interview > lynd > lynd 28

Lynd 28 (1:26)
Topic(s): Biofuels / Government
User Comments

Video Transcript

So if you want to get to a sustainable and a secure energy future, we have to think about that in two pieces. One is: what are the new techno— What are the new energy supply technologies? And I think that biomass is certainly one of a relatively small handful of ones that simply we have to make work, among the ones we can foresee today, along with wind, along with solar, conceivably along with nuclear. I mean, those are the things we have that don't contribute to net CO₂ production, or could be run so they don't contribute to net CO₂ production and provide continuing energy sources.

But it's not only a supply problem. There's many ways to look at this. The one I find most compelling is called footprint analysis. And essentially it's a simple idea. It's like, well, how much land would be necessary, for example, to provide for the world's resource consumption and assimilate the world's waste? And the answer, projected to, you know, a 10-billion-person world living at, say, a western European standard of resource consumption, is about five Earths. What does that tell you? Well, it tells us it's not only a supply problem and the other piece of it is the efficiency of utilization; I think that we in the United States are dragging our feet worldwide at recognizing the public interest in energy efficiency.