The following is a Plan B Update by my colleague Janet Larsen, the Director of Research for the Earth Policy Institute, about the connection between the increase of wildfires and rising temperature.

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 Feb. 9, now known as “Black Saturday,” the mercury in Melbourne topped 115 degrees F as fires burned over 1 million acres in the state of Victoria -- destroying more than 2,000 homes and killing more than 170 people, tens of thousands of cattle and sheep, and 1 million native animals.

Even as more people move into fire-prone wildlands around the world, the intense droughts and higher temperatures that come with global warming are likely to make fires more frequent and severe in many areas (see table of regional observations and predictions). For southeastern Australia, home to much of the country’s population, climate change could triple the number of extreme fire risk days by 2050.

Although fires typically make the news only when they grow large and put lives or property at risk, on any given day thousands of wildfires burn worldwide. Fire is a natural and important process in many ecosystems, clearing the land and recycling organic matter into the soil. Some 40 percent of the earth’s land is covered with fire-prone vegetation. A number of plants -- such as giant Sequoia trees and certain prairie grasses -- need fire to propagate or to create the right conditions for them to flourish.

Fire patterns have changed over time as human populations have grown and altered landscapes by clearing forests, allowing pasture animals to overgraze grasslands, and importing new plant species. Across parts of the western United States, for example, cheatgrass, an invasive annual adapted to frequent burns, has supplanted native brush, desert shrub, and perennial grasses that typically experience longer intervals between fires. In other areas, mixed-age and mixed-species forests have been replaced by single-species plantations where flames can jump easily from tree to tree. The result, instead of a low-intensity restorative fire, is a fire so hot that it can cause lasting harm to soils.

Humans have also altered fire patterns through deliberate suppression. After 1910, when a severe wildfire charred more than 3 million acres of western U.S. forest in just two days, the strong desire to protect timber resources gave life to a policy of quickly extinguishing fires. For decades, firefighters proved remarkably successful in this endeavor, but the upshot was that forests became so loaded with fuel that a blaze that evaded control could quickly grow into a dangerous megafire.

Now policies are shifting in many places to let some fires proceed naturally or through preventative controlled burns; yet by warming the planet, we may be relinquishing even more control than we bargained for. Higher average global temperatures mean extremes are in store: even as climate change brings more flooding in some areas, other places will be plagued by droughts and extended heat waves. As the temperature rose between the 1970s and early 2000s, for instance, the share of total global land area experiencing very dry conditions doubled from less than 15 percent to close to 30 percent. A hotter, drier world burns more readily. Global warming could be pushing us into a new regime of larger, longer-burning, more intense fires as well as fires in places that historically have been hard to ignite, like moist tropical forests.

Already there is evidence of the connection between higher temperatures and wildfire. Anthony Westerling of Scripps Institution and colleagues found a marked uptick in forest fires in the western United States since the mid-1980s, with the wildfire season lengthening by 78 days over the last 15 years compared with the preceding 15 years. The fire season length and the duration of each fire rose in concert with regional spring and summer temperatures, which were an average 0.87 degrees C (1.56 degrees F) higher in the later period. Higher temperatures are melting mountain snow cover earlier in the spring, leaving less moisture for the summer and giving fires a better chance to spread. And while human land use certainly has had a direct effect on wildfire patterns throughout the West, the biggest increase in U.S. wildfire frequency has actually occurred in the largely untouched mid-elevation Northern Rockies forests, implicating climate change.

Farther north, Alaska’s and Canada’s boreal forests recently have experienced more-frequent fires, releasing enough carbon to transform them in some years from net absorbers to net emitters. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the total area burned more than doubled.  Higher temperatures have extended the range of the tree-damaging spruce budworm into new territory and allowed spruce beetles, no longer delayed by cold winters, to complete their typical two-year life cycle in just a single year. Drought has limited the efficacy of the trees’ defenses. Together the insects and the drought are leaving millions of acres of dead wood in their wake, providing fuel for wildfires. Overall, a warmer climate is predicted to double the area burned in northern Canada by 2100; in Alaska, the area could double by as early as 2050.

In other parts of the world fire regimes are changing and are projected to change even more as the planet heats up. Over much of Europe fire frequency decreased during most of the twentieth century, and expanding forests soaked up carbon. Now, however, some areas may be starting to see more fires. Between 2000 and 2006, some 50,000 fires burned each year in the Mediterranean region, compared with 30,000 a year in the 1980s, though the total area burned did not increase, in part because of more vigilant firefighting.

During Europe’s record 2003 heat wave, which killed over 50,000 people, an estimated 650,000 hectares (about 1.6 million acres) of forest burned continent-wide. Although the number of fires during this warm and dry year was not particularly high, the area burned was a record. More than 5 percent of Portugal's forest area burned, four times the 1980–2004 annual average, resulting in economic damages exceeding 1 billion euros. If future warming is not kept in check, hot and dry summers like 2003 could happen as frequently as every other year, dramatically increasing wildfire risk.

