permaculture

[Saor Stetler <saor@ycbtal.net>]

   What Is Plan B?


         By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
         Posted on February 2, 2006, Printed on February 4, 2006
         http://www.alternet.org/story/31679/

Of all the resources needed to build an economy that will sustain 
economic progress, none is more scarce than time. That is one of the key 
messages of Lester Brown's new book, "Plan B. 2.0: Rescuing a Planet 
Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble 
<http://alternet.bookswelike.net/isbn/0393328317>." The world may 
finally be listening.

China now consumes more grain, meat, coal and steel than the United 
States. If China's income grows as projected, in 2031 its income per 
person will match incomes in the United States today. At that point, it 
will be consuming the equivalent of two-thirds of the current world 
grain harvest, driving 1.1 billion cars (versus 800 million in the world 
today) and using 99 million barrels of oil per day, well above current 
world production of 84 million barrels. That's Plan A.

New threats -- climate change, environmental degradation, the 
persistence of poverty and the loss of hope -- call for new strategies. 
Brown -- who left World Watch in 2001 to found Earth Policy Institute 
<http://www.earth-policy.org/> -- says it's time for Plan B -- a 
renewable-energy-based, reuse-recycle economy with a diversified 
transport system: time to build a new economy and a new world. The world 
is now spending $975 billion annually for military purposes. Plan B -- 
social goals and earth restoration -- requires an additional annual 
expenditure of $161 billion.

Brown, founder of the World Watch Institute, was in Europe recently to 
address the Royal Geographic Society in London, the World Economic Forum 
in Davos, Switzerland, and the OECD in Paris. He will speak to the World 
Affairs Councils of San Francisco 
<http://www.itsyourworld.org/program.php?page=1526> and Los Angeles 
<http://www.lawac.org/> the first week of February.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: For many, environmental issues are local -- the beach, 
the nearby polluting factory, the smog. Yet you focused on the global 
environment at a time when few were. Where did that come from?

LESTER BROWN: Well I suppose there were a number of things that 
contributed to it. One was, when I was farming I was very much aware of 
the environmental issues that one has to deal with, whether it's water 
resources or weather or soils or crop diseases or what have you.

Beyond that, after I graduated from Rutgers in 1955 with a degree in 
agricultural science, I had the chance to spend half of 1956 living in 
villages in India, and there I was exposed very directly to the food 
population issue, though India at that time had only 430 million people 
or so compared with over a billion today.

Then I became a foreign policy adviser to Secretary of Agriculture 
Orville Freeman during the Kennedy-Johnson administration. The 
population pressures on resources and the problems associated with that, 
whether it's deforestation or overgrazing or soil erosion, aquifer 
depletion, those problems were becoming evident way back then. By 1974 I 
was convinced not only that these were going to be major issues, but 
also that we needed a research institute to focus on environmental 
issues at the global level.

TM: Yet you also make clear that we need a vision of the future, not 
just the bad news.

LB: No question. If we don't have a sense of where we want to go, we're 
probably not going to get there. I think one of the things that's 
lacking in the global environmental movement is a vision. We spend so 
much time being against things, it's not always clear what we're for.

TM: In the first paragraph of the Preface to "Plan B: 2.0," you write: 
"If our goal is to sustain economic progress, we have no choice other 
than to move onto a new path." Two things -- first, you don't mention 
the word "environment" in that sentence, you're talking about economic 
progress. Second, why isn't that reality being recognized and acted on?

LB: Two things are driving the recognition of the need for a 
restructuring of the global economy. One is the knowledge of what's 
happening to the economy's environmental support systems, whether it's 
forests or fisheries or rangelands or soils or aquifers or the climate 
system. Many environmentalists have been clear for some time that we 
have to restructure the economy if we want progress to continue. If we 
don't, we're going to be in serious trouble.

In Jared Diamond's book, "Collapse," he looked at earlier civilizations 
<http://www.alternet.org/story/23413/>, many of which also got on to an 
economic path that was environmentally unsustainable. He pointed out was 
that some of those early civilizations realized they were in trouble and 
made the needed course corrections to survive. Others either did not 
understand they were in environmental trouble, or understood it but 
politically they could not mobilize an effective response.

TM: "Plan B" came out two years ago. Why did you feel the need to 
deliver "Plan B: 2.0"?

