Plan B 2.0 | Lester Brown | Talks at Google

Thanks, Amy. When you were introducing me, I was reminded of being introduced by the late Senator Paul Simon of Illinois many years ago. And he held up the latest book I'd written and said, lester's written the sort of book that once you put it down, you can't pick it up again. As we were walking in, I saw the dinosaur skeleton outside. Reminded me of principle. In science, it's called the principle of misplaced precision. There was a family in a natural history museum in Boston, and there was there a dinosaur skeleton. They were looking at it and they read the caption and they couldn't figure out how old it was. So the building engineer came by and they said, sir, can you tell us how old this dinosaur skeleton is? And he said, yes, it is 65 million and 12 years old. They said, wow, how do you know that? He said, when I came here 12 years ago, they said, The principle of misplaced precision. Ever since I can remember, we've been saying that the United States, with 5% of the world's people, consumes a third or 40% of the Earth's resources. That was true. It is no longer true. China now consumes more of most basic resources than does the United States. Incidentally, those standing in the back, there's still a few scattered seats here, two or three, if you want to come up. We look at grain, meat, oil, steel, coal. China consumes more of each of those resources than does the United States. Except for oil. We still have a wide, though fast shrinking, margin in oil consumption. Meat consumption in China is now nearly double that in the United States. Steel consumption in China is triple that in the United States. We're not even in the same league anymore. Now that China has overtaken the United States in the consumption of most basic resources, it gives us license to ask the next question, which is, what happens if China catches up to us in consumption per person? If the Chinese economy slows from the 10% annual growth in recent years to 8% a year and sustains that, then in 2031, income per person in China will be the same as that in the United States today. If we further assume that the Chinese will spend their income more or less as we do, if they consume, for example, the same amount of paper per person that we do, then in 2031, China's 1.45 billion people will consume twice as much paper as the world currently produces. There go the world's forests. If we look at automobiles, three cars for every four people in this country, in China, three cars for every four people In 2031 means a fleet of 1.1 billion cars. The current global fleet means is 800 million. China would have to pave roads, highways, parking lots in area comparable to the area now planted in rice. They would consume 99 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 84 million barrels a day and may never produce much more than that. There go the world's oil reserves. What China is teaching us is that the Western economic model, the fossil fuel based, automobile centered, throwaway economy, is not going to work for China. If it doesn't work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2031 may have an even larger population. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in the developing countries who are also dreaming the American dream. And in an increasingly integrated global economy where we all depend on the same grain, oil, steel, it will not work for us in the industrial countries either. That is perhaps, or at least in the minds of most readers of Plan B 2.0, the most important single research finding in the book. Our challenge is to build a new economy, one that can sustain economic progress. Instead of a fossil fuel based, automobile centered throwaway economy, we need to build an economy powered largely by renewable sources of energy, like these solar panels. We see here, a transport system that's much more diversified and an economy that reuses and recycles everything. This is our challenge. The exciting thing is we can see glimpses of the new economy beginning to emerge here and there around the world. We see it in the wind farms of western Europe, where 40 million Europeans now get their residential electricity from wind farms. We see it in the solar electric rooftops in Japan, where they now manufacture a roofing material that is in effect a solar cell, a photovoltaic roofing material. We see the new economy beginning to emerge in the geothermally heated homes of Iceland. 90% of all the homes in Iceland are heated with geothermal energy, which means they virtually eliminated the need for imported oil for heating purposes. We see the new economy emerging in the reforested mountains and the hillsides of South Korea. We see it in the growing fleet of hybrid cars in the United States. I've been in the Bay Area, I was UCAL Berkeley the last day or two. And it's really good for the soul to see so many Priuses on the road. I mean, this must be ground zero for the world's Prius population. It's extraordinary. And I say every time I see a Prius I get sort of a psychological boost. Maybe we will make reminds me a bit I mean, you guys don't remember this? I remember people used to go to airports to watch the planes take off. I'm going to start coming to this area to watch the Priuses go by. This is pretty exciting. We see the new economy emerging in China in the extraordinary development that's not yet well known outside China, the extraordinary spread of rooftop solar water heaters. What we are seeing in China is that this technology is leapfrogging into rural areas where there is no electricity. And for $160, you can get a solar water heater on your rooftop and an insulated tank. So people in rural areas for the first time in their lives are taking hot showers. They have hot water to wash the dishes, something they've never had before. So with a modest investment, we suddenly find that wasn't someone that was the dog laying on the floor that was groaning. So it probably wasn't anything I said. By the end of this year, There may be 40 