1 A Planet Under Stress As world population has doubled and as the global economy has expanded sevenfold over the last half-century, our claims on the earth have become excessive. We are asking more of the earth than it can give on an ongoing basis, creating a bubble economy. We are cutting trees faster than they can regenerate, overgrazing rangelands and converting them into deserts, overpumping aquifers, and draining rivers dry. On our cropland, soil erosion exceeds new soil formation, slowly depriving the soil of its inherent fertility. We are taking fish from the ocean faster than they can reproduce. We are releasing carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere faster than nature can absorb it, creating a greenhouse effect. As atmospheric CO2 levels rise, so does the earth’s temperature. Habitat destruction and climate change are destroying plant and animal species far faster than new species can evolve, launching the first mass extinction since the one that eradicated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Throughout history, humans have lived on the earth’s sustainable yield—the interest from its natural endowment. But now we are consuming the endowment itself. In ecology, as in economics, we can consume principal 4 PLAN B along with interest in the short run, but in the long run it leads to bankruptcy. In 2002, a team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel, an analyst at Redefining Progress, 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 our demands in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20 percent. We are satisfying our excessive demands by consuming the earth’s natural assets, in effect creating a global bubble economy.1 Bubble economies are not new. American investors got an up-close view of this when the bubble in high-tech stocks burst in 2000 and the NASDAQ, an indicator of the value of these stocks, declined by some 75 percent. Japan had a similar experience in 1989 when the real estate bubble burst, depreciating stock and real estate assets by 60 percent. The bad-debt fallout and other effects of this collapse have left the once-dynamic Japanese economy dead in the water ever since.2 The bursting of these two bubbles affected primarily people living in the United States and Japan, but the global bubble economy that is based on the overconsumption of the earth’s natural capital assets will affect the entire world. When the food bubble economy, inflated by the overpumping of aquifers, bursts, it will raise food prices worldwide. The challenge for our generation is to deflate the economic bubble before it bursts. Unfortunately, since September 11, 2001, political leaders, diplomats, and the media worldwide have been preoccupied with terrorism and, more recently, the invasion of Iraq. Terrorism is certainly a matter of concern, but if it diverts us from the environmental trends that are undermining our future until it is too late to reverse them, Osama Bin Laden and his followers will have A Planet Under Stress 5 achieved their goal of bringing down western civilization in a way they could not have imagined. In February 2003, U.N. demographers made an announcement that was in some ways more shocking than the September 11th attack: the worldwide rise in life expectancy has been dramatically reversed for a large segment of humanity—the 700 million people living in subSaharan Africa. The HIV epidemic has reduced life expectancy among this region’s people from 62 to 47 years. The epidemic may soon claim more lives than all the wars of the twentieth century. If this teaches us anything, it is the high cost of neglecting newly emerging threats.3 The HIV epidemic is not the only emerging megathreat. Numerous countries are feeding their growing populations by overpumping their aquifers—a measure that virtually guarantees a future drop in food production when the aquifers are depleted. In effect, these countries are creating a food bubble economy—one where food production is artificially inflated by the unsustainable use of groundwater. Another mega-threat—climate change—is not getting the attention it deserves from most governments, particularly that of the United States, the country responsible for one fourth of all carbon emissions. Washington wants to wait until all the evidence on climate change is in, by which time it will be too late to prevent a wholesale warming of the planet. Just as governments in Africa watched HIV infection rates rise and did little about it, the United States is watching atmospheric CO2 levels rise and doing little to check the increase.4 Other mega-threats being neglected include eroding soils and expanding deserts, which are threatening the livelihood and food supply of hundreds of millions of the world’s people. These issues do not even appear on the radar screen of many national governments. 6 PLAN B Thus far, most of the environmental damage has been local: the death of the Aral Sea, the burning rainforests of Indonesia, the collapse of the Canadian cod fishery, the melting of the glaciers that supply Andean cities with water, the dust bowl forming in northwestern China, and the depletion of the U.S. Great Plains aquifer. But as these local environmental events expand and multiply, they will progressively weaken the global economy, bringing closer the day when the economic bubble will burst.5 Ecological Bills Coming Due Humanity’s demands on the earth have multiplied over the last half-century as our numbers have increased and our incomes have risen. World population grew from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 6.1 billion in 2000. The growth during those 50 years exceeded that during the 4 million years since we emerged as a distinct species.6 Incomes have risen even faster than population. Income per person worldwide nearly tripled from 1950 to 2000. Growth in population and the rise in incomes together expanded global economic output from just under $7 trillion (in 2001 dollars) of goods and services in 1950 to $46 trillion in 2000, a gain of nearly sevenfold.7 Population growth and rising incomes together have tripled world grain demand over the last half-century, pushing it from 640 million tons in 1950 to 1,855 million tons in 2000. To satisfy this swelling demand, farmers have plowed land that was highly erodible—land that was too dry or too steeply sloping to sustain cultivation. Each year billions of tons of topsoil are being blown away in dust storms or washed away in rainstorms, leaving farmers to try to feed some 70 million additional people, but with less topsoil than the year before.8 Demand for water also tripled as agricultural, industrial, and residential uses climbed, outstripping the sus- A Planet Under Stress 7 tainable supply in many countries. As a result, water tables are falling and wells are going dry. Rivers are also being drained dry, to the detriment of wildlife and ecosystems.9 Fossil fuel use quadrupled, setting in motion a rise in carbon emissions that is overwhelming nature’s capacity to fix carbon dioxide. As a result of this carbon-fixing deficit, atmospheric CO2 concentrations climbed from 316 parts per million (ppm) in 1959, when official measurement began, to 369 ppm in 2000.10 The sector of the economy that seems likely to unravel first is food. Eroding soils, deteriorating rangelands, collapsing fisheries, falling water tables, and rising temperatures are converging to make it more difficult to expand food production fast enough to keep up with demand. In 2002, the world grain harvest of 1,807 million tons fell short of world grain consumption by 100 million tons, or 5 percent. This shortfall, the largest on record, marked the third consecutive year of grain deficits, dropping stocks to the lowest level in a generation.11 Now the question is, Can the world’s farmers bounce back and expand production enough to fill the 100-million-ton shortfall, provide for the more than 70 million people