Worldchanging Interview: Lester Brown

A large share of the world’s oil is used for transportation and we know that a good part of that can be substituted — we can substitute, as I mentioned using plug-in hybrids with, we can substitute wind for example, any source of electricity, but wind, because it’s clean, or — for automotive fuel, for gasoline, or for diesel. So that takes care of a large part of our use of oil. But there’s still a lot more. And the more difficult ones to substitute are construction machinery — heavy duty construction machinery — some farm implements, jet aircraft. They’re more difficult. But what we can begin to do with, I mean jet aircraft can run on ethanol as well as jet fuel. So that’s entirely do-able. The trick is to develop sources of liquid fuel that are not environmentally disruptive — and are not socially competitive with, for — the food supply. And that means developing cellulosic ethanol as a form of liquid fuel that can be used in the place of gasoline and biodiesel.

But that’s a smaller, a relatively small part of the total — it’s automobiles — but we can look at urban transport systems that are almost entirely electricity driven with light rail, begin to substitute light rail more and more for buses for example, and, so, much of our passenger transport is fairly easy. Some farm implements, I mean, farm implements can also operate on ethanol, tractors and combines and those sort of things. So we will need something other than electricity for a piece of the automotive fuel and transport fuel use, but we can begin to see how to get most of that energy from renewable sources, importantly wind.

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