Saving Civilization: Lester Brown at I-House

By Alexander Naylor

Two weeks ago I reviewed Jerry Taylor’s talk on energy policy, which provided an economic conservative’s view on energy policy. Although Lester Brown, founder of both the Worldwatch and Earth Policy Institutes, definitely falls on the more liberal end of the spectrum, that wasn’t the driving point of his talk. Unlike Taylor, who started with a basic axiom of social organization (free markets are good) and then deduced from there, Brown started by taking a look at how our world actually is.

For Brown, the main issue facing global civilization today is not energy, but food. At this point I braced myself—too often when we hear about food as an issue it’s about how we are not eating organically and locally enough, and coming from a background in the geography of development such talk seems incredibly small, having studied agriculture, famine and water shortages over such broad swaths of land as Xinjiang or the Sahel. Brown, however, completely blew away my concerns about scale, beginning by talking about the global trade in grains.

Brown went deeper than this, though—he noted that we eat something like 2000 liters of water a day, mostly due to the fact that plants are made out of water and carbon dioxide (remember 6CO2+6H2O=C6H12O6+CO2?). The global trade in grain, then, can be seen as a global trade in water—countries short of water import grain, and countries with a surplus export (like the US, the largest grain exporter).

Saudi Arabia formerly imported most of its grain. For security reasons, in the 1970’s they started literally drilling for water in deep aquifers, much as they would drill for oil, to irrigate their crops (pictured). For twenty years Saudi Arabia was actually self-sufficient in wheat, but last year they started scaling back production due to depletion of the aquifer. By 2016 the water will run out and they’ll be back to importing grain again.

The Saudis are something of a unique case because they tapped what’s known as fossil water—water that was stuck in an aquifer millennia ago and isn’t being replenished. Even so, many of the world’s water resources are overdrawn, in large part due to the more water-intensive diets that come with increasing wealth and continued population growth. This is especially true in the world’s largest grain producers: India and China.

This is reason enough for concern—things only get worse when we take into account the effects of global warming. Rising sea levels would disrupt rice production in Southeast Asia. The depletion of glaciers would threaten China and India’s major rivers, and thus their extensive irrigation systems. Americans cannot shut off grain exports, as we did in the 1970’s—the world is now too interconnected economically for that. Grain prices will rise, and hunger will follow.

With hunger, Brown noted, comes political instability. He compared the “nation building” of the 1950’s and ’60’s—the peak of decolonization—with the comparatively new term “failed state.” What will happen to global politics if more states go along that route? When one person asked Brown if northerly Russia could be a potential “winner” from global warming, his reply was grim—how can any country win if global civilization is collapsing?

Brown urged that we abandon the term “sustainability”—it’s not an easy word to rally around—and move towards “saving civilization.” Invoking the collapse of ancient civilizations, he noted the stress on water resources, and consequently food production, threatens to upset our entire world system. And the best way to prevent future threats, he noted, was by addressing the problem of climate change and keeping the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide down. As Brown recalled half-facetiously suggesting to the Chinese government, there needs to be a phone line between the departments of energy and agriculture.

Fortunately for the audience’s nerves, Brown was pretty optimistic on this point. He noted that activists have been incredibly successful in blocking construction of most proposed coal-powered electrical power plants in the US, leaving increases in efficiency and the expansion of wind power to pick up the projected growth in consumption. He also noted that technologies seem to be developing on their own accord—Los Angeles is installing highly efficient light-emitting diodes into its streetlights, a private consortium of European (plus one Algerian) firms is looking to generate solar electricity in Algeria for export to Europe, Texas has installed the equivalent of 53 coal-powered plants in wind turbines and the production of wind energy in China is growing exponentially.

Brown was not naïve enough to think this could all happen on its own, though. He hoped that we would have a “sandwich” model of sustainable energy adoption, with activists and entrepreneurs at the bottom and government at the top simultaneously working to make a new economy. There need to be big federal initiatives in improving our electrical grid and pricing carbon (Brown, like John Rowe last spring, advocated a carbon tax combined with a reduction in income taxes).

Brown’s message didn’t have little “what you can do” items besides improvements in lighting. As opposed to the gimmickry of many low-impact schemes, Brown’s “Plan B” recognizes that the problems we are facing are of too large a scale for any individual to act upon. In a bit of perhaps paradoxical optimism, he noted that such global agreements of Copenhagen are “obsolete”—such agreements are always “minimalist” by nature, and as the halting of coal plant construction in the US and expansion of wind power in China demonstrate, big actions usually come from outside of bureaucratic conferences. The most effective thing we can do is to become politically active, pressuring policy makers to mirror and encourage the innovation currently going on at the private and grassroots levels. After all, one cannot make a sandwich with just one piece of bread.