The evidence is right in front of us, spread out over thousands of kilometres. Still, no one can say definitively what it is. Is it a kind of energy? Or a food? It is a mystery that goes back over a hundred years. On June 4, 1896, a thirty-two-year-old engineer working in a tiny shed in Dearborn, Michigan, used it to power a spectacular invention. Since that moment it has, in one way or another, determined the lives of billions of people, been the cause of wars and prosperity, and now, many believe, it might determine the very fate of the planet itself. It is not just food. It is not just energy. It is, amazingly, both. Yellow gold. Corn. The crop that feeds the world. And one that might fuel the world as well.
Henry Ford, that young engineer in Dearborn, knew all about the profound connection between food and fuel. After all, he came from a farm, but loathed the back-breaking rural life. He preferred to tinker with machines, like taking apart and putting back together his father’s watch. As soon as he could, Ford bolted for the big city of Detroit, where he found work at the Edison Illuminating Company. There he met Thomas Edison himself, who, in an historic moment, personally encouraged Ford to keep noodling on the invention Ford called the “Quadricycle.” The Quadricycle was a motorized carriage Ford built in the cramped quarters of the shed behind his modest little house, where he and his wife and son lived. Four bicycle tires supported a wooden carriage, and a tiller was used to steer. That was the simple part. The key to the contraption was the fuel. Ford powered his combustion engine with the fuel of the day, ethanol. It was, ironically, made from the very crop grown on the farms Ford so hated: corn.
In other words, the dawn of the mass production of cars and the mass production of food were intimately intertwined, and have remained that way since. By 1906, Ford founded his own automobile company and that year, when Congress finally repealed the liquor tax, he announced that ethanol was the fuel of the future. His famous Model T was the first flex-fuel car, designed to run on a mixture of gasoline and ethanol, very much like the cars coming off the Ford plant in Dearborn today.
A century later, Henry Ford’s ethanol revolution is actually happening. The record-high, volatile oil prices, combined with concerns over energy security and climate change, have made ethanol once again a popular fuel. Politicians of all stripes, including President Barack Obama, are open supporters of the idea that America can grow its energy. After all, ethanol means votes. In Iowa alone — a key state in every U.S. presidential primary season — over 50,000 jobs are dependent on the biofuel business. Governments around the world have followed suit, aggressively setting targets for increasing the percentage of ethanol mixtures in automotive fuel. (In Brazil, 30 percent of the cars run on a sugar cane–based ethanol, which is actually more efficient than corn-based ethanol.) These targets come with huge subsidies. In the U.S. the biofuel industry received government subsidies of over $8 billion a year, which has kick-started the ethanol industry explosion. Private investment in ethanol is expected to reach $100 billion by 2010 in the U.S. alone.
But there are serious questions about using food as fuel, especially the so-called yellow gold. It turns out it requires almost as much energy to produce a barrel of corn-based ethanol as one can derive from it. On the climate front, the math is even worse. Depending on the processing method, corn-based ethanol can emit more greenhouse gas emissions than a similar quantity of conventional oil. In the developing world, the turn to biofuels has another devastating effect. Converting huge tracts of land to the production of corn and sugar cane in places like Indonesia or the Amazon basin in Brazil is an environmental catastrophe. Biodiversity has been sharply reduced, and vast and valuable carbon sinks of rainforest have been eliminated. Clearly, industrializing agriculture is not an effective, long-term strategy to combat climate change.
However, the impact of the biofuel industry is felt most dramatically at the grocery store, not at the gas station. When the appetite for biofuel grows, so does the price of staple foods. It is not surprising that in 2008, when the price of oil approached $150 a barrel and the price of natural gas shot up to record highs, the price of food also skyrocketed. The amount of grain it takes to make enough ethanol to fill the tank of a single car could feed a person for a year. In a world where over 800 million people are starving, the relationship between food and fuel is not an abstract economic issue. Last year, we witnessed some more remarkable illustrations of this: there were riots in Mexico over the price of flour, which is needed for the diet staple of tortilla; protests in Italy over pasta and in France over bread; uprisings in Pakistan, Cameroon, and Haiti over basic food needs. In the last year alone, the cost of making bread around the world has doubled. When food prices rise, the one billion people in the world who spend 90 percent of their income on food suffer. That makes for one very expensive tank of “environmentally friendly” gas.