added each year, and rebuild stocks to a more secure level? In the past, farmers responded to short supplies and higher grain prices by planting more land and using more irrigation water and fertilizer. Now it is doubtful that farmers can fill this gap without further depleting aquifers and jeopardizing future harvests.12 In 1996, at the World Food Summit in Rome, hosted by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 185 countries plus the European Community agreed to reduce hunger by half by 2015. Using 1990–92 as a base, governments set the goal of cutting the number of people who were hungry—860 million—by roughly 20 million per 8 PLAN B year. It was an exciting and worthy goal, one that later became one of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals.13 But in its late 2002 review of food security, the United Nations issued a discouraging report: “This year we must report that progress has virtually ground to a halt. Our latest estimates, based on data from the years 1998–2000, put the number of undernourished people in the world at 840 million…a decrease of barely 2.5 million per year over the eight years since 1990–92.”14 Since 1998–2000, world grain production per person has fallen 5 percent, suggesting that the ranks of the hungry are now expanding. As noted earlier, life expectancy is plummeting in sub-Saharan Africa. If the number of hungry people worldwide is also increasing, then two key social indicators are showing widespread deterioration in the human condition.15 Farmers Facing Two New Challenges As we exceed the earth’s natural capacities, we create new problems. For example, farmers are now facing two new challenges: rising temperatures and falling water tables. Farmers currently on the land may face higher temperatures than any generation since agriculture began 11,000 years ago. They are also the first to face widespread aquifer depletion and the resulting loss of irrigation water. The global average temperature has risen in each of the last three decades. The 16 warmest years since recordkeeping began in 1880 have all occurred since 1980. With the three warmest years on record—1998, 2001, and 2002—coming in the last five years, crops are facing heat stresses that are without precedent.16 Higher temperatures reduce crop yields through their effect on photosynthesis, moisture balance, and fertilization. As the temperature rises above 34 degrees Celsius (94 degrees Fahrenheit), photosynthesis slows, dropping A Planet Under Stress 9 to zero for many crops when it reaches 37 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit). When temperatures in the U.S. Corn Belt are 37 degrees or higher, corn plants suffer from thermal shock and dehydration. They are in effect on sick leave. Each such day shrinks the harvest.17 In addition to decreasing photosynthesis and dehydrating plants, high temperatures also impede the fertilization needed for seed formation. Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines and at the U.S. Department of Agriculture have together developed a rule of thumb that each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum during the growing season reduces grain yields by 10 percent.18 These recent research findings indicate that if the temperature rises to the lower end of the range projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, grain harvests in tropical regions could be reduced by an average of 5 percent by 2020 and 11 percent by 2050. At the upper end of the range, harvests could drop 11 percent by 2020 and 46 percent by 2050. Avoiding these declines will be difficult unless scientists can develop crop strains that are not vulnerable to thermal stress.19 The second challenge facing farmers, falling water tables, is also recent. With traditional animal- or humanpowered water-lifting devices it was almost impossible historically to deplete aquifers. With the worldwide spread of powerful diesel and electric pumps during the last half-century, however, overpumping has become commonplace. As the world demand for water has climbed, water tables have fallen in scores of countries, including China, India, and the United States, which together produce nearly half of the world’s grain. Water tables are falling throughout the northern half of China. As the water table falls, springs and rivers go dry, lakes disappear, and 10 PLAN B wells dry up. Northern China is literally drying out. Water tables under the North China Plain, which accounts for a fourth or more of China’s grain harvest, are falling at an accelerating rate.20 In India, water tables are also falling. As India’s farmers try to feed an additional 16 million people each year, nearly the population equivalent of another Australia, they are pumping more and more water. This is dropping water tables in states that together contain a majority of India’s 1 billion people.21 In the United States, the third major grain producer, water tables are falling under the southern Great Plains and in California, the country’s fruit and vegetable basket. As California’s population expands from 26 million to a projected 40 million by 2030, expanding urban water demands will siphon water from agriculture.22 Scores of other countries are also overpumping their aquifers, setting the stage for dramatic future cutbacks in water supplies. The more populous among these are Pakistan, Iran, and Mexico. Overpumping creates an illusion of food security that is dangerously deceptive because it enables farmers to support a growing population with a practice that virtually ensures a future drop in food production. The water demand growth curve over the last halfcentury looks like the population growth curve, except that it climbs more steeply. While world population growth was doubling, the use of water was tripling. Once the growing demand for water rises above the sustainable yield of an aquifer, the gap between the two widens further each year. As this happens, the water table starts to fall. The first year after the sustainable yield is surpassed, the water table falls very little, with the drop often being scarcely perceptible. Each year thereafter, however, the annual drop is larger than the year before. A Planet Under Stress 11 In addition to falling exponentially, water tables are also falling simultaneously in many countries. This means that cutbacks in grain harvests will occur in many countries at more or less the same time. And they will occur at a time when the world’s population is growing by more than 70 million a year.23 These, then, are the two new challenges facing the world’s farmers: rising temperatures and falling water tables. Either one by itself could make it difficult to keep up with the growth in demand. The two together provide an early test of whether our modern civilization can cope with the forces that threaten to undermine it. Ecological Meltdown in China In the deteriorating relationship between the global economy and the earth’s ecosystem, food is the most vulnerable economic sector, but geographically it is China that is on the leading edge. A human population of 1.3 billion and their 400 million cattle, sheep, and goats are weighing heavily on the land. Huge flocks of sheep and goats in the northwest are stripping the land of its protective vegetation, creating a dust bowl on a scale not seen before. Northwestern China is on the verge of a massive ecological meltdown.24 Since 1980, the Chinese economy has expanded more than fourfold. Incomes have also expanded by nearly fourfold, lifting more people out of poverty faster than at any time in history. Like many other countries, China is exceeding the carrying capacity of its ecosystem—overplowing its land, overgrazing its rangelands, overcutting its forests, and overpumping its aquifers. In its determined effort to be self-sufficient in grain, it cultivated highly erodible land in the arid northern and western provinces, land that is vulnerable to wind