million homes in China with rooftop solar collectors providing hot water. It's exploding. There are hundreds of companies now in this business. The largest has 5,000 outlets around China. They have a standard village demonstration. They take the solar collector into the village, ask for some water and an egg. They put the water in the collector, drop the egg in, and in 10 minutes they hand back the villager a hard boiled egg. It makes the point. People get it. It's exciting. Nearly 40 million homes, the electricity equivalent of that hot water exceeds all the wind farms in the world today. It is huge. It's really beginning to move ahead. Another example we've been hearing a lot about what's happening in California. I was sort of amused when I was in Brussels meeting with the environment Minister and he was talking about the back and forth between his office and Governor Schwarzenegger's office on various initiatives and comparing notes and what would work and what the standards should be and so forth. And that combined with the arrangement the governor worked out with Tony Blair on carbon trading. What I realized was that since Arnold Schwarzenegger can never be President of the United States, he's decided he's President of California. And while he doesn't have an ambassador in Brussels, he does have regular contact and representation there. It's very exciting to see what's happened. Who would have guessed three years ago, whenever he initially took office, that we would see this blossoming of environmental leadership. Exciting. We see the new economy emerging in Texas. California is one thing, Texas is another. But what's happening in Texas is even bigger in terms of megawattage than California Governor Rick Perry, also Republican Governor has put together a coalition of wind farm developers, a couple utilities to build transmission lines. They are planning a 7,000 megawatt cluster of wind farms. 7,000 megawatts. For those of you who think in megawatts a typical coal fired power plant is 300 megawatts. This is big. I mean not just big by renewable energy standards. This is big by any yardstick. It reminds me a bit of when Elizabeth Colbert was interviewing Amory Levins for that profile piece was in the New Yorker a few months ago and she was asking Amory a question about thinking outside the box. And Amory's response was there is no box. There is no box. And that's the mindset we need now. And that's why the things we see happening are so exciting. Such as Texas with a 7,000 megawatt wind farm. This is beyond incremental thinking now. This is sort of quantum jump thinking about what the future might look like. One of the things I did when I was researching and writing plan B 2.0 was to I was constantly going back and looking at what happened to earlier civilizations. Joseph Tainer's book the Collapse of Complex Civilizations, Jared Diamond's book Collapse. And I was looking at the environmental trends and the indicators that they should have been watching. They, the Sumerians or the Mayans or what have you. Then I asked myself what are the indicators we should be looking at that will tell us something about the future of our civilization? And if I were to pick one environmental indicator it would be the atmospheric concentration of CO2. If I were to pick one economic indicator it would be the price of oil. The price of oil because we are an oil based civilization. Oil is a depletable resource and we are fast depleting it. I looked the other day at the data for the last five years. During this five year period, new oil discoveries are equal to about one fourth of world oil consumption. 1/4. That means reserves are going down pretty fast. One of our responses or one of our concerns about rising oil prices is the effect it has on food production costs. But we now realize there is a much greater effect and that is the effect of rising oil prices on the demand for agricultural commodities. Because what's now become clear is that almost everything we eat can be converted into fuel for cars either in the form of ethanol or biodiesel. In this country we started building ethanol distilleries or the legislation for the biofuels program was passed in 1978. Between then and now we've built quite a few distilleries, but the number of distilleries now under construction exceeds all those built over the last 27 years. I mean, what was a horizontal trend slowly moving upward has become almost a vertical trend. If all the distilleries under construction are completed by the fall of next year, then close to 30% of next year's grain crop will be going into ethanol distilleries. Most of that grain will be corn. Corn is now the world's largest grain crop. Corn is number one, 700 million tons. Wheat number two, 600 million tons. Rice is a distant third, 420 million tons. What happens to the corn crop affects everyone. The US produces 40% of that world corn crop. Nearly 70% of all the corn imports in the world come from the United States. And just to give you a sense of what a magnificent piece of agricultural real estate we have in the Midwest, the Corn belt, which if we were naming today would be the corn soybean belt. But it's a remarkable piece of agricultural real estate to illustrate that the corn harvest of Iowa is larger than the entire grain harvest of Canada. It is huge. What we are now beginning to see as more and more ethanol distilleries are built is that the world price of grain is moving up toward its oil equivalent value. Anytime the food value of a commodity is below its fuel value, the economy will move it into the market, will move it into the energy economy. We've never faced a situation like this before. Price of oil is now just over $60 a barrel. If it jumps to $80 a barrel or $120 a barrel, the price of grain will follow it upward unless we somehow intervene. But if we let the market take care of it, that's exactly what will happen. What we're now looking at is an epic competition between the 800 million people in the world who own automobiles and who want to