'We Are Running Out of Environment'

Paul Ehrlich

The same holds for the food supply?
Unless we are extremely lucky, climate change will continuously alter the distribution of precipitation all over the planet. It's not that we're just going to deal the cards once and some farms are going to be better off and others worse off. Changes in water management will be required over centuries, for instance, switching from rain-fed to irrigation and maybe back. It's going to be extraordinarily expensive and disruptive, especially when we have a problem of how to feed ever more people.

Crude oil is at record prices. What's the first immediate step on energy?
You really need an overall energy policy. We have been reducing our energy research and development budget, not increasing it. The quickest energy solution is efficiency. Next is to stop population growth. If we'd stopped U.S. population growth in 1945 at half today's size, guess how much less fuel we would need to buy from the Middle East. Energy policy is a vast area we are not putting the right kind of thought into. The whole launch into biofuels was done without any ecological analysis of what the actual climate gains and losses would be or what the environmental impact would be.

Can biofuels even be part of a real solution?
It's not necessarily an insane idea. What was insane was not to very carefully look at it and get some more lead time. There may be some place in a sensible world for use of biofuels. It's not crystal clear. You hear, well, we'll just do X and Y in wasteland. I work in a laboratory in a beautiful mountain valley in Colorado. All the land is classified as wasteland and could be used for biofuel production, which would just be destroying beauty and biodiversity. It's important to understand that when biodiversity is gone, we're gone, too.

Brazil has a thriving biofuels industry based on converting sugar cane to fuel.
They are also cutting down big chunks of the Amazon. We don't know how much of the Amazon you can cut down before the whole thing goes, and what the effect on global climate will be. Besides the loss of biodiversity, the resulting climate change could basically destroy us, and we're probably not going to know in the near future until we've run the experiment and find out.

Recently there's been chatter about revisiting nuclear power.
Nuclear power, whether you are in favor of it or against it, is not a silver bullet. It is another very complex issue. There may be a place in our energy mix for nuclear power. But it's not going to solve this complex of problems.

What else might be in that mix?
We could easily increase efficiency on energy use in buildings and transportation. Let's build only coal-fired power plants that can sequester carbon dioxide, or shift away from coal to natural gas and then various solar technologies. There are lots of things we can do; no single one of them is going to solve the problem. You need action at the local level, at the state level, and the federal level, and the international level.

At the federal level, there is gridlock. How can we speed up progress?
Elect smart, informed people. I get the impression that Congress thinks if it promotes wind power, in two years we could be getting 75 percent of our energy from wind. Actually, we'd be lucky to be getting 10 percent in 30 years. There is a huge time delay in deploying new energy technologies. The only way to speed that up is basically to go to a WWII-type commitment. The Manhattan Project took three or four years, but we put gigantic amounts of effort into it. We need a Manhattan Project on energy and the environment, but we don't yet even know what direction to go.

The presidential campaign, so far, hasn't offered much guidance.<
Essentially none of this is in the campaign. Sure, there are occasional statements on candidates' websites about climate. But what my colleagues and I are dealing with all the time and are scared witless about are not presidential campaign issues. It's sort of a wonderland. Whatever you think about gay rights and what starlet isn't wearing her panties today, those are not critical issues for most of our society.