erosion.25 While overplowing is now being partly remedied by 12 PLAN B paying farmers to plant their grainland in trees, overgrazing is destroying vegetation and increasing wind erosion. China’s cattle, sheep, and goat population more than tripled from 1950 to 2002. The United States, a country with comparable grazing capacity, has 97 million cattle, while China has 106 million. For sheep and goats, the figures are 8 million versus 298 million. Concentrated in the western and northern provinces, sheep and goats are destroying the land’s protective vegetation. The wind then does the rest, removing the soil and converting productive rangeland into desert.26 China is now at war. It is not invading armies that are claiming its territory, but expanding deserts. Old deserts are advancing and new ones are forming, like guerrilla forces striking unexpectedly, forcing Beijing to fight on several fronts. And worse, the growing deserts are gaining momentum, occupying an ever-larger piece of China’s territory each year. China’s expanding ecological deficits are converging to create a dust bowl of historic dimensions. With little vegetation remaining in parts of northern and western China, the strong winds of late winter and early spring can remove literally millions of tons of topsoil in a single day—soil that can take centuries to replace. For the outside world, it is these storms that draw attention to the dust bowl forming in China. On April 12, 2002, for instance, South Korea was engulfed by a huge dust storm from China that left residents of Seoul literally gasping for breath. Schools were closed, airline flights were cancelled, and clinics were overrun with patients having difficulty breathing. Retail sales fell. Koreans have come to dread the arrival of what they now call “the fifth season”—the dust storms of late winter and early spring. Japan also suffers from dust storms originating in China. Although not as directly exposed as Koreans are, the A Planet Under Stress 13 Japanese complain about the dust and the brown rain that streaks their windshields and windows.27 Each year, residents of eastern Chinese cities such as Beijing and Tianjin hunker down as the dust storms begin. Along with the difficulty in breathing and the dust that stings the eyes, there is the constant effort to keep dust out of homes and to clean doorways and sidewalks of dust and sand. Farmers and herders, whose livelihoods are blowing away, are paying an even heavier price. Desert expansion has accelerated with each successive decade since 1950. China’s Environmental Protection Agency reports that the Gobi Desert expanded by 52,400 square kilometers (20,240 square miles) from 1994 to 1999, an area half the size of Pennsylvania. With the advancing Gobi now within 150 miles of Beijing, China’s leaders are beginning to sense the gravity of the situation.28 The fallout from the dust storms is social as well as economic. Millions of rural Chinese may be uprooted and forced to migrate eastward as the deserts claim their land. Desertification is already driving villagers from their homes in Gansu, Inner Mongolia (Nei Monggol), and Ningxia provinces. A preliminary Asian Development Bank assessment of desertification in Gansu Province reports that 4,000 villages risk being overrun by drifting sands.29 The U.S. Dust Bowl of the 1930s forced some 2.5 million “Okies” and other refugees to leave the land, many of them heading west from Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas to California. But the dust bowl forming in China is much larger, and during the 1930s the U.S. population was only 150 million—compared with 1.3 billion in China today. Whereas the U.S. migration was measured in the millions, China’s may measure in the tens of millions. And as a U.S. embassy report entitled The Grapes of Wrath in Inner Mongolia noted, “unfortunately, China’s 14 PLAN B twenty-first century ‘Okies’ have no California to escape to—at least not in China.”30 Food: A National Security Issue The ecological deficits just described are converging on the farm sector, making it more difficult to sustain rapid growth in world food output. No one knows when the growth in food production will fall behind that of demand, driving up prices, but it may be much closer than we think. The triggering events that will precipitate future food shortages are likely to be spreading water shortages interacting with crop-withering heat waves in key food-producing regions. The economic indicator most likely to signal serious trouble in the deteriorating relationship between the global economy and the earth’s ecosystem is grain prices. Food is fast becoming a national security issue as growth in the world harvest slows and as falling water tables and rising temperatures hint at future shortages. More than 100 countries import part of the wheat they consume. Some 40 import rice. While some countries are only marginally dependent on imports, others could not survive without them. Iran and Egypt, for example, rely on imports for 40 percent of their grain supply. For Algeria, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, among others, it is 70 percent or more. For Israel and Yemen, over 90 percent. Just six countries—the United States, Canada, France, Australia, Argentina, and Thailand—supply 90 percent of grain exports. The United States alone controls close to half of world grain exports, a larger share than Saudi Arabia does of oil.31 Thus far the countries that import heavily are small and middle-sized ones. But now China, the world’s most populous country, is likely to soon turn to world markets in a major way. When the former Soviet Union unexpect- A Planet Under Stress 15 edly turned to the world market in 1972 for roughly a tenth of its grain supply, following a weather-reduced harvest, world wheat prices climbed from $1.90 to $4.89 a bushel. Bread prices soon rose too.32 If China depletes its grain reserves and turns to the world grain market to cover its shortfall, now 40 million tons per year, it could destabilize world grain markets overnight. Turning to the world market means turning to the United States, presenting a potentially delicate geopolitical situation in which 1.3 billion Chinese consumers with a $100-billion trade surplus with the United States will be competing with American consumers for U.S. grain. If this leads to rising food prices in the United States, how will the government respond? In times past, it could have restricted exports, even imposing an export embargo, as it did with soybeans to Japan in 1974. But today the United States has a stake in a politically stable China. With an economy growing at 7–8 percent a year, China is the engine that is powering not only the Asian economy but, to some degree, the world economy.33 For China, becoming dependent on other countries for food would end its history of food self-sufficiency, leaving it vulnerable to world market uncertainties. For Americans, rising food prices would be the first indication that the world has changed fundamentally and that they are being directly affected by the growing grain deficit in China. If it seems likely that rising food prices are being driven in part by crop-withering temperature rises, pressure will mount for the United States to reduce oil and coal use. For the world’s poor—the millions living in cities on $1 per day or less and already spending 70 percent of their income on food—rising grain prices would be lifethreatening. A doubling of world grain prices today could impoverish more people in a shorter period of time 16 PLAN B than any event in history. With desperate people holding their governments responsible, such a price rise could also destabilize governments of low-income, grainimporting countries.34 When I projected in 1995 in Who Will Feed China? that China would one day turn abroad for part of its grain, the U.S. National Intelligence Council, the umbrella over all the U.S. intelligence