maintain mobility, and the 2 billion poorest people in the world who want to simply survive. I was on Tuesday, this week, at the University of Minnesota. Two of the professors there have co authored an article in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Just literally off the press. They had done projections, I think it was four years ago, projecting the number of hungry people in the world. Then about 800 million would drop to about 600 million by, I think it was 20, 2015. They are now projecting that the 800 million will increase to 1.2 billion by 2015 because of the ethanol effect, driving up world grain prices. As most of you probably know, world corn prices have doubled over the last 12, 15 months. Wheat prices have been trading at 10 year highs. Wheat futures trading at 10 year highs. Rice prices are going up. You've probably been reading about the tortilla demonstrations in Mexico where the price of tortillas has gone up 60%. Mexico is one of the countries that has a corn based diet. So what happens? The price of corn affects people throughout that country. My overriding concern is that in this competition between cars and people, the price of grain will keep moving up toward the oil equivalent price, creating urban food riots in low and middle income countries that import grain. And there are most low and middle income countries do import grain. And the concern that this political instability could occur on a scale that would disrupt global economic progress because so many countries would be affected. I think as a country we need to one, as I've suggested a few months ago, have a moratorium on licensing new distilleries while we sort of take a time out to catch our breath and look at what's happening and decide if we really want to stay on this path. The risk we face is that the world will begin to see us. This is a foreign policy issue. The world will begin to see us as a country of people who are determined to keep driving our SUVs even if it means increasing hunger and even starvation in low income countries around the world. We've never faced an issue like this emerging competition between cars and people for the world's grain supplies. It's a moral issue, it's a social issue, it's a political issue. There is no UN agency, there is no international office to mediate this competition between automobile owners whose average income is about $30,000 a year, and the 2 billion poorest people in the world whose average income is below $3,000. It's easy to see who wins in that competition. We were talking, a few of us at lunch about some of the unintended consequences of our efforts to reduce oil dependence or respond to climate change or what have you. I think we have to be think things through pretty carefully because it is possible to get into into trouble. From an agricultural point of view, the demand for crop based fuels is insatiable. The grain it takes to fill a 25 gallon SUV tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year at a level that's just somewhat above the level of consumption in India and a bit below that in Italy. It's a bit below the Mediterranean diet, for example. One tank full, one person for a year. One of my other concerns is that the number of failing States. The list seems to be getting longer now. Each year will suddenly get much longer if world grain prices and food prices rise as much as they appear likely to. If we get an increase in the number of hungry and chronically malnourished people in the world, from 800 million to 1.2 billion by 2015 or so, this is not going to be good for political stability. And if the number of failing states keeps increasing, at what point does that translate into a failing civilization? I don't know the answer, but I think it's a question we need to be asking. What are the alternatives to a grain based automotive fuel economy? I can think of two very quickly in this country. For example, if we were to simply raise automotive fuel efficiency standards by 20%, which is roughly what we did when President Ford was signed similar legislation in 1976 after the first oil price hike. But if we were to raise fuel efficiency by 20% for the US fleet over the next decade, we would reduce oil imports several times as much as we will from our ethanol program, our fuel ethanol program, and at a fraction of the cost. If we were to convert our entire grain harvest into fuel for cars, it would satisfy maybe 16% of our automotive fuel needs. It's not the answer. In my view, the exciting alternative is plug in hybrids. And if we were simply to switch to plug ins, I mean switch to hybrids entirely for reasons of reducing oil independence or stabilizing climate again over a decade or so, we could cut gasoline use almost by half. But hybrids give us another option, which if you take say a Toyota Prius and add a second storage battery and an electric only option when you're driving, then we can do most of our short distance driving, commuting to work, grocery shopping and so forth, almost entirely with electricity. If while we're making that shift to plug in hybrids, we invest not in hundreds of wind farms around the country, but thousands of wind farms feeding cheap electricity into the grid, then we're running our cars largely on wind energy. At a cost equivalent of less than a dollar a gallon. So there's some exciting possibilities here, and I'm pleased to see that Google has plug in hybrids as one of the areas it wants to invest some time and energy. I could talk about wind energy. We have a lot of it. 1991 Department of Energy study, National Wind Resource Inventory pointed out that three states, North Dakota, Kansas and Texas, have enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy national electricity needs. And when that study came out, we all said, wow. But what we now realize is that that was a Gross underestimate because it was based on the wind Turbine Technologies of 1991. Advances in wind turbine design since then enable turbines to operate at lower wind speeds to convert wind into