Janet Larsen
http://www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2009/update85
Future firefighters have their work cut out for them. Perhaps nowhere does this hit home harder than in Australia, where in early 2009 a persistent drought, high winds, and record high temperatures set the stage for the worst wildfire in the country’s history. On February 9th, [...]
For the 193 national delegations gathering in Copenhagen for the U.N. Climate Change Conference in December, the reasons for concern about climate change vary widely. For delegations from low-lying island countries, the principal concern is rising sea level. For countries in [...]
Lester R. Brown
Can we change fast enough? When thinking about the enormous need for social change as we attempt to move the world economy onto a sustainable path, I find it useful to look at various models of [...]
www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/press_room/C68/pb4_ch7_datarelease
In Chapter 7 of the recently released Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Lester Brown lays out the Plan B goals for eradicating poverty and stabilizing population. Behind the scenes are a number of datasets and graphs that delve deeper into the trends discussed in the chapter. [...]
Lester R. Brown
Our early twenty-first century civilization is being squeezed between advancing deserts and rising seas. Measured by the biologically productive land area that can support human habitation, the earth is shrinking. Mounting population densities, once generated solely by population growth, are now also [...]
http://www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2009/update83
By Lester R. Brown
Emissions Drop 9 Percent in Last Two Years
For years now, many members of Congress have insisted that cutting carbon emissions was difficult, if not impossible. It is not. During the two years since 2007, carbon emissions have dropped 9 percent. While [...]
Our Global Ponzi Economy
Lester R. Brown
Our mismanaged world economy today has many of the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme takes payments from a broad base of investors and uses these to pay off returns. It creates the illusion that it is [...]
In recent years there has been a growing concern over thresholds or tipping points in nature. In my latest book Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, I state that scientists worry about when the shrinking population [...]
To understand our current environmental dilemma, it helps to look at earlier civilizations that also got into environmental trouble. Our early twenty-first century civilization is not the first to face the prospect of environmentally induced economic decline. The question [...]
In April 2005, the World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointly announced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of the year. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of people [...]
As the earth warms, the melting of the earth’s two massive ice sheets—Antarctica and Greenland—could raise sea level enormously. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt, it would raise sea level 7 meters (23 feet). Melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise [...]
By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute
In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres,” in which he challenged the view that the sun revolved around the earth, arguing instead that the earth revolved around the sun. With [...]
Lester R. Brown - Earth Policy Institute
In the May issue of Scientific American Lester R. Brown, President of Earth Policy Institute, discusses how food shortages could be the weak link that brings down civilization.
In this feature article, “Could Food Shortages Bring [...]
Protecting the earth’s nearly 4 billion hectares of remaining forests and replanting those already lost are both essential for restoring the earth’s health, an important foundation for the new economy. Reducing rainfall runoff and the associated flooding and soil erosion, [...]
In early December 2004, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo “ordered the military and police to crack down on illegal logging, after flash floods and landslides, triggered by rampant deforestation, killed nearly 340 people,” according to news reports. Fifteen years earlier, in 1989, the [...]
Community opposition, legal challenges, and financial uncertainty over future carbon costs are prompting companies to rethink their plans for coal.
Since the beginning of 2007, 95 proposed coal-fired power plants have been canceled or postponed in the United States—59 in [...]
Earth Policy Institute (EPI) has created a PowerPoint presentation that summarizes Lester Brown’s latest book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. It quickly reviews the book’s key concepts using data, facts, and figures, including the Plan B blueprint for reducing [...]
By Lester R. Brown
Ensuring basic health care for people in low-income countries is critical to the Plan B goal of eradicating poverty and stabilizing population.While heart disease and cancer (largely the diseases of aging), obesity, and smoking dominate health concerns in industrial countries, [...]
Health challenges are becoming more numerous as new infectious diseases such as SARS, West Nile virus, and avian flu emerge. In addition, the accumulation of chemical pollutants in the environment is starting to take a toll. While infectious [...] 
As land and water become scarce, competition for these vital resources intensifies within societies, particularly between the wealthy and those who are poor and dispossessed. The shrinkage of life-supporting resources per person that comes with population growth is threatening to [...] 
Aside from the overriding need to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels to stabilize climate, there are several other compelling reasons for countries everywhere to restructure their transport systems, including the need to prepare for falling oil production, to alleviate [...] 
Some 43 countries around the world now have populations that are either essentially stable or declining slowly. In countries with the lowest fertility rates, including Japan, Russia, Germany, and Italy, populations will likely decline somewhat over the next half-century. A larger [...] 
By Lester R. Brown
By Lester R. Brown
By Lester R. Brown
By Lester R. Brown
By Lester R. Brown
By Jonathan G. Dorn
With the dramatic increase in oil prices earlier this year translating into higher prices at the gas pump in the United States, concerns over U.S. dependence on foreign oil are once again part of the national discussion on energy [...]
By Lester R. Brown
After World War II, accelerating population growth and steadily rising incomes drove the demand for seafood upward at a record pace. At the same time, advances in fishing technologies, including huge refrigerated processing ships that enabled trawlers to exploit distant [...]
By Lester R. Brown
By Lester R. Brown
As fossil fuel prices rise, as oil insecurity deepens, and as concerns about climate change cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new energy economy is emerging in the United States. The old energy economy, fueled [...]
By Janet Larsen
Standing before the United Nations General Assembly in October 1987, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, President of the Maldives, made an appeal representing “an endangered nation.” That year for the first time, “unusual high waves” in the Indian [...]
By Lester R. Brown
One of the questions I am frequently asked when I am speaking in various countries is, given the environmental problems that the world is facing, can we make it? That is, can we avoid economic decline and the collapse of civilization? My answer is always the same: [...]
By Jonathan G. Dorn
Background
• The United States consumes nearly 21 million barrels of petroleum per day (7.5 billion barrels per year), one fourth the world total.
• Of the crude oil consumed in the U.S., 66 percent is imported.
• The U.S. is on [...]
By Lester R. Brown
The social and economic gap between the world’s richest 1 billion people and its poorest 1 billion has no historical precedent. Not only is this gap wide, it is widening. The poorest billion are trapped at subsistence level and the [...]
By Lester R. Brown
With water shortages emerging as a constraint on food production growth, the world needs an effort to raise water productivity similar to the one that nearly tripled land productivity during the last half of the twentieth century. [...]