For Southeast Asia, the extreme 1997–98 El Niño brought a major drought to the region, allowing some of the most severe fires in recent history to burn in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Laos. Fires set to clear land jumped from grasslands and shrublands to logged forests and peat swamps, where they burned underground. For months, Southeast Asian skies were hazy from smoke. Nearly 10 million hectares (about 25 million acres) burned in Indonesia alone, affecting 23 of 27 provinces and costing more than $9 billion.

During that same El Niño, more than 20 million hectares (about 50 million acres) burned in Latin America, wreaking damages of up to $15 billion. In 2001 the following El Niño brought more drought and put a frightening one third of Amazon forests at risk of burning. With a temperature rise of more than 3 degrees C (5 degrees F) -- well within the range projected for this century barring rapid and dramatic action to curb carbon emissions -- much of South America is likely to see more frequent wildfires.

Just as a weakened immune system leaves a person vulnerable to otherwise innocuous germs, the combination of logging, road construction, and intentional burning to clear forests for cattle ranches, farms, and plantations has fragmented the world’s tropical forests, increasing their vulnerability to fire. Piling higher temperatures on top of such stresses could completely undermine forests’ resilience. For the massive Amazon rainforest, we risk reaching a tipping point where recurrent droughts dry out the landscape enough so that small fires can turn into devastating conflagrations.

We all rely on trees to soak up greenhouse gases and store carbon. If large swaths of forest go up in flames, it could set into motion a vicious cycle, where more wildfires in turn release more carbon into the atmosphere. Stabilizing climate, and doing so quickly, takes on a new urgency when it means averting an inferno on earth.

For more information regarding this article, click here. 

Related Links:

Lester Brown and I, diavlogging

The Copenhagen Conference on food security

Three models of social change

I recently recorded my first BloggingHeads TV ... episode? diavlog? not sure what they're called ... with Lester Brown, focused on the latest edition of his book: Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. My main takeaway from the experience is that I need a much better microphone on my laptop. The sound is pretty awful on my end. Also I'm long overdue for some beard maintenance. And media training.

There's some chit-chat and technical glitches toward the beginning, but we get rolling about 5 minutes in:

If you just can't get enough BHTV, here's another good episode, with enviro journalist David Orr squaring off against conservative Jim Manzi on the subject of climate change and Orr's new book:

Related Links:

Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

Gourmet’s conscience, Gopnik on cookbooks, and other tasty morsels

The Copenhagen Conference on food security

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 southern Europe, climate change means less rainfall and more drought. For countries of East Asia and the Caribbean, more powerful storms and storm surges are a growing worry. This climate change conference is about all these things, and many more, but in a very fundamental sense, it is a conference about food security.

We need not go beyond ice melting to see that the world is in trouble on the food front. The melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets is raising sea level. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, sea level would rise by 23 feet. Recent projections show that it could rise by up to 6 feet during this century.

Rice harvesters in Vietnam. Photo courtesy jeremysabol via Flickr The world rice harvest is particularly vulnerable to rising sea level. A World Bank map of Bangladesh shows that even a 3 foot rise in sea level would cover half of the riceland in this country of 160 million people. It would also inundate one third or more of the Mekong delta, which produces half of the rice in Vietnam, the world’s number two rice exporter. And it would submerge parts of the 20 or so other rice-growing river deltas in Asia.

The worldwide melting of mountain glaciers is of even greater concern. The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland has recently reported the 18th consecutive year of shrinking mountain glaciers. Glaciers are melting in the Andes, the Rocky Mountains, the Alps, and throughout the mountain ranges of Asia.

It is the disappearing glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau that are of most concern, because their ice melt sustains the flow of the major rivers of India and China -- the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers -- during the dry season. This ice melt thus also sustains the irrigation systems that depend on these rivers.

Yao Tandong, one of China’s leading glaciologists, who predicts that two thirds of China’s glaciers could be gone by 2050, says “the full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau region will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe.”

It will also lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. China is the world’s leading producer of wheat. India is number two. (The United States is third.) In contrast to the United States, most wheat grown in China and India is irrigated. With rice, these two countries totally dominate the world harvest. The projected melting of these mountain glaciers in Asia represents the most massive threat to food security the world has ever seen.

The prospects for the harvests of wheat and rice, in these two countries, each with over a billion people, are of concern everywhere. We live in an integrated world food economy, one where harvest shortfalls anywhere can drive up food prices everywhere.

Rising temperature also directly affects crop yields. In a study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, an international team of scientists confirmed the rule of thumb emerging among crop ecologists that for each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the norm during the growing season, we can expect a 10 percent decline in wheat and rice yields. In a world with limited grain stocks -- a world that is only one poor harvest away from chaos in grain markets -- a crop-shrinking heat wave in a major grain-producing region could lead to politically destabilizing food shortages.

The delegates are gathering in Copenhagen against a backdrop of spreading hunger. For much of the late 20th century, the number of hungry people was declining, but it bottomed out in the late 1990s at 825 million. It then turned upward, reaching 870 million in 2005 and passing one billion in 2009. The combination of rising seas, melting glaciers, and crop-withering heat waves could push these numbers up even faster, forcing millions more families to try and survive on one meal a day.

