Power Hungry (28 page)

Nor am I denying the corruption that comes with oil. Petroleum has spawned kleptocracies all over the world. Most of the Middle Eastern petrostates are run by corrupt royal families who have effectively been stealing the mineral wealth of their countrymen for decades. Or consider the corruption in Equatorial Guinea, a tiny, oil-rich country in West Africa that has been ruthlessly ruled by Teodoro Obiang since the 1970s. In 2009, Transparency International named Obiang's country the twelfth most corrupt locale in the world, ranking it 168th in the Corruption Perceptions Index, a rank that puts it in a tie with another petrostate, Iran. Two other petrostates, Chad (175th) and Iraq (176th), also made the list of the most corrupt places.
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The current poster boy among the petro-kleptocrats: Teodoro Nguema Obiang, the son of Equatorial Guinea's president. In November 2009, the
New York Times
reported that the younger Obiang, who serves as the forest and agriculture minister in his native country, owns a $35 million estate in Malibu as well as a fleet of luxury cars and a private jet. A U.S. Justice Department memorandum says that much of Obiang's
wealth has come “from extortion, theft of public funds, or other corrupt conduct.” The
Times
reported that during one twelve-month period ending in April 2006, Obiang “funneled at least $73 million into the United States, using shell corporations and offshore bank accounts to launder the money and ultimately buy his Malibu estate and a luxury jet.”
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Obviously, the environmental and societal ills caused by petroleum cannot be denied. Oil is not a perfect fuel. There is no such thing. But oil is—in nearly every case—greener than any of the alternative energy forms that might replace it. No matter whether the replacement is ethanol from corn, biomass—such as wood, straw, or dung—or biofuels made from palm oil or other feedstocks, the conclusion is apparent: Oil (and if you can get it, natural gas) simply has no peers. Oil provides consumers with both high energy density and high power density. It burns cleanly. It's easily handled at atmospheric temperature and pressure, and the number of uses for it are essentially limitless.

My conversion to the idea that oil is green occurred in late 2007 when I was watching a
60 Minutes
report on the death of ten mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park in Congo. The mountain gorillas are among the most threatened species on the planet. After providing a few details about the deaths of the apes, reporter Anderson Cooper got to the motive. The gorillas hadn't been killed by poachers eager for a trophy, or even for food. They were killed because of a shortage of energy. Looking at the camera, Cooper held up a handful of black flakes and explained that the gorillas were killed “for this: charcoal.”
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The problem, he said, was that “more than a million people in this area, practically everyone, use charcoal to cook their food. It's made by burning the trees in the gorillas' forest.” And the gorillas in Virunga were in the way of the charcoal makers who were supplying fuel to the local population. Robert Muir of the Frankfurt Zoological Society told Cooper that solving the problem in Virunga was simple: “Provide alternative fuel, butane, for example.” With a few thousand butane stoves and enough fuel to keep them running, Muir explained, the charcoal makers could be put out of business almost immediately.
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In short, the easiest and fastest way to preserve one of the world's most endangered species was not to forge more treaties banning trade in their skins, to create new regulations, or to fund more police to patrol
the park. Instead, the simplest solution was to increase the use of oil products.

Only about seven hundred mountain gorillas remain on the planet—about half live in Virunga, one of the most important parks in Africa. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has designated Virunga as a World Heritage Site, saying that it has “the highest biological diversity of any national park in Africa.” The park straddles the backbone of the Albertine Rift, a region renowned for its biological diversity and richness. Extending through parts of Uganda, Rwanda, Congo, Burundi, and Tanzania, the Albertine Rift contains habitats ranging from active volcanoes to ice fields and from lowland forests to alpine vegetation.
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In April 2009, I corresponded via e-mail with Emmanuel de Merode, the chief warden for Virunga National Park.
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“From a biodiversity perspective there is nothing more important in Africa than Virunga,” de Merode told me. “The destruction of Virunga would be a loss to the whole of humanity, not just Africa, hence its status as a World Heritage Site and our efforts to globalize the effort to protect it.”
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Hundreds of thousands of people live in the areas surrounding the park, but only a few of them have electricity. With few other sources of energy, the locals have little choice but to buy charcoal produced from wood that is cut illegally from the park. De Merode and his fellow park managers have declared that the charcoal trade “stands as the single biggest threat to the mountain gorillas and other flora and fauna in the park.”
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Although the solution to the charcoal trade is obvious, the butane stoves, and the fuel they need, are simply too expensive for most of the people who live near the park. De Merode said supplying the stoves and the fuel would cost millions of dollars. But that cost must be compared with the value of keeping the mountain gorillas safe in the wild. Saving the gorillas and other wildlife and fauna in Virunga, de Merode told me, “is a test case, and a measure of our determination in addressing environmental issues of global proportions.”
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And what will happen if more energy services are not made available to the people who live in and around the park? De Merode replied that the deforestation will continue as the locals produce more charcoal. And that will mean destruction of
the gorillas' habitat, “which would be the end for Congo's gorillas,” he said. “It could take the overall population below the minimum threshold and threaten them with extinction.”

Without butane as an option, de Merode and his team are trying to ramp up the production of biomass briquettes, which they hope will help cut demand for charcoal and therefore slow the rate of deforestation in Virunga. The biomass briquettes are made with grass, leaves, agricultural waste, sawdust, and other material that is fed into special presses and then dried in a greenhouse. He hopes that, eventually, the program will have 5,000 presses, enough, he believes, to supply briquettes for 800,000 people.
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But by mid-2009, progress appeared to be slow.

