[Lester Brown, the maverick ecologist, visited Delhi for the release of his latest book, Plan 3.0, in 2008. I interviewed him with two colleagues. We discovered that we had almost passed by each other in 1956: on his first trip to India, his boat got through the Suez Canal just before it was blocked by Abdul Gamal Nasser; mine just got to Aden when the canal was closed, and my boat to England went round the Cape of Good Hope . We got on very well. Here is a transcript of our conversation. It was published in the Telegraph of 1 July 2008]
INTERVIEW WITH LESTER BROWN
AD: In your career of 50 and more years, have you ever gone wrong in a major way?
LB: Yes! In 1996, when I was president of Worldwatch, we got a call from the office of the German Environment Minister who was coming to town saying she'd like to have a meeting. So I went over to the hotel where she was staying to meet with her. It was a great meeting, very informal, talking about global environmental issues. Then a couple of weeks later, i got a letter from her asking if I'd be interested in co-authoring a book on global environmental issues. But I had a bunch of deadlines because of my work at Worldwatch. I knew if I tried another major project, I'd go over the edge. So I wrote back and declined. But now that Angela Merkel is Chancellor of Germany... (laughs). So, that's my big mistake. I have a file for big mistakes and that's where that one goes. But I take solace from the fact that if indeed we had written a book together, she probably wouldn't be chancellor of germany!
She's had a really remarkable career. One, she's east german; two, she's a woman and she came into politics maybe 15 years ago and worked her way up through the system. She's also interesting because not too may politicians have a PhD in Physics. So you can talk science to her and you don't have to draw pictures. She gets it. It's remarkable. The only other politician with a similar career is Marina XXXXX, who recently resigned as environment minister in Brazil. She's been environment minister since Lula became President. She was born in a rubber tapper’s family in the Amazon. At age 16, she got a job as a domestic for a well-to-do family not far from where she'd grown up. That's when she learned to read. At age 35, she was the youngest member of the Brazilian senate. Can you imagine learning to read when you're 16? And then having a political career?
AD: You haven't co-authored too many collaborative books. Most of them are your own. It is very difficult to write with someone isn't it?
LB: Well, for two reasons. One, you have to mesh your thinking and that can be a time-consuming and frustrating process. There's also a matter of efficiency. Some people aspire to be writers; I never wanted to be a writer. I still don't. It's just that there are some ideas you want to share with people. But I don't really write, I dictate everything. That's partly because I never learned to type. As long as I have someone to transcribe, my career will come along.
SN: You never learned to type?
LB: No, never. I was a farmer and I was going to be a tomato farmer the rest of my life. In late 1956 I came to India under the International Farm Youth Exchange Program and went back and grew tomatoes for a couple more years with my brother. We were marketing that year a million and half pounds of tomatoes. So we'd put together a fairly substantial operation. But I realised that I really wanted to work on the world's food and population problems. So I went to Washington to join the farm agriculture service in the US department of agriculture in 1959; and have been in Washington ever since.
AD: Tomatoes are a very labour-intensive crop...
LB: They are indeed. When you're planting, you've got to move really quickly. At harvest of course it's really labour-intensive. For a million and a half tomatoes it takes a lot of labour. So we hired classmates and housewives who wanted short-term pay. And we brought in, under contract, Puerto Ricans and blacks from nearby cities who wanted summer-time work on farms. This was in southern New Jersey. That's where I was born and that's where I grew up.
The other sort of amusing thing to me is you hear people who say they were the first from their family to graduate from college, I was the first in my family to graduate from elementary school!
AD: Incredible!
LB: It's amazing. I think my father got to fifth grade. He was a hired hand on a farm and then we sharecropped for a few years. He was too old for the draft in World War 2. So we were farming during the war when prices weren't very good. Even then we were sharecropping. And we accumulated enough cash to buy a small farm of our own. So that's where we finished growing up and that was the base. My brother and I, who is three years younger than I am, we learned management very early. It turns out that management is the same whether you're growing tomatoes or managing a research institute. The challenge is to get good people and then give them the leeway to unfold and develop their skills.