We are in a race between political tipping points and natural tipping points. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to keep the melting of the Greenland ice sheet from becoming irreversible? Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save at least the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau? Can we head off crop-withering heat waves of ever greater intensity? These are food security issues. This is what Copenhagen is about.

More information can be found in Chapter 1: “Selling Our Future” and Chapter 3: “Climate Change and the Energy Transition,” available for free downloading.

Additional resources at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2009/update84

Related Links:

Climate Denial Crock of the Week: The big mist take

Climate talks timeline: From 350 to Kyoto to Copenhagen and beyond

Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

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 change.

Three stand out. One is the catastrophic event model, which I call the Pearl Harbor model, where a dramatic event fundamentally changes how we think and behave. The second model is one where a society reaches a tipping point on a particular issue often after an extended period of gradual change in thinking and attitudes. This I call the Berlin Wall model. The third is the sandwich model of social change, where there is a strong grassroots movement pushing for change on a particular issue that is fully supported by strong political leadership at the top.

The surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, was a dramatic wakeup call. It totally changed how Americans thought about the war. If the American people had been asked on Dec. 6 whether the country should enter World War II, probably 95 percent would have said no. By Monday morning, Dec. 8, perhaps 95 percent would have said yes.
 
The weakness of the Pearl Harbor model is that if we have to wait for a catastrophic event to change our behavior, it might be too late. It could lead to stresses that would themselves lead to social collapse. When scientists are asked to identify a possible “Pearl Harbor” scenario on the climate front, they frequently point to the possible breakup of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Relatively small blocks of it have been breaking off for more than a decade now, but huge parts of the sheet could break off, sliding into the ocean.
 
It is conceivable that this breakup could raise sea level a frightening two or three feet within a matter of years. Unfortunately, if we reach this point it may be too late to cut carbon emissions fast enough to save the remainder of the West Antarctic ice sheet or the Greenland ice sheet, whose melting is also accelerating. This is not the model we want to follow for social change on climate.

The Berlin Wall model is of interest because the wall’s dismantling 20 years ago, in November 1989, was a visual manifestation of a much more fundamental social change. At some point, the people living in Eastern Europe, buoyed by changes in Moscow, had rejected the great “socialist experiment” with its one-party political system and centrally planned economy. Although it was not anticipated, Eastern Europe experienced a political revolution, an essentially bloodless revolution, that changed the form of government in every country in the region. It had reached a tipping point, but it was not expected. You can search the political science journals of the 1980s in vain for an article warning that Eastern Europe was on the verge of a political revolution. In Washington, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “had no idea in January 1989 that a tidal wave of history was about to break upon us,” reflected Robert Gates, formerly with the CIA and now U.S. Secretary of Defense, in a 1996 interview.

Many social changes occur when societies reach tipping points or cross key thresholds. Once that happens, change comes rapidly and often unpredictably. One of the best known U.S. tipping points is the growing opposition to smoking that took place during the last half of the twentieth century. This anti-smoking movement was fueled by a steady flow of information on the health-damaging effects of smoking, a process that began with the Surgeon General’s first report in 1964 on smoking and health. The tipping point came when this information flow finally overcame the heavily funded disinformation campaign funded by the tobacco industry.

Published almost every year, the Surgeon General’s report both drew attention to what was being learned about the effect of smoking on health and spawned countless new research projects on this relationship. There were times in the 1980s and 1990s when it seemed every few weeks another study was being released that had analyzed and documented one health effect or another associated with smoking. Eventually smoking was linked to more than 15 forms of cancer and to heart disease and strokes. As public awareness of the damaging effects of smoking on health accumulated, various measures were adopted that banned smoking on planes and in offices, restaurants, and other public places. As a result of these collective changes, cigarette smoking per person peaked around 1970 and began a long-term decline that continues today.

One of the defining events in this social shift came when the tobacco industry agreed to compensate state governments for past Medicare costs of treating smoking victims. More recently, in June 2009, Congress passed by an overwhelming margin and President Obama signed a bill that gave the Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate tobacco products, including advertising. It opened a new chapter in the effort to reduce the health toll from smoking.

The sandwich model of social change is in many ways the most attractive one, partly because it brings a potential for rapid change. As of late 2009, the strong grassroots interest in cutting carbon emissions and developing renewable sources of energy is merging with the interests of Obama and his administration. One result is a near de facto moratorium on building new coal plants.

There are many signs that the United States may be moving toward a tipping point on climate, much as it did on civil rights in the 1960s. Though some of the indicators also reflect the economic downturn, it now seems likely that carbon emissions in the United States peaked in 2007 and have begun what will be a long-term decline. The burning of coal and oil, the principal sources of carbon emissions, may  be declining. And with the cars to be scrapped in 2009 likely to exceed sales, the U.S. automobile fleet size may have peaked and begun to shrink.

