OT Book: Plan B20

[William]

Not that I want to get all hot and heavy on all of you first thing Monday morning, but I started reading a book this weekend that is touching on a lot of issues that fascinated me in college. Some of these issues have come to pass, and others look like they eventually will. How much can the planet sustain? What are the ecological thresholds for sustainability that can't be crossed (“overshoot-and-collapse” mode)? Oil depletion and the rise of competition between fuel interests (Biodeisel & ethanol) and food consumption. Population explosions and competition for food (mainly India & China).

excerpt from Chapter 1:

"The first big test of the international community’s capacity to manage scarcity may come with oil or it could come with grain. If the latter is the case, this could occur when China—whose grain harvest fell by 34 million tons, or 9 percent, between 1998 and 2005—turns to the world market for massive imports of 30 million, 50 million, or possibly even 100 million tons of grain per year. Demand on this scale could quickly overwhelm world grain markets. When this happens, China will have to look to the United States, which controls the world’s grain exports of over 40 percent of some 200 million tons.32 This will pose a fascinating geopolitical situation. More than 1.3 billion Chinese consumers, who had an estimated $160-billion trade surplus with the United States in 2004— enough to buy the entire U.S. grain harvest twice—will be competing with Americans for U.S. grain, driving up U.S. food prices. In such a situation 30 years ago, the United States simply restricted exports. But China is now banker to the United States, underwriting much of the massive U.S. fiscal deficit with monthly purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds.33 Within the next few years, the United States may be loading one or two ships a day with grain for China. This long line of ships stretching across the Pacific, like an umbilical cord providing nourishment, will intimately link the two economies. Managing this flow of grain so as to simultaneously satisfy the food needs of consumers in both countries, at a time when ethanol fuel distilleries are taking a growing share of the U.S. grain harvest, may become one of the leading foreign policy challenges of this new century."

(in the extreme) When that time comes, I don't think China is going to sit around and just except U.S.restrictions on grain exports when they start going hungry. They basically own us, and have the manufacturing base to back it up if needed.

It's a long read but interesting stuff.

Anyway, I'm finding it an interesting read. Here is part of the preface and the first chapter below. You can download the whole book online ( www.earthpolicy.org ), or purchase the hardcover. He does talk about Bicycles in the book, and to keep this somewhat cycling related, here is an article on Bicycle production worldwide. How many customs you think are in there??? ;) :

http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Bike/2005.htm



William

[William]

PREFACE

Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006).


Plan A, business-as-usual, has the world on an environmental path that is leading toward economic decline and eventual collapse. If our goal is to sustain economic progress, we have no choice other than move onto a new path—Plan B. This is why I wrote the original Plan B in 2003.

There are many reasons why we have updated and expanded this 2003 edition into Plan B 2.0. Most fundamentally, there still is no widely shared sense that we need to build a new economy—and even less, a vision of what it might look like. The purpose of this book is to make a convincing case for building the new economy, to offer a more detailed vision of what it would look like, and to provide a roadmap of how to get from here to there.

There are several other reasons for this new edition. One, there is strong new evidence that the western economic model will not work for China. Two, the tightening oil supply raises challenging new issues that deserve attention. Three, since poverty cannot be eradicated if the economy’s natural support systems continue to deteriorate, we have also included here an earth restoration budget to complement the poverty eradication budget in the first edition. Four, technological advances in the last few years offer exciting new possibilities for reversing the environmental trends that are undermining our future. And, five, we wanted to do a new edition simply because of the unexpectedly enthusiastic response to the first edition.

To elaborate on the first of these points, China has now overtaken the United States in the consumption of most basic resources. Among the leading commodities in the food sector (grain and meat), in the energy sector (oil and coal), and in the industrial economy (steel), China now leads the United States in consumption of all except oil.

What if China catches up to the United States in consumption per person? If China’s economy continues to expand at 8 percent per year, its income per person will reach the current U.S. level in 2031. If we assume that Chinese consumption levels per person in 2031 are the same as those in the United States today, then the country’s projected population of 1.45 billion would consume an amount of grain equal to two thirds of the current world grain harvest, its paper consumption would be double current world production, and it would use 99 million barrels of oil per day—well above current world production of 84 million barrels.

The western economic model is not going to work for China. Nor will it work for India, which by 2031 is projected to have a population even larger than China’s, or for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the “American dream.” And in an increasingly integrated world economy, where all countries are competing for the same oil, grain, and mineral resources, the existing economic model will not work for industrial countries either. The days of the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy are numbered.

Closely related to China’s expanding resource consumption is the world’s fast-changing oil outlook and the new issues it generates. For example, we have long been concerned about the effect of rising oil prices on food production costs, but of even more concern is the effect on the demand for food commodities. Since virtually everything we eat can be converted into automotive fuel either in ethanol distilleries or biodiesel refineries, high oil prices are opening a vast new market for farm products. Those buying commodities for fuel producers are competing directly with food processors for supplies of wheat, corn, soybeans, sugarcane, and other foodstuffs. In effect, supermarkets and service stations are now competing for the same commodities.