agencies, launched the most detailed assessment of China’s food prospect ever undertaken. The council was concerned precisely because such a move by China could drive up world grain prices and destabilize governments in developing countries. An interdisciplinary team led by Michael McElroy, Chairman of Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, conducted this extraordinarily ambitious study. Relying on an interdisciplinary approach and a vast array of resources, including 35 years of CIA satellite data on land use and the Sandia National Laboratories to model the water supply-demand balance of every river basin in China, the team concluded in its “most likely” scenario that China would one day have to import massive quantities of grain.35 The team then decided that the world would not have any difficulty in supplying grain on such a vast scale. The shortcoming of this conclusion, in my opinion, was that it relied too heavily on extrapolating late twentiethcentury grain production trends into the twentyfirst century, failing to take into account emerging constraints on harvests, such as aquifer depletion and rising temperatures. When grain prices began to climb in 1972–74, it did not take long for a politics of food scarcity to emerge. Pressure from within grain-exporting countries to restrict exports in order to check the rise in domestic food prices was common.36 A Planet Under Stress 17 More recently, the Canadian Wheat Board, which handles the nation’s wheat exports, announced in early September 2002 that it had no more to sell. This abrupt withdrawal from the market—even before that year’s drought-reduced harvest was complete—illustrates the kind of action that exporters can take when confronted with scarcity. Instead of letting the world market allocate scarce supplies of high-quality wheat, the Board decided that it would protect domestic supplies, then sell only to traditional clients, leaving other importers to fend for themselves. In late October, Australia—also experiencing a severe drought—announced that it would ration wheat and barley exports among its best customers, excluding all other potential buyers.37 Historically, the world had two food reserves: the global carryover stocks of grain and the cropland idled under the U.S. farm program to limit production. The latter could be brought into production within a year. Since the U.S. land set-aside program ended in 1996, however, the world has had only carryover stocks as a reserve.38 Food security has changed in other ways. Traditionally it was largely an agricultural matter. But now it is something that our entire society is responsible for. National population and energy policies may have a greater effect on food security than agricultural policies do. With most of the 3 billion people to be added to world population by 2050 being born in countries already facing water shortages, childbearing decisions may have a greater effect on food security than crop planting decisions. Achieving an acceptable balance between food and people today depends on family planners and farmers working together.39 Climate change is the wild card in the food security deck. It is perhaps a measure of the complexity of our time that decisions made in the Ministry of Energy may 18 PLAN B have a greater effect on future food security than those made in the Ministry of Agriculture. The effect of population and energy policies on food security differ in one important respect: population stability can be achieved by a country acting unilaterally. Climate stability cannot. The Case for Plan B Thus far, this chapter has focused primarily on how environmental changes can affect the food prospect, but there could be other wake-up calls, including more destructive storms or deadly heat waves. Unless we quickly reverse the damaging trends that we have set in motion, they will generate vast numbers of environmental refugees—people abandoning depleted aquifers and exhausted soils and those fleeing advancing deserts and rising seas. In a world where civilization is being squeezed between expanding deserts from the interior of continents and rising seas on the periphery, refugees are likely to number not in the millions but in the tens of millions. Already we see refugees from drifting sand in Nigeria, Iran, and China.40 We are now looking at the potential wholesale evacuation of cities as aquifers are depleted and wells go dry. Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, may become the early ghost towns of the twenty-first century.41 A reversal of the basic trends of social progress of the last half-century has long seemed unthinkable. Progress appeared inevitable. But now we are seeing reversals. As noted earlier, the number of hungry may be increasing for the first time since the war-torn decade of the 1940s. And a rise in life expectancy—a seminal measure of economic and social progress—has been interrupted in sub-Saharan Africa as a result of the HIV epidemic. As millions of able-bodied adults die, families are often left with no one A Planet Under Stress 19 to work in the fields. The disease and spreading hunger are both weakening immune systems and reinforcing each other, something epidemiologists had not reckoned on. The failure of governments to deal with falling water tables and the depletion of aquifers in the Indian subcontinent could be as disruptive for the 1.3 billion living there as the HIV epidemic is for the people in sub-Saharan Africa. With business as usual, life expectancy could soon begin to fall in India and Pakistan as water shortages translate into food shortages, deepening hunger among the poor.42 The world is moving into uncharted territory as human demands override the sustainable yield of natural systems. The risk is that people will lose confidence in the capacity of their governments to cope with such problems, leading to social breakdown. The shift to anarchy is already evident in countries such as Somalia, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Business as usual—Plan A—is clearly not working. The stakes are high, and time is not on our side. Part I details the mounting evidence that our modern civilization is in trouble. The good news, as outlined in Part II of this book, is that there are solutions to the problems we are facing. The bad news is that if we continue to rely on timid, incremental responses, our bubble economy will continue to grow until eventually it bursts. This book argues for a new approach—for Plan B—an urgent reordering of priorities and a restructuring of the global economy in order to prevent that from happening. 1 A Planet Under Stress As world population has doubled and as the global economy has expanded sevenfold over the last half-century, our claims on the earth have become excessive. We are asking more of the earth than it can give on an ongoing basis, creating a bubble economy. We are cutting trees faster than they can regenerate, overgrazing rangelands and converting them into deserts, overpumping aquifers, and draining rivers dry. On our cropland, soil erosion exceeds new soil formation, slowly depriving the soil of its inherent fertility. We are taking fish from the ocean faster than they can reproduce. We are releasing carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere faster than nature can absorb it, creating a greenhouse effect. As atmospheric CO2 levels rise, so does the earth’s temperature. Habitat destruction and climate change are destroying plant and animal species far faster than new species can evolve, launching the first mass extinction since the one that eradicated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Throughout history, humans have lived on the earth’s sustainable yield—the interest from its natural endowment. But now we are consuming the endowment itself. In ecology, as in economics, we can consume principal 4 PLAN B along with interest in the short run, but in the long run it leads