After the first two errands took me as far afield as Tennessee and Minnesota, the third, mercifully, required traveling only eighty miles to Dartmouth College. I arrived in the morning and walked the campus as the autumn’s cool breath plucked crimson leaves from the sugar maples. I had made the drive through the Green Mountains and across the Connecticut River into New Hampshire to see Lee Lynd, an engineering professor at Dartmouth. Though he might not enjoy much renown outside scientific circles, he could some day occupy a place in history among the likes of Pasteur, Tesla, and Salk. That is, if his research succeeds. Lynd is one of the world’s leading experts on cellulosic ethanol. He’s working to create a microorganism that would break down a plant’s cellulose to sugar, then ferment it and convert it directly into ethyl alcohol without any added enzymes. This all-in-one natural process would eliminate distillation, and the high amount of energy it requires, altogether. In other words, it would be the silver bullet for oil alternatives.
Dartmouth would be a fitting place for a radical environmental discovery, given its Supreme Court case nearly a century ago that partly led to big business’s stranglehold over energy policy today. The school was founded seven years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence by a Congregational minister from Connecticut named Eleazar Wheelock. Granted a charter and a plot of land by the provincial governor of New Hampshire, he built the campus in the frontier town of Hanover and named his school after Lord Dartmouth, one of its largest donors. In 1815 Dartmouth trustees fired John Wheelock—the son of the founder—as president. The state legislature intervened, changing the school’s charter against the will of the trustees and rehiring Wheelock.
The trustees then sued, and the case went to the Supreme Court, where famed orator and Dartmouth alum Daniel Webster (class of 1801) argued on behalf of his alma mater against the New Hampshire government. In 1818 the justices decided in the college’s favor, saying no state legislature possessed the authority to step in and change a corporation’s charter. In essence, the ruling barred the government from being able to force corporations to operate in the public interest. To butcher Milton Friedman, this is when the business of business became business. So today, every time a corporation overlooks its environmental (and human impact) for the sake of profits while the government idly watches (or actively aids it), this case from nearly a century ago can be credited—or blamed—as one of the early paving stones for the country’s path to date.
On the morning I arrived on campus, I reached a brick building with a sign etched into it reading, “Thayer School of Engineering. Founded in 1867 by Sylvanus Thayer: To prepare the most capable and faithful for the most responsible positions and the most difficult service.” Inside, I ascended a flight of stairs to Lynd’s office. Taped to his closed wooden door was a yellowed, photocopied article from the September 29, 1916, edition of the New York Evening Journal, with the headline “Alcohol from Sawdust to be Auto Fuel.” Above it, on another piece of paper, hung a quote from George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Lynd’s voice seeped into the hallway through the crack under the door. He was on the phone, and I could hear him bellowing words like “cellulosic ethanol” and “biomass.”
His conversation lasted about ten minutes after I got there and when he hung up, I knocked. The door opened, and my eyes fell upon the enamel grin of a broad, fit man wearing a black-and-white flannel shirt. His unruly blond hair was graying at the temples, but made him look much younger than his fifty years. “Come on in.” he said, “Thanks for coming all this way,” as if he were imposing upon me, rather than vise versa.
Lynd became interested in the potential of plants to produce energy in the 1970s, during a summer job at an organic farm. He was an undergrad studying biology at Bates College in Maine at the time and noticed steam rising from the compost heaps every morning. So one day he stuck a thermometer in a pile and it read 150 degrees Fahrenheit. He immediately began experimenting with methods to pull the energy from the compost, with no success. “But sometimes a bad idea gets you to a good one,” he told me.
This work led him to research the potential of biofuels — a subject he has single-mindedly pursued ever since. As part of his senior thesis at Bates, he tried for the first time to cultivate a microorganism that could break down cellulose. He continued this same work while earning a master’s in bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin, and a master’s and PhD in engineering from the Thayer School at Dartmouth, where he became a teacher after graduating and still is today. In 2005 Lynd cofounded Mascoma Corporation, which makes cellulosic ethanol through the conventional—and expensive—method of using synthetic enzymes to convert cellulose to sugar and then using yeast to convert the sugar to alcohol. The company (which shares the name of the lake where the Dartmouth sailing team trains) has raised more than one hundred million dollars in funding and is planning ethanol facilities in New York, Michigan, and Tennessee.
“A lot of academics say to themselves, ‘This is the direction the world is headed—how can I find a wrinkle in it for my research?’ I’m actually looking for a way to send the world in a different direction,” he said sitting in front of a built-in bookshelf crammed with hundreds of biochemistry books. He is—as Shaw would put it—an “unreasonable man.”
When Lynd speaks, there’s a twinge of urgency in his dramatic voice. He sounds impatient to make the necessary breakthroughs in his cellulosic biofuel research and to stop the threat of global warming.
“Climate change is the defining challenge of our time,” he told me. “The most effective thing I can do is point to the paths that will lead us to climbing this mountain. This is a climbable mountain.”
For a man convinced of the potential environmental catastrophe that awaits humankind if we don’t change our ways, his optimism seemed surprising. “I have to be an optimist about the future,” he countered. “If I’m not, what’s the point?”
Yet to him, the future doesn’t include corn-based ethanol or biodiesel. “I think we should use every drop of waste grease in this country for energy. But corn-based ethanol and biodiesel from oil seeds are a poor use of land. So little fuel is produced per acre compared to other alternatives. Their production has not been about sustainability and security. It has been about price supports. We’ve got a huge industry that grows corn and soybeans. Their objective has been to find a way to grow more corn and soybeans. Not create biofuel. There are signs that this might be changing, though.”