The price of oil is setting the price for food simply because if the fuel value of a commodity exceeds its value as food, it will be converted into fuel. As more and more ethanol distilleries and biodiesel refineries are built, the world’s affluent automobile owners will be competing with the world’s poor for the same commodities.

In the original Plan B, we had a budget for eradicating poverty, but if the economy’s environmental support systems are collapsing, poverty eradication will not be possible. If croplands are eroding and harvests are shrinking, if water tables are falling and wells are going dry, if rangelands are turning to desert and livestock are dying, if fisheries are collapsing, if forests are shrinking, and if rising temperatures are scorching crops, a poverty eradication program—no matter how carefully crafted and well implemented—will not succeed.

For this reason, we have added an earth restoration budget to restore the earth’s productive health that parallels the budget for poverty eradication. It includes the costs of protecting and restoring soils, forests, rangelands, and oceanic fisheries, plus conserving the earth’s biological diversity. It also means halting advancing deserts that threaten to displace millions of people.

And finally, the good news—and another reason for updating Plan B—is that new technologies offer hope in dealing with the mounting challenges we face on the environmental front. For example, advances in gas-electric hybrid cars and in wind turbine design have set the stage for the evolution of a new automotive fuel economy. Using gas-electric hybrids with an extra storage battery plus a plug-in capacity enables us to do our short-distance driving largely with electricity. If we combine this with investment in wind farms to feed cheap electricity into the grid, we can largely power automobiles with wind energy. Using cheap wind-generated electricity to recharge batteries during off-peak hours costs the equivalent of 50¢-a-gallon gasoline! This is but one example of the possibilities for building a new economy, one that can sustain economic progress while saving money, reducing oil dependence, and cutting carbon emissions.

We were also inspired to do Plan B 2.0 because of the extraordinary response to the first edition. In looking at our sales database several months after publication, we noticed that many individuals who had ordered a copy initially had returned to order 5, 10, 20, even 50 or more copies for distribution to colleagues, opinion leaders, political leaders, and others.

[William]

Plan B 2.0:
Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble

www.earthpolicy.org



1.) Entering a New World.

Our global economy is outgrowing the capacity of the earth to

support it, moving our early twenty-first century civilization

ever closer to decline and possible collapse. In our preoccupation

with quarterly earnings reports and year-to-year economic

growth, we have lost sight of how large the human enterprise

has become relative to the earth’s resources. A century ago,

annual growth in the world economy was measured in billions

of dollars. Today it is measured in trillions.

As a result, we are consuming renewable resources faster

than they can regenerate. Forests are shrinking, grasslands are

deteriorating, water tables are falling, fisheries are collapsing,

and soils are eroding. We are using up oil at a pace that leaves

little time to plan beyond peak oil. And we are discharging

greenhouse gases into the atmosphere faster than nature can

absorb them, setting the stage for a rise in the earth’s temperature

well above any since agriculture began.

Our twenty-first century civilization is not the first to move

onto an economic path that was environmentally unsustainable.

Many earlier civilizations also found themselves in environmental

trouble. As Jared Diamond notes in Collapse: How Societies

Choose to Fail or Succeed, some were able to change course

and avoid economic decline. Others were not. We study the

archeological sites of Sumerians, the Mayans, Easter Islanders,

and other early civilizations that were not able to make the

needed adjustments in time.1

Fortunately, there is a consensus emerging among scientists

on the broad outlines of the changes needed. If economic

progress is to be sustained, we need to replace the fossil-fuelbased,

automobile-centered, throwaway economy with a new

economic model. Instead of being based on fossil fuels, the new

economy will be powered by abundant sources of renewable

energy: wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower, and biofuels.

Instead of being centered around automobiles, future transportation

systems will be far more diverse, widely employing

light rail, buses, and bicycles as well as cars. The goal will be to

maximize mobility, not automobile ownership.

The throwaway economy will be replaced by a comprehensive

reuse/recycle economy. Consumer products from cars to computers

will be designed so that they can be disassembled into their

component parts and completely recycled. Throwaway products

such as single-use beverage containers will be phased out.

The good news is that we can already see glimpses here and

there of what this new economy looks like. We have the technologies

to build it—including, for example, gas-electric hybrid

cars, advanced-design wind turbines, highly efficient refrigerators,

and water-efficient irrigation systems.

We can see how to build the new economy brick by brick.

With each wind farm, rooftop solar panel, paper recycling facility,

bicycle path, and reforestation program, we move closer to

an economy that can sustain economic progress.

If, instead, we continue on the current economic path, the

question is not whether environmental deterioration will lead to

economic decline, but when. No economy, however technologically

advanced, can survive the collapse of its environmental

support systems.

The Nature of the New World

We recently entered a new century, but we are also entering a

new world, one where the collisions between our demands and

the earth’s capacity to satisfy them are becoming daily events. It

4 PLAN B 2.0

may be another crop-withering heat wave, another village abandoned

because of invading sand dunes, or another aquifer

pumped dry. If we do not act quickly to reverse the trends, these

seemingly isolated events will come more and more frequently,

accumulating and combining to determine our future.