to bankruptcy. In 2002, a team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel, an analyst at Redefining Progress, 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 our demands in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20 percent. We are satisfying our excessive demands by consuming the earth’s natural assets, in effect creating a global bubble economy.1 Bubble economies are not new. American investors got an up-close view of this when the bubble in high-tech stocks burst in 2000 and the NASDAQ, an indicator of the value of these stocks, declined by some 75 percent. Japan had a similar experience in 1989 when the real estate bubble burst, depreciating stock and real estate assets by 60 percent. The bad-debt fallout and other effects of this collapse have left the once-dynamic Japanese economy dead in the water ever since.2 The bursting of these two bubbles affected primarily people living in the United States and Japan, but the global bubble economy that is based on the overconsumption of the earth’s natural capital assets will affect the entire world. When the food bubble economy, inflated by the overpumping of aquifers, bursts, it will raise food prices worldwide. The challenge for our generation is to deflate the economic bubble before it bursts. Unfortunately, since September 11, 2001, political leaders, diplomats, and the media worldwide have been preoccupied with terrorism and, more recently, the invasion of Iraq. Terrorism is certainly a matter of concern, but if it diverts us from the environmental trends that are undermining our future until it is too late to reverse them, Osama Bin Laden and his followers will have A Planet Under Stress 5 achieved their goal of bringing down western civilization in a way they could not have imagined. In February 2003, U.N. demographers made an announcement that was in some ways more shocking than the September 11th attack: the worldwide rise in life expectancy has been dramatically reversed for a large segment of humanity—the 700 million people living in subSaharan Africa. The HIV epidemic has reduced life expectancy among this region’s people from 62 to 47 years. The epidemic may soon claim more lives than all the wars of the twentieth century. If this teaches us anything, it is the high cost of neglecting newly emerging threats.3 The HIV epidemic is not the only emerging megathreat. Numerous countries are feeding their growing populations by overpumping their aquifers—a measure that virtually guarantees a future drop in food production when the aquifers are depleted. In effect, these countries are creating a food bubble economy—one where food production is artificially inflated by the unsustainable use of groundwater. Another mega-threat—climate change—is not getting the attention it deserves from most governments, particularly that of the United States, the country responsible for one fourth of all carbon emissions. Washington wants to wait until all the evidence on climate change is in, by which time it will be too late to prevent a wholesale warming of the planet. Just as governments in Africa watched HIV infection rates rise and did little about it, the United States is watching atmospheric CO2 levels rise and doing little to check the increase.4 Other mega-threats being neglected include eroding soils and expanding deserts, which are threatening the livelihood and food supply of hundreds of millions of the world’s people. These issues do not even appear on the radar screen of many national governments. 6 PLAN B Thus far, most of the environmental damage has been local: the death of the Aral Sea, the burning rainforests of Indonesia, the collapse of the Canadian cod fishery, the melting of the glaciers that supply Andean cities with water, the dust bowl forming in northwestern China, and the depletion of the U.S. Great Plains aquifer. But as these local environmental events expand and multiply, they will progressively weaken the global economy, bringing closer the day when the economic bubble will burst.5 Ecological Bills Coming Due Humanity’s demands on the earth have multiplied over the last half-century as our numbers have increased and our incomes have risen. World population grew from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 6.1 billion in 2000. The growth during those 50 years exceeded that during the 4 million years since we emerged as a distinct species.6 Incomes have risen even faster than population. Income per person worldwide nearly tripled from 1950 to 2000. Growth in population and the rise in incomes together expanded global economic output from just under $7 trillion (in 2001 dollars) of goods and services in 1950 to $46 trillion in 2000, a gain of nearly sevenfold.7 Population growth and rising incomes together have tripled world grain demand over the last half-century, pushing it from 640 million tons in 1950 to 1,855 million tons in 2000. To satisfy this swelling demand, farmers have plowed land that was highly erodible—land that was too dry or too steeply sloping to sustain cultivation. Each year billions of tons of topsoil are being blown away in dust storms or washed away in rainstorms, leaving farmers to try to feed some 70 million additional people, but with less topsoil than the year before.8 Demand for water also tripled as agricultural, industrial, and residential uses climbed, outstripping the sus- A Planet Under Stress 7 tainable supply in many countries. As a result, water tables are falling and wells are going dry. Rivers are also being drained dry, to the detriment of wildlife and ecosystems.9 Fossil fuel use quadrupled, setting in motion a rise in carbon emissions that is overwhelming nature’s capacity to fix carbon dioxide. As a result of this carbon-fixing deficit, atmospheric CO2 concentrations climbed from 316 parts per million (ppm) in 1959, when official measurement began, to 369 ppm in 2000.10 The sector of the economy that seems likely to unravel first is food. Eroding soils, deteriorating rangelands, collapsing fisheries, falling water tables, and rising temperatures are converging to make it more difficult to expand food production fast enough to keep up with demand. In 2002, the world grain harvest of 1,807 million tons fell short of world grain consumption by 100 million tons, or 5 percent. This shortfall, the largest on record, marked the third consecutive year of grain deficits, dropping stocks to the lowest level in a generation.11 Now the question is, Can the world’s farmers bounce back and expand production enough to fill the 100-million-ton shortfall, provide for the more than 70 million people added each year, and rebuild stocks to a more secure level? In the past, farmers responded to short supplies and higher grain prices by planting more land and using more irrigation water and fertilizer. Now it is doubtful that farmers can fill this gap without further depleting aquifers and jeopardizing future harvests.12 In 1996, at the World Food Summit in Rome, hosted by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 185 countries plus the European Community agreed to reduce hunger by half by 2015. Using 1990–92 as a base, governments set the goal of cutting the number of people who were hungry—860 million—by roughly 20 million per 8 PLAN B year. It was an exciting and worthy goal, one that later became one of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals.13 But in its late 2002 review of food security, the United Nations issued a discouraging report: “This year we must report that progress has virtually ground to a halt. Our latest estimates, based on data from the years 1998–2000, put the number of undernourished people in the world at 840 million…a decrease of barely 2.5 million per year over the eight years since 1990–92.”14 Since 1998–2000, world grain production per person has fallen 5 percent, suggesting that the ranks of the hungry are now expanding. As noted earlier, life expectancy is plummeting