Plan B 4.0

You listen to Lester Brown, and you have to wonder what the big fuss is all about at the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen. I mean, the guy is saying we don't really have to fight over this, because the technologies available right now could cut greenhouse gas emissions by ... drumroll, please... 80 percent by 2020. Yes! (It really puts into perspective President Obama's pledge today to cut emissions 17 percent over the same time period, eh?)  

[caption id="attachment_6332" align="alignright" width="226" caption="Lester Brown "][/caption]

Now, we've written about Brown before, and we may be guilty of featuring him entirely too much, but the man is talking sense. Today he was doing that right here in Rain City on KUOW's Weekday with Steve Scher, revealing how this seemingly magical transformation can happen. A couple of quick examples from his latest tome*, the unassumingly named Plan B 4.0 --  Mobilizing to Save Civilization: 

• You want energy efficiency? We got energy efficiency. Replace the world's incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescents and you get a 75 percent reduction in energy use. Replace them with Light Emitting Diode, or LED, lights and combine that with smart technology that, for instance, turns lights out when a room is empty. Then the savings is 90 percent. (Los Angeles is replacing its 130,000 streetlights with LEDs at a savings of $11 million a year.
  

I tend to doubt that there's a write more eloquent than Lester R. Brown when it comes to saying, "We're screwed!"

Fortunately, the founder of the Worldwatch Institute and now the Earth Policy Institute also comes to the party armed with solutions as he romps through growing food scarcity, our energy conundrum and our interrelated population and climate problems.

This week Brown's new book "Plan B 4.0" is due in bookstores. It's an update of, as you might imagine, previous versions that we covered earlier. It's the Big Picture, environmentally, about how deep we are in this hole and what it's going to take to build the ladder to get out.

I mean, this is a guy who says we can cut greenhouse gases by 80 percent not by mid-century... but by 2020! You gotta love his title, too. Plan B. Hah!

Predictably -- as longtime Dateline Earth readers could guess -- Brown's  latest tome starts out talking about the growing food shortage crisis, traceable to a paucity of grains. Grain prices worldwide tripled between 2006 and 2008 -- along the lines of what Brown had previously projected. He shows how this is a structural problem, not an ephemeral grain-price hike like those related to weather in the past. The man is a grain-supply Nostradamus, really.

Bear with us here, but he ranges in just the first chapter -- the only one available online so far (PDF) -- through food shortages, the energy/climate dilemma and population growth, showing they are are all intimately related.