Lester Brown's Stabilizing Climate Summary

“Stabilizing Climate: Shifting to Renewable Energy" was written by Lester Brown and originally published as a chapter in his book Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Citizens. Brown is a well known environmental analyst as well as founder of Worldwatch Institute and Earth Policy Institute. Being on the forefront of the environmental movement, Brown has published numerous books that all tackle the global environmental issues being faced and Plan B 4.0 focuses on the transition from an energy market supported by fossil-fuel to a new energy market fueled by wind, solar, and geothermal energy. This chapter rallied for the replacement of fossil fuels and provided multiple statistics to support his view on turning to wind energy. Brown raised many strong

He expressed his hope for this to happen by 2020 and explained that it would require investing $4.5 trillion in wind energy (116). This was a rather lofty claim, but Brown used that analogy of the rapid adoption computers and cellular devices as a comparison for wind energy. This was helpful to his case along with when he later insisted that the “idled capacity [of] the U.S. automobile industry is sufficient to produce all the wind turbines” (Brown 117). He pointed to Detroit, Michigan and that wind turbines could be mass produced on assembly lines much like in World War II with B-24 bombers (117). Both of these analogies were beneficial to his argument and expressed the creativity and drive needed to implement his “Plan B.” By equating the production of wind turbines to B-24 bombers, Brown was able to successfully express the urgent need to shift to renewable resources. And while this was extremely effective, his claim about wind energy producing 40% of the world’s energy still is misleading. The claim is very possible, but this is misleading once capacity factors for wind turbines are taken into account. The capacity factor of wind turbines is the amount of energy actually produces compared to what it could be producing. With wind energy being an intermittent energy source, or a noncontinuous energy source, the average capacity factor for wind turbines are much lower than more reliable fossil fuels. Many claim capacity factors of 40%, which is the percentage Brown appeared to use when he calculated that 3,000 gigawatts of wind energy are needed to satisfy 40% of the world’s electricity needs (116). But upon further research, one can find that more often wind turbine capacity factors oscillate between 20-30% (Boccard 2681). Nicolas Boccard findings challenge Brown’s claiming, Boccard