electricity more efficiently. And because Instead of being 120ft tall, they're 300ft tall, they're much larger, harvesting a larger, stronger, more reliable wind regime. And then a year and a half ago, DOE came out with another study saying that our offshore wind resources, out to a distance of 50 miles, were almost sufficient to run the entire to supply all US Electricity as well. The point is, we have a lot of wind energy that can be harnessed without disrupting the Earth's climate system. We hear about the NIMBY problem not in my backyard. It was particularly prominent on the east coast with the Cape wind project, a 400 megawatt project that was opposed by the Kennedys and others because they thought being seven miles offshore, it was going to mess up the view. But that's changing now. We have a new governor in Massachusetts who's really working to help make this new wind farm a reality. Some 45 plus years ago, I married into a ranching family on the Wyoming Colorado border. So I have a lot of relatives in laws in that area. And the thing that impresses me when I'm around there is they have not a NIMBY problem, but a PIMBY problem. When Xcel, the leading utility in that region of the country, announces it's going to develop 750 megawatts of wind power, the competition among communities in that region for those wind farms is intense. The ranchers know if they get for each of those turbines on their land one, the turbine will generate a quarter million dollars worth of electricity. And if they get even a modest royalty, they're going to get $5,000 or $10,000 a year for each turbine on their ranch with no investment on their part. And they'll continue to run cattle on the land. It only takes a quarter acre from one of those wind turbines. There are thousands of ranchers in the Great Plains that 10 years from now are almost certain to be earning far more from wind sales or wind royalties than from cattle sales. This is a major source of income for these rural communities, creates tax revenue. They can upgrade their school systems, their jobs in maintaining the wind farms apart from the initial construction, so lots happening. I began by using China to make the point that we have to restructure the world economy. We have to build a new economy. The key, I think the key policy instrument in doing this is restructuring the tax system getting the market to tell the environmental truth, when we buy a gallon of gasoline for close to $3 a gallon, what we're paying for is the cost of getting the oil out of the ground, getting it to a refinery and refining it into gasoline, getting the gasoline to local service station. We do not pay the cost of treating respiratory illnesses from breathing polluted air, damage from acid rain. And we certainly don't pay for the cost of climate change. If we paid for all those things, then instead of being priced at $3, it would more likely be $10 a gallon. The key is to restructure the economy. Reduce income taxes and raise taxes on environmentally destructive activities. Carbon emissions, for example. No change in taxes, just change what we tax and thus steer the economy in an environmentally sustainable direction. Many of you will remember a company called Enron. It had been a Houston based natural gas pipeline company, a rather staid company, in fact. And then they got into trading energy futures, even broadband futures, extraordinarily successful. Their income was going up every quarter. Profits were climbing. It was an investor's delight. Everyone wanted Enron stock. And then in late 2001, early 2002, some accountants, incidentally, it was the seventh most valuable corporation in the United States. Some outside accountants began looking at it, and what they realized was that Enron had been leaving costs off the books, doing it rather skillfully, so it was not clear to outsiders. But they'd been leaving costs off the books. And when they got done with the accounting, they discovered that Enron was essentially worthless. A stock that had been trading for, I think it was $56 a share was suddenly trading for pennies per share. Enron was bankrupt. We are doing exactly what Enron did, except on a far larger scale. We are leaving costs off the books. Eventually someone will have to pay those costs, If not us, then our children. But like Enron, we too will have to make adjustments. You can't continually leave costs off the books without eventually getting into trouble. The key is to get the market to tell the environmental truth. We are all economic decision makers. We rely on market signals as consumers, as corporate planners, government policymakers, investment bankers. Problem is, the market's giving us bad information and we're making bad decisions. Oysten Dali, Norwegian, was vice president of Exxon for Norway and the North Sea for many years. Took my place a few years ago as chairman of the board of the World Watch Institute. But Oysten said a decade ago, sometime after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he said, socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to Tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth. That quote's in near the end of the the book. In looking at resources, I think the scarcest of all now is time. I don't think we have a lot of time to do this economic restructuring, particularly of the energy economy in a way that will dramatically cut carbon emissions. I don't think it's something we can do by 2050. I think it's something we have to do in the next decade or so, by 2020, and we have the technologies now to do it. The problem is that we don't know where the key thresholds are. We don't know at what point the melting of the Greenland ice sheet becomes irreversible and we face the 23 foot rise in sea level that comes when that ice sheet is finally melted. 