Good afternoon.

Let me begin by reciting the complete title for my remarks: “We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you this news flash. Something called woody biomass has been discovered in western forests. It holds the potential to reduce global warming while reducing our nation’s dependence on foreign oil. Film at 11”

You could say that the cynic in me picked this title, or you could say that the devil made me do it. Either way, you would not be far off the mark.

The current buzz about renewable energy reminds me of my first meeting with Jerry Laussman. The old guys in this room this afternoon – me included - remember when Jerry was running around the country selling pollution control technology he had developed that reduced particulate emissions from burners.

Jerry and I met at a meeting in Grants Pass, Oregon in the spring of 1971. He was there peddling his wares and I was there in search of a good story for the Daily Courier, where I was then employed. I don’t know how many kits Jerry eventually sold, but I do know he did not sell one to Milt Herbert because, by 1971, Milt had torn down his burner and was selling his wood waste to outfits in Eugene. It was a story that repeated itself all over the West.

I also remember when D.R. Johnson fired up his co-generation plant at Riddle, Oregon in the early 1970s. I left the Courier in 1972 to go to work for D.R. He insisted on it – and if you know and love D.R. as I do, you know what I mean when I say “he insisted.” Most people thought D.R. was nuts when he went into the power business. I assure you he was not. In fact, he had one of the most extraordinary senses of timing I’ve ever observed. I suspect he made a bloody fortune selling power to the Bonneville Power Administration at the avoided rate. 

The point I want to make here is that woody biomass, bio-fuels and renewable energy are all old hat. They are yesterday’s news. But they are today’s news, too, and they will be tomorrow’s news as well. Over the next half hour or so, I’ll explain why.

But first let me say what a pleasure it is to be here with you this afternoon. I do a fair amount of public speaking, but this is the first time I’ve ever attended one of your annual meetings, much less been one of your speakers. It’s an honor to be here. I see a long time supporter of our Evergreen Foundation missing seated in the back of the room – and I’d like t publicly acknowledge his faithful support: John Shelk of the Ochoco Lumber Company at Prineville, Oregon.

I’d also like to extend a special ‘thank you’ to Butch Bernhardt for inviting me. Actually, I think he took pity on me after he learned that I was out trying to raise money to do a special issue of Evergreen devoted to the biomass potential in western forests. I’ll have more to say about this in a moment, but first let me tell you what’s new at Evergreen; then we’ll forge ahead and see what we can learn.
   
Big changes are underway at Evergreen. In case you hadn’t noticed, we haven’t published an issue for nearly two years. The reason is brutally simple: our traditional funding sources – the West’s logging and lumber companies – are facing the worst economic downturn they’ve witnessed since the 1970s. This isn’t news to you – and I’m not going to dwell on it – but I do want to say that in my unbiased opinion, Evergreen has been the finest forestry education program your industry has ever had, and that we intend to stay in the business, one way o the other, come hell or high water.

This said, there is simply no denying that printing and distribution costs have soared beyond our reach, perhaps permanently. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we were successful in raising sufficient money to transform our magazine into an electronic news service – thanks to major contributions from the Lematta Foundation and my old friend, Dick Bennett, who I am sure some of you know.

It took me some time to warm up to this transition – mainly because I’ve had printer’s ink in my veins since I was a kid. I love print; I love the look of it, the feel of it and the permanence that it imparts to readers. In print, there is no “delete” key.

But having explored the astonishing array of options that are open to us on the worldwide web, I now believe that we may be able to do an even better job with the forestry story – assuming we are able to raise the funding necessary to assemble and manage electronic content on line. The fact that we have effectively cut our annual operating budget by 50 percent will surely help, but I don’t know if it will help enough. Time will tell.

We hope to activate our new website by the end of this month, so I hope you’ll give us a look, say, around the 25th. When you do, keep in mind the fact that evergreenmagazine.com will always be a work in progress. This is as it should be with websites as active as we hope ours will be – and when I say “active” I’m saying that we intend to add new material to the site whenever we get it, perhaps daily if funding allows.

One of the beauties of the technology we will be using is that it will allow use to add content from very remote locations. All we need is a line of sight view of the satellite we are using and we’re business. We can thus report from forest fires, logging operations, wilderness hideaways…you name it and we can do it if we can find our satellite in the sky.

