Lester Brown's latest account of our environmental outlook, with bad and good factors alike, is a masterly survey. Consider, for instance, his treatment of China and India. Their sudden and powerful emergence as economic giants can be viewed as both ‘one of the greatest opportunities and one of the gravest threats.’ Just these two countries are prominent enough on the world stage to present a future beset by abundant environmental and political instabilities, or a form of sustainable development based on environmental underpinnings of every sort. Already China's world-leading solar industry provides water heating for 35 million buildings, and India's pioneering use of rainwater harvesting brings clean water to tens of thousands of homes. Thus China and India are poised to leapfrog today's industrial nations and become world leaders in sustainable energy and agriculture within just one decade. Coal provides half of India's energy and two-thirds of China's, meaning that both countries are crucial as the world attempts to stem climate change. Already China ranks as the world's second largest source of carbon dioxide, and India is fourth.
If China's per caput grain consumption were to double to more or less match Europe's consumption, China alone would need the equivalent of almost 40% of today's global grain harvest. India is the fourth largest generator of wind power, while China and India together are the third and fourth largest ethanol producers. China has an ecological footprint of 1.6 global ha (GH), while India's footprint is 0.8 GH, both in marked contrast to the USA's 9.7 GH.
Brown postulates four overriding goals in his new book: stabilizing climate, stabilizing population, eradicating poverty and restoring the planet's ecosystems. He lays out a not totally impossible plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 80% as early as 2020, and doing it through three principal measures: raising energy efficiency, developing renewable energy and expanding the planet's forest cover both by halting deforestation and by planting billions of trees to sequester carbon.
So the book is not all doom and gloom. Rather, Brown deals in ‘doom or boom’. At least 60 million Europeans now get their residential electricity from wind farms. Over 40 million Chinese homes get their hot water from rooftop solar water heaters. Iceland now heats almost 90% of its homes with geothermal energy. India has more than quadrupled its milk production since 1970, becoming the world's number one milk producer with an output the value of which exceeds that of the country's rice harvest. China produces farmed fish through aquaculture equivalent to approximately one-third of the world's marine fish catch. The USA has slashed soil erosion by 40%, during a period when American farmers have expanded their grain harvest by more than one-fifth. Australia is to ban incandescent light bulbs by 2010, Canada has quickly followed suit, and the United States, Europe and China are expected to do the same soon. Were the world to slash world electricity consumption by around 12% (eminently feasible given current technologies), that would enable us to close at least 700 coal-fired power plants. Opposition to the construction of new coal-fired power plants has persuaded several leading USA states, namely California, Texas, Florida, Minnesota and Kansas, to deny construction permits or otherwise restrict construction. Texas is coordinating a vast expansion of wind farms to yield 23 000 MW of new electrical generating capacity, an amount equal to 23 coal-fired power plants. But, as Brown exhorts, ‘We must move at wartime speed, restructuring the world energy economy at a pace reminiscent of the restructuring of the US industrial economy in 1942 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. . . . One of the keys to this extraordinarily rapid restructuring was a ban on the sale of cars.’
There is a host of similar success stories. No doubt about it: the crucial breakthroughs can be achieved if only mankind determines to get to grips with the challenge. In the main, the science and technology are sufficient to do a far better job. It will not cost the earth to save the Earth, in fact it will often put money into our pockets. What is principally needed is leadership, at a time when political leaders seem more loathe to lead than ever before.
In his > 400 pp. book (84 of them with notes and references), Brown deals with such other topics as: market failures; tipping points both environmental and political; shortages of oil, food and water; population pressures; failed states; rising sea level; ever-more destructive sea storms; environmental security; environmental refugees; eradicating poverty; absurd subsidies; moving down the food chain; energy efficiency; hybrid cars; and wartime mobilization, all directed at the ultimate purpose of ‘saving civilization - no less’.
Why the title Plan B 3.0? There is ultra urgency and we need constant updating. When Plan B 2.0 was published in 2006, the polar ice caps were melting at a disconcerting rate; now these rates are a good deal worse than had been anticipated. Similarly, the total of ‘failed states’ has grown steadily. Two years ago the scope for increased oil output was a good way below official projections, but today that peak looks likely to be just around the corner; whereas oil was US$ 50 a barrel, today it is twice as much. The USA has enough distilleries to convert one-fifth of its grain crop into car fuel, whereupon corn prices have nearly doubled and wheat prices have more than doubled. By 2006, the world grain harvest had fallen short of consumption in five of the previous six years, now it is a case of seven of the past eight years, and world grain reserves are dropping toward all-time lows.
A principal way to head off disaster on a scale unprecedented since humans emerged from caves, is to spread the message as far and wide and as speedily as possible. Brown's book goes a splendidly long way to helping humankind get from here to there.