The shift to more fuel-efficient cars over the last two years, spurred in part by higher gasoline prices, was strongly reinforced by the new automobile fuel efficiency standards and by rescue package pressures on the automobile companies to improve fuel efficiency. The combination of much more demanding automobile efficiency standards, a dramatic restoration of funding for public transit, and an encouraging shift not only to more fuel-efficient gas-electric hybrid cars but also to both plug-in hybrids and electric cars could dramatically reduce gasoline sales. The U.S. Department of Energy in past years had projected substantial growth in U.S. oil consumption, but it has recently revised this downward. The question now is not will oil use decline, but how fast will it do so.
 
Shifts within the energy sector, with rapid growth in wind and solar energy while coal and oil are declining, also signal a basic shift in values, one that could eventually alter every sector of the economy. If so, this, combined with a national leadership that shares these emerging values, could lead to social and economic change on a scale and at a pace we cannot now easily imagine.

Of the three models of social change, relying on the Pearl Harbor model is by far the riskiest, because by the time a society-changing catastrophic event occurs, it may be too late. The Berlin Wall model works, despite the lack of government support, but it does take time. Some 40 years elapsed after the communist takeover of the governments of Eastern Europe before the spreading opposition became strong enough to overcome repressive regimes and switch to democratically elected governments. The ideal situation for rapid, historic progress occurs when mounting grassroots pressure for change merges with a national leadership committed to the same change. This may help explain why the world has such high hopes for the new U.S. leadership.

Adapted from Chapter 10, “Can We Mobilize Fast Enough?” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org.

Related Links:

Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

Lester Brown and I, diavlogging

The Copenhagen Conference on food security

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. Here are some highlights from the Chapter 7 data:

World population has grown steadily over the past half century, increasing from 2.5 billion in 1950 to a projected 6.8 billion in 2009. The United Nations medium fertility level scenario projects that world population will grow to 9.2 billion in 2050. Their high projection takes the world to 10.5 billion in 2050. Under their low projection, which assumes rapid reductions in fertility rates, population peaks at just over 8 billion in 2042, then begins to decline.

Though life expectancies around the world have increased in the past half century, large discrepancies remain among different regions. Overall, world life expectancy increased from an average of 47 years in the mid-twentieth century to 68 years today. While life expectancy in 1950 hovered around 40 years in both Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, it has since increased far more rapidly in Asia, reaching 69 years, compared to 51 years in Sub-Saharan Africa. On a regional basis, the United States and Canada top the world with an average life expectancy of 79 years. Leading causes of death also vary widely across regions. In low-income countries, 18 percent of deaths are caused by infectious or parasitic diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and diarrheal diseases. Such diseases cause only 2.5 percent of deaths in high-income countries.

Some progress, however, has been made in fighting infectious disease in low-income countries. Thanks to an international vaccine campaign, the number of polio cases worldwide has dropped from close to 400,000 in 1987 to fewer than 2,000 in 2008.

On the economic front, China and India, the two most populous countries in the world, have experienced significant economic growth over the past several decades. However, while India’s gross domestic product (GDP) of $363 per person in 1990 just barely exceeded China’s, since then, China’s per capita GDP has grown 10-fold, while India’s has grown only 3-fold.

As countries have experienced economic growth, poverty rates have declined, though discrepancies again exist between countries and regions. Poverty rates in China have declined significantly, from 60 percent of the population in 1990 to 16 percent in 2007. Brazil, another success story, has reduced poverty rates by two-thirds, from 15 percent to 5 percent over the same period. India’s poverty rate has declined more modestly, from slightly over half the population in 1990 to 42 percent in 2007. Sub-Saharan Africa has also made slow progress, with poverty rates declining from 58 percent to 51 percent over the same period.

These data highlights show that while there have been some successes in the fight to reduce poverty and improve quality of life around the world, many challenges remain, particularly in the face of continuing population growth. You can download our datasets to learn more about the Plan B proposals for eradicating poverty and stabilizing population -- goals that play an important role in the mobilization to save civilization.

Related Links:

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

City preps and countries posture ahead of Copenhagen talks

Water, conflict, and security on the banks of the Hudson

Desertification of formerly productive farm land is one of the many reasons for a growing number of environmental refugees around the world.Photo: pizzodisevo via FlickrOur 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 fueled by the relentless advance of deserts and may soon be affected by the projected rise in sea level. As overpumping depletes aquifers, millions more are forced to relocate in search of water.

Desert expansion in sub-Saharan Africa, principally in the Sahelian countries, is displacing millions of people -- forcing them to either move southward or migrate to North Africa. A 2006 U.N. conference on desertification in Tunisia projected that by 2020 up to 60 million people could migrate from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and Europe. This flow of migrants has been under way for many years.

In mid-October 2003, Italian authorities discovered a boat bound for Italy carrying refugees from Africa. After being adrift for more than two weeks and having run out of fuel, food, and water, many of the passengers had died. At first the dead were tossed overboard. But after a point, the remaining survivors lacked the strength to hoist the bodies over the side. The dead and the living shared the boat, resembling what a rescuer described as “a scene from Dante’s Inferno.”

The refugees were believed to be Somalis who had embarked from Libya, but the survivors would not reveal their country of origin, lest they be sent home. We do not know whether they were political, economic, or environmental refugees. Failed states like Somalia produce all three. We do know that Somalia is an ecological disaster, with overpopulation, overgrazing, and the resulting desertification destroying its pastoral economy.