The worldwide web offers one more enormous advantage: it allows us to reach today’s school kids. They live on the Internet. Now we will live there with them. I’ve always been amazed by the number of youngsters who contact us for information about forests and forestry. Over the years I’ve spent countless evenings answering e-mail questions from students.

We also hope to present major in-depth reports on our website on a monthly basis. It is this desire that led me to the biomass story – and it was Butch’s interest in supporting the biomass story that has me here with you.

But before I go any further, I have a confession to make. When I started Evergreen Magazine in 1986, one of my fond hopes was to become a trusted public relations advisor to western sawmill owners. It was a natural inclination on my part. I had owned my own quite successful public relations firm in Montana for many years and had several industrial clients, including one of the nation’s major aluminum producers. But in hindsight, my hopes were misplaced. I lacked the pedigree and I didn’t have the right address to get my foot through the door. So I settled in to what it is that I know how to do better than anyone else who has ever stumbled across your remarkable story: and what I know how to do best is write. I thus come here today as a writer who loves your story and wants to see it shouted from the heavens.

Some of you probably know that I am writing a book about the history of the West’s independent sawmill owners. Many of you – probably most of you – are in this story in one way or another. It is a helluva story – In my mind one of the great entrepreneurial sagas in our country’s history. I don’t mind telling you that I am truly blessed to be the one who gets to write this story, and you are truly blessed by the fact that my wonderful friend, Aaron Jones, cared enough about the story to underwrite its extraordinary cost.

As to your obvious questions, the story is titled “The Independents,” and I will finish the manuscript later this year. Last week I finished Chapter 12, which deals with the 1955 Chudoff-Neuberger hearings – a political side show much too involved to describe here – except to say that by 1955 the West’s lumbermen had figured out that there was big money in biomass.

Back then, though, it wasn’t called biomass. It was “wood waste” at best and “hog fuel” at worst. But in either case, advancements in wood and paper science – the result of work done at the Forest Service’s research laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin – were helping to wring real value out of wood waste that had for decades been going up in smoke in teepee burners. Hardboard and Presto Logs entered the marketplace, as did rayon and a bevy of lower grade paper and packaging materials.

Even more dramatic, World War II-era scientists had figured out how to convert wood waste into fuel on a large scale. A plant that would do it was constructed in Eugene in the early 1940s at the behest of the Department of Defense, which was worried about running out of fuel in much the same way that Rommel’s tanks did in North Africa in 1943. Not surprisingly, the biofuel idea died after the war – in part because we had plenty of cheap oil, but also because the German war machine, which was the first to perfect biofuel, was crushed in the spring of 1945.

Switch reels, come forward to 2009 and we have paper scientists talking out loud about how paper mills can be made to produce energy while also producing various grades of paper. I don’t doubt for a moment that this is possible or that it will eventually happen, but I might have doubted it a few years ago, but that was before I met Wink Sutton. Apart from being one of the most delightful people I’ve ever interviewed, he is also a world-class scientist with three PhD’s behind his name. Wink delivered a paper at a millennium forestry conference in South Africa in which he predicted that in this century cellulose will replace carbon as our civilization’s great building block. I hope he is right. The last frontier involves unlocking cellulose at the molecular level. Once there, civilization can move beyond the host of petroleum-based products that it cannot live without today.

The biomass story has more moving parts to it – more different storylines – than any story I’ve ever run across. But before I dig into them, I’d like to give you my ten-cent tour of the world from 30,000 feet.

There are a lot of things going on in the world today that bear watching – not least the economic rubble piling up at our feet. I’ve never seen anything like it in my 65 years. The Great Depression was much worse in most respects, but this economic downturn has wiped out more wealth than any other in our history. One might argue that most of it was paper wealth, but when paper wealth vanishes into thin air, so does consumer confidence – and I will argue that consumer confidence is at the moment a far more serious problem than consumer credit. People who could easily get loans for cars or home repairs or even a new home simply aren’t applying for loans because they aren’t sure where the economy is headed and they don’t want any unnecessary debt on their books. I haven’t the faintest idea why this truth is so difficult to grasp in some political quarters, but it is.

But one thing is certain: the federal government is going to throw money at this crisis until some of it sticks to the wall. And when you see money start sticking to walls you will know that the worst is behind us. I look for modest improvement beginning later this year.