23ft would cover many of the world's coastal cities, inundate all the rice growing river deltas and flood plains. In Asia, for example, it would create hundreds of millions of climate refugees retreating from the coast. How much time do we have? And the answer is we don't know because nature establishes the threshold. Nature is the timekeeper and we can't see the clock. So there's a lot of uncertainty as to exactly how much time we have. Have we already crossed some key thresholds? Is the Amazon rainforest already damaged and drying out to the point where it's going to feed on itself? I don't know. But these are the kinds of questions we need to be asking. The question that I am asked most frequently as I travel around the world is. What can I do now? I want to come to that in just a minute, but I want to first mention two reasons why I am hopeful. People often say, you've been working on these issues for decades. Aren't you discouraged? Why don't you give up? But I think of the Berlin Wall coming down, for example, and this was a visual manifestation of a political revolution in Eastern Europe. I mean, one day people woke up in Eastern Europe and everyone knew that the great socialist experiment, the one party political system, the centrally planned economy, was finished, including the people in power. There was no real effort to suppress the revolution. So we had an essentially bloodless political revolution. Amazing. Not a single political scientist anticipated it, at least in terms of writing articles in journals or magazines. You can't find one political scientist saying in the 80s, watch Eastern Europe, big change coming here. It wasn't anticipated. I remember in Washington, the White House calling in the CIA and saying, why didn't you anticipate this? But not only did the agency not anticipate it, they couldn't explain it. But what I think we see are social thresholds. And once they're crossed, change comes rapidly and unpredictably. One other example, one that I can also remember, if you had conducted a poll in this country on December 6, 1941, a Saturday, and asked the American people, should we get involved in the war or not? Probably 95% said, nothing doing. If you conducted that poll on Monday, December 8, after the Sunday attack on Pearl harbor, that ratio would probably have flipped. And 95%, yes, we've got to go to war. On January 6, 1942, President Roosevelt gave his State of the Union address in which he outlined the arms production goals. He said, we're going to produce 45,000 tanks, 60,000 planes, 20,000 artillery guns, 6 million tons of shipping. No one had ever seen numbers like this before. But what Roosevelt and his colleagues realized was that at that time, the largest concentration of industrial power in the world was in the US Automobile industry. So after his State of the Union address, he called in the leaders of the industry and said, because you guys represent such a large share of our industrial capacity, we're going to depend heavily on you to help us reach these arms production goals. They said, well, Mr. President, we're going to do whatever we can, but it's going to be a real stretch producing cars and all these arms, too. He said, you don't understand. Going to ban the sale of private automobiles in the United States. And that's exactly what happened. From the beginning of April 1942 until the end of 1944, nearly three years, there were essentially no cars produced in the United States. And the automobile industry led the way in restructuring the economy and in exceeding every one of those arms production goals. It didn't take decades to restructure the US Industrial economy. It didn't take years. It was done in a matter of months. And I mention that because if we become convinced of the need to restructure the energy economy, the world energy economy, because of the increasingly visible evidence of the effects of climate change, it can be done quickly if we're convinced of the need to do it. And then the final point. What can I do? I think people expect me to say, you know, change your light bulbs and recycle your newspapers and so forth. And those things are important, but more important is become politically active. We've got to change the system. We've been doing little things for the last 20 or 30 years and we're still losing. It's going to take some big time change, systemic change. And it means each of us has to become an activist, a lobbyist. It means supporting candidates who understand and want to do something about these issues. It means writing letters to the editor. It means organizing like minded people into groups to meet with elected members of the city council, the state legislature, your representatives in Washington, letting them know what you want them to do about these issues. Go with a, you know, three points or one point, six points, whatever it is, the things that you want them to do in response to these issues. What we're talking about now is no longer just saving the planet. What we're talking about now as I see it, is mobilizing to save civilization because the stresses are building and individual nation states are beginning to disintegrate into what we call failed states. Our future depends on an international community of states that can cooperate and work with each other. Whether it's controlling infectious diseases or maintaining the stability of international monetary system or what have you failed states cannot do those sorts of things. This is our challenge. This is why I'm so pleased to be here this afternoon and so pleased that you've all come out to focus on these issues. I think we have time for questions and who's going to moderate the questions? I can moderate. And we have a mic here to move around. First question. Thank you very much for this talk. I really appreciated it, it was tremendous. I'm old enough just barely to remember Sputnik and the push on scientific and engineering knowledge that followed it. Something I've seen over the last 10 or 15 years or so in this country is a very, very strong anti science basis in which scientific truths are combated from as though they were political or religious truths instead, in which we have a substantial fraction of the population who thinks we're coming to the end.