Perhaps the largest flow of Somali migrants is into Yemen, another failing state. In 2008, an estimated 50,000 migrants and asylum seekers reached Yemen, 70 percent more than in 2007. And during the first three months of 2009 the migrant flow was up 30 percent over the same period in 2008. These numbers simply add to the already unsustainable pressures on Yemen’s land and water resources, hastening its decline.

On April 30, 2006, a man fishing off the coast of Barbados discovered a 20-foot boat adrift with the bodies of 11 young men on board, bodies that were “virtually mummified” by the sun and salty ocean spray. As the end drew near, one passenger left a note tucked between two bodies: “I would like to send my family in Basada [Senegal] a sum of money. Please excuse me and goodbye.” The author of the note was apparently one of a group of 52 who had left Senegal on Christmas Eve aboard a boat destined for the Canary Islands, a jumping off point for Europe. They must have drifted for some 2,000 miles, ending their trip in the Caribbean. This boat was not unique. During the first weekend of September 2006, police intercepted boats from Mauritania with a record total of nearly 1,200 people on board.

For those living in Central American countries, including Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, Mexico is often the gateway to the United States. In 2008, Mexican immigration authorities reported some 39,000 detentions and 89,000 deportations.

In the city of Tapachula on the Guatemala-Mexico border, young men in search of jobs wait along the tracks for a slow-moving freight train passing through the city en route to the north. Some make it onto the train. Others do not. The Jesús el Buen Pastor refuge is home to 25 amputees who lost their grip and fell under a train while trying to board. For these young men, says Olga Sánchez Martínez, the director of the refuge, this is the “end of their American dream.” A local priest, Flor María Rigoni, calls the migrants attempting to board the trains “the kamikazes of poverty.”

Today, bodies washing ashore in Italy, Spain, and Turkey are a daily occurrence, the result of desperate acts by desperate people. And each day Mexicans risk their lives in the Arizona desert trying to reach jobs in the United States. On average, some 100,000 or more Mexicans leave rural areas every year, abandoning plots of land too small or too eroded to make a living. They either head for Mexican cities or try to cross illegally into the United States. Many of those who try to cross the Arizona desert perish in its punishing heat. Since 2001, some 200 bodies have been found along the Arizona border each year.

With the vast majority of the 2.4 billion people to be added to the world by 2050 coming in countries where water tables are already falling, water refugees are likely to become commonplace. They will be most common in arid and semiarid regions where populations are outgrowing the water supply and sinking into hydrological poverty. Villages in northwestern India are being abandoned as aquifers are depleted and people can no longer find water. Millions of villagers in northern and western China and in parts of Mexico may have to move because of a lack of water.

Advancing deserts are squeezing expanding populations into an ever smaller geographic area. Whereas the U.S. Dust Bowl displaced 3 million people, the advancing desert in China’s Dust Bowl provinces could displace tens of millions.

Africa, too, is facing this problem. The Sahara Desert is pushing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria northward toward the Mediterranean. In a desperate effort to deal with drought and desertification, Morocco is geographically restructuring its agriculture, replacing grain with less thirsty orchards and vineyards.

In Iran, villages abandoned because of spreading deserts or a lack of water already number in the thousands. In the vicinity of Damavand, a small town within an hour’s drive of Tehran, 88 villages have been abandoned. And as the desert takes over in Nigeria, farmers and herders are forced to move, squeezed into a shrinking area of productive land. Desertification refugees typically end up in cities, many in squatter settlements. Others migrate abroad.

In Latin America, deserts are expanding and forcing people to move in both Brazil and Mexico. In Brazil, some 66 million hectares of land are affected, much of it concentrated in the country’s northeast. In Mexico, with a much larger share of arid and semiarid land, the degradation of cropland now extends over 59 million hectares.

While desert expansion and water shortages are now displacing millions of people, rising seas promise to displace far greater numbers in the future, given the concentration of the world’s population in low-lying coastal cities and rice-growing river deltas. The numbers could eventually reach the hundreds of millions, offering yet another powerful reason for stabilizing both climate and population.

In the end, the issue with rising seas is whether governments are strong enough to withstand the political and economic stress of relocating large numbers of people while suffering heavy coastal losses of housing and industrial facilities.

During this century we must deal with the effects of trends -- rapid population growth, advancing deserts, and rising seas -- that we set in motion during the last century. Our choice is a simple one: reverse these trends or risk being overwhelmed by them.


Adapted from Chapter 2, “Population Pressure: Land and Water,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009). Available online. Additional data and information sources at http://www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/book_bytes/2009/pb4ch02_ss7

Related Links:

Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

Lester Brown and I, diavlogging

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 part of this drop is from the recession, part of it is also from efficiency gains and from replacing coal with natural gas, wind, solar, and geothermal energy.

The U.S. has ended a century of rising carbon emissions and has now entered a new energy era, one of declining emissions. Peak carbon is now history. What had appeared to be hopelessly difficult is happening at amazing speed.

