Janet Larsen, Director of Research at the Earth Policy Institute discusses 'Plan B 3.0 – Mobilizing to Save Civilization'

Janet is a co-author of a book called, ‘The Earth Policy Reader’, which tells us about how the global economic accounting system does not account for ecological deficits such as overfishing and unsustainable logging, and the large economic cost we suffer as a consequence.

Janet Larsen podcast

download

Transcript

Scott Bilby: We are looking forward this morning to talk to Janet Larsen, Director of Research at the Earth Policy Institute. She is a co-author of a book called, ‘The Earth Policy Reader’, which tells us about how the global economic accounting system does not account for ecological deficits such as overfishing and unsustainable logging, and the large economic cost we suffer as a consequence.

She's also written on natural resource availability, about population growth, and global warming. Prior to this, Janet worked at Worldwatch Institute, providing research for the State of the World series of publications.

Today, we will be speaking with Janet about a subject similar to last week’s guest. Last week we had Amory Lovins, you’d remember, who told us about the huge energy efficiency gains we can make, and some nations and businesses are already making large economic gains based on energy efficiency (already). He also told us about the superiority of renewable energy over fossil fuel energy, especially when you consider externalities and perverse subsidies, if they’re all calculated well. He also told us how uneconomic nuclear power is.

Anyway, a similar range of topics are covered in a book that Janet has co-authored and it's called Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. This book follows on from the influential book Plan B 2.0, released in 2006. Plan B 3.0 outlines how we can make the greenhouse gas cuts necessary to avoid dangerous effects from climate change.

As we know, burning fossil fuel and destroying forests are causing a large release of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. We’ve already passed one tipping point, which is the melting of the Arctic sea ice. Hopefully we can bring that back as soon as we can by reducing emissions. Now, we passed that tipping point some 30-40 years ago, and atmospheric concentrations at the time where about 350 ppm CO2. We’re now at about 385 ppm and getting higher and higher. So, we’re hovering on the threshold of more tipping points, such as the Greenland ice sheet, the permafrost and the West Antractic ice sheet.

In response to this, the Earth Policy Institute’s Plan B outlines a plan to cut net carbon dioxide emission by 80% by the year 2020.

Hello Janet.

Janet Larsen: Hello.

Scott: Thank you for joining us from Washington DC.

Janet: Thank you very much. I am glad to be talking with you.

Scott: Given your knowledge base and the fact that the Earth Policy Institute is located in Washington DC, I guess it is both appropriate and timely to get your thoughts on some early statements on energy efficiency that have been made by the newly inaugurated President Barack Obama. So, here’s my question; how do you react to his aim to reduce the energy intensity of the U.S economy by 50% by 2030, and how far short of Plan B does this fall?

Janet: Well, I think I should start off by saying that we’re very, very excited to have someone now in the White House who takes climate change seriously. He understands the science and has acknowledged it's real. He gave a recorded message to a number of state governors at the end of last year at a symposium put together by the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, where he did not at all mince words and talked about climate change and our energy dependence on fossil fuels as being priorities to tackle. So, we are very, very excited to have an ally.

But of course, just because we have someone who understands climate in the White House doesn't mean we sit back and relax. There is always more that can be done. The targets that you mentioned for reducing energy intensity in the United States would be a first step, but they fall short of the full-on wartime mobilisation that we call for in Plan B 3.0.

Scott: That war-footing that's been spoken about by a few people, and can you just basically tell our audiences about the kind of World War 2 analogy?

Janet: Well, certainly. Sometimes social change happens rather gradually, and other times it happens immediately. You go to bed one night and you wake up, and you’re in a new world and it's that latter case that is what happened in the United States back in 1941, December 7th, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. Before that point, most Americans were rather reluctant to get involved in a massive war being fought on the far sides of two distant oceans. They didn't feel affected, and there was very little public support to get involved.

After Pearl Harbour was bombed, one month later, President Roosevelt could stand before the country giving his State of the Union address and in that address he announced this incredibly ambitious arms production goals. He said we’re going to produce 45,000 tanks, 60,000 planes, 20,000 anti-aircraft guns and 6 million tons of merchant shipping. These are enormous numbers and after that he called in the leaders of the American auto manufacturing companies and he said, ‘we’re going to need all your capacity to help us achieve these goals’, and apparently the leaders of these companies hem’d and hahhed and said, ‘well you know, Mr President, we will do our best. That will be difficult, but you know, we are making these cars, but we’re going to try’. And his reply was along the lines of, ‘You don't understand. We’re not going to be producing any cars. We’re going to be devoting all of our resources to this war effort.’.

