Swans

Lester R. Brown, PLAN B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, W.W. Norton, New York, 2004; ISBN: 0-393-32523-7 (pbk): 285 pages, $15.95.

"If abrupt climate change is on the way, the driving force will probably be a great ocean current one scientist calls the 'Achilles' Heel of our climate system.' The current, known as the Great Conveyor, sweeps north through the Atlantic, carrying warmth from the tropics to the eastern U.S. and northern Europe before looping south. If the current shuts down -- which apparently can occur rapidly during times of global warming -- the huge heat pump goes off, potentially causing drastic weather change in just a few years."

"Scientists used to think that major climate changes, like the onset of an ice age, took thousands of years to unfold. Now they know [after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic ice] such dramatic transitions can occur in less than a decade. Global warming is likely pushing the climate to a tipping point -- like a canoe that's gradually tipped until it flips over."

"Their findings predict that at first the changes will be easily mistaken for normal weather variation -- allowing skeptics to dismiss them as a 'blip' of little importance. But by 2020, there could be little doubt that something drastic is happening."

"In the scenario, Megadroughts will afflict the U.S., especially in the southern states, along with winds 15% stronger than average, causing widespread dust storms and soil loss. Turning inward, it will seek to build a fortress around itself to protect its resources. Borders are strengthened to hold back starving immigrants from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean. Tensions rise when the U.S. reneges on the 1944 treaty that guarantees water flow from the Colorado River into Mexico. America is forced to meet its rising energy demand with nuclear power and onerous Middle Eastern [oil] contracts. Yet it survives without catastrophic losses."

"Europe, hardest hit by the temperature drop, struggles to deal with [mass] immigration from Scandinavia. Southern Europe is beleaguered by refugees from Africa and elsewhere. But Western Europe's wealth helps buffer it from catastrophe."

"China's huge population and food demands make it particularly vulnerable to increasingly unpredictable monsoon rains, which cause devastating floods in drought denuded areas. Bangladesh becomes nearly uninhabitable because of rising sea levels, which contaminates inland water supplies. India and Indonesia are hard pressed to maintain internal order while coping with the unfolding changes."

"As the decade progresses, facing starvation, nations start raiding. Eastern Europe invades Russia from the west, and Japan from the east, for access to its mineral and energy supplies. Nuclear-armed Pakistan, India, and China skirmish at the borders over refugees, shared rivers, and diminishing arable land. Oil supply is stretched thin by falling temperatures. Many more countries seek atomic power, making widespread nuclear proliferation inevitable."

"As the planets 'carrying capacity' shrinks, ancient patterns reemerge with the eruption of desperate, all out wars over food, water, and energy supplies. Warfare, again, as in centuries past, comes to define human existence"

"Throughout history, humans have lived on the earth's sustainable yield -- the interest from its natural endowment. But now we are consuming the endowment. In ecology, as in economics, we can consume principal 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 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."

"The key to restructuring the economy is the creation of an honest market, one that tells the ecological truth. The market is an incredible institution-- with some remarkable strengths and some glaring weaknesses. It allocates scarce resources with an efficiency no central planning body can match. It easily balances supply and demand and sets prices that readily reflect both scarcity and abundance. The market does not, however, incorporate the indirect costs of providing good and services, it does not properly value nature's services, and it does not respect the sustainable-yield thresholds of natural systems such as fisheries, forests, range lands, and aquifers."

"As the global economy has expanded and as technology has evolved, the indirect costs of some products have far exceeded their fixed cost on the market. The price of a gallon of gasoline, for instance, reflects the cost of production but not the expense of treating respiratory illness or the repair bill for acid rain. Nor does it cover the cost of rising global temperature, melting ice caps, more destructive storms, or the relocation of millions of refugees forced from their homes by rising seas. As the market is now organized, the motorist burning the gasoline does not bear these costs."

"Something is wrong. Unfortunately we have a faulty economic accounting system at the global level. Economic prosperity is achieved in part by running up ecological deficits, costs that do not show up on the books, but costs someone will eventually have to pay."

"Economic prosperity versus environmental protection is a false choice. We measure how the economy functions but not the dignity of the jobs. We treat the planet as if it's in liquidation. Environmental injury is deficit spending and loaded onto the backs of future generations."

"I'm the biggest advocate there is of the free market. However, we don't have a free market. Polluters evade the free market by making themselves rich at the expense of us. They destroy the value of the asset and rob value from communities."

"There have been huge subsidies for the nuclear power industry. But what are you going to do with these plants and their waste in 30 years? Now the cost is falling on the American public. It's the biggest subsidy ever."

"True free market capitalism would be the best thing for the environment. Show me a polluter and I'll show you a subsidy. They're industrial fat cats using their political pull to get subsidies and avoid the discipline of the free market."

Lester R. Brown, PLAN B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, W.W. Norton, New York, 2004; ISBN: 0-393-32523-7 (pbk): 285 pages, $15.95.

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