The circle that began with the promises of Henry Ford has closed. We have reached a point where we are being asked to choose between having fuel or having food. It is a terrible choice. But to make matters worse, it is now almost impossible to know where one ends and one begins. Food makes fuel and fuel makes food. They are like identical twins, separated at birth. Without either one, our society literally grinds to a halt. At the same time, our reliance on cheap energy and vast food reserves has created a host of devastating problems, the worst of which is global climate change. This book is about finding a way out of this dilemna.
For the past four years, we have been exploring the relationship between energy and food. When we first published Fueling the Future, talk of an energy crisis was theoretical. SUVs dominated the roads. Al Gore had yet to release his documentary. When we wrote that the need to develop a sustainable energy model was urgent, we were seen by some as alarmists. Nonetheless, many inside the energy industry knew that we were at the end of the age of abundance and at the beginning of a much more volatile age of energy scarcity. And then, just as we launched the book, 50 million North Americans were left in the darkness during the blackout of 2003. Suddenly energy security and supply became popular issues. Not long after, increasing media pressure brought to light the cascading problems of global climate change.
We also knew that if there was an energy crisis there might well be a food crisis as well. After all, everyone in the energy sector knew that food and fuel are joined at the hip, from the price of artificial, fossil fuel–based fertilizers to the cost of gasoline needed to drive tractors. But the issue was simply not being talked about in the public domain. If the public is not aware of the real problems, it cannot ask its leadership the right questions and change cannot really take place. So a few years later, we gathered together another group of experts and took a close look at the issues surrounding food. From starvation in the developing world at one end of the spectrum to obesity in the developed world at the other, we examined a diverse and at times contradictory array of problems. Once again, the idea that our food systems are dangerously unbalanced was not universally shared. If anything, critics said, there is too much food! Perhaps there was a food distribution issue, but not a food supply issue. Again, when riots over flour broke out around the world a year later, the food crisis became obvious. This is not to say that we in any way predicted the issues. Just that a deeper understanding of the dynamic of energy and food revealed something not often talked about: what happens at the oil well will show up on your dinner plate. And this relationship is going to become one of the key drivers of global change in the near future. It is — to use the political phrase of the moment — part of the fierce urgency of now.
But this book is not only about shining light on intractable problems. Rather, it is about finding practical, clearly articulated solutions to them. Solutions average people can grasp, not just experts. The truth is, most of the problems we all face are, fundamentally, solvable. Which is why exploring better models for sustainable energy and food supplies is the ultimate task of this book. Some of these solutions are technical — new inventions that will allow us to use resources more sustainably. Other solutions, though, will be social — new business relationships, new legal structures, new trade deals. In the rush to innovate, leaders too often focus exclusively on technical ingenuity, but social ingenuity is even more important. And nowhere is this more evident than in the dismal science, economics.
The economic models the world still uses to calculate value, like the GDP, do not account for damage to “natural capital” that results from human industry. This flaw in our economic model leads to many perverse results. In the classic example, the Exxon Valdez oil spill actually caused an increase in Alaska’s GDP. The cleanup caused profitable economic activity, but the cost of the pollution was not factored in. The distortion was tragic. Who sees an oil spill as a net gain for a local economy? Apparently, we do. Throughout our economy, we almost never factor in the ecological costs into our goods and services. As a result of this gap in our calculus we never get a real understanding of the true cost of human activity. That blind spot only encourages a further degradation of our common resources. This is a phenomenon known as the Tragedy of the Commons. It was starkly illustrated by the collapse of the once great cod stocks off the Grand Banks. No one counted the cost of over-fishing to the natural environment. We counted only the cost of catching and selling the fish.
So the question remains: Why do we insist on constantly updating our technologies, but refuse to update our systems of measurement? It is a costly and retrograde error. After all, only what can be measured can be improved. We urgently need to account for the full cost of the things we use and for the costs that society bears for the use of common property, like air and water. We also must learn to account for the unintended consequences — the externalities — that have resulted from our greatest innovations of the past. That is what the authors of the chapters ahead have in mind as they propose their solutions for the food and fuel crises. After all, only when we learn to include the total cost of our actions — economic, social, and environmental — will we be in a position to use Ford’s technology, and the potential of resources like yellow gold, more wisely. We will finally know the true value and cost of our actions. That is real progress.