Resources that accumulated over eons of geological time are

being consumed in a single human lifespan. We are crossing

natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines

that we do not recognize. These deadlines, determined by

nature, are not politically negotiable.

Nature has many thresholds that we discover only when it is

too late. In our fast-forward world, we learn that we have

crossed them only after the fact, leaving little time to adjust. For

example, when we exceed the sustainable catch of a fishery, the

stocks begin to shrink. Once this threshold is crossed, we have a

limited time in which to back off and lighten the catch. If we fail

to meet this deadline, breeding populations shrink to where the

fishery is no longer viable, and it collapses.

We know from earlier civilizations that the lead indicators of

economic decline were environmental, not economic. The trees

went first, then the soil, and finally the civilization itself. To

archeologists, the sequence is all too familiar.

Our situation today is far more challenging because in addition

to shrinking forests and eroding soils, we must deal with

falling water tables, more frequent crop-withering heat waves,

collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, deteriorating rangelands,

dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising seas, more-powerful

storms, disappearing species, and, soon, shrinking oil

supplies. Although these ecologically destructive trends have

been evident for some time, and some have been reversed at the

national level, not one has been reversed at the global level.

The bottom line is that the world is in what ecologists call an

“overshoot-and-collapse” mode. Demand has exceeded the sustainable

yield of natural systems at the local level countless

times in the past. Now, for the first time, it is doing so at the

global level. Forests are shrinking for the world as a whole. Fishery

collapses are widespread. Grasslands are deteriorating on

every continent. Water tables are falling in many countries. Carbon

dioxide (CO2) emissions exceed CO2 fixation everywhere.

In 2002, a team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel, who

Entering a New World 5

now heads the Global Footprint Network, concluded that

humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative

capacity around 1980. Their study, published by the U.S.

National Academy of Sciences, estimated that global demands

in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20 percent. The gap, growing

by 1 percent or so a year, is now much wider. We are meeting

current demands by consuming the earth’s natural assets, setting

the stage for decline and collapse.2

In a rather ingenious approach to calculating the human

physical presence on the planet, Paul MacCready, the founder

and Chairman of AeroVironment and designer of the first

solar-powered aircraft, has calculated the weight of all vertebrates

on the land and in the air. He notes that when agriculture

began, humans, their livestock, and pets together accounted for

less than 0.1 percent of the total. Today, he estimates, this group

accounts for 98 percent of the earth’s total vertebrate biomass,

leaving only 2 percent for the wild portion, the latter including

all the deer, wildebeests, elephants, great cats, birds, small

mammals, and so forth.3

Ecologists are intimately familiar with the overshoot-andcollapse

phenomenon. One of their favorite examples began in

1944, when the Coast Guard introduced 29 reindeer on remote

St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea to serve as the backup food

source for the 19 men operating a station there. After World

War II ended a year later, the base was closed and the men left

the island. When U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist David

Kline visited St. Matthew in 1957, he discovered a thriving population

of 1,350 reindeer feeding on the four-inch-thick mat of

lichen that covered the 332-square-kilometer (128-square-mile)

island. In the absence of any predators, the population was

exploding. By 1963, it had reached 6,000. He returned to

St. Matthew in 1966 and discovered an island strewn with reindeer

skeletons and not much lichen. Only 42 of the reindeer

survived: 41 females and 1 not entirely healthy male. There were

no fawns. By 1980 or so, the remaining reindeer had died off.4

Like the deer on St. Matthew Island, we too are overconsuming

our natural resources. Overshoot leads sometimes to

decline and sometimes to a complete collapse. It is not always

clear which it will be. In the former, a remnant of the population

or economic activity survives in a resource-depleted

6 PLAN B 2.0

environment. For example, as the environmental resource base

of Easter Island in the South Pacific deteriorated, its population

declined from a peak of 20,000 several centuries ago to today’s

population of fewer than 4,000. In contrast, the 500-year-old

Norse settlement in Greenland collapsed during the 1400s,

disappearing entirely in the face of environmental adversity.5

As of 2005, some 42 countries have populations that are

stable or declining slightly in size as a result of falling birth

rates. But now for the first time ever, demographers are

projecting population declines in some countries because of

rising death rates, among them Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia,

and Swaziland. In the absence of an accelerated shift to smaller

families, this list of countries is likely to grow much longer in

the years immediately ahead.6

[William]

The most recent mid-level U.N. demographic projections

show world population increasing from 6.1 billion in 2000 to 9.1

billion in 2050. But such an increase seems highly unlikely, considering

the deterioration in life-support systems now under

way in much of the world. Will we not reach 9.1 billion because

we quickly eradicate global poverty and lower birth rates? Or

because we fail to do so and death rates begin to rise, as they are

already doing in many African countries? We thus face two

urgent major challenges: restructuring the global economy and

stabilizing world population.7

Even as the economy’s environmental support systems are

deteriorating, the world is pumping oil with reckless abandon.