And indeed between early 1942 and 1944, there were essentially no cars produced in this country, but instead they were churning out planes and tanks, and toy factories started manufacturing compasses, and spark plug factories were churning out machine guns. Those that made corsets were then making grenade belts. So, we, in just a matter of months, we completely restructured the U.S economy. And this is kind of massive and rapid scale restructuring that we're saying we need to confront the challenges we're facing today. Mainly, this is what we need to do to stop climate change from spinning out of control.

Scott: At Beyond Zero, our audience has heard about these sorts of plans, where we need to make this transformation very quickly and Beyond Zero Emissions has actually been asked to develop some plans for the Victoria and Australia-wide on stationary energy, etc. Now, this plan that you have, I have been reading a bit about it and Plan B 2.0, which is the book that came out previously, this Plan B 3.0 is a book that builds on that, can you just basically describe - just quickly for the audience, what Plan B 3.0 is? What the components of Plan B 3.0 are all about?

Janet: Sure. In Plan B 3.0, and it’s called Plan B on the notion that Plan A, that is business as usual, is not working. So, we need a new plan.

Plan B has four major goals. Number one, it’s to stabilise population. Two, to eradicate poverty. Three, to restore Earth's damaged ecosystem, and number four is to stabilise climate.

That climate goal we’re calling for is a worldwide cut in carbon emissions by 80% by 2020. And that’s the important part. Here in U.S, we often hear people talking about people cutting carbon emissions 80% by 2050, and when they’re talking about that it seems like they are asking the question, ‘what can we get through congress? What’s politically feasible today?’. We’re saying the goal is 2020 because we think that’s not necessarily how much is politically feasible, but really that's how much looks to be necessary to give us the best chance of avoiding tipping points that you mentioned - to save the Greenland or the West Antractic ice sheets for instance.

Scott: Sure. Now, there has been a lot of general happiness and joy around the world at the fact that Obama got in, and people are looking expectantly to see what he will do over the coming year especially, and especially leading up to those Copenhagen talks at the end of this year. And he's been speaking about spending/investing $150 billion over the next 10 years to develop and deploy climate-friendly energy supplies, and we interviewed Richard Heinberg recently who is a peak-oil educator from the Post Carbon Institute, and on hearing that target he said to us that, ‘well, what we really need to be doing is spending hundreds of billions of dollars every single year, not over 10 years’. So, can you tell us about your thoughts on the sort of spending that U.S would need to meet the targets that you’re suggesting on cutting carbon emission?

Janet: Well, a lot of what our plan entails is one major investment in energy efficiency. The good news on energy efficiency is that it has very quick payback time. So, there will be money spent to do things upfront like weatherise home or buy more energy efficiency appliances, and in industry, we need to be making steel and plastics as efficiently as possible. That will take money upfront, but overall it pays itself back. On the household level, people find when they switch their light bulbs from traditional incandescent bulb to compact fluorescents, they use a quarter of the electricity and last ten years longer. They have a very quick payback time. So, that is money spent, but I wouldn't count that in the hundreds of billions because it gets paid back.

Then, the next step is to invest in renewable sources of energy, and we focus on solar, wind power and geothermal energy, but there will be smaller roles for ocean power and biomass. Now, these are areas where it will take a fair amount of investment, but the good news is that is not necessary taxpayer's money. That is, a lot of it is private capital going into renewable energy because people are realising that they can make an awful lot of money by building wind farm or solar farm because once you put up the infrastructure your fuel is free. So, you’re creating a kind of energy system that can last for a very long time. So, while there is investment needed, it's not necessary all going to be coming from taxpayers.

Now, there will be some government money going in, namely; our renewable energy industry right now is competing against fossil fuels, which are very heavily subsidised. So, in order to level the playing field, sure we’re going to be spending money on investment tax credits or production tax credits. But a lot of the capital is coming from private sources and what we need to do is to really figure out how to get the market to tell the truth; correct these current market failures.