in sub-Saharan Africa. If the number of hungry people worldwide is also increasing, then two key social indicators are showing widespread deterioration in the human condition.15 Farmers Facing Two New Challenges As we exceed the earth’s natural capacities, we create new problems. For example, farmers are now facing two new challenges: rising temperatures and falling water tables. Farmers currently on the land may face higher temperatures than any generation since agriculture began 11,000 years ago. They are also the first to face widespread aquifer depletion and the resulting loss of irrigation water. The global average temperature has risen in each of the last three decades. The 16 warmest years since recordkeeping began in 1880 have all occurred since 1980. With the three warmest years on record—1998, 2001, and 2002—coming in the last five years, crops are facing heat stresses that are without precedent.16 Higher temperatures reduce crop yields through their effect on photosynthesis, moisture balance, and fertilization. As the temperature rises above 34 degrees Celsius (94 degrees Fahrenheit), photosynthesis slows, dropping A Planet Under Stress 9 to zero for many crops when it reaches 37 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit). When temperatures in the U.S. Corn Belt are 37 degrees or higher, corn plants suffer from thermal shock and dehydration. They are in effect on sick leave. Each such day shrinks the harvest.17 In addition to decreasing photosynthesis and dehydrating plants, high temperatures also impede the fertilization needed for seed formation. Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines and at the U.S. Department of Agriculture have together developed a rule of thumb that each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum during the growing season reduces grain yields by 10 percent.18 These recent research findings indicate that if the temperature rises to the lower end of the range projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, grain harvests in tropical regions could be reduced by an average of 5 percent by 2020 and 11 percent by 2050. At the upper end of the range, harvests could drop 11 percent by 2020 and 46 percent by 2050. Avoiding these declines will be difficult unless scientists can develop crop strains that are not vulnerable to thermal stress.19 The second challenge facing farmers, falling water tables, is also recent. With traditional animal- or humanpowered water-lifting devices it was almost impossible historically to deplete aquifers. With the worldwide spread of powerful diesel and electric pumps during the last half-century, however, overpumping has become commonplace. As the world demand for water has climbed, water tables have fallen in scores of countries, including China, India, and the United States, which together produce nearly half of the world’s grain. Water tables are falling throughout the northern half of China. As the water table falls, springs and rivers go dry, lakes disappear, and 10 PLAN B wells dry up. Northern China is literally drying out. Water tables under the North China Plain, which accounts for a fourth or more of China’s grain harvest, are falling at an accelerating rate.20 In India, water tables are also falling. As India’s farmers try to feed an additional 16 million people each year, nearly the population equivalent of another Australia, they are pumping more and more water. This is dropping water tables in states that together contain a majority of India’s 1 billion people.21 In the United States, the third major grain producer, water tables are falling under the southern Great Plains and in California, the country’s fruit and vegetable basket. As California’s population expands from 26 million to a projected 40 million by 2030, expanding urban water demands will siphon water from agriculture.22 Scores of other countries are also overpumping their aquifers, setting the stage for dramatic future cutbacks in water supplies. The more populous among these are Pakistan, Iran, and Mexico. Overpumping creates an illusion of food security that is dangerously deceptive because it enables farmers to support a growing population with a practice that virtually ensures a future drop in food production. The water demand growth curve over the last halfcentury looks like the population growth curve, except that it climbs more steeply. While world population growth was doubling, the use of water was tripling. Once the growing demand for water rises above the sustainable yield of an aquifer, the gap between the two widens further each year. As this happens, the water table starts to fall. The first year after the sustainable yield is surpassed, the water table falls very little, with the drop often being scarcely perceptible. Each year thereafter, however, the annual drop is larger than the year before. A Planet Under Stress 11 In addition to falling exponentially, water tables are also falling simultaneously in many countries. This means that cutbacks in grain harvests will occur in many countries at more or less the same time. And they will occur at a time when the world’s population is growing by more than 70 million a year.23 These, then, are the two new challenges facing the world’s farmers: rising temperatures and falling water tables. Either one by itself could make it difficult to keep up with the growth in demand. The two together provide an early test of whether our modern civilization can cope with the forces that threaten to undermine it. Ecological Meltdown in China In the deteriorating relationship between the global economy and the earth’s ecosystem, food is the most vulnerable economic sector, but geographically it is China that is on the leading edge. A human population of 1.3 billion and their 400 million cattle, sheep, and goats are weighing heavily on the land. Huge flocks of sheep and goats in the northwest are stripping the land of its protective vegetation, creating a dust bowl on a scale not seen before. Northwestern China is on the verge of a massive ecological meltdown.24 Since 1980, the Chinese economy has expanded more than fourfold. Incomes have also expanded by nearly fourfold, lifting more people out of poverty faster than at any time in history. Like many other countries, China is exceeding the carrying capacity of its ecosystem—overplowing its land, overgrazing its rangelands, overcutting its forests, and overpumping its aquifers. In its determined effort to be self-sufficient in grain, it cultivated highly erodible land in the arid northern and western provinces, land that is vulnerable to wind erosion.25 While overplowing is now being partly remedied by 12 PLAN B paying farmers to plant their grainland in trees, overgrazing is destroying vegetation and increasing wind erosion. China’s cattle, sheep, and goat population more than tripled from 1950 to 2002. The United States, a country with comparable grazing capacity, has 97 million cattle, while China has 106 million. For sheep and goats, the figures are 8 million versus 298 million. Concentrated in the western and northern provinces, sheep and goats are destroying the land’s protective vegetation. The wind then does the rest, removing the soil and converting productive rangeland into desert.26 China is now at war. It is not invading armies that are claiming its territory, but expanding deserts. Old deserts are advancing and new ones are forming, like guerrilla forces striking unexpectedly, forcing Beijing to fight on several fronts. And worse, the growing deserts are gaining momentum, occupying an ever-larger piece of China’s territory each year. China’s expanding ecological deficits are converging to create a dust bowl of historic dimensions. With little vegetation remaining in parts of northern and western China, the strong winds of late winter and early spring can remove literally millions of tons of topsoil in a single day—soil that can take centuries to