But do we have the land in the United States to replace unleaded gas with cellulosic ethanol? He said there are four hundred million acres of cropland in the country. If cover crops were planted on one-third of it in the fall—not interfering with whatever is grown there in the spring and summer, and actually adding nutrients like nitrogen to the soil — these plants could supply half of our fuel needs for transportation (about 60 billion gallons of gas), Lynd claims.
Replacing fossil fuels with an earth-friendly alternative is only one part of his energy and climate-change solution. In Lynd’s view, if we’re to meet this defining challenge of our time, rather than allowing it to defeat us, we’ll be forced to change our views on the size of our homes and SUVs, and in the way we live.
“I love our country,” I said, “but I’m not sure if we’re a culture that’s willing to sacrifice much for the common good anymore. When there’s a war, the president cuts taxes, so it won’t change our everyday lives. At the same time, we’re piling up a national debt for our kids and grandkids to pay off, and we’re not batting an eye.”
He cut me off. “We can mobilize. We did it during World War II.”
True, through war bonds and rationing, and millions of other ways, nearly everyone took a personal stake in the fight. Which led to my next question for Lynd: “Well then, how do you personally try to solve the problem in the way you live?”
He drives a Prius, he replied. (A couple of years ago, a study claimed that hybrid cars require so much energy to build that driving a giant SUV was actually cleaner for the environment in the long run. But given its lack of peer review, faulty data, and the lack of transparency in who funded it, the study was quickly shot down by other scientists. He heats his small house with wood, mostly. (A burning log produces no more carbon dioxide than one that rots in the backyard, and if it’s harvested sustainably, it’s infinitely kinder to the environment than coal, oil, or natural gas.) Coincidentally, a solar panel array was being installed on his property that very morning. He knows the panels will probably never pay for themselves in electricity-bill savings, but he hopes they’ll partly cancel out his environmental impact from flying around the country to give lectures on cellulosic ethanol and biofuels.
“Doesn’t the good you achieve by teaching others about green living outweigh your carbon footprint from flying in a plane or living in a big home?” I asked.
“At some point, you’ve got to live the way you tell others to do,” he said. “You know, I got in a debate about this with someone recently. It was regarding Al Gore. My argument was, if everyone lived like Gore, in a ten-thousand-square-foot house, the earth couldn’t sustain it.”
I scribbled feverishly into my notebook, waiting for him to say, “And that was off the record, of course.” But he didn’t.
“Okay. Now for the billion-dollar question. When are you going to reach that breakthrough and make that microbe that will turn a cornstalk, or blade of grass, or pile of sawdust into ethanol?”
His broad smile didn’t waver and his dramatic tone didn’t soften, but he didn’t answer directly. For all I knew, he had already achieved it, and the information that would change the world forever sat right in front of me, encrypted within the hard drive of the lone computer in his office: a slim laptop. Or maybe he was no closer to a breakthrough than he was during his senior year at Bates, in 1979. According to the articles I had read on cellulosic ethanol, the prevailing thought is that someone — whether it’s Lynd, who’s leading the charge, or another researcher somewhere around the globe—will reach it within the next decade. He did say that even using the technology available today, the ethyl alcohol plants like the ones being built by his company Mascoma will be making profits within three years.
So if a cellulosic ethanol plant is capable of making money and producing a fuel comparable in price to unleaded gas, will the free market shift consumers and automakers further toward ethanol?
“The market can be a force for that shift, but you need government to get us there,” he said.
I told him that I thought that even the Democrats were afraid to take a firm, meaningful stand on the environment, because it’s a dead-end issue for politicians. They gladly avoid the topic, beyond saying that they support clean air and renewable energy—so they won’t be labeled as tree huggers which is code for being antijobs, antibusiness, and out of the mainstream. The press isn’t forcing them to address the issue, either. During the many debates and major network interviews of presidential candidates in 2006 and early 2007, only four out of the twenty-eight hundred questions posed by journalists were about global warming, according to the League of Conservation Voters. By comparison, three questions were asked about UFOs.
Lynd countered that candidates actually avoid environmental issues to their detriment. “It’s pretty mainstream to me if a politician would say, ‘You know what, if you care about stronger national security, if you care about creating wealthy rural economies, if you care about water quality and climate change, you’re for this.’ “
He elaborated: American foreign policy is largely dictated by protecting the resources we need, like oil. To kick the fossil-fuel habit by replacing it with a homemade solution is to strengthen national security. He believes that the cost of cellulosic ethanol, created through the methods he’s researching, would cost about seventeen dollars a barrel—a fraction of what oil goes for. So the cost savings would be immense — even if ethanol doesn’t quite provide the same fuel economy as unleaded—and improve our economy. It would also return prosperity to hard-on-their-luck rural areas in the Deep South, Northwest, and Northeast that have the suitable land and climate for growing switchgrass and other energy crops.
“Outside of the corn belt, rural economies have been depressed for fifty years. Now even the paper industry is leaving a lot of them, and paper is all they’ve got left,” he said. The key is finally finding that clean and quick way to turn plant matter into cellulosic ethanol—the fruits of an unreasonable man’s lifelong labors. I lingered on campus after the interview, to enjoy the weather and the musty academic atmosphere. For real change to occur, the government must lead. His refrain wasn’t much different than what the wind farmers in Minnesota had told me. We can mobilize. We did it in World War II. But I wondered if anyone would have the courage to lead us in time.