Initially, I did not think the Obama stimulus plan – now called the Obama recovery plan - would work. Now I think it might help some, though not as much as it could have if more money had gone into shovel-ready jobs and less of it had gone into the pockets of political patrons, but then I remind myself that political patronage has been around for a very long time. More interesting to me is our current national conversation, which hasn’t been this lively or this divided since the Vietnam War. 

    As you might imagine, I’m very interested in the Obama Administration’s energy initiatives. A certain amount of political pandering to environmental interests is to be expected here, but I think that if the forest products industry were to make its voice known, it could rightfully earn a place at the table where some very large and very important policy decisions are going to be made over the next year or two.

A person would have to be a damned fool not to see and understand the great biomass potential lying around – quite literally – in western federal forests. Yet, federal woody biomass has been mysteriously excluded from pending energy legislation.

Rumor has it there were two reasons why - first, the Natural Resources Defense Council, which saw a way to drive a political wedge in the biomass debate and, second, a few pulp and paper producers in the Southeast saw in NRDC’s silliness a chance to drive a stake in deep into the heart of the entire federal biomass to energy discussion.

Personally, I think the position that these companies have taken is both untenable and unconscionable. But I felt the same way about western companies that attempted to sabotage President Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative. I understand the rigors of competition and free markets as well as anyone in this room. What I do not understand though is why this industry’s largest companies continue to look for ways to get the federal government to kill off their smaller competitors.

Even so, I have some sympathy for pulp and paper producers. Just the other day there was a report on Fox News which suggested that one way to “save” trees was to stop selling soft toilet tissue… [You can’t make this stuff up]

There is nothing new in your industry’s attempt to get the federal government to do its dirty work. It has been going on since the 1930s, when several of our country’s largest timberland owners attempted to hijack the West’s federal forests under the guise of cooperative sustained yield forestry, which had been a dream of David Mason’s since he first wrote about it in the 1920s. If I had the time this morning, I’d explain it to you in all of its exquisite detail, so you will have to read about it my book. But here’s a hint: most of the lumber trade associations that exist in the West today, including this one are, in one way or another, by-products of a monumental battle that occurred in Eugene Oregon in January of 1948.

As for biomass, it is a shame that your industry cannot seem to find its voice because the opportunity is huge. Hopefully those who represent the interests of the West’s family-owned saw mills and logging companies will find a way to proactively position their members in this debate. It is my heartfelt opinion that the renewable energy story – which is the biomass story – offers you the best chance you have yet had to alter the course of political events that have pushed the nation’s federal forests to the brink of ecological collapse.

The biomass story is a writer’s dream because it has multiple plot lines and a terrific cast of characters.

There’s the utilization story, with its roots in science and technology; the utilization story with roots in logging, the utilization story with roots in sawmilling and paper-making, the utilization story with roots in new product developments, the utilization story with roots in forestry, the utilization story with roots in public policy and the utilization story with its roots in history. Do you see a pattern here?

Since the end of World War II, no single factor has driven your industry forward faster or more forcefully than technological advancements in scanning and sawing that have made it possible for you to wring more wood fiber – and thus more value - out of every log you process.

There is also a forestry story here, with its roots in active forest management: pre-commercial and commercial thinning, forest genetics and tree improvement, planting, fertilization and forest pest control, monitoring tools and growth and harvest simulation models and a steady stream of improvements in both logging equipment and methods. 

Then there’s the environmental story with its roots in renewable wood products, renewable energy, energy independence, reduced fossil fuel emissions, clean air, clean water, abundant fish and wildlife habitat and a wealth of year round recreation opportunity. This is the real conservation story. This is where we get to have our cake and eat it too.

There is also a numbers story here that gives the whole story a sense of proportion. Numbers tell us that in some parts of the world - Sweden for example - biomass has been a big story for a long time. More than half of all Sweden’s energy comes from renewable fuels, much of it forest-based. This is a helluva story that merits widespread public consumption.

But there are other numbers here that help quantify the woody biomass story in meaningful ways. Here are some examples:

80 percent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels, so if the goal is to wean the world from fossil fuels, biomass is definitely a growth business – and what we have here is definitely a growth story. World-wide, 13 percent of our energy comes from renewable sources and 7 percent comes from nuclear.

