SUAREZ:    When we look out at the future, Suzanne Hunt, are there things waiting out there that don’t give us some of these difficult trade offs. Waste plants, volunteer plants, plants that aren’t really strictly speaking cultivated but just grow in places in the world that may have alcohol hiding in them if only we could figure out how to get to it.

HUNT:  There are lots and lots of different examples that I think we could agree would be considered examples of sustainable energy production systems.  I visited a community in Guatemala in April that was taking away the waste grease from the restaurants and making fuel and just after they got their processor built a hurricane came through and they were able to run their generators on biodiesel and get through the week when they had no power whatsoever.  Obviously that’s not a solution for the whole planet but I think when you start to see many examples of these contact-specific locally appropriate pressing systems, there are definitely a lot of examples.

SUAREZ:  Is there trouble in scaling up so that instead of one restaurant every restaurant in La Paz is feeding its waste vats into a central place and deriving some of the benefit from that.  How do you get from one restaurant which is doing this smart thing to every restaurant that does it? 

HUNT:   I think that there definitely are some technologies that lend themselves much better to being scaled up so I think in the biofuels world there are very much two tracks.  You have the high tech large scale taking advantage of economies of scale kinds of production and those are the technologies in the field that are going to develop to really start to displace a large quantity or significant quantity of our fossil fuels.  And then this other track of viable production that’s much more focused on local energy provision as a key part in development and poverty alleviation.  And so in some instances you just can’t scale some things. 

But on the other hand, there are a lot of ways where you do kind of have these central collection hubs and as we start moving towards perennial feed stocks you can have some partial processing in the field so that instead of having a big, bulky truckload of grasses or of wood chips that you are transporting, you make it into some kind of liquid at a regional hub or actually on the farm and then transport that liquid to a much larger facility that then refines it into high quality fuel.  So there are ways of combining locally appropriate feed stocks with farmer-ownership in the production cooperatives and then they link up to use a larger facility in a more central location.

SUAREZ:  Cynthia, is there a pacing problem and a chronology problem?  Are these technologies evolving at a pace that is being outstripped by the pace of climate change so that once we decide on a way forward we’re shooting a moving target and really things aren’t the same as they were when we were making our initial decision?

ROSENZWEIG:  That’s why adaptation is so important in the near term because while we’re figuring out about all the mitigation strategies that Suzanne has been talking about for example we have to be helping adapt to increasing climate extremes of today in the near decades.  What these mitigation strategies actually do is reduce the risk of long-term climate change in the outer decades.  So while we’re reorganizing our energy systems in many, many different ways, we also have to be working on reducing vulnerability to climate extremes of today.  Something that farmers can do is both mitigation and adaptation.  I’ll give you one example.  One thing that farmers can do is work to increase the carbon matter in their soil.  Because that was lost when the natural land was cleared.  And by reincorporating the residues from the crops, instead of taking it all off the field, is plowing that back into the soil, leaving that in the soil, that increases the carbon and takes it out of the atmosphere. 

SUAREZ:  Don’t you have to worry about vulnerability to pests then?

ROSENZWEIG:  Oh, you certainly do and it does.  As we’ve said, everything has issues and nothing is completely problem free.  And yes you do have to spray pesticides and herbicides, particularly herbicides, for the crop to be able to grow in a low till or a minimum tillage situation.  But what I like about this technique is that when you have a soil with carbon storage in it, increased organic matter and a drought comes or a flood comes, that good humus as we used to call it in 6th grade, helps the farmers, it helps to hold soil moisture within the soil helping their crops. Also alternatively, when we have a flood that climate change is bringing, it’s also absorbing the flood waters and helping.  So it both mitigates and reduces the emissions of the atmospheric concentration of the gas and it helps farmers adapt as well.

SUAREZ:  And fields with stubble are less prone to runoff.

ROSENZWEIG:  Exactly, and soil erosion.

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