Lester Brown’s Plan B | Climate Change

Here’s a terrific book from the sustainability pioneer Lester Brown that I used in my Clean Tech class last Fall. It touches on everything that needs examination. It shows the state of the climate system and the impacts we’ve been experiencing, and it looks closely at all the other environmental insults we’ve been visiting on our tired old planet, like our shockingly profligate use of water for industrial agriculture, fishing out the oceans, destroying rainforests and other critical carbon sinks to grow soybeans to feed pigs, and putting incredible land and price pressures on food crops in order to grow corn and sugar for cars. It’s like we’re guilty of elder abuse.

But Lester Brown has been at this for a long time and has answers for our problems. He surveys the incredible range of viable, cost-effective, clean and smart alternatives to our profligacy. He’s got high-tech solutions and low. His program is simple. Many elements of it already are being vigorously pursued. To quote from the book: “It has four components: cutting net carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent by 2020, stabilizing population at 8 billion or lower, eradicating poverty, and restoring the earth’s natural systems, including its soils, aquifers, forests, grasslands, and fisheries.” Brown walks us through how to do it.

In a documentary airing tonight on PBS, as part of its “Journey to Planet Earth” series, we take a tour with Brown as he looks at and discusses some of the issues. I watched a DVD of this yesterday with my kid who was home from school because it was parent-teacher conference day. I told her, having read and taught from the book, that the film would be great, showing all sorts of neat ways to achieve real sustainability and peace with the planet. Well, it turns out it isn’t as much about the solutions as it is about the problems. The film doesn’t have the wonderful balance and breadth that the book has.

It is, nevertheless, an eminently worthwhile hour plus of viewing. It has Brown illustrating a number of critical observations, such as the potential impact thatmelting of the glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau will have on agricultural productivity in the great river basins of China, India, and Southeast Asia. It looks at the kinds of malign influence that environmental stresses produce on human security. Thomas Homer-Dixon, a revolutionary thinker in this area, is on hand to make further comment. Paul Krugman further elucidates the critical observations here relative to the fact that we take our environmental degradation “off the books” and this externalizing of these costs radically skews our economic calculations. As Krugman says “the atmosphere is not a free good.”

Some of the fun stuff, all the many solutions that are available to us – and are being researched, developed, financed and deployed by the boatload – comes under review by Brown here as well. One expert voice, Tony Janetos, Director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute, says “We are really on the cusp of a fundamental restructuring of the energy system in a way, and on a scale, that we’ve never tried before.”
Can we get there fast enough? This is a question I’ve had a number of times from students. Brown reminds us of the massive and rapid restructuring of the American industrial economy that Franklin Roosevelt set into motion after Pearl Harbor. So, yes, we can change our way of doing business. One longtime environmental visionary, Bruce Babbitt, in remembering the Civil Rights Movement in this country, notes that “change which seems impossible happens.” (I worked on Babbitt’s short but sweet Presidential campaign in 1988. I will never forget meeting him with a group of folks to talk about environmental issues and how amazingly ahead of his time he was for his views – and not just on the environment.)
Brown ends the film with a call to arms. He thinks that people can be and should be involved in rolling out the new energy economy and embracing a changed perspective in our relationship with Planet Earth. Watch the show tonight, then pick up the book.