The plight of the gorillas in Virunga is similar to the loss of tropical forest habitat in Indonesia, where the misguided quest to produce more biofuels has led to rapid deforestation. Since 1996, some 9.4 million acres of Indonesian forest have been destroyed to make way for palm oil plantations.
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And much of that palm oil was aimed at producing biodiesel for export for the European market. The lowland tropical forests in Sumatra and Borneo have been decimated by the quest for palm oil. And as reporter Tom Knudson detailed in an early 2009 story for London's
Guardian
newspaper, as the forests have declined, so, too, have the numbers of rare endemic species such as tigers and orangutans. Sumatra, the sixth-largest island in the world, is home to the rare Sumatran tiger. Since the 1980s, the population of Sumatran tigers has fallen by more than 60 percent to fewer than 400 animals. “The tiger is going to go extinct, if we don't do something,” one Indonesian biologist told Knudson. Indonesia's orangutans face similar threats. Found only on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, the great apes are increasingly isolated because of the destruction of their rainforest habitats. On Sumatra, there are about 7,000 individuals.
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The destruction caused by palm oil production in Indonesia and elsewhere is a direct result of the misbegotten policies in Europe and elsewhere that assumed that biofuels were environmentally superior to petroleum. That wrongheaded thinking led to a huge rush to clear large swaths of the tropics in order to produce an energy alternative that has had the exact opposite effect of what was hoped. A 2008 World Bank report estimated that the deforestation in Indonesia—much of it associated with
biofuels—had resulted in huge releases of carbon dioxide from the burning of the forest and the release of greenhouse gases from swamps and bogs. Those releases, amounting to some 2.6 billion tons per year, made Indonesia the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide on the planet, behind China and the United States.
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Although the gorillas, tigers, and apes are important, the most important beneficiaries of more widespread use of oil would be humans. And, to be more specific, it would be the millions of young children and women who are sickened or who die prematurely every year from indoor air pollution caused by the burning of biomass.

In 2007, the World Health Organization estimated that indoor air pollution was killing about 500,000 people in India every year, most of them women and children. The agency also found that air pollution levels in some kitchens in rural India were thirty times higher than recommended and that the pollution was six times as bad as that found in New Delhi. Worldwide, as many as 1.6 million people per year are dying premature deaths due to indoor air pollution.
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About 37 percent of the world's population relies on solid fuels, such as straw, wood, dung, or coal, to cook their meals.
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These low-quality fuels, combined with inadequate ventilation when the cooking is done inside, often results in the living areas being filled with a variety of noxious pollutants, including soot particles, carbon monoxide, benzene, formaldehyde, and even dioxin.
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Continued exposure to polluted indoor air can result in numerous illnesses, ranging from relatively minor problems such as headaches and eye irritation to deadly conditions such as asthma, pneumonia, blindness, lung cancer, tuberculosis, and low birth weight in children born to mothers who were exposed to indoor air pollution during pregnancy.
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Despite these numbers, the problem of indoor air pollution doesn't get nearly as much attention as other public health issues, such as vaccination or safe drinking water. One of the most passionate voices proclaiming the need for more hydrocarbon use among the world's poor is that of Kirk R. Smith, a professor of global environmental health at the University of California, Berkeley.
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In 2002, Smith wrote a piece for
Science
magazine entitled “In Praise of Petroleum?” in which he challenged the notion that “for the poor as
for everyone else, only renewable energy sources qualify as sustainable.” He went on to say, “What possible better use for high-efficiency clean-burning fossil fuels such as LPG [liquefied petroleum gas] than providing high-quality energy services for poor households?”
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When I interviewed Smith in July 2009, he explained that “poor women in rural areas of developing countries are about as low on the totem pole, globally, as you can get.... They don't have anybody speaking for them. They don't have their own Sierra Club or whatever.” Smith continues to advocate increased use of oil as a way to help the rural poor. “Even if you were to substitute LPG for all of the biomass used for cooking in the world, it would have very little impact on overall resources,” he told me. “Why ask the poor to take on the need to use fancy, new, novel, untested renewable energy devices when we have something that's good for them? They have many other needs. And this is a great thing for them.”
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Reducing the amount of biomass used for cooking in the developing world would also reduce black carbon emissions. Soot particles from burning biomass, as well as from other sources such as coal-fired power plants and diesel engines, are the second-largest manmade contributor to global climate change.
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In the polar regions of the Arctic and Antarctic, and in other areas where snow and ice are prominent, deposition of black carbon particles causes the surfaces to absorb more solar radiation and therefore accelerates the melting process. Research has shown that these black carbon deposits may be causing more of the Arctic climatic change than all other manmade causes combined.
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About one-third of all the black carbon emissions on the planet come from inefficient cookstoves used in households in the developing world. By pushing more efficient biomass stoves as well as promoting increased use of stoves that use butane, propane, or other clean-burning fuels, Smith said, those releases could be cut dramatically. And even better, the new stoves would reduce the number of trees being cut to produce charcoal in developing countries like Congo, a process Smith calls “the most greenhouse-intensive fuel cycle in the world.”
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Moving the world's rural poor away from charcoal to cleaner, denser fuels such as LPG and refined oil products will not only help save the world's forests and endangered animals, it will also dramatically improve
their health and their standards of living. But to do that, we must move past the idea that oil is bad. The reality is that oil is greener than nearly everything else that might replace it. Natural gas is greener still. If we want to improve the lot of the world's poorest people, and women and girls in particular, we should be using more of both.

Cellulosic Ethanol Can Scale Up and Cut U.S. Oil Imports

F
OR YEARS, ETHANOL boosters have promised Americans that “cellulosic” ethanol lurks just ahead, right past the nearest service station. Once it becomes viable, this magic elixir—made from grass, wood chips, sawdust, or some other plant material—will deliver us from the evil clutches of foreign oil and make the United States “energy independent” while enriching farmers and strengthening small towns across the country.