In the U.S., 86 percent of our energy comes from fossil fuels, more than half of it imported from countries that don’t like us very well. Another 8 percent of the energy we Americans consume comes from nuclear power plants. Only 6 percent comes from renewable fuels, so we definitely have a growth story here.

Biomass accounts for 10.6 percent of the world’s total energy and 79.4 percent of renewable energy. By contrast, solar, wind and ocean tides account for less that one-tenth of one percent. Most biomass is used in solid form, but since 1990, liquid biomass use has increased 84 percent per year, compared to only 20 per cent per year for wind and solar energy.

In OCED countries – of which we are one – biomass accounts for about 3 percent of energy supply. For those who are waiting breathlessly, OCED stands for Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. I have no idea what it is or does, but its membership includes most if not all of the industrialized nations in the world. More important to me is the fact that most of these countries are also big manufacturers of forest products, which again suggests to me that we have a growth story.

Here’s a set of numbers I really like:

In the U.S. the energy output from renewable energy sources doubled from 2005 to 2007 – then increased another 30 percent in 2007 and 2008. That’s impressive – especially when we consider the fact that a Texas oil man was sitting in the White House.

But what do these numbers really mean. Well, if we count hydroelectric power as a renewable, it means that 2.4 percent of our nation’s energy came from renewables. A growth story, for sure.

But what’s this? We’ve torn down more than 200 dams since 1999 to improve fish passage. Not to worry: more growth possibilities. And more numbers:

Wind and solar output in the U.S. totaled 45.5 million megawatts in 2008. Sounds very impressive, doesn’t it - until you know that the country used 4.1 billion megawatt hours in 2008. In other words, solar and wind accounted for 1.1 percent of total U.S. consumption. Hey, it’s a start.

I think a lot of these numbers are more easily understood if they are converted to barrels of oil – so here we go:

Those 45.5 million megawatts of power generated from wind and solar in 2008 amount to 27.7 million barrels of oil equivalent – about 76,000 barrels per day, the daily output of an average size coal mine. But we use about 48 million barrels per day – nearly 624 times total wind and solar output.

How did we use so many barrels of oil? Well, 19 million barrels was consumed as oil, principally in our cars and trucks; 11.9 million barrels was consumed as natural gas, principally in big power plants; 11.5 million barrels was consumed as coal and 1.1 million barrels were consumed as nuclear power. So, if renewables are to replace fossil fuel in our lifetimes, the goal is to increase renewables production from 76,000 barrels per day to 47.4 million barrels per day.

Pardon my pun, but the woods seem to be full of numbers that help quantify both current biomass use and future opportunity. But you have to be careful with numbers because people assemble them for different and sometimes conflicting reasons. Were I to attempt to reconcile these conflicts, I’d start with the recently published “Billion Ton Report,” a joint effort of the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Energy. Then I’d take a look at global data gathered by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. FAO has been monitoring the global wood fiber equation for many years. I tend to trust their stuff, as I do anything written by Lloyd Irland or Bill Carlson, who has forgotten more about the woody biomass to energy story that most of us will ever know.

On the magazine front, you can find interesting and useful data in the Journal of Forestry. There is also a new magazine called Biomass floating around. I subscribe to it, but confess I haven’t had much time to read it yet. The current issue has a picture of a Holstein cow on the cover, which serves to warn me that when telling the biomass story it is pretty easy to get cow shit on your boots and embarrass yourself in public. 

There are other important green stories that are actually biomass stories in disguise. How about the “going green” story and its companion, the green jobs story? Is there a major corporation in America that hasn’t jumped on this bandwagon? Yet your industry remains strangely silent at a time when it ought to be shouting its bonafide’s to the high heavens.

What’s wrong here? Why are you letting companies that would not know a green job if it bit them in the butt steal your best material. Is the bumper sticker that reads, “For Foresters, Every Day is Earth Day,” the best you can do? If it is, you ought to take a stroll down memory lane. Back in the 1940’s, 50s and 60s, your industry did a spectacular job of telling its story and telling it often – thanks in large part to my old friend, Bill Hagenstein, who remains the greatest public spokesman you ever had.

