[Vision2020] From Rep. Trail - advance look at Lester Brown's book on problems facing planet earth and possible solutions

[ttrail at moscow.com]

Constituents:  

Lester R. Brown's new book, Plan B, is well worth a read.

Brown provides excellent documentation of the problems facing planet earth
and possible solutions.

Rep. Tom Trail

Earth Policy Institute
Plan B 3.0 Book Byte
For Immediate Release
January 3, 2008

PLAN B 3.0 - A PLAN OF HOPE

http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/Seg/PB3ch01_ss7.htm

* advance look at a new book by *
Lester R. Brown

Plan B is shaped by what is needed to save civilization, not by what may
currently be considered politically feasible. Plan B does not fit within a
particular discipline, sector, or set of assumptions.

Implementing Plan B means undertaking several actions simultaneously,
including eradicating poverty, stabilizing population, and restoring the
earth’s natural systems. It also involves cutting carbon dioxide emissions
80 percent by 2020, largely through a mobilization to raise energy
efficiency and harness renewable sources of energy.

Not only is the scale of this save-our-civilization plan ambitious, so is
the speed with which it must be implemented. We must move at wartime speed,
restructuring the world energy economy at a pace reminiscent of the
restructuring of the U.S. industrial economy in 1942 following the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor. The shift from producing cars to planes, tanks, and
guns was accomplished within a matter of months. One of the keys to this
extraordinarily rapid restructuring was a ban on the sale of cars, a ban
that lasted nearly three years.

We face an extraordinary challenge, but there is much to be upbeat about.
All the problems we face can be dealt with using existing technologies. And
almost everything we need to do to move the world economy back onto an
environmentally sustainable path has already been done in one or more
countries.

We see the components of Plan B -- the alternative to business as usual --
in new technologies already on the market. On the energy front, for
example, an advanced-design wind turbine can produce as much energy as an
oil well. Japanese engineers have designed a vacuum-sealed refrigerator
that uses only one eighth as much electricity as those marketed a decade
ago. Gas-electric hybrid automobiles, getting nearly 50 miles per gallon,
are twice as efficient as the average car on the road.

Numerous countries are providing models of the various components of Plan
B. Denmark, for example, today gets 20 percent of its electricity from wind
and has plans to push this to 50 percent. Some 60 million Europeans now get
their residential electricity from wind farms.
By the end of 2007, some 40 million Chinese homes will be getting their hot
water from rooftop solar water heaters. Iceland now heats close to 90
percent of its homes with geothermal energy. In so doing, it has virtually
eliminated the use of coal for home heating.

With food, India -- using a small-scale dairy production model that relies
almost entirely on crop residues as a feed source -- has more than
quadrupled its milk production since 1970, overtaking the United States as
the world’s leading milk producer. The value of India’s dairy production
now exceeds that of its rice harvest.

Fish farming advances in China, centered on the use of an ecologically
sophisticated carp poly-culture, have made this the first country where
fish farm output exceeds the oceanic catch. Indeed, the 32 million tons of
farmed fish produced in China in 2005 was equal to roughly a third of the
world’s oceanic fish catch.

We see what a Plan B world could look like in the reforested mountains of
South Korea. Once a barren, almost treeless country, the 65 percent of
South Korea now covered by forests has checked flooding and soil erosion,
returning environmental health and stability to the Korean countryside.

The United States -- which over the last two decades retired one tenth of
its cropland, most of it highly erodible, and shifted to conservation
tillage practices -- has reduced soil erosion by 40 percent. At the same
time, the nation’s farmers expanded the grain harvest by more than one fifth.

Some of the most innovative leadership has come from cities. Curitiba,
Brazil, a city of 1 million people, began restructuring its transport
system in 1974. Since then its population has tripled, but its car traffic
has declined by 30 percent. Amsterdam has developed a diverse urban
transport system, where nearly 40 percent of all trips within the city are
taken by bicycle. Paris has a transport diversification plan that also
includes a prominent role for the bicycle and is intended to reduce car
traffic by 40 percent. London is relying on a tax on cars entering the city
center to attain a similar goal.

Not only are new technologies becoming available, but some of these
technologies can be combined to create entirely new outcomes. Gas-electric
hybrid cars with an enhanced battery and a plug-in capacity, combined with
investment in wind farms feeding cheap electricity into the grid, permit
most daily driving to be done with electricity, and at a cost equivalent of
less than $1-a-gallon gasoline. In much of the world, domestic wind energy
can be substituted for imported oil.

The challenge is to build a new economy and to do it at wartime speed
before we miss so many of nature’s deadlines that the economic system
begins to unravel. Our civilization is in trouble because of trends we
ourselves have set in motion.

The good news is that momentum is building in efforts to reverse damaging
environmental trends. Just to cite one example, in early 2007 Australia
announced that it would ban incandescent light bulbs by 2010, replacing
them with highly efficient compact fluorescents that use only one fourth as
much electricity. Canada quickly followed with a similar initiative. 
Europe, the United States, and China are expected to do the same soon. The
world may be approaching a tipping point on a political initiative that can
drop world electricity use by nearly 12 percent, enabling us to close 705
coal-fired power plants. This “ban the bulb” movement could become the
first major win in the battle to stabilize climate.

Participating in the construction of this enduring new economy is
exhilarating. So is the quality of life it will bring. We will be able to
breathe clean air. Our cities will be less congested, less noisy, less
polluted, and more civilized. A world where population has stabilized,
forests are expanding, and carbon emissions are falling is within our grasp.

#     #     #

Excerpted from Chapter 1, “Entering a New World,” in Lester R. Brown, 
Plan B 3.0:
Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. 
Norton & Company, 2008), available on-line at 
www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm

Additional data and information sources at www.earthpolicy.org



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