LB: Enough things have changed over the past two years, both in terms of 
what we can do and the potential of new technologies like gas-electric 
hybrid cars and advances in wind turbine design, and so forth. But more 
importantly, the evidence first of all, that China has already overtaken 
the United States in the consumption of most basic resources.

Ever since you and I can remember, we've been saying that the U.S. with 
5 percent of the world's people consumes a third or 40 percent of the 
world's resources. That was true for a long time. It is no longer true. 
China is now consuming more of these basic resources. Look at the food 
sector -- grain and meat, the energy sector -- oil and coal, the 
industrial sector -- steel. China now consumes more of all of those than 
the United States except for oil. Their consumption of meat is nearly 
double that of the United States, and their steel consumption, 258 
million tons a year. We consumed 104 million tons a year last year.

TM: India is expected to overtake China in terms of population. We hear 
about India mostly in terms of outsourcing jobs to India. What's its 
take on resources?

LB: India has a huge population, but they're still mostly poor; they're 
a good 20 years behind China. They're probably where China was in 1980 
or '85.

TM: Having said that, India still has a middle class of about 300 
million, about the size of the entire U.S. population.

LB: That's right and it's growing fast.

Now that China has overtaken the U.S. in the total consumption of 
resources, we have license to ask the next question: What if China 
catches up to the U.S. in consumption per person? If their economy, 
which has been growing at 9 or 10 percent a year in recent years, drops 
down to 8 percent a year, by 2031, income per person in China will be 
the same as that in the U.S. today. By 2031 we're probably talking about 
1.45 billion Chinese.

TM: 1.45 billion consuming at the rate we consume today is impossible. 
China alone would consume more than one earth at that point.

LB: Based on those projections, in 2031, China would be consuming two 
thirds of the current world grain harvest. Their consumption of paper 
would be double current world production. There go the world's forests. 
If China in 2031 has three cars for every four people, as we now have in 
this country, it would have a fleet of 1.1 billion cars.

The current global fleet is 800 million. They would have to pave over an 
area comparable to the land they now have in rice, and they would be 
consuming 99 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently 
producing 84 million barrels a day and will probably never produce much 
more than that.

TM: Because we're also close to or about to hit peak oil. We've heard 
the diagnosis. What's the prescription? What is Plan B?

LB: The Western economic model, the fossil fuel-based, 
automobile-centered throw-away economy, is not going to work for China. 
It won't work for India, which by 2031 will have an even larger 
population, nor will it work for the other three billion people in the 
developing countries, who are also dreaming the American dream. Most 
importantly, it will not work for the industrial countries either in a 
world that is more and more integrated economically and where we all 
depend on the same oil, grain and iron ore.

So then the question becomes, if the old economy won't work, what will 
the new economy look like?

We can see this much more clearly than we could even two years ago, and 
that's exciting. It will be powered by renewable sources of energy. It 
will have a comprehensive re-use recycle system, and it will have a much 
more diversified transport system, not as much the automobile-centered 
system we now have.

We can now see the new economy beginning to emerge in various places 
around the world. We see it in the wind farms of Western Europe, the 
solar rooftops of Japan, the bicycle-friendly streets of Amsterdam, the 
reforested mountains of South Korea and the growing fleet of 
gas-electric hybrid cars in the United States. It's beginning to take 
shape, but it's not moving fast enough.

TM: What is it going to take to accelerate that?

LB: It's difficult to say. I play around with scenarios that will wake 
us up. The situation today reminds me a bit of the United States in the 
early 1940s when we were trying to ignore the war in Europe and the war 
in Asia, somehow thinking that we could get through without getting 
involved -- and then came Pearl Harbor. Overnight literally everything 
changed, and we mobilized for a war like you've never seen a country 
mobilize before. It was an extraordinary performance, but it took a very 
clear, distinct wake-up call.

TM: At the point at which we get a wake-up call that extreme, it may be 
too late to reverse some of those things, isn't that true?

LB: It's quite possible that the wake-up call will come too late.

TM: I'm an optimist. I look at the negatives that we see right now -- 
the incompetence in the war and the response to Katrina, the rampant 
corruption in D.C. -- as perhaps offering a teachable moment. Could Plan 
B offer the kind of dream -- like Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights 
dream or John Kennedy's Apollo mission -- that could rally people to 
take on a big challenge that's not a military challenge?