Leading geologists now think oil production may soon peak and

turn downward. This collision between the ever-growing

demand for oil and the earth’s finite resources is but the latest in

a long series of collisions. Although no one knows exactly when

oil production will peak, supply is already lagging behind

demand, driving prices upward.8

In this new world, the price of oil begins to set the price of

food, not so much because of rising fuel costs for farmers and

food processors but more because almost everything we eat can

be converted into fuel for cars. In this new world of high oil

prices, supermarkets and service stations will compete in commodity

markets for basic food commodities such as wheat, corn,

soybeans, and sugarcane. Wheat going into the market can be

converted into bread for supermarkets or ethanol for service sta-

Entering a New World 7

tions. Soybean oil can go onto supermarket shelves or it can go

to service stations to be used as diesel fuel. In effect, owners of

the world’s 800 million cars will be competing for food resources

with the 1.2 billion people living on less than $1 a day.9

Faced with a seemingly insatiable demand for automotive

fuel, farmers will want to clear more and more of the remaining

tropical forests to produce sugarcane, oil palms, and other highyielding

fuel crops. Already, billions of dollars of private capital

are moving into this effort. In effect, the rising price of oil is generating

a massive new threat to the earth’s biological diversity.

As the demand for farm commodities climbs, it is shifting the

focus of international trade concerns from the traditional goal

of assured access to markets to one of assured access to supplies.

Countries heavily dependent on imported grain for food are beginning

to worry that buyers for fuel distilleries may outbid them for

supplies. As oil security deteriorates, so, too, will food security.

As the role of oil recedes, the process of globalization will be

reversed in fundamental ways. As the world turned to oil during

the last century, the energy economy became increasingly globalized,

with the world depending heavily on a handful of countries

in the Middle East for energy supplies. Now as the world

turns to wind, solar cells, and geothermal energy in this century,

we are witnessing the localization of the world energy economy.

The globalization of the world food economy will also be

reversed, as the higher price of oil raises the cost of transporting

food internationally. In response, food production and consumption

will become much more localized, leading to diets

based more on locally produced food and seasonal availability.

The world is facing the emergence of a geopolitics of scarcity,

which is already highly visible in the efforts by China, India, and

other developing countries to ensure their access to oil supplies.

In the future, the issue will be who gets access to not only Middle

Eastern oil but also Brazilian ethanol and North American grain.

Pressures on land and water resources, already excessive in most

of the world, will intensify further as the demand for biofuels

climbs. This geopolitics of scarcity is an early manifestation of

civilization in an overshoot-and-collapse mode, much like the one

that emerged among the Mayan cities competing for food in that

civilization’s waning years.10

You do not need to be an ecologist to see that if recent envi-

8 PLAN B 2.0

ronmental trends continue, the global economy eventually will

come crashing down. It is not knowledge that we lack. At issue is

whether national governments can stabilize population and

restructure the economy before time runs out. Looking at what is

happening in China helps us to see the urgency of acting quickly.

Learning from China

For many years environmentalists have pointed to the United

States as the world’s leading consumer, noting that 5 percent of

the world’s people were consuming nearly a third of the earth’s

resources. Although that was true for some time, it no longer is.

China has replaced the United States as the leading consumer of

basic commodities.11

Among the five basic food, energy, and industrial commodities—

grain and meat, oil and coal, and steel—consumption in

China has eclipsed that of the United States in all but oil. China

has opened a wide lead with grain, consuming 380 million tons

in 2005 versus 260 million tons in the United States. Among the

big three grains, China leads in the consumption of both wheat

and rice and trails the United States only in corn.12

Although eating hamburgers is a defining element of the U.S.

lifestyle, China’s 2005 meat consumption of 67 million tons is

far above the 38 million tons eaten in the United States. While

U.S. meat intake is rather evenly distributed between beef, pork,

and poultry, in China pork totally dominates. Indeed, half the

world’s pigs are now found in China.13

[William]

With oil, the United States was still solidly in the lead in

2004, using more than three times as much as China—20.4 million

barrels per day versus 6.5 million barrels. But U.S. oil use

expanded by only 15 percent between 1994 and 2004, while use

in China more than doubled. Having recently eclipsed Japan as

an oil consumer, China now trails only the United States.14

Energy use in China also obviously includes coal, which supplies

nearly two thirds of the country’s energy. China’s annual

burning of 960 million tons easily exceeds the 560 million tons

used in the United States. With this level of coal use and with oil

and natural gas use also climbing fast, it is only a matter of time

before China’s carbon emissions match those of the United

States. Then the world will have two major countries driving

climate change.15

Entering a New World 9

China’s consumption of steel, a basic indicator of industrial

development, is now nearly two and a half times that of the

United States: 258 million tons to 104 million tons in 2003. As

China has moved into the construction phase of development,

building hundreds of thousands of factories and high-rise

apartment and office buildings, steel consumption has climbed

to levels never seen in any country.16

With consumer goods, China leads in the number of cell

phones, television sets, and refrigerators. The United States still

leads in the number of personal computers, though likely not

for much longer, and in automobiles.17

That China has overtaken the United States in consumption

of basic resources gives us license to ask the next question.