Of the world anyway.

How do you see approaching dealing with that problem which translates into a problem of political will in this country? The people who seem global warming as a leftist political attack on their lives. Good question. I think the good news is that the number of people who share that view is shrinking and the number who think we should be doing something is increasing. It's been interesting to watch within the evangelical Christian movement the mounting support and raising the question of whether or not as individuals we have the right to trash the earth. I mean, that's basically the basic point they're making. And their answer is no, we don't. Our responsibility is one of stewardship, of protecting the earth, including its climate system. So there is a strong counter movement even within the evangelical movement now on this issue. That's the good news.

I agree with every word you said. I just want to make a point about biofuels. The efficiency of raising grain is 1% because it's all deficiency from the sun. The solar efficiency. It does make sense to use an area to grow corn or whatever and make oil out of it. It makes much more sense to use it as a solar energy field. Where you have today, you can convert solar energy to electric energy at an efficiency of 40%. And you can use water electrolysis and produce hydrogen. You go to hydrogen economy. I mean, this is the direction that should be taken. And don't waste the area that really can be used for corn and to feed people. There are lots of areas where you can use the solar energy.

Your point is well taken. The point is that crops corn in Iowa, for example, converts about 1% of the incoming solar radiation into biochemical energy in the form of grain and so forth that we can use. But solar cells convert anywhere from 15. I think the commercial rate now is around 15%, but it's climbing and theoretically can go up perhaps as high as 40%. Another example of this is that a corn farmer in northern Iowa can lease a quarter acre to the local utility to install a wind turbine. That wind turbine can produce a quarter of a million dollars worth of electricity. That same quarter acre in corn will produce 40 bushels or 100 gallons of ethanol worth maybe 3, $300. So that's an economic measure of the point you're making that mechanical ways, whether solar cells or wind turbines, are much more efficient ways of capturing solar energy than our plants.

Do you have any perspective on how.

Nuclear power will fit in in the.

Next 10 or 20 years? Is it part of this Plan B or is it should be totally excluded.

For the in the long run? Could you hear the question about the future of nuclear power in this and do I have a perspective on nuclear power? And the answer is I do. First I look at the economics. I talked earlier about cost accounting. If utilities that want to build nuclear power plants assume the cost for waste disposal, assume the cost of decommissioning the plants when they're worn out, which may cost more than the cost of building them originally. And if they can find an insurance company that will insure the reactors against an accident, if they can do all those things, then I think they're out of the run economically, just not competitive. But just in case they can figure out how to become economically competitive, then we have a political question. If we say nuclear power is the answer, do we mean for all countries or just for some countries? If only for some countries, who makes the A list and the B list and who enforces it? Thank you. It's actually being taped, so they need to get you closer.

Hi, I was wondering if you had any thoughts or directions around mechanisms or channels that we could use to try and make people more aware of, of the importance of these things. I mean, it seems like there's been a lot of people spending a lot of energy trying to make everyone in the world aware of this, and it seems like a lot of people just aren't listening. So do you have any thoughts or ideas around specific strategies that we could try and use to combat sort of like misinformation or misperceptions or just the fact that people don't understand the importance of addressing climate change?

Right. When you say we, do you mean you or do you mean Google or.