I think there is also a very important “follow the money trail” story here. Earlier I alluded to my belief that the Obama Administration’s stimulus-recovery plan will place a high priority on renewable energy. When the federal floodgates finally open – in my view sooner rather than later – you will witness the damnedest feeding frenzy you have ever seen. $94 billion over ten years will be available. Everyone is going to be searching for their slice of the pie – and I do mean everyone. But at the moment, no one knows which pipelines will funnel money to the energy hordes.

The story here is probably more of a “how too” instructional manual than an actual story, but that hardly matters. What matters is that people living in rural communities with struggling sawmills need to know where to go for the money they need to first, keep their mills alive and, second, help steer them into the brave new world of biomass energy.  

But let’s be clear here. Everything depends on making sure that federal forests get taken off the “bad” biomass list and put on the “good” biomass list. It will take a 90-yard Hail Mary pass to get this done, but assuming success, my gut tells me that governors, county commissioners and the volunteer directors of the Forest Service-appointed Resource Conservation and Development boards are going to have a lot to say about who gets money and who doesn’t.

There is also a carbon credits story here – though I think it is still on the periphery, at least for now, behaving a bit like the old carnival shell game. Nevertheless, the idea that carbon can be traded in the same way we trade commodities fascinates me. If a company is a polluter it has to buy credits from a company that isn’t – and since yours is a clean industry compared to many others, you should be sellers of carbon credits.

There must be something good going on here because a lot of environmental outfits are whining about the fact that you might actually get credit for something you do, like plant trees that take up carbon quickly, or harvest trees that no longer take in carbon as fast as they did when they were younger. I know this sounds absurd, but you need to remember that you are living in the Theater of the Absurd, so you have to expect that from time to time some of the stage players are going to make damned fools of themselves.

And speaking of the Theater of the Absurd is anyone going to blow the whistle on ethanol production anytime soon? I like corn farmers as well as the next guy, but it looks to me like ethanol production is more damn trouble than it’s worth. When it takes more fuel to make a fuel, something is wrong that probably can’t be easily fixed. And when the fuel that is made is less efficient and more expensive than the fuel it is supposed to replace, something is really wrong.

Woody biomass is also a carbon sequestration story – and if you’ll pardon my pun, carbon sequestration is one of the hottest forestry stories on the planet, so hot in fact that science’s frauds and fakers are doing everything in their power to corrupt the story by misrepresenting the essential roles that active forest management and wood utilization play in sequestering carbon for very long periods of time. I love the story because it is both a forestry and forest health story, in addition to being the other half of the wildfire story which, again, is a biomass story. You cannot tell this story often enough.

Then there is the photosynthesis story – in my mind the greatest story of them all – and a story we’ve told on Evergreen pages many times over the years. This is the global warming story writ large. It is the process – dare I call it a miracle – by which plants use the free, non-polluting energy of the sun to convert water, complex carbohydrates and carbon dioxide – the chief culprit in global warming - into cellulose and thus, wood. And, miracle of miracles, the byproduct of this completely natural process is oxygen. 

What a story. And yet, I cannot remember the last time I saw this story in print except on the pages of Evergreen.

You manufacture a wonderful product engineered in nature from the free, non-polluting energy of the sun, the only building, packaging and communications material on earth that is renewable, recyclable and biodegradable, yet you absolutely refuse to talk about it, except amongst yourselves.

The public outreach work you need to fund is not expensive – but it is hard, which is why Evergreen never had any competition and still doesn’t despite its near two-year absence from the stage. I know how hard this work is because I do it every day. From experience, I know there are no short cuts, no rabbits in hats and no grand slams you can hit in the bottom on the ninth. Public outreach is a cost of doing business. So too are the costs currently being paid by the coal and oil industries to secure their seats at the table where the Obama Administration will decide the fates of their industries. The American Forest Resource Council is bravely trying to represent you at the Obama table, but the coal and oil industries probably spent more on lunch today than AFRC spends in an entire year. Over the years your industry has splintered into so many different groups – with competing interests – it is now virtually impossible for you to mount a common offensive, or speak with one voice.

What a shame. Yours is a beautiful story no coal mine or oil refinery can ever hope to match. Your story is beautiful because it has trees in it, and trees are beautiful. Your story also beautiful because it has wood in it and wood is beautiful, too. Its strength-to-weight ratio is unmatched among structural building materials, yet it consumes less energy in its manufacture and use than any of its non-renewable competitors, none of which beautifies our world in the same way wood does.