AD: Your first degree was in agriculture, right?
LB: Yes, agricultural science. When you think about, at that time there were no environmental science majors. I mean, environmental science didn't exist. Because I was going to be a farmer, I took a lot of agricultural courses; there was a major called general agricultural science. But I had a scholarship so I took a lot of other courses – sort of like a kid in a candy store. And when you think about the array of courses, it's about as close as you could get to environmental science without actually being in environmental science. I took chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry, physics, soil physics, entomology, plant pathology, meteorology, climatology, geology.
AD: That's really broad...
LB: Yeah, it provided a really broad, at least rudimentary familiarity with basic science, which is good for farming, and that's what I had in mind.
PF: That's still eight or ten years before Rachel Carlson's Silent Spring came out and sparked off the environmental movement...
LB: Right. It was an evolutionary sort of thing. I was working in the department of agriculture on international issues. I began in the Asia branch. After a period, I became the administrator of the international agricultural development service, which was the technical assistance arm of the US dept. of agriculture. And we'd work with USAID program. Then, I was the youngest agency head in the US government. But before that when I was in the department, I was working on countries in Asia, my goal was to get to know world agriculture. I learned time management very early. So I brought that same work ethic to the department.
AD: You're very efficient. You produce a lot...
LB: I suppose. By some standards at least. But I also enjoy what I'm doing. I enjoy the analytical challenges. They intrigue me. The exciting thing is to discover new linkages; how issues and problems relate to each other. That's something that you don't get with more traditional academics, when all your degrees are in one field. I really enjoy the analysis. The writing is not as exciting.
AD: The process of discovery...
LB: Yes.
AD: You read a lot. You pick the most unexpected sources in your books. Do you look for things which you are not familiar with?
LB: It's a combination of things. I read a lot and in many different fields. My colleagues at the Earth Policy Institute feed me a steady flow of articles and information. We have a staff of eight, five do research. So the others in various ways, sort of support the research I do. They also do their own things but they don't do books. So we do come across a very rich variety of things that are part of the analysis that we do.
AD: Your initial interest was in agriculture. When was it that you broadened out into energy and the environment? Was it the oil crisis?
LB: I'd been head of the international development service at the department of agriculture from 1966 to 1969. When Nixon won and took office in January, I resigned the day before. As an agency head, I was politically expendable and also, I did not particularly want to work in the Nixon administration. That's when I helped Jim Grant start the overseas development council, so I worked on issues across the board. Over five years, I began to sense the need for a research institute that would focus on global environmental issues. By chance, one afternoon at a conference in Aspen, late in the afternoon after the conference was finished, there Jim and me in the swimming pool and the other happened to be executive vice president of the Rockefeller Brothers ? foundation. We got talking and we each sensed the need for a research institute on global environmental issues. One thing led to another and the Rockefeller fund gave us a half million dollars as start-up and that's how the Worldwatch Institute was formed. I was there for 26 years, moved from President to Chairman and then realised I had a lot of things I still wanted to do. So I started the Earth Policy Institute as a place to do those things.
AD: Why did you come to India the first time?
LB: I had been nominated for the International farm youth exchange program from New Jersey in 1956, the year after I graduated from Rutgers. It was decided that someone should come to India. And, it was an interesting experience in that I had never been out of the country before. We sailed from New York to Bombay. It was New York to Naples on a ship called Queen Frederica and from Naples to Bombay through the Suez on an Italian ship called the Victoria.
AD: Yes, Lloyd Triestino!
LB: You've been on it?
AD: Yes.
LD: And the Victoria was the sister ship, as you remember to the Andrea Doria, that went down off the coast of Massachusets in the late spring. We were sailing in late August! So we were well aware of the risk.
AD: Did you have a good storm in the Indian ocean?
