PLAN B: SHIFTING TO SUSTAINED ECONOMIC PROGRESS
Lester R. Brown
It is decision time. Business as usual has the world on an environmental path that is heading toward economic decline and collapse. In order to sustain economic progress, we have no choice but to move onto a new path – Plan B.
The world economy is consuming renewable resources faster than they can regenerate. As a result, forests are shrinking, grasslands are deteriorating, soils are eroding, water tables are falling, and fisheries are collapsing. No civilization has survived the destruction of its environmental support systems.
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.
Environmental scientists have long known that the economy was slowly destroying its support systems, but now there is convincing new evidence from China that the current economy cannot sustain progress for much longer.
Although the United States was long the leading consumer of resources, China now leads in the use of most resources. Among the leading commodities in the food sector (grain and meat), in the energy sector (oil and coal), and in the industrial sector (steel), China now leads the United States in the use of all except oil.
What if China reaches the U.S. resource consumption level per person? If China’s economy continues to expand at 8 percent per year, its income per person will reach the current U.S. level in 2031.
If we further assume that Chinese resource consumption per person in 2031 will be the same as that in the United States today, then the country’s projected population of 1.45 billion will consume an amount of grain equal to two thirds of the current world grain harvest. Its paper consumption would be double current world production. There go the world’s forests. And it would use 99 million barrels of oil per day – well above current world production of 84 million barrels.
The western economic model is not going to work for China. Nor will it work for India, which by 2031 is projected to have a population even larger than China’s. Or for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the “American dream.”
And in an increasingly integrated world economy, where all countries are competing for the same oil, grain, and mineral resources, the existing economic model will not work for industrial countries either. The days of the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy are numbered. Our future depends on shifting to a renewable energy-based, diversified transport, reuse-recycle economy.
Our twenty-first century global 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 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.
We can already see warning signs of possible contemporary decline. We see it in the drop of life expectancy among the 750 million people of sub-Sahara Africa from 61 years to 48 years. We see it in the swelling flow of environmental refugees, those forced from their homes by expanding deserts, depleted water supplies, and more destructive storms.
Perhaps the most disturbing recent development is the growing list of failed states. The latest analysis lists some 60 countries that have failed, are failing, or are at high risk of failing. Governments in low-income countries are being overwhelmed by demographic and environmental forces. How many states have to fail before the international system breaks down, disrupting global economic progress?
At what point does climate change spiral out of control? When Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast in late summer 2005, devastating New Orleans, its estimated cost was $200 billion – nearly seven times the previous record. Record high surface water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico helped make Katrina one of the most powerful storms ever to make landfall in the United States.
Is the record price of oil in 2005 an aberration or does it reflect something more fundamental – a failure to plan for the depletion of the world’s oil reserves? The failure of national governments to plan beyond peak oil is near universal. Is it an early sign of system failure?
We have long been concerned about the effect of rising oil prices on food production costs, but of even more concern is the effect on the demand for food commodities. Since virtually everything we eat can be converted into automotive fuel either in ethanol distilleries or biodiesel refineries, high oil prices are opening a vast new market for farm products. Those buying commodities for fuel producers are competing directly with food processors for supplies of wheat, corn, soybeans, sugarcane, and other foodstuffs. As the competition between service stations and supermarkets intensifies, food prices will rise.
It is time to replace the old economy with one that is powered with renewable sources of energy, that has a diversified transport system and that comprehensively recycles and reuses materials. The good news is that we have the technologies needed to build the new economy, and, as Jeffrey Sachs so often reminds us, for the first time in history we have the resources to eradicate poverty.
It is difficult to underestimate the urgency of responding to the situation in which we find ourselves. In this mobilization, the scarcest resource of all is time. The temptation is to reset the clock, but we cannot. Nature is the timekeeper.
In some ways the mobilization required to save civilization is similar to the U.S. mobilization during World War II. Initially, the United States resisted involvement in the war and responded only after it was directly attacked at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. But respond it did.
In his State of the Union address on January 6, 1942, President Roosevelt announced the country was planning to produce 45,000 tanks, 60,000 planes, 20,000 anti-aircraft guns, and 6 million tons of merchant shipping. Such arms production numbers were unheard of, but every goal was exceeded.
The sale of automobiles was banned and the automobile industry was converted to arms production. From the beginning of 1942 through 1944, the United States far exceeded the initial goal of 60,000 planes, turning out 229,600 aircraft, a fleet so vast it is hard even today to visualize it.
Sustaining economic progress now depends on restructuring the global economy, protecting and restoring the earth’s natural systems and resources, and eradicating poverty and stabilizing population.
Restructuring the economy is not as difficult as it sounds. If the United States, for instance, were to decide to replace the existing fleet of inefficient gasoline-burning vehicles with super-efficient gas/electric hybrids over the next 10 years, gasoline use could easily be cut in half.
Beyond this, a gas/electric hybrid with an additional storage battery and a plug-in capacity sets the stage for using electricity exclusively for short distance driving, such as the daily commute or grocery shopping. Then if we invest in thousands of wind farms, Americans could do most of their short-distance driving with wind energy, dramatically reducing carbon emissions and the pressure on world oil supplies.
We can see the new economy emerging in the wind farms of Western Europe, the solar rooftops of Japan, the growing fleet of gas-electric hybrid cars in the United States, the reforested mountains of South Korea, and the bicycle-friendly streets of Amsterdam.
Eradicating poverty, which is the key to stabilizing population, means universal primary school education, village-level health care, including childhood vaccinations, and family planning services for women everywhere. The budget for this totals $68 billion of additional expenditures per year.
Protecting and restoring the earth’s natural resources, which are essential if economic progress is to be sustained, includes restoring forests, fisheries, and rangelands, stabilizing water tables, protecting soils from erosion, and protecting the earth’s plant and animal diversity. With forests, for example, if all countries were to raise paper recycling rates to those of Germany, the number of trees used to make paper worldwide would drop by one third. The earth restoration budget totals $93 billion per year.
The total budget of $161 billion to protect and preserve civilization seems like a lot, but it is only one sixth of the global military budget. It is one third of the U.S. military budget, which now matches that of all other countries combined. The question is not can we afford this, but how can we afford not to make this investment?
Paralleling the need for political leadership is the need for media leadership. Turning the tide depends on a worldwide effort to raise public awareness about the gravity of our situation and the urgency of responding to it. Just as the automobile industry was the key to meeting U.S. arms production goals during World War II, so today the communications media is the key to disseminating the needed information in the time available. No other institution has this capacity.
All of us have a stake in the future. Saving our civilization is not a spectator sport. It means becoming politically active, supporting candidates and policies that will move us toward an economy that will sustain economic progress.
The choice is ours – yours and mine. We can stay with business as usual and preside over an economy that continues to destroy its natural support systems until it destroys itself, or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that changes direction, moving the world onto a path of sustained progress. The choice will be made by our generation, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.