For a country where oil and coal use have been growing for more than a century, the fall since 2007 is startling. In 2008, oil use dropped 5 percent, coal 1 percent, and carbon emissions by 3 percent. Estimates for 2009, based on U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) data for the first nine months, show oil use down by another 5 percent. Coal is set to fall by 10 percent. Carbon emissions from burning all fossil fuels dropped 9 percent over the two years.

Beyond the cuts already made, there are further massive reductions in the policy pipeline. Prominent among them are stronger automobile fuel-economy standards, higher appliance efficiency standards, and financial incentives supporting the large-scale development of wind, solar, and geothermal energy. (See the data.)

Efforts to reduce fossil fuel use are under way at every level of government -- national, state, and city -- as well as in corporations, utilities, and universities. And millions of climate-conscious, cost-cutting Americans are altering their lifestyles to reduce energy use.

For its part, the federal government -- the largest U.S. energy consumer, with some 500,000 buildings and 600,000 vehicles -- announced in early October 2009 that it is setting its own carbon-cutting goals. These include reducing vehicle fleet fuel use 30 percent by 2020, recycling at least 50 percent of waste by 2015, and buying environmentally responsible products.

Electricity use is falling partly because of gains in efficiency. The potential for further cuts is evident in the wide variation in energy efficiency among states. The Rocky Mountain Institute calculates that if the 40 least-efficient states were to reach the electrical efficiency of the 10 most-efficient ones, national electricity use would be reduced by one-third. This would allow the equivalent of 62 percent of the country's 617 coal-fired power plants to be closed.

Actions are being taken to realize this potential. For several years DOE failed to write the regulations needed to implement appliance efficiency legislation that Congress had already passed. Within days of taking office, President Obama instructed the agency to write the regulations needed to realize these potentially vast efficiency gains as soon as possible.

The energy efficiency revolution that is now under way will transform everything from lighting to transportation. With lighting, for example, shifting from incandescent bulbs to the newer light-emitting diodes (LEDs), combined with motion sensors to turn lights off in unoccupied spaces, can cut electricity use by more than 90 percent. Los Angeles, for example, is replacing its 140,000 street lights with LEDs -- and cutting electricity and maintenance costs by $10 million per year.

The carbon-cutting movement is gaining momentum on many fronts. In July, the Sierra Club -- coordinator of the national anti-coal campaign -- announced the 100th cancellation of a proposed plant since 2001. This battle is leading to a de facto moratorium on new coal plants. Despite the coal industry's $45 million annual budget to promote "clean coal," utilities are giving up on coal and starting to close plants. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), with 11 coal plants (average age 47 years) and a court order to install over $1 billion worth of pollution controls, is considering closing its plant near Rogersville, Tennessee, along with the six oldest units out of eight in its Stevenson, Ala., plant.

TVA is not alone. Altogether, some 22 coal-fired power plants in 12 states are being replaced by wind farms, natural gas plants, wood chip plants, or efficiency gains. Many more are likely to close as public pressure to clean up the air and to cut carbon emissions intensifies. Shifting from coal to natural gas cuts carbon emissions by roughly half. Shifting to wind, solar, and geothermal energy drops them to zero.

State governments are getting behind renewables big time. Thirty-four states have adopted renewable portfolio standards to produce a larger share of their electricity from renewable sources over the next decade or so. Among the more populous states, the renewable standard is 24 percent in New York, 25 percent in Illinois, and 33 percent in California.

While coal plants are closing, wind farms are multiplying. In 2008, a total of 102 wind farms came online, providing more than 8,400 megawatts of generating capacity. Forty-nine wind farms were completed in the first half of 2009 and 57 more are under construction. More important, some 300,000 megawatts of wind projects (think 300 coal plants) are awaiting access to the grid.

U.S. solar cell installations are growing at 40 percent a year. With new incentives, this rapid growth in rooftop installations on homes, shopping malls, and factories should continue. In addition, some 15 large solar thermal power plants that use mirrors to concentrate sunlight and generate electricity are planned in California, Arizona, and Nevada. A new heat-storage technology that enables the plants to continue generating power for up to six hours past sundown helps explain this boom.

For many years, U.S. geothermal energy was confined largely to the huge Geysers project north of San Francisco, with 850 megawatts of generating capacity. Now the United States, with 132 geothermal power plants under development, is experiencing a geothermal renaissance.

After their century-long love-affair with the car, Americans are turning to mass transit. There is hardly a U.S. city that is not either building new light rail, subways, or express bus lines or upgrading and expanding existing ones.

As motorists turn to public transit, and also to bicycles, the U.S. car fleet is shrinking. The estimated scrappage of 14 million cars in 2009 will exceed new sales of 10 million by 4 million, shrinking the fleet 2 percent in one year. This shrinkage will likely continue for a few years.

Oil use and imports are both declining. This will continue as the new fuel economy standards raise the fuel efficiency of new cars 42 percent and light trucks 25 percent by 2016. And since 42 percent of the diesel fuel burned in the rail freight sector is used to haul coal, falling coal use means falling diesel fuel use.

