Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [72]
In the United States, we use 70 percent of our oil for transportation. We already know how to replace it all, except for the relatively small portion used for jet fuel. We use the other 30 percent for things like plastics and chemicals, for which there are not viable substitutes. That may be changing too. Cargill is using corn and soybeans as oil substitutes in plastics and chemicals, and its products are finding their way into carpets, disposable cups, plastic bags, Astroturf, lipstick, and the body panels of John Deere combines. If the program continues and consumers and businesses support it, the United States and other nations could become oil-free in a few decades. That would be good for our economy and our security, as well as for the fight against global warming.
Clean energy technologies are catching on outside Europe, Japan, and North America. Brazil pioneered the world’s most efficient ethanol from cane sugar and 70 percent of new cars in the country are built to run on it. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia told me he too wants to produce cane-based ethanol, and believes Africa as a whole should embrace the goal of running all the continent’s vehicles on biofuel, reducing harmful emissions (most studies predict Africa will be hardest hit by climate change), and dramatically increasing income among the millions of poor farmers in rural areas. My friend Rolando González-Bunster, a major producer of electricity in the Dominican Republic and other Latin American countries, is in the process of building two wind farms there, with support from donor nations and the International Finance Corporation. The larger of the two projects will be located in a windy area on the coast near Haiti, with which he hopes to share the power. Because of the international financial support, the electricity can be sold inexpensively and could be particularly helpful to Haiti, which has been virtually denuded—often by poor people scavenging wood for fuel—with disastrous consequences, including loss of topsoil and pollution of fishing sites from runoff. The Solar Electric Light Fund has been providing low-cost solar power for more than twenty years to villages in poor nations not on their nation’s power grid. Decentralized power from solar (and wind) may well be the wave of the future, just as cell phones are making telephone lines unnecessary. Saving the planet and saving money can work in developing countries as well as developed ones. We should hope clean energy entrepreneurs succeed everywhere. If they do, all of us, as consumers, will have even more opportunities to do our part.
Amory Lovins has been telling us for more than thirty years that we have opportunities right now. In terms of the scope and detail of his work and his sheer persistence, Lovins is almost certainly the most important clean-energy social entrepreneur of our time. He has never wanted to do anything that doesn’t make economic sense, and he has been demonstrating the financial benefits of energy conservation for a long time. Until the last few years, most of what he said was dismissed or ignored by all but the most devoted environmentalists.
I first met Lovins in January 1977, when, as the new attorney general of Arkansas, I asked him to give testimony before our Public Service Commission in opposition to the construction of a large nuclear power plant that would require a substantial increase in consumer utility bills. I didn’t know anything about global warming then, I just wanted to hold the rates down and stop wasting so much energy. I had read an essay Lovins published the year before in Foreign Affairs, in which he argued that, over a period of decades,