Any of the above? So us individually, the average American, average citizens? Google.

One of the things I think we need to do first is educate ourselves. And the way to do that is by reading this book. We need to educate ourselves and get an understanding. And I think most of us, almost by definition who are in this room do have a basic understanding of the issues. And then the question is how to educate others. I mean, you can talk to people at receptions and dinner parties and things, but that's kind of limited. Maybe do your own website or develop your own listserv so that a personal listserv so that when you come across an article or something that's really good that you think makes some good, send it to your friends, to the people you've put on the listserv. I mean, that's one of the great things about the Internet. We can all become educators with, you know, develop a website and develop a listserv and you're in business. I mean, may not reach as many people as, you know, the LA Times does, but you can reach a lot of people and keep feeding them information. So this is one of the things I would suggest beyond that, letters to the editor, writing op ed pieces on these issues, when there's something coming up in the legislature or what have you. Those are the things that quickly come to mind when I think about educating people. Follow up question.

Yeah, just to follow up. So would there be any sort of specific, like political strategies that you think might be effective, that we could promote our representatives, try and push the most.

Important single Thing I think is restructuring the tax system, reduce income taxes and raise environmental taxes, including a carbon tax, for example. Since we have been talking about climate change. But there are many environmentally destructive things you can tax. But the great thing about this is that it leads to systemic change and it affects decision makers at all levels and moves. It sort of steers the economy in an environmentally sustainable direction. So if you were to ask me, you know, if I were to push one initiative, it would be restructuring tax systems. One more.

Actually, I have a similar question to the one that Teo just asked. So there's a lot of different things you talked about during your speech about things that people can do, such as wind power or biofuels and things like that. And a lot of it is due to political resistance or political circumstances that prevent certain things from happening. So if you were to pick the one area which you think has the highest potential, I mean, there's a lot of areas to focus on, but which area do you think is the area that there's the highest potential for success right now? So if we were to focus our efforts, we could focus there, get something done that creates active change versus diversifying over 20 different areas. The tax situation might be a good one, but it's probably really hard to push through relative to something that's easier that could probably get done.

And maybe I've got an answer for you. One of the most interesting and exciting things that's happened in recent weeks is the announcement by the Conservative government of Australia. This is the government that would not sign the Kyoto Protocol that they are going to ban incandescent light bulbs by 2009 or 2010. They will either ban them or they'll raise the efficiency standards so high that incandescents can't make them. Everyone will be using compact fluorescence. Now the thing that I find exciting about this is that this is something that can happen worldwide. It would lead, if we were to do this worldwide, it would probably reduce electricity demand by something like 9%, which is no small thing. But I think, I mean, we talk about in looking for ways of cutting carbon emissions, we look for low hanging fruit that's easy to reach. I mean, this fruit's lying on the ground. We just have to pick it up. It's so easy and it's profitable changing. If you have incandescent light bulbs in your home and convert them to incandescents, which costs three or four times as much, but the rate of return on that investment in energy savings is around 30% a year, if you can Find a better rate of return, go to it. But that's really pretty attractive. So we can cut carbon emissions and reduce and make an investment that has a very attractive rate of return. The thing that's exciting about this is I think it's something that could catch and could happen very quickly, because in addition to Australia, we have California with the legislation. How many legislators does it take to screw in a light bulb act which is intended to. I mean, this is to replace incandescents with compact fluorescence. If California does it, other states will start doing it. Walmart has a campaign now, next year, they want to sell 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs. So that's. That's going to help boost awareness in a segment of the economy that might not otherwise be sensitive to the relationship between light bulbs and climate change. For example, Moscow has a campaign now, not for environmental reasons, but because they have a fuel shortage. They're obligated to export so much gas and so much oil, and they're running short themselves. So they want to reduce the demand for electricity in Moscow. For example, Philips, the world's largest, I think the world's largest bulb manufacturer based in the Netherlands, plans to phase out incandescents no later than 2016. So I think the stage is being set now where, if we get to work on this, we can really pull off a major advance. And I think it'll have a positive psychological effect because people will suddenly realize that we've accomplished something. I mean, an important step in the right direction that would encourage us to try other things that may not be quite as simple and easy to do. So thank you for that final question and giving me a chance to make that point. This is one that I think we can make happen, and quickly. Thank you. And thank you all for coming and thank Google for hosting this today. You're doing a great job.