But the big gains in fuel efficiency will come with the shift to plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars. Not only are electric motors three times more efficient than gasoline engines, but they also enable cars to run on wind power at a gasoline-equivalent cost of 75 cents a gallon. Almost every major car maker will soon be selling plug-in hybrids, electric cars, or both.

In this new energy era carbon emissions are declining and they will likely continue to do so because of policies already on the books. We are headed in the right direction. We do not yet know how much we can cut carbon emissions because we are just beginning to make a serious effort. Whether we can move fast enough to avoid catastrophic climate change remains to be seen.

Related Links:

Ask Umbra on ditching dirty things

Climate Hope: Inspiring 2009 Books for Clean Energy

What Do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

Don't stop making sense: Lester Brown testifies tirelessly, but is anyone listening?I don't agree with everything Lester Brown says, but the man generally talks good sense. Which means he's absolutely marginalized in today's key policy debates. If people in Congress would quit protecting client industries and squriming over polls and just listen to straight-talking Cassandras like Brown, we might stand a chance of averting climate/food disaster.

Of course, they might listen to Brown if their constituents demanded it. But I fear that Brown's policy-wonk prose and penchant for charts--both of which I admire--don't get him much traction with The Public.

Well, Brown's got another iteration of his "Plan B" series out, called Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. The hyperbolic subtitle won't likely move many units--not many people stop to listen to the guy with the "end is nigh" sandwich board. But I do hold out hopes that at least some Congressional staffers and mid-level agency functionaries might read Brown. Maybe some of his insights--and urgency--will percolate upwards.

In his latest version of Plan B, Brown focuses on food security, which he calls civilization's "weak link" as we move into an era of climate change. From a "fact sheet" (PDF) released along with the book:

• The tripling of grain prices from 2006‐2008 was trend‐driven (unlike event‐driven surges in the past). Among the trends are the annual addition of 80 million people, 3 billion people moving up the food chain, and one fourth of the U.S. grain harvest being used to produce fuel for cars. On the supply side are falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures, all making humanity more vulnerable to food shortages.
• Some 175 million Indians and 130 million Chinese are fed with grain irrigated by overpumping wells. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Yemen face similar challenges due to groundwater depletion.
• After decades of nutritional gains, the number of hungry people has jumped from 825 million in the  mid‐1990s to over 1 billion in 2009. Combined with rising food prices and intensifying competition for land and water, this trend has opened a disturbing new chapter in the politics of food scarcity.

Intense stuff. Brown gave a telephone press conference Tuesday to outline the findings in his new book. David Roberts will not be pleased with the message Brown delivered on the climate bill that's about to be debated in the Senate: Brown repeatedly argued that a carbon tax, and not cap-and-trade, should be the basis of climate policy.

In a Q&A after his presentation, I asked Brown what he thought about farm-policy reform. Much to my delight, he went on an extended jag about the utter absurdity of the U.S. goverment's $5 billion/year ethanol program--how silly it is, given the serious nature of climate change, to counter it with the frivolous policy of turning grain into liquid fuel for internal-combustion engines. While he went on, I tried to interrupt to ask what he thought of cellulosic ethanol. He didn't seem to hear me, but i can see why he didn't even consider cellulosic in his response. First of all, it doesn't exist at commercial scale, and remains, as it has for decades, at least five years away.

Moreover, if it's dumb to think you're going to power a 211-million-strong fleet of internal-combustion engines, designed for energy-rich petroleum, by turning corn sugar into alcohol, than it's downright insane to think you're going to achieve that by turning stuff like corn cobs and grass into ethanol fuel. How many corn cobs will it take to offset significant amounts of petroleum, which represents the compressed energy of millions of years of rotting biomass?

Clearly, it makes much more sense to change the nature of car engines. And that's what Brown calls for. Like lots of smart people, he's pushing for a switch to electric cars, combined with a greening of the power grid. (He also advocates real investments in trans-city speed trains and inner-city light rail.) In terms of farm policy, Brown's vision means "phasing out the ethanol subsidies" (yes!) and putting in place incentives for midwestern farmers to install wind turbines on their land. Brown envisions a new kind of midwestern farm with grass-fed cattle wandering amid wind turbines.

That would mean less land devoted to corn but also less demand for corn--by slashing ethanol production and switching from corn-fed to grass-fed beef, U.S. corn consumption would decline dramatically.

Imagine the environmental knock-on effects. Less corn planted would mean dramatically less nitrogen and phosphorous runoff into streams--meaning healthier waterways clear down to the the nutrient-choked Gulf of Mexico. And less synthetic nitrogen fertilizer to turn into nitrous oxide--a greenhouse gas with something like 300 times more heat-trapping energy than carbon.

In short, Brown's work makes bracing reading for any serious policy maker. Perhaps Obama will read it on the plane on his way to Copenhagen to shill for Chicago's Olympic bid? Sure is pretty to think so.

Related Links:

Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

Lester Brown and I, diavlogging

The Copenhagen Conference on food security

Related Links:

Is there a tradeoff between economics and the environment?