LB: No, but in the Atlantic! As we were leaving New York, I got caught in Hurricane Betsy that was coming up the East coast. I remember the third day, when I came down for breakfast, only four people had showed up!
AD: You get automatic exercise with the ship going up and down and up and down...!
LB: (Laughs) I remember looking out the porthole; you'd go down and see waves, then go up and see clouds!
AD: Yes, you stood at one end and you could see the sea right over the funnel!
LB: It was amazing.
AD: I travelled the first time when I went to England; the Suez crisis broke out just as we entered the Red Sea. So we had to go right around Africa, stopping in Durban and Capetown. That's where we had a terrific storm.
LD: So you were sailing in October 1956?
AD: Yes! As you came through to India, I was going around Africa to England.
LD: Well, we took the ship through, and had tickets to go back. But obviously, by December, you couldn't. So we took a flight to Europe because we were catching the SS United States from Southampton to New York.
AD: Where did you spend your time in India?
LB: I lived with three families. One was in a small village maybe 60 miles north of Nagpur called Pardi. And that was an interesting experience, because the last several miles we went by bullock cart to get to the village! The second one was near Trivandrum and the third was North of Lucknow. Not a typical village family, I was staying with the Raja of Mankapur at his palace! And it was really interesting because he had two modes of transport – a Buick and an elephant! So, depending on where we were going, we took the car or the elephant!
AD: So you had very varied experiences...
LB: Geographically too. A lot of interesting things happened. When we arrived in September in New Delhi for our orientation, there were ten of us actually; six men and four women. After we got to Delhi, we separated to each of our families and didn't see each other till we got back. We spent about a month with each family. But while we were in Delhi, I saw that India was having the wrestling finals to select the team to go to the Melbourne Olympics. So we went and because we were from abroad, we got ring-side seats. We got talking to some of the officials about US collegiate wrestling and its differences to the Olympics. There were two of us who'd wrestled - a guy called Armstrong from Oregon state and me. So after they'd selected their team, we were invited by the Indian officials to give an exhibition of American collegiate wrestling! They gave us some of the wrestling tights of the Indian wrestlers. We changed into these and did this exhibition. For some reason, it was in the newspapers! And so, as I went about India, to stay with all the families, the local wrestlers always wanted to challenge me to a bout! (Laughter).It was a good way to establish social contact and to sort of get to know people....
AD: You got very close to people!
LB: (Laughs), Indeed! And the interesting thing was that they didn’t have mats. They had these pits of sand. It was great fun though! But there were many interesting experiences living in the villages.
AD: Do you find India frustrating in the sense that the government is not terribly concerned about global warming or even about the running out of oil...
LB: No more so than the government of Washington. We're not very well prepared for what lies ahead. I think of peak oil...
AD: I got a feeling from reading your work that you think that the age of oil is going to be followed by an age of electricity. Is that right?
LB: To a substantial degree, yes. Electricity largely from renewables. One of the things I find so interesting about the oil situation, my sense is that we've either reached peak oil (it might have been last year), or we're if not, it's imminent. And the thing that's so fascinating and frustrating, is the projections of the International Energy Agency in Paris. They project that world oil demand will go from 85 million barrels today to 120 million barrels in 2030. And these are based economic growth and income changes and so forth. But then, the way they do the supply projects is what's surprising. They project demand and they assume that supply will match that demand! Because that's the way it's always been!
AD: What about prices? I mean, I just can't believe that the price elasticity of demand for oil is zero. That people will continue to consume as much oil as they do, whatever the price...
LB: There was an interruption in the growth in oil production after the price hikes of the 1970s. But then it resumed growth. For whatever reasons, they began with demand and they never, to the best of my knowledge, did any analysis of supply. Many geologists have been aware, for some time, that we're never going to reach even a hundred million barrels, much less 120 million. In my own thinking on this, I'm not an oil analyst, but one thing I did was to look at the 20 largest oil fields. And they were all discovered between 1914 and 1979, which means that the youngest of these really big oil fields, is almost 30 years old, with the others obviously much older. And that, to me, is the most convincing evidence that world oil production is not going to increase much longer. And it may, in fact, not increase at all.