What if China catches up with the United States in consumption

per person? If the Chinese economy continues to grow at 8

percent a year, by 2031 income per person will equal that in the

United States in 2004. If we further assume that consumption

patterns of China’s affluent population in 2031, by then 1.45

billion, will be roughly similar to those of Americans in 2004,

we have a startling answer to our question.18

At the current annual U.S. grain consumption of 900 kilograms

per person, including industrial use, China’s grain consumption

in 2031 would equal roughly two thirds of the current

world grain harvest. If paper use per person in China in 2031

reaches the current U.S. level, this translates into 305 million

tons of paper—double existing world production of 161 million

tons. There go the world’s forests. And if oil consumption per

person reaches the U.S. level by 2031, China will use 99 million

barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 84 million

barrels a day and may never produce much more. This helps

explain why China’s fast-expanding use of oil is already helping

to create a politics of scarcity.19

Or consider cars. If China one day should have three cars for

every four people, as the United States now does, its fleet would

total 1.1 billion vehicles, well beyond the current world fleet of

800 million. Providing the roads, highways, and parking lots for

such a fleet would require paving an area roughly equal to

China’s land in rice, its principal food staple.20

The inevitable conclusion to be drawn from these projections

is that there are not enough resources for China to reach U.S.

10 PLAN B 2.0

consumption levels. The western economic model—the fossilfuel-

based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy—will

not work for China’s 1.45 billion in 2031. If it does not work for

China, it will not work for India either, which by 2031 is projected

to have even more people than China. Nor will it work

for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are

also dreaming the “American dream.” And in an increasingly

integrated world economy, where countries everywhere are competing

for the same resources—the same oil, grain, and iron

ore—the existing economic model will not work for industrial

countries either.21

Learning from the Past

Our twenty-first century global civilization is not the first to

face the prospect of environmentally induced economic decline.

The question is how we will respond. We do have one unique

asset at our command—an archeological record that shows us

what happened to earlier civilizations that got into environmental

trouble and failed to respond.

As Jared Diamond points out in Collapse, some of the early

societies that were in environmental trouble were able to change

their ways in time to avoid decline and collapse. Six centuries

ago, for example, Icelanders realized that overgrazing on their

grass-covered highlands was leading to extensive soil loss from

the inherently thin soils of the region. Rather than lose the

grasslands and face economic decline, farmers joined together

to determine how many sheep the highlands could sustain and

then allocated quotas among themselves, thus preserving their

grasslands and avoiding what Garrett Hardin later termed the

“tragedy of the commons.”22

The Icelanders understood the consequences of overgrazing

and reduced their sheep numbers to a level that could be sustained.

We understand the consequences of burning fossil fuels

and the resulting CO2 buildup in the atmosphere. Unlike the

Icelanders who were able to restrict their livestock numbers, we

have not been able to restrict our CO2 emissions.

Not all societies have fared as well as the Icelanders, whose

economy continues to produce wool and to thrive. The early

Sumerian civilization of the fourth millennium BC was an

extraordinary one, advancing far beyond any that had existed

Entering a New World 11

before. Its carefully engineered irrigation system gave rise to a

highly productive agriculture, one that enabled farmers to produce

a food surplus, supporting formation of the first cities.

Managing the irrigation system required a sophisticated social

organization. The Sumerians had the first cities and the first

written language, the cuneiform script.23

By any measure it was an extraordinary civilization, but

there was an environmental flaw in the design of its irrigation

system, one that would eventually undermine its food supply.

The water that backed up behind dams built across the

Euphrates was diverted onto the land through a network of

gravity-fed canals. Some water was used by the crops, some

evaporated, and some percolated downward. In this region,

where underground drainage was weak, percolation slowly

raised the water table. As the water climbed to within inches of

the surface, it began to evaporate into the atmosphere, leaving

behind salt. Over time, the accumulation of salt on the soil surface

lowered its productivity.24

[William]

As salt accumulated and wheat yields declined, the Sumerians

shifted to barley, a more salt-tolerant plant. This postponed

Sumer’s decline, but it was treating the symptoms, not the

cause, of falling crop yields. As salt concentrations continued to

build, the yields of barley eventually declined also. The resultant

shrinkage of the food supply undermined the economic

foundation of this once-great civilization. As land productivity

declined, so did the civilization.25

Archeologist Robert McC. Adams has studied the site of

ancient Sumer on the central floodplain of the Euphrates River, an

empty, desolate area now outside the frontiers of cultivation. He

describes how the “tangled dunes, long disused canal levees, and

the rubble-strewn mounds of former settlement contribute only

low, featureless relief. Vegetation is sparse, and in many areas it is

almost wholly absent....Yet at one time, here lay the core, the

heartland, the oldest urban, literate civilization in the world.”26

The New World counterpart to Sumer is the Mayan civilization

that developed in the lowlands of what is now Guatemala.

It flourished from AD 250 until its collapse around AD 900. Like

the Sumerians, the Mayans had developed a sophisticated, highly

productive agriculture, this one based on raised plots of earth

surrounded by canals that supplied water.27

12 PLAN B 2.0

As with Sumer, the Mayan demise was apparently linked to

a failing food supply. For this New World civilization, it was

deforestation and soil erosion that undermined agriculture.

