transferring energy from one form to another, but we cannot really use them as a means of generating energy.
• We need to grow more food. As the world’s population grows, we will clearly need to produce more food in order to feed the population (unless we all convert to vegetarianism, which would allow us to eat food currently being used to feed farm animals).
• Biofuel crops are grown on agricultural land. If we want to produce biofuels, we will need to either convert food-crop land to fuel-crop land, or convert non-agricultural land to fuel-crop land.
• Biofuels use a large amount of land. For instance, if we converted an entire year’s U.S. corn production to bioethanol, we could only replace only 6% of the year’s U.S. gasoline consumption.
• 35% of the earth’s ice-free land is already used for agriculture. Converting more land to agriculture means cutting down forests. This is already happening in Brazil, which is converting Amazon rain forest to sugar cane production for bioethanol.

Given the above, I cannot see any reason to devote resources to developing biofuels. We cannot afford to use land for growing biofuel crops, and biofuels are not a significant net generator of energy anyway. How can we bring this to the attention of the public and our politicians?

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