replace. For the outside world, it is these storms that draw attention to the dust bowl forming in China. On April 12, 2002, for instance, South Korea was engulfed by a huge dust storm from China that left residents of Seoul literally gasping for breath. Schools were closed, airline flights were cancelled, and clinics were overrun with patients having difficulty breathing. Retail sales fell. Koreans have come to dread the arrival of what they now call “the fifth season”—the dust storms of late winter and early spring. Japan also suffers from dust storms originating in China. Although not as directly exposed as Koreans are, the A Planet Under Stress 13 Japanese complain about the dust and the brown rain that streaks their windshields and windows.27 Each year, residents of eastern Chinese cities such as Beijing and Tianjin hunker down as the dust storms begin. Along with the difficulty in breathing and the dust that stings the eyes, there is the constant effort to keep dust out of homes and to clean doorways and sidewalks of dust and sand. Farmers and herders, whose livelihoods are blowing away, are paying an even heavier price. Desert expansion has accelerated with each successive decade since 1950. China’s Environmental Protection Agency reports that the Gobi Desert expanded by 52,400 square kilometers (20,240 square miles) from 1994 to 1999, an area half the size of Pennsylvania. With the advancing Gobi now within 150 miles of Beijing, China’s leaders are beginning to sense the gravity of the situation.28 The fallout from the dust storms is social as well as economic. Millions of rural Chinese may be uprooted and forced to migrate eastward as the deserts claim their land. Desertification is already driving villagers from their homes in Gansu, Inner Mongolia (Nei Monggol), and Ningxia provinces. A preliminary Asian Development Bank assessment of desertification in Gansu Province reports that 4,000 villages risk being overrun by drifting sands.29 The U.S. Dust Bowl of the 1930s forced some 2.5 million “Okies” and other refugees to leave the land, many of them heading west from Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas to California. But the dust bowl forming in China is much larger, and during the 1930s the U.S. population was only 150 million—compared with 1.3 billion in China today. Whereas the U.S. migration was measured in the millions, China’s may measure in the tens of millions. And as a U.S. embassy report entitled The Grapes of Wrath in Inner Mongolia noted, “unfortunately, China’s 14 PLAN B twenty-first century ‘Okies’ have no California to escape to—at least not in China.”30 Food: A National Security Issue The ecological deficits just described are converging on the farm sector, making it more difficult to sustain rapid growth in world food output. No one knows when the growth in food production will fall behind that of demand, driving up prices, but it may be much closer than we think. The triggering events that will precipitate future food shortages are likely to be spreading water shortages interacting with crop-withering heat waves in key food-producing regions. The economic indicator most likely to signal serious trouble in the deteriorating relationship between the global economy and the earth’s ecosystem is grain prices. Food is fast becoming a national security issue as growth in the world harvest slows and as falling water tables and rising temperatures hint at future shortages. More than 100 countries import part of the wheat they consume. Some 40 import rice. While some countries are only marginally dependent on imports, others could not survive without them. Iran and Egypt, for example, rely on imports for 40 percent of their grain supply. For Algeria, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, among others, it is 70 percent or more. For Israel and Yemen, over 90 percent. Just six countries—the United States, Canada, France, Australia, Argentina, and Thailand—supply 90 percent of grain exports. The United States alone controls close to half of world grain exports, a larger share than Saudi Arabia does of oil.31 Thus far the countries that import heavily are small and middle-sized ones. But now China, the world’s most populous country, is likely to soon turn to world markets in a major way. When the former Soviet Union unexpect- A Planet Under Stress 15 edly turned to the world market in 1972 for roughly a tenth of its grain supply, following a weather-reduced harvest, world wheat prices climbed from $1.90 to $4.89 a bushel. Bread prices soon rose too.32 If China depletes its grain reserves and turns to the world grain market to cover its shortfall, now 40 million tons per year, it could destabilize world grain markets overnight. Turning to the world market means turning to the United States, presenting a potentially delicate geopolitical situation in which 1.3 billion Chinese consumers with a $100-billion trade surplus with the United States will be competing with American consumers for U.S. grain. If this leads to rising food prices in the United States, how will the government respond? In times past, it could have restricted exports, even imposing an export embargo, as it did with soybeans to Japan in 1974. But today the United States has a stake in a politically stable China. With an economy growing at 7–8 percent a year, China is the engine that is powering not only the Asian economy but, to some degree, the world economy.33 For China, becoming dependent on other countries for food would end its history of food self-sufficiency, leaving it vulnerable to world market uncertainties. For Americans, rising food prices would be the first indication that the world has changed fundamentally and that they are being directly affected by the growing grain deficit in China. If it seems likely that rising food prices are being driven in part by crop-withering temperature rises, pressure will mount for the United States to reduce oil and coal use. For the world’s poor—the millions living in cities on $1 per day or less and already spending 70 percent of their income on food—rising grain prices would be lifethreatening. A doubling of world grain prices today could impoverish more people in a shorter period of time 16 PLAN B than any event in history. With desperate people holding their governments responsible, such a price rise could also destabilize governments of low-income, grainimporting countries.34 When I projected in 1995 in Who Will Feed China? that China would one day turn abroad for part of its grain, the U.S. National Intelligence Council, the umbrella over all the U.S. intelligence agencies, launched the most detailed assessment of China’s food prospect ever undertaken. The council was concerned precisely because such a move by China could drive up world grain prices and destabilize governments in developing countries. An interdisciplinary team led by Michael McElroy, Chairman of Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, conducted this extraordinarily ambitious study. Relying on an interdisciplinary approach and a vast array of resources, including 35 years of CIA satellite data on land use and the Sandia National Laboratories to model the water supply-demand balance of every river basin in China, the team concluded in its “most likely” scenario that China would one day have to import massive quantities of grain.35 The team then decided that the world would not have any difficulty in supplying grain on such a vast scale. The shortcoming of this conclusion, in my opinion, was that it relied too heavily on extrapolating late twentiethcentury grain production trends into the twentyfirst century, failing to take into account emerging constraints on harvests, such as aquifer depletion and rising temperatures. When grain prices began to climb in 1972–74, it did not take long for a politics of food scarcity to emerge. Pressure from within grain-exporting countries to restrict exports in order to