Changes in climate may also have played a role. Food shortages

apparently triggered civil conflict among the various Mayan

cities as they competed for food. Today this region is covered by

jungle, reclaimed by nature.28

During the later centuries of the Mayan civilization, a new

society was evolving on faraway Easter Island, some 166 square

kilometers of land in the South Pacific roughly 3,200 kilometers

west of South America and 2,200 kilometers from Pitcairn Island,

the nearest habitation. Settled around AD 400, this civilization

flourished on a volcanic island with rich soils and lush vegetation,

including trees that grew 25 meters tall with trunks 2 meters in

diameter. Archeological records indicate that the islanders ate

mainly seafood, principally dolphins—a mammal that could

only be caught by harpoon from large sea-going canoes.29

The Easter Island society flourished for several centuries,

reaching an estimated population of 20,000. As its human numbers

gradually increased, tree cutting exceeded the sustainable

yield of forests. Eventually the large trees that were needed to

build the sturdy canoes disappeared, depriving islanders of

access to the dolphins and dramatically shrinking their food

supply. The archeological record shows that at some point

human bones became intermingled with the dolphin bones, suggesting

a desperate society that had resorted to cannibalism.

Today the island has some 2,000 residents.30

One unanswerable question about these earlier civilizations

was whether they knew what was causing their decline. Did the

Sumerians understand that the rising salt content in the soil

from water evaporation was reducing their wheat yields? If they

knew, were they simply unable to muster the political support

needed to lower water tables, just as the world today is struggling

unsuccessfully to lower carbon emissions?

These are just three of the many early civilizations that

moved onto an economic path that nature could not sustain.

We, too, are on such a path. Any one of several trends of environmental

degradation could undermine civilization as we

know it. Just as the irrigation system that defined the early

Sumerian economy had a flaw, so too does the fossil fuel energy

Entering a New World 13

system that defines our modern economy. For them it was a rising

water table that undermined the economy; for us it is rising

CO2 levels that threaten to disrupt economic progress. In both

cases, the trend is invisible.

Whether it resulted from the salting of Sumer’s cropland, the

deforestation and soil erosion of the Mayans, or the depleted

forests and loss of the distant-water fishing capacity of the Easter

Islanders, collapse of these early civilizations appears to have

been associated with a decline in food supply. Today the annual

addition of more than 70 million people to a world population

of over 6 billion at a time when water tables are falling, temperatures

are rising, and oil supplies will soon be shrinking suggests

that the food supply again may be the vulnerable link

between the environment and the economy.31

[William]

The Emerging Politics of Scarcity

The first big test of the international community’s capacity to

manage scarcity may come with oil or it could come with grain.

If the latter is the case, this could occur when China—whose

grain harvest fell by 34 million tons, or 9 percent, between 1998

and 2005—turns to the world market for massive imports of 30

million, 50 million, or possibly even 100 million tons of grain

per year. Demand on this scale could quickly overwhelm world

grain markets. When this happens, China will have to look to

the United States, which controls the world’s grain exports of

over 40 percent of some 200 million tons.32

This will pose a fascinating geopolitical situation. More

than 1.3 billion Chinese consumers, who had an estimated

$160-billion trade surplus with the United States in 2004—

enough to buy the entire U.S. grain harvest twice—will be competing

with Americans for U.S. grain, driving up U.S. food

prices. In such a situation 30 years ago, the United States simply

restricted exports. But China is now banker to the United

States, underwriting much of the massive U.S. fiscal deficit with

monthly purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds.33

Within the next few years, the United States may be loading

one or two ships a day with grain for China. This long line of

ships stretching across the Pacific, like an umbilical cord providing

nourishment, will intimately link the two economies.

Managing this flow of grain so as to simultaneously satisfy the

14 PLAN B 2.0

food needs of consumers in both countries, at a time when

ethanol fuel distilleries are taking a growing share of the U.S.

grain harvest, may become one of the leading foreign policy

challenges of this new century.

The way the world accommodates the vast projected needs of

China, India, and other developing countries for grain, oil, and

other resources will help determine how the world addresses the

stresses associated with outgrowing the earth. How low-income,

importing countries fare in this competition for grain will also tell

us something about future political stability. And, finally, the U.S.

response to China’s growing demands for grain even as they drive

up food prices for U.S. consumers will tell us much about the

capacity of countries to manage the emerging politics of scarcity.

The most imminent risk is that China’s entry into the world

market, combined with the growing diversion of farm commodities

to biofuels, will drive grain prices so high that many

low-income developing countries will not be able to import

enough grain. This in turn could lead to escalating food prices

and political instability on a scale that will disrupt global economic

progress.

Earlier civilizations that moved onto an economic path that

was environmentally unsustainable did so largely in isolation.

But in today’s increasingly integrated, interdependent world

economy, if we are facing civilizational decline, we are facing

it together. The fates of all peoples are intertwined. This

interdependence can be managed to our mutual benefit only if

we recognize that the term “in the national interest” is in

many ways obsolete.

Getting the Price Right

The question facing governments is whether they can respond

quickly enough to prevent threats from becoming catastrophes.