In support of that, is the recent indication by a couple of different Russian officials that Russian oil production probably peaked in the last quarter of last year. In recent months, it's been going down. They don't see this as a temporary decline. They think this is probably it. If that's the case, then peak oil cannot be far away.
I have a feeling that the oil industry, which is reflected very much in the International Energy Agency and also in the international side of the Department of Energy in Washington, that neither the oil exporting countries or the oil production companies want the world to be fully informed and fully aware of the fact that oil fields are being depleted and production is not going to increase. Because, if it became clear that peak oil was imminent, there would be a flurry of activity to develop alternatives.
Up until a couple of years ago, oil companies and oil countries were saying “Don't worry, there's plenty of oil,” and suddenly everything has changed.
AD: Is it true that only 15 per cent of world oil production, now, is in the hands of oil companies.
LB: It's a very small amount; surprisingly small. I don't know the exact percentage, but I think that that number is consistent with my impression of where things are. Some of the oil companies are buying most of their oil now. And their share is getting smaller all the time because they're working their own fields pretty hard.
AD: So, as oil nationalism gets stronger, international distribution of oil will get less equal. So, while Saudi Arabia may continue to float in oil for some time, India may have to take many early steps to economise.
LB: One of the interesting things of peak oil, is that once we pass it, no country gets more oil, unless another gets less. And that world is very different from the one we spent our lives in, where oil production was almost always increasing so everyone got more oil. But that era is about to come to an end. I see this happening at about the same time that the world food situation is tightening. What we're seeing is the emergence of a politics of food scarcity. Exporting countries like Russia and Argentina - wheat exporters – restricting their exports or even banning exports for some months. And Vietnam, a rice exporter, not exporting any rice for several months, all in order to keep domestic prices under control. In response to this, importing countries are becoming very nervous and we're seeing what I think is a new chapter in world food security. For the first time, countries are looking for land in other countries. Libya, which imports 90 per cent of its great, has at least 100,000 hectares in the Ukraine on which to grow wheat and ship back. Egypt is working on a similar deal because they import close to half their grain. One reason they've been able to do that is because the Libyans gave Ukraine some of their oil and Egypt did the same thing with natural gas. It was in Ukraine's interest to do this because they've been trying to get out of Russian control of oil and natural gas. So here we have an interesting intersection of the politics of oil and natural gas and food coming together.
AD: So Libya exports oil to Ukraine?
LB: I think what they've done is to give one of the Ukrainian companies access to their fields. I think there was a historical tie there that had been broken but they restored it. Other countries are doing the same thing. South Korea is looking for land in Siberia and in the Sudan and some others. They import 70 per cent of their grain. If they get land in Siberia, they will employ North Koreans to work on the land. This is cheap labour for them, but good for the North Koreans. Some entrepreneurs from India are looking for land in Uruguay and Paraguay; not huge sums – some 25,000 acres – to grow grain and oilseeds. China is looking everywhere; Myanmar, Kazakhstan, Philippines, Siberia, Brazil. The Chinese had actually signed an agreement with the Philippines for a million acres or something, to grow and ship back to China; probably mostly grain. Then the Philippines had trouble finding rice to import, and the deal was off. This deal had been worked out with a few Philippine government officials; sounds like one of those special deals.
AD: Yes, Philippines works like that; the President and the Army, and so on...
LB: Yes. So the government was forced to break that agreement because of all the political pressure. What is happening is that there will be a lot of bilateral deals working out between countries that are more affluent and have some special influence to work out long-term trade deals. This will work for the more affluent countries, but will leave out a lot of poor countries which, a year or two from now, will have to import grain and won't be able to find it. Then we're going to have a lot of desperate people in these countries. Desperate people do a lot of desperate things. They loot, they overthrow their governments, they migrate to more food secure countries. What we're beginning to see with more and more food insecurity is that more and more countries are looking after their own narrow self interest and that is potentially a dangerous thing for the world....