Yes, you face big challenges, but then you always have. Yours is a tough and unforgiving business. And now you face an administration that leans left on many issues that are important to you personally, and to your businesses. But on the other hand, this administration, more than any in my lifetime, means to make big things happen on the energy front – and that favors your story in a way it has never been favored before. But you are going to have to tell your story in new and more imaginative ways, and you are going to have to rise above your own lesser angels.

To me it is dumbfounding that your industry is again at loggerheads over whether federal biomass should be included in energy legislation. How in the world are we ever going to wrap our arms around our enormous wildfire and forest health problems in the West if we aren’t allowed to take out the trash that is piling up by the billions of tons in our national forests? May I remind you that more than 80 percent of this nation’s citizens – measured by survey and focus group work conducted in seven major urban centers - supported the kind of thinning and forest restoration work envisioned in the Bush Administration’s Healthy Forests Initiative. An eighty percent public approval rating is much more than a political landslide, it is a political earthquake.

Thank God for my old friend, Greg Walden, who is introducing legislation that will change the definition of what constitutes biomass to include federal biomass. Congressman Walden is going to need the help of western lumbermen to get this legislation passed. I understand Ron Wyden has introduced similar legislation in the Senate. Do not let this opportunity slip through your fingers. It may be years before you get another chance.

There is no shortage of information needed to mount an offensive. You should see the pile of news releases that are e-mailed to me daily from organizations and companies clamoring for niches in the burgeoning renewable energy marketplace.

Why do I get tons of these press releases? Because my e-mail address is  HYPERLINK "mailto:jim@evergreenmagazine.com" jim@evergreenmagazine.com. Search engines find the word “green,” and I get everything from everyone who wants to be green. Kermit the Frog was wrong. It is easy being green – too easy in my opinion.

The larger challenge you face lies in translating your story into plain English so that our Congress will understand what is needed on the policy front to ensure that a biomass industry can take root and grow in the West. I would think it vital that you tell Congress that it makes no sense to displace the existing biomass marketplace in order to create a new one. This is what the pulp and paper industry fears most. It is why some companies have quietly opposed including federal biomass in energy legislation. Personally, I think their fears are unfounded. I think there is more than enough biomass to go around. 

What seems to have been forgotten is that we will never run out of biomass. It accumulates in forests by the hundreds of tons per acre per year, every year, year in and year out. And it always will  – which suggests to me that simply doing the stand tending work necessary to maintain biological, structural and age-class diversity in publicly owned forests will require a full range of competitive fiber markets, from lumber to pulp and biomass energy.

There are hopeful signs: Seneca Sawmill Company – another long time Evergreen supporter recently announced that it will build a quite large cogeneration facility next to its Eugene, Oregon sawmill; serious investor interest in building a pulp and/or OSB complex somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico; Stoltze Lumber Company – another long-time Evergreen supporter, recently announced its plans to building a cogeneration plant next to its sawmill at Columbia Falls, Montana; and Montana Governor, Brian Schweitzer’s announced intent to use at least $10 million in stimulus money to help Montana sawmills increase their capacity to process biomass.

I will readily concede that environmental litigation remains a huge problem – and is the chief reason why investment capital is not flowing to this opportunity. But my environmental friends – and I have a few – tell me there is a good deal of soul searching going on in their organizations. There is fear that some groups are simply out of control; there is a fear that private timber landowners will finally give up in disgust and sell out to developers; and there is fear of losing the infrastructure, know-how, capital and markets that you bring to the table – all of which they need in abundance to get their own renewable energy dreams off the ground.

So it may be that the ground you now jointly occupy with them is the common ground you have been looking for – the place where you can start a civil conversation and hopefully develop the mutual senses of dignity, trust and respect that has been missing from the West’s debilitating forestry debate for so many 20 years.

As for me, I hope to continue to write stories about you and your contributions to the nation’s economic and environmental well-being for many years to come. And of the stories that need telling right now, none looms larger or is more hopeful than the renewable forest biomass to energy story – not just because it can light homes and offices, but also because it can light imaginations – imaginations that may well lead us to the day when cellulose molecules and not carbon molecules will power civilization’s advancement. What a glorious day that will be.