So, when you're burning fossil fuels you're emitting carbon into the air. That needs to have a price on it, so that is also a way to generate money that can go into some of these other things. So, the investment is massive, but it's not going to all come out taxpayers’ pockets necessarily.

Scott: And I guess that, as you say, the taxpayer is already funding vast amounts of those kind of perverse incentives to fossil fuel industries who continue to pollute. And I guess once, if we can start to remove that if possible and if we can also, well just by removing alone, I am sure that renewable energy would become very cost competitive.

Janet: Exactly. In some markets in the United States, already wind power [price] has fallen below conventional power, in part because wind power is getting cheaper, but also natural gas is getting more expensive. But there are couple of places where the path lines have already crossed, and I think what’s appealing to a lot of businesses that are trying to sign contracts to get electricity from wind is that they can sign a twenty year, fixed-price contract. You can't do that with fossil fuels like natural gas because nobody know exactly how the price is going to fluctuate. But with something like wind, you know the fuel cost, it is basically free. So, it is very, very appealing to companies that are carefully guarding their bottom line.

I should mention on the investment front; one thing that will take government investment and likely government co-ordination is strengthening our national grid so that our electrical grid can handle distributed power because every state in the United States, and virtually every country in the world, has wind energy or has solar energy, it’s not always located right where the population centres are. So, that is a place where the government will have to co-ordinate and invest money, is upgrading that grid, and that is something that has been acknowledged by the President Obama and his administration.

Scott: Well, that’s good to hear, and so it’s good to hear also that we’ve got an ‘economic tipping point’ appearing in favour of wind energy over conventional energy. Let’s hope that solar energy is not far behind that too, and it can come out to the open once and for all that not just on an environmental ground, but on an economical ground as well, renewable energy is basically the only way to go.

Janet: Exactly. You know, most of the businesses investing are not doing it to save the planet. They’re doing it to make a good investment and it just makes such great economical sense, if you can sign a 20-year contract for fixed price, it’s hard to beat that.

Scott: Well, yes, and when we were speaking to Amory Lovins, he gave quite a number of examples including Du Pont and all manner of big companies that are doing exactly what you said. They're making energy efficiency, an area they're making big saving on, because energy efficiency, just like renewable energy, is an area where you can make money out of that. In Australia for example, our government, both federal and state, have been constantly telling us that these things are uneconomic and stuff like that, and we’ve been fed so much nonsense because we’re such a coal-dominated economy but it's good to hear people coming out and saying, ‘No, the opposite is true.’

Janet: It's amazing.

Scott: I’d also like to talk to you about um; it’s also obvious that in switching to renewable energy in the United States that the United States will reduce its dependence on foreign oil, and Obama has also made statements to that effect, and he wants to reduce consumption by (it says here) at least 35% by the year 2030. Now, I’ve heard that the U.S can quite easily reduce its consumption of oil and its dependency on foreign oil by a much greater degree than that by 2030. So, do you think that Obama's target there is a little bit too conservative?

Janet: Oh, I think we could beat that several times over. The President Obama also called to have one million plug-in hybrid vehicles on the road. Now, we’ve beefed up that goal and tried to get, replace much of our automobile fleet with higher efficiency cars like plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Basically, taking today’s hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius and adding extra battery and plug-in capacity, we can run America’s automobiles largely on cheap electricity produced from the wind. And that’s something where we need the wartime mobilisation effort to get that to happen, because we don't need to be using oil to be running cars or using diesel to run trucks or trains. If we electrify our transportation system, the efficiency gains are enormous, and the good news for consumers is that you can run your car on the gasoline equivalent of less than $1 per gallon. So, that's another thing that can be very helpful for the pocket book.

Scott: That's excellent. Yes, and can you tell us a little bit more about Plan B 3.0’s outline for restructuring transport, and I’d like to hear you say a little bit more about the light rail and rail part of the equation, because in Victoria and in Australia, but in Victoria especially, we have a fantastic light rail and rail system. Back in 20s and 30s, and I’m talking about the 1920’s and 1930’s, we were the envy of the world but we allowed that thing to slowly slide and slide and get more and more backward. But it's still sitting there, and can be revitalised, and what we want to hear from experts such as yourself is, ‘what are your plans for light rail and rail?’

Janet: Light rail and rail are huge priorities in the Plan B economy.