The world has precious little experience in responding to

aquifer depletion, rising temperatures, expanding deserts, melting

polar ice caps, and a shrinking oil supply. These new trends

will fully challenge the capacity of our political institutions and

leadership. In times of crisis, societies sometimes have a Nero as

a leader and sometimes a Churchill.

[William]

The central challenge, the key to building the new economy, is

getting the market to tell the ecological truth. The dysfunctional

Entering a New World 15

global economy of today has been shaped by distorted market

prices that do not incorporate environmental costs. Many of our

environmental travails are the result of severe market distortions.

One of these distortions became abundantly clear in the

summer of 1998 when China’s Yangtze River valley, home to 400

million people, was wracked by some of the worst flooding in

history. The resulting damages of $30 billion exceeded the value

of the country’s annual rice harvest.34

After several weeks of flooding, the government in Beijing

announced in mid-August a ban on tree cutting in the Yangtze

River basin. It justified the ban by noting that trees standing are

worth three times as much as trees cut. The flood control services

provided by forests were three times as valuable as the lumber

in the trees. In effect, the market price was off by a factor of

three! With this analysis, no one could economically justify cutting

trees in the basin.35

A similar situation exists with gasoline. In the United States,

the gasoline pump price was over $2 per gallon in mid-2005. But

this reflects only the cost of pumping the oil, refining it into

gasoline, and delivering the gas to service stations. It does not

include the costs of tax subsidies to the oil industry, such as the

oil depletion allowance; the subsidies for the extraction, production,

and use of petroleum; the burgeoning military costs of

protecting access to oil supplies; the health care costs for treating

respiratory illnesses ranging from asthma to emphysema;

and, most important, the costs of climate change.36

If these costs, which in 1998 the International Center for

Technology Assessment calculated at roughly $9 per gallon of

gasoline burned in the United States, were added to the $2 cost

of the gasoline itself, motorists would pay about $11 a gallon

for gas at the pump. Filling a 20-gallon tank would cost $220. In

reality, burning gasoline is very costly, but the market tells us it

is cheap, leading to gross distortions in the structure of the

economy. The challenge facing governments is to incorporate

such costs into market prices by systematically calculating them

and incorporating them as a tax on the product to make sure its

price reflects the full costs to society.37

If we have learned anything over the last few years, it is that

accounting systems that do not tell the truth can be costly.

Faulty corporate accounting systems that leave costs off the

16 PLAN B 2.0

books have driven some of the world’s largest corporations into

bankruptcy, costing millions of people their lifetime savings,

retirement incomes, and jobs. Distorted world market prices that

do not incorporate major costs in the production of various

products and the provision of services could be even costlier.

They could lead to global bankruptcy and economic decline.

Plan B—A Plan of Hope

Even given the extraordinarily challenging situation we face,

there is much to be upbeat about. First, virtually all the destructive

environmental trends are of our own making. All the problems

we face can be dealt with using existing technologies. And

almost everything we need to do to move the world economy

onto an environmentally sustainable path has 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. Gaselectric

hybrid automobiles, getting 55 miles per gallon, are easily

twice as efficient as the average vehicle on the road.38

Numerous countries are providing models of the different

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 by 2030. Similarly, Brazil is on its way to automotive

fuel self-sufficiency. With highly efficient sugarcane-based

ethanol supplying 40 percent of its automotive fuel in 2005, it

could phase out gasoline within a matter of years.39

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 to become the world’s leading

milk producer. The value of India’s dairy production in 2002

exceeded that of the rice crop.40

On another front, fish farming advances in China, centered

on the use of an ecologically sophisticated carp polyculture,

have made China the first country where fish farm output

exceeds oceanic catch. Indeed, the 29 million tons of farmed

Entering a New World 17

fish produced in China in 2003 was equal to roughly 30 percent

of the world’s oceanic fish catch.41

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 a high degree of

environmental stability to the Korean countryside.42

The United States—which retired one tenth of its cropland,

most of it highly erodible, and shifted to conservation tillage

practices—has reduced soil erosion by 40 percent over the last

20 years. At the same time, the nation’s farmers expanded the

grain harvest by more than one fifth.43

Some of the most innovative leadership has come at the

urban level. Amsterdam has developed a diverse urban transport

system; today 35 percent of all trips within the city are

taken by bicycle. This bicycle-friendly transport system has

greatly reduced air pollution and traffic congestion while providing

daily exercise for the city’s residents.44

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 a second storage battery

and a plug-in capacity, combined with investment in wind

farms feeding cheap electricity into the grid, could mean that

much of our daily driving could be done with electricity, with

the cost of off-peak wind-generated electricity at the equivalent

of 50¢-a-gallon gasoline. Domestic wind energy can be substituted

for imported oil.45

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. This introductory

chapter leads into five chapters outlining the leading environmental

challenges facing our global civilization. Following these

are seven chapters that outline Plan B, both describing where we

want to go and offering a roadmap of how to get there.

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, and less polluted. The prospect of living in a world where

population has stabilized, forests are expanding, and carbon

emissions are falling is an exciting one.