LB: That's an exciting way to put it. I think of King from time to time 
-- "I have a dream." He kept repeating that theme and described various 
parts of it, and it became a shared vision of our society.

The wake-up call could come with another disruption in the supply of oil 
that would drive prices up to, say, $100 a barrel, which is entirely 
feasible. Another less direct possibility: When the price of oil gets up 
to $60 a barrel, it becomes profitable to convert many agricultural 
commodities into automotive fuel. Almost everything that we eat can be 
converted either into ethanol or bio-diesel to run automobiles. As we 
develop the ethanol distilling capacity and the bio-diesel refining 
capacity, the price of oil begins to set the price of food. If the food 
value of a commodity is less than the fuel value, it will be converted 
into fuel.

TM: In other words, we would take food out of the mouths of the poor and 
put it into the fuel tanks of the rich?

LB: That's right. One of the consequences of high oil prices is that it 
sets up direct competition between supermarkets and service stations for 
the same commodities. The difference is that, in agricultural terms, the 
appetite of service stations is basically insatiable.

TM: If the world gets hammered this year and next year as they did last 
year by weather disasters, the people or the insurance companies are 
going to say, something has to be done about climate change -- another 
possible wake-up call. What is Plan B?

LB: Plan B has three components: (1) a restructuring of the global 
economy so that it can sustain civilization; (2) an all-out effort to 
eradicate poverty, stabilize population and restore hope in order to 
elicit participation of the developing countries; and (3) a systematic 
effort to restore natural systems.

Virtually everything we need to do to build an economy that will sustain 
economic progress is already being done in one or more countries. In 
Europe, for instance, which is leading the world into the wind era, some 
40 million people now get their residential electricity from wind farms. 
The European Wind Energy Association projects that by 2020, half of the 
region's population -- 195 million Europeans -- will be getting their 
residential electricity from wind.

TM: But it's not just about new technologies, is it?

LB: That's right. Building an economy that will sustain economic 
progress also means eradicating poverty and stabilizing population -- in 
effect, restoring hope among the world's poor. Eradicating poverty 
accelerates the shift to smaller families. Smaller families in turn help 
to eradicate poverty.

The principal line items in the budget to eradicate poverty are 
investments in universal primary school education; school lunch programs 
for the poorest of the poor; basic village-level health care, including 
vaccinations for childhood diseases; and reproductive health and family 
planning services for all the world's women. In total, reaching these 
goals will take $68 billion of additional expenditures each year.

TM: Where does the environment fit in all this?

LB: A strategy for eradicating poverty will not succeed if an economy's 
environmental support systems are collapsing. This means putting 
together an earth restoration budget -- one to reforest the earth, 
restore fisheries, eliminate overgrazing, protect biological diversity 
and raise water productivity to the point where we can stabilize water 
tables and restore the flow of rivers. Adopted worldwide, these measures 
require additional expenditures of $93 billion per year.

Combining social goals and earth restoration components into a Plan B 
budget means an additional annual expenditure of $161 billion. Such an 
investment is huge, but it is not a charitable act. It is an investment 
in the world in which our children will live.

TM: Where's the money going to come from?

LB: The world is now spending $975 billion annually for military 
purposes. The U.S. 2006 military budget of $492 billion, accounting for 
half of the world total, goes largely to the development and production 
of new weapon systems. Unfortunately, these weapons are of little help 
in curbing terrorism, nor can they reverse the deforestation of the 
earth or stabilize climate.

If the United States were to underwrite the entire $161 billion Plan B 
budget by shifting resources from the $492 billion spent on the 
military, it still would be spending more for military purposes than all 
other NATO members plus Russia and China combined.

TM: I hardly imagine the slightest move in that direction for at least 
the next three years of a Bush administration ...

LB: Of all the resources needed to build an economy that will sustain 
economic progress, none is more scarce than time. With climate change we 
may be approaching the point of no return. Nature is the timekeeper.

Like earlier civilizations that got into environmental trouble, we can 
decide to stay with business as usual and watch our global economy 
decline and eventually collapse. One way or another, the decision will 
be made by our generation. Of that there is little doubt. But it will 
affect life on earth for all generations to come.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los 
Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org <http://www.kpfk.org>).