‘Heretic’ battles straw man

Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

Related Links:

Freeing the grid

Making buildings more efficient: rationalizing retrofit markets

Is there a tradeoff between economics and the environment?

Related Links:

Freeing the grid

Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

A Penny Saved Is…

Related Links:

Top 25 reasons to give a damn about climate change

Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

Global boiling declares war on Thanksgiving

Related Links:

Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

Lester Brown and I, diavlogging

The Copenhagen Conference on food security

Related Links:

Top 25 reasons to give a damn about climate change

Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

Lester Brown and I, diavlogging

Related Links:

Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

Lester Brown and I, diavlogging

The Copenhagen Conference on food security

There are few titans remaining in the environmental world -- figures that command respect not only inside the movement but in the larger global political milieu as well. Lester Brown is one of them. In 1974, he founded the Worldwatch Institute, one of the first think tanks to focus on the global environmental situation (its agenda-setting yearly reports, State of the World, remain required reading among the green set). In 2001, he left Worldwatch to start the Earth Policy Institute, a small outfit dedicated to envisioning an "eco-economy" and figuring out how to get there.

In 2003, EPI released Plan B, a book synthesizing research on the earth's multiple converging ecological crises and laying out a step-by-step plan (including a budget -- if you're curious, it's $161 billion) for how to transition to a sustainable path. Reception was enthusiastic; mogul Ted Turner was one of many influential figures to buy dozens of copies to send to friends.

Late last year saw Plan B 2.0, a revised, expanded edition incorporating the many developments -- good and bad -- of the intervening two years. In addition to your local bookstore, the book is available in its entirety as PDF or HTML on EPI's website.

Brown's been globe-trotting since the book's release, promoting the plan. Weeks before I met with him, he spoke to world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum, at the invitation of founder and executive director Klaus Schwab. He and I met in a small cafe in Seattle and, over omelets, discussed biofuels, plug-in hybrids, China, the Bush administration, and sudden, unpredictable social change.

What was the genesis of Plan B?

Our goal was to give a sense of what an environmentally sustainable economy would look like. If you don't know where you want to go, there's a good chance you won't get there. And within the environmental community there was no global vision.

Do you envision regular two-year updates?

Things are happening fast enough now, in terms of new opportunities, new technologies, new success stories, new problems developing, new understandings of climate change, and so forth. So I'm beginning to think this is going to be an every-two-year effort.

Even since this book came out, Goldman Sachs got in the wind-energy business big time. A year ago it bought Horizon, which was a small company building wind farms, and now that company has 5,000 megawatts of generating capacity under construction or in the planning stage. That's equal to 17 typical coal-fired power plants.

What trend in the world is most alarming?

One is climate change and the other is population growth.

On population growth, close to 3 billion people will be added between now and mid-century, the vast majority in countries where water tables are already falling and wells are going dry. That's not a happy situation.

China's growth is illuminating, but it's just that they're growing faster than most of the rest of the world. In that sense they're doing us a favor: they're telescoping history so that we can see what the future looks like.

You discuss nuclear energy very little in the book. What are your thoughts on it?

I've tried to love nuclear, but I haven't been very successful. I don't think it can get beyond the economics. If we insist that utilities bear the full cost of nuclear power -- and that's something we need to do -- they have to set aside money for decommissioning and include that in the rates. That would cost as much or more than construction. They have to deal with the waste issue. And they have to find an insurance company that will insure them.

There are other questions as well. If we decide to go nuclear, do we mean all countries can have nuclear power? Do we have an A-list and a B-list? If so, who makes that list? Who enforces it? Looking at Iran and North Korea right now, I'm not sure we're very good at that.

Do you consider biofuels a permanent solution or a bridge?

I think we're going to need almost all agricultural resources to produce food. We keep forgetting the water issue, which is a sleeper. Half the world's people live in countries where water tables are falling. We may wake up one morning and there won't be enough grain to go around, and not enough water to produce enough grain.

We've always been concerned about the effect of high oil prices on food-production costs, and those are very real, given the oil intensity of world agriculture today. But more important is the effect of high oil prices on the demand for agriculture commodities. Once oil gets up to $60 a barrel, it becomes profitable to convert agricultural commodities into automotive fuels. In effect, the price of oil becomes a support price for agricultural commodities, and therefore food prices. If at any point the food value of the commodity drops below the fuel value, the market will move that commodity into the energy economy.

I don't think we yet quite grasp the effect of $60-a-barrel oil on food prices, because the capacity to distill ethanol and produce biodiesel is not yet large enough to really have an impact. But it's exploding all over the world. Up until a year or two ago, all the government programs here [in the U.S.], in Europe, and in Brazil were driven by government subsidies. In Brazil there are no more subsidies. Ethanol investment is just exploding; it's entirely a market-based operation.

There's enormous investment in this country in ethanol distilleries and biodiesel refineries. Most people aren't even aware that on Jan. 1 a year ago, we adopted a $1-a-gallon subsidy for biodiesel. But we're setting up competition between supermarkets and service stations for the same commodities.

There is a very attractive alternative automotive-fuel model: gas-electric hybrids with a plug-in and wind