check the rise in domestic food prices was common.36 A Planet Under Stress 17 More recently, the Canadian Wheat Board, which handles the nation’s wheat exports, announced in early September 2002 that it had no more to sell. This abrupt withdrawal from the market—even before that year’s drought-reduced harvest was complete—illustrates the kind of action that exporters can take when confronted with scarcity. Instead of letting the world market allocate scarce supplies of high-quality wheat, the Board decided that it would protect domestic supplies, then sell only to traditional clients, leaving other importers to fend for themselves. In late October, Australia—also experiencing a severe drought—announced that it would ration wheat and barley exports among its best customers, excluding all other potential buyers.37 Historically, the world had two food reserves: the global carryover stocks of grain and the cropland idled under the U.S. farm program to limit production. The latter could be brought into production within a year. Since the U.S. land set-aside program ended in 1996, however, the world has had only carryover stocks as a reserve.38 Food security has changed in other ways. Traditionally it was largely an agricultural matter. But now it is something that our entire society is responsible for. National population and energy policies may have a greater effect on food security than agricultural policies do. With most of the 3 billion people to be added to world population by 2050 being born in countries already facing water shortages, childbearing decisions may have a greater effect on food security than crop planting decisions. Achieving an acceptable balance between food and people today depends on family planners and farmers working together.39 Climate change is the wild card in the food security deck. It is perhaps a measure of the complexity of our time that decisions made in the Ministry of Energy may 18 PLAN B have a greater effect on future food security than those made in the Ministry of Agriculture. The effect of population and energy policies on food security differ in one important respect: population stability can be achieved by a country acting unilaterally. Climate stability cannot. The Case for Plan B Thus far, this chapter has focused primarily on how environmental changes can affect the food prospect, but there could be other wake-up calls, including more destructive storms or deadly heat waves. Unless we quickly reverse the damaging trends that we have set in motion, they will generate vast numbers of environmental refugees—people abandoning depleted aquifers and exhausted soils and those fleeing advancing deserts and rising seas. In a world where civilization is being squeezed between expanding deserts from the interior of continents and rising seas on the periphery, refugees are likely to number not in the millions but in the tens of millions. Already we see refugees from drifting sand in Nigeria, Iran, and China.40 We are now looking at the potential wholesale evacuation of cities as aquifers are depleted and wells go dry. Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, may become the early ghost towns of the twenty-first century.41 A reversal of the basic trends of social progress of the last half-century has long seemed unthinkable. Progress appeared inevitable. But now we are seeing reversals. As noted earlier, the number of hungry may be increasing for the first time since the war-torn decade of the 1940s. And a rise in life expectancy—a seminal measure of economic and social progress—has been interrupted in sub-Saharan Africa as a result of the HIV epidemic. As millions of able-bodied adults die, families are often left with no one A Planet Under Stress 19 to work in the fields. The disease and spreading hunger are both weakening immune systems and reinforcing each other, something epidemiologists had not reckoned on. The failure of governments to deal with falling water tables and the depletion of aquifers in the Indian subcontinent could be as disruptive for the 1.3 billion living there as the HIV epidemic is for the people in sub-Saharan Africa. With business as usual, life expectancy could soon begin to fall in India and Pakistan as water shortages translate into food shortages, deepening hunger among the poor.42 The world is moving into uncharted territory as human demands override the sustainable yield of natural systems. The risk is that people will lose confidence in the capacity of their governments to cope with such problems, leading to social breakdown. The shift to anarchy is already evident in countries such as Somalia, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Business as usual—Plan A—is clearly not working. The stakes are high, and time is not on our side. Part I details the mounting evidence that our modern civilization is in trouble. The good news, as outlined in Part II of this book, is that there are solutions to the problems we are facing. The bad news is that if we continue to rely on timid, incremental responses, our bubble economy will continue to grow until eventually it bursts. This book argues for a new approach—for Plan B—an urgent reordering of priorities and a restructuring of the global economy in order to prevent that from happening. from Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0 Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006). © 2006 Earth Policy Institute. All Rights Reserved. 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 4 PLAN B 2.0 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 Entering a New World 5 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 6 PLAN B 2.0 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 Entering a New World 7 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 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- 8 PLAN B 2.0 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- Entering a New World 9 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 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 10 PLAN B 2.0 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. Entering a New World 11 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 12 PLAN B 2.0 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 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 Entering a New World 13 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 14 PLAN B 2.0 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 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 Entering a New World 15 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. The central challenge, the key to building the new economy, is getting the market to tell the ecological truth. The dysfunctional 16 PLAN B 2.0 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 Entering a New World 17 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 18 PLAN B 2.0 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. from Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, by Lester R. Brown © 2008 Earth Policy Institute 1 Entering a New World During the late summer of 2007, the news of accelerating ice melting arrived at a frenetic pace. In early September, the Guardian in London reported, “The Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer, and levels of sea ice in the region now stand at a record low.” Experts were “stunned” by the loss of ice, as an area almost twice the size of Britain disappeared in a single week.1 Mark Serreze, a veteran Arctic specialist with the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, said: “It’s amazing. If you asked me a couple of years ago when the Arctic could lose all of its ice, then I would have said 2100, or 2070 maybe. But now I think that 2030 is a reasonable estimate.”2 A few days later, the Guardian, reporting from a symposium in Ilulissat, Greenland, said that the Greenland ice cap is melting so fast that it is...
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