Number one, we’re looking at transportation within cities. There’s a new movement in the United States called the Complete Streets movement. Basically, the idea is that current streets are built for the car to be king. Pedestrians and cyclists are largely shoved to the side, if the streets are even safe for them at all. So, this Complete Street movement has a lot of proponents.

One big group behind it is AARP, the Retired Persons’ Association, because they’re realising our elderly population, they may get to the point where they can't drive a car anymore but they still need to get around, but in many communities there aren't even sidewalks. So, we need to figure out how to allow everybody to get around. So, in city we will have more lanes for biking, light rail and subways in some places can work in cities. The other thing is Bus Rapid Transit; having designated lanes for buses can all make streets safer and more accessible for everybody.

To connect cities though, we're looking at electrified, high-speed rail, and that is another area where, like Victoria, the U.S had once had a fairly excellent rail system that was largely allowed to deteriorate, and it’s almost a planned deterioration because we have shifted our investment to highways and basically forced railway to shut down. I believe we’re going to be seeing, in the coming years and decades, a real rail Renaissance where we realise it can be a much more efficient way to get around; not only saving carbon emissions and helping us with the climate problem, but cutting down on traffic congestion and moving things around the country.

One then of the great things with renewable energy is that we will no longer have to be moving around heavy fossil fuels, namely coal. One fact, when we're researching Plan B 3.0 that really surprised me was 40% of freight rail transportation in the United States actually goes to move coal around…

Scott: Extraordinary!

Janet: ...40% that was astonishing. Now, once we have a Plan B economy, we're not going to need to be moving coal around. We can use that rail instead to be moving other goods instead of putting them on trucks or moving people around instead of having them go onto to aeroplanes which are still very fossil fuel reliant.

Scott: So, we’ve got energy efficiency measures that we need to implement and we want to reduce CO2 emission by switching to renewable energy. These two things are going to give us the greatest reductions, but we also need to stop deforestation, for example, which is going on as a widespread practise in Australia unfortunately. Not only is (stopping) deforestation is essential, but it's going to give us a greater reduction in emissions than even transportation sector. Is that correct?

Janet: Well, what we do call for in Plan B 3.0 is to completely end net deforestation. If we stop deforestation altogether, the gains would be comparable to restructuring the transportation system - slightly larger. And then when you add in revamping our agricultural system so that we’re not just ploughing fields and allowing the carbon from the soils to go into the atmosphere and other greenhouse gases to be emitted, managing our soils to better sequester that carbon (can get us more gains), and then on top of that we need to have an ambitious tree planting campaign around the globe to help us reforest some of the areas that have lost much of the tree cover.

Scott: Now, Janet, we're running out of time but I’d just like to hear you tell us a little bit about how, well, we have all the technologies that are required to make this transition, and then you follow up by saying that all that’s needed now is leadership, can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Janet: I think that the leadership component is essential. International agreements and negotiations are important, they should still go on, but to get the real change we need we’re going to need countries to really stand up and say, ‘we’re going to go ahead and cut our carbon emissions.’ We were inspired by the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Helen Clark, who called for her country to dare to aspire to be carbon neutral. She’s not in office anymore, but that is the kind of leadership we need, or a country like Sweden trying to ween themselves off fossil fuels and really moving ahead, realising that there's enormous economic opportunities to be leader, to be on the forefront of developing these technologies. That is one area where both the US and Australia could greatly benefit by being a leader rather than a lagger.

Scott: And for more details on how to cut emissions by 80% by the year 2020, as well as to plan to stabilise population, to eradicate poverty and to restore the Earth’s damaged ecosystems, Janet, we need to go to www.earth-policy.org. We can read about Plan B 3.0., we can buy a book and we can also download a whole lot of free publications and data, is that correct?

Janet: The full book is available online www.earth-policy.org. That's correct.

Scott: Look, Janet, I am afraid we’ve already run out of time. Unfortunately, we’re only a half hour show. Hopefully in the future we can have a 10-hour show and we can really get into this subject with a little bit more depth.

Janet: Fantastic.

Scott: That was Janet Larsen, and she’s Director of Research at the Earth Policy Institute. Beyond Zero is presented by climate change campaign group, Beyond Zero Emissions. To find out more about issues relating to global warming visit us at www.beyondzeroemissions.org

Transcript by Tharatorn Supasiti.