Time: Plan B — How to Stop Global Warming

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1700189,00.html

Plan B — How to Stop Global Warming

Friday, Jan. 04, 2008 By BRYAN WALSH

It's called eco-anxiety — free-form worry triggered by concerns about the worsening fate of the planet — and if you suffer from it, you might want to give Lester Brown's new book, Plan B 3.0, a pass. Brown — the president of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington-based environmental think tank — paints a comprehensive and depressing picture of the planet, with ream after ream of dire statistics. Here's just a handful: Arctic summer sea ice shrinkage increased by 9.1% a decade between 1979 and 2006, and this year an area of ice almost twice the size of Britain melted in a single week. In an era of unprecedented global economic growth, the number of hungry people increased from 800 million to 830 million between 1996 and 2003. At current rates of logging, the natural forests of Indonesia and Burma will be gone within a decade or so. Each year the number of failing states increases — Sudan and Somalia today, perhaps Pakistan tomorrow — a trend that climate change will only worsen. Global demands on the Earth already exceed sustainable capacity by 25% — and we're set to add another 3 billion people by 2050. As Brown writes: "Civilization is in trouble."

But take a few deep breaths and relax — a little bit. Brown, one of the U.S.'s most respected environmentalists, has a plan — and it's called Plan B. (Hear Brown talk about Plan B 3.0 in this week's Greencast.) After detailing just how screwed our overpopulated, overconsuming world is — thanks to an economic system that rewards production without regard for environmental impact — Brown lays out an alternate path that could save us from the worst consequences of climate change. At the heart is a call to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions 80% by 2020 — far more aggressive than anything you'll hear from political leaders or even most activists. It's an ambitious plan, one that is less concerned with political feasibility than the survivability of the planet. "This is not Plan A, business as usual," Brown writes. "This is Plan B — a wartime mobilization, an all-out response proportionate to the threat that global warming presents to our future."

The key to Brown's Plan B is winding down our dependence on coal — the carbon-heavy fuel that the people over at the environmental website Grist like to refer to as "the enemy of the human race." Right now the world is on pace to build hundreds of new coal power plants over the coming decades, adding vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and if that happens the fight against global warming is as good as lost. Brown argues that rapid action to improve energy efficiency, develop renewable sources of power and expand the Earth's forest cover could reduce carbon emissions enough to allow us to phase out coal power and meet that 80% target.

The numbers are simple. It's easy to ridicule the "switch a light bulb, save the planet" school of environmental planning, but Brown points out that by making the most of efficiency improvements in lighting and appliances, we could reduce power demand sufficiently to obviate the need for 1,410 coal plants. That's more than the 1,382 coal plants the International Energy Agency predicts will be built by 2020. If we start pumping out new wind turbines with the same industrial urgency the U.S. produced tanks and bombers in World War II, Brown writes, we could generate 3 million megawatts of wind power by 2020, enough to meet 40% of the world's energy needs. Solar thermal, plug-in hybrid and geothermal technology are all part of Plan B. (Did you know that the geothermal energy contained in the upper six miles of the Earth's crust is 50,000 times more powerful than all of our oil and natural gas? Brown does.)

...

[hobbit709]

1. We need a good large, dusty, volcanic eruption.

[emmadoggy]

2. I suffer from eco-anxiety.

And add that to "losing our democracy-anxiety" and it amounts to a whole shit-load of anxiety about the future and what sort of world my children will live in.

[kestrel91316]

3. The cost-of-food anxiety is kicking in, too.

[losthills]

4. The ultimate solution to global warming

may well turn out to be a nuclear winter...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road

[GliderGuider]

5. Lester Brown is good with numbers

But I notice he never, ever talks about evolutionary psychology. To do so would put a stick through the spokes of Plan B (Version whatever).

After he tells you the unvarnished truth about the situation we're in, he trots out all these "coulda woulda shoulda" ideas, complete with numbers, each preceded by the tranquilizing weasel phrase, "All we need to do is..." And everybody sighs with relief, because if all these solutions are technically possible and utterly self-evident, then surely someone will do them. And everybody goes back to sleep, only to wake up when the winds of change start howling at the door, and they are shocked and appalled that while they were asleep nobody actually did any of them. In fact, while they were asleep, the people who were beavering away seemed to have actually been making things worse!

So I'm ambivalent about Brown. He really understands the technical situation humanity is in, but he hasn't a clue about the psychological terrain we're playing on. If he did, the "solutions" he suggests would be a lot different than the bromides of "Plan B".