[keno]

did you take a spill over the weekend? You're talking to your guys and now this. Should I be worried about you?

keno

[William]

did you take a spill over the weekend? You're talking to your guys and now this. Should I be worried about you?

keno

My "guys" told me to read this. They're concerned with the future. Are yours?


William ;)

[keno]

In seriousness, William, I don't place much trust in futurists, actually none. The book does sound interesting insofar as it raises issues of importance interesting to think about. Beyond that, who knows?

As far as a particular individual's convictions about the future are concerned, I believe that they are most clearly understood through his investments. Show me the author's portfolio and I can better guess at his level of belief in what he writes.

A piece that influenced my thinking on similar issues is a short article, still somewhere among my stuff I think, as to why predictions of future technology developments go awry. If I find it I'm happy to share by fax.

The only future that I'm worried about currently is how I will fare in Argentina next week with mileage and hills I have my doubts about my ability to deal with. The wine is another story.

keno

[William]

In seriousness, William, I don't place much trust in futurists, actually none. The book does sound interesting insofar as it raises issues of importance interesting to think about. Beyond that, who knows?

As far as a particular individual's convictions about the future are concerned, I believe that they are most clearly understood through his investments. Show me the author's portfolio and I can better guess at his level of belief in what he writes.

A piece that influenced my thinking on similar issues is a short article, still somewhere among my stuff I think, as to why predictions of future technology developments go awry. If I find it I'm happy to share by fax.

The only future that I'm worried about currently is how I will fare in Argentina next week with mileage and hills I have my doubts about my ability to deal with. The wine is another story.



keno

I agree in the sense that I don't take this guys word as gospel, but he does bring up some interesting points. At some point in the near future, peak oil production will pass, if it hasn't already. The move to bio-fuels has been around and is back in the forefront again. And populations of emerging countries are are growing rapidly. Oil is a finite resource. Food sources, in a sense, are finite year to year (harvest to harvest). How much further can we continue at our present pace with growing consumption year to year?

I think we'll see the passing of oil dependence in most of our lifetimes. It's interesting to consider where we are headed and the problems that could face us in the future.


William

PS: My "guys" say to have fun while you're down in Argentina. :beer:

[keno]

take a look at http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/people/paul_ehrlich.html. His ideas got a great deal of acceptance but turned out to be quite wrong. This, too, had a great deal of influence on my thinking.

You might put "Fooled By Randomness", by Nassim Taleb, on your reading list.

keno

[Tom]

It's about cranes and he talks a lot about habitat destruction and he doesn't hit you over the head with it but when he's in China and Korea, especially, it always seems to be about population growth and intensive farming for food. You can't help but see where that's going.

[catulle]

Thank you, William. Pragmatism tends to be myopic and squinty eyed. Politicians become fixed on short term elections, businessmen in yearly profits, and the big picture become an anecdote. Idealism might be a bit dreamy, but it carries a sense of direction. atmo.

[Richard]

IN 1998, an American Petroleum Institute memo ambitiously titled "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan" envisioned a day when promoters of curbs on fossil fuel emissions will be seen as "out of touch with reality." "Victory will be achieved," advised the memo leaked to the New York Times, "when uncertainties in climate science become part of the conventional wisdom for average citizens." In 2003, GOP political consultant Frank Luntz, coauthor of Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Contract With America," issued a 16-page memo on the environment that seemed taken directly from the institute's playbook. One section, "Winning the Global Warming Debate," described how fellow Republicans could effectively distract U.S. citizens from the overwhelming juggernaut of scientific evidence that global warming is human-caused, or anthropogenic. "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue," Luntz urged.

Call it whatever you want — "A Contract on the Earth" springs to mind — but the campaign of misinformation about the science underpinning global warming is breathtaking in the extent and degree of its excesses. As the New York Times recently reported, Bush administration political appointees, former energy industry lobbyists and others with no scientific credentials have censored, screened, bowdlerized or delayed the publication of climate change research that runs contrary to the stance of skepticism. "The Bush administration is trying to stifle scientific evidence of the dangers of global warming in an effort to keep the public uninformed," James E. Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a speech at the University of Iowa in 2004. "In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now."

Has anything changed and who controls the message? The above was taken from a review of a couple of books on the environment. I am not so erudite.

[William]

Through politics, misinformation, short sightedness, and inaction are certainly a major part of the problems we face, I think we need to start looking beyond our immediate future.
If you consider geologic time of the earth as a 24 hour clock, man hasn't even been present on the planet for the last couple of seconds of that time. Yet look how much we've done to it in our short existence here. In those same terms, it would appear that we are burning the candle at both ends.

I'm not a hippie, yuppie, or chicken little doom-sayer. I usually question everything and everyone. But looking objectively at the evidence, it's seems pretty clear to me that we are not on a sustainable path.

Who's looking out for us? The focus at this time seems to be more on big business and short term profits over long term sustainability.

What to do? There's not an easy answer to that question, but one we should be seriously considering. atmo



William

[Kevan]

confuse'm.

[Serotta_Andrew]

Please keep the off topic closer to cycling.

Thanks