AD: Because the world market for food is breaking down...
LB: Yes! And it begins to weaken the network. The world works today because we have a network of functioning, cooperating nation states. Whether it's controlling the spread of infectious diseases or maintaining the integrity of the international monetary system and what have you, I mean there are so many things that depend on this cooperative mentality and mindset. With the community fracturing because of food shortages, it makes me feel uneasy.
AD: One could imagine the world going back to the 19th century with colonialism...
LB: That's one thing. But it could go much further than that. Because there'll be a number of countries, failing states, then the whole system could start to unravel.
AD: Failing states are also states that are ripe to be taken over.
PF: This is interesting because you find fractures happening over food, in energy supplies.... this sort of colonialism does seem to be returning. There are a bunch of books out that talk about what happens after American power weakens. Now you have the US, China and the EU...
AD: Well, it's natural. When people see a change coming...
LB: Especially changes that are threatening...
AD: Yes, it is natural for political scientists to think of models from the past. Colonialism is such a model. What will happen will not replicate what happened in the past. But we're just playing with different models. I think Lester is pointing out things that are already happening – countries taking tracts of land in other countries, sort of becoming 'landlords’.
SN: But what could stop these countries from snatching more land in case there is a food crisis?
LB: Your point is well taken. I think if there were a food shortage in the Ukraine, for example, and food prices rose, there would be political pressure on the government to nationalise the land and take it back.
PF: So effectively, multilateralism is dead...
AD: Well, markets are breaking up. That's already happened in food grains. The market is much less unified than it was 10 years ago. This is partly because the US had declined as the world's major food grain exporter. And that could be because of ethanol. Lester, is ethanol the most likely substitute for oil, or would something else emerge?
LB: From an agricultural point of view, the demand for auto fuel is insatiable. If the entire US grain harvest was converted into ethanol, it would answer maybe 16 per cent of our automotive fuel needs.
AD: So that's no solution. And, in fact, if you took the whole world's harvest, it would perhaps just about cover America's requirement, since American produces a seventh of the world's grain.
LB: About 1/5th. Yes, It would come close but certainly wouldn't make it. Keep in mind that it takes a certain amount of oil to produce the corn and ethanol. So it's not a net gain. To look at this at the micro level, the grain required to fill a 25 gallon SUV tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year. In a bushel of corn, there are about 2.5 gallons of ethanol. So, 25 gallons of ethanol would be 10 bushels which is about 600 pounds of grain. The average Indian consumes less than 1 pound of grain a day, so this tank full could feed 1 and a half indians a year. At the global level, where grain consumption is around 300 kgs a year, this would feed 1 person a year. So, it's not a solution. You mentioned electricity; my sense is we're going to move first in the US towards plug-in hybrid cars on one hand and wind farms on the other, which basically means our cars will run on wind power. This is a very exciting possibility, but the technologies are already out there. They're still wrestling with getting the wrinkles out of the batteries to get lithium ion batteries, but of the five companies coming to market, the winner will probably be Toyota or GM. Both have said they'll be in the market by 2010.
I have a feeling Toyota will try to do a plug-in version of the Prius. GM's Volt is a different kind of hybrid; it's got lithium ion batteries that are more advanced than the Prius's nickel metal hydrides. But The Volt is an electric car with an auxiliary gasoline engine that doesn't power the car. It generates electricity when the batteries drop below a certain point. GM expects the Volt, under typical driving conditions in the US, to get about 151 miles per gallon. The US fleet average is maybe 22 miles per gallon. I have a feeling this is a good bet technologically. It's simple. The Toyota hybrid is a remarkable piece of engineering where the motor and engine power the car at the same time. That's really a major achievement. The software that manages all that is also fairly complex. In fact, when Ford tried to get to market with a small SUV Hybrid, they couldn't get the software right. So they licensed Toyota's software for the Prius.
AD: So the end of oil need not lead to a contraction of transport.
LB: Need not, because countries everywhere have access to renewable energy. I mean, it might be wind, it might be geo-thermal, it might be solar, a certain amount of hydro power, these will be part of the equation. Wave power will find a place. We're still in the early stages of enormous potential there, especially for countries with long coastlines like India. But, I don't think the end of oil will necessarily be the end of automobiles. It may cause some contraction, but the energy to run cars will be available. Texas is developing 23,000 megawatts of wind energy. That is enough to take off 23 coal fired power plants.
PF: Do you see hydrogen playing a major role? Shell and others have already invested billions in research. India too has some large-scale industrial experiments..
LB: Four or five years ago, it looked as though fuel cell automobiles were going to be the next thing. Especially since they were clean. You'd still have to produce the hydrogen, but in my model, at least, it would have been mostly wind energy for the US. But in the end, the advances in fuel cell technology have not occurred and they're still very costly; prohibitively so. I think that they're going to lose the race to plug-in hybrids or pure electrics will do it.
AD: So it's not an oil problem. It's an energy problem. And the energy problem is also to a large extent the green-house problem. There also, just as countries are not going to be able to agree easily on food or oil, here too, they will find it difficult to agree. We could live through an age of global warming.
LB: We may. It's hard to say. We're seeing in the US, the emergence of a powerful grassroots movement to ban the construction of coal- fired power plants. A year ago, there were 151 proposed new coal-fired power plants in the US; 59 of them are now off the list. This is either because state regulators refused to license them or because local opposition was so strong. Another 48 are being challenged in the courts largely on the grounds that the utilities did not do at least a cost-analysis of efficiency and they didn't look at renewables. We've been building gas-fired power plants, but the price of natural gas has gone so high, that the utilities automatically wanted to go back to what they knew best, which was coal-fired power plants. There's another 40 on that list that haven't been challenged because they haven't reached the permitting stage, but when they do, I think every one will be challenged.
Even Wall Street represented by three major banks – JP Morgan, Citibank and Morgan Stanley, issued a statement,
PF: The Carbon Principles...
LB: Right... saying basically that they would no longer fund coal-fired power plants. So Wall Street has turned its back on the coal industry. So it's quite possible that by the end of this year, we'd be close to a sort of de-factor moratorium on coal fired power plants in the US. And it's happened so fast. It's one of those political tipping points that once it started, it couldn't be stopped. The other interesting thing is that this is grassroots. It has nothing to do with Washington. What's interesting is that at no point has this movement said “We're going to do this if the rest of the world does it.” They're just doing it. That, if we make it, is how it's going to be. It's not going to be internationally-negotiated agreements. Time will run out long before we succeed on that front. This to me is one of the most exciting things to happen. It could be our first big win in the effort to stabilise the Earth's climate. If this happens in the US, not that other countries will automatically follow, but it will influence the way the rest of the world thinks about this. And particularly if we get the kind of leadership in the White House that we need, we could see some really exciting things on that front.
PF: Could the next President pass something like the Lieberman-Warner Climate Change bill, that's looks unlikely to go through Congress?
LB: I think it will be much more ambitious than that. One of the things that I see in Obama that isn’t in Clinton or McCain, both of them are incrementalists. Obama is capable of taking bold steps and mobilising support for it. He's sufficiently charismatic. I think he can do that. I mean, we may be disappointed, but that's still my sense. When you think of what he's done, a year ago, the Clintons had donor lists from two Presidential campaigns, to New York senatorial campaigns; they knew everyone in the party who had money. Who could possibly take them on? Not only did Obama take them on, but he beat them decisively! It's amazing when you think about it. It's also interesting because, there was an interview on TV. A reporter was being interviewed on analysing the Primaries. She'd gone to observe a corporate executive training program. The speaker on that occasion was the CEO of the company and he was talking to the trainees. He said, “If you want to look at a good model of modern management, look at the Obama campaign. And I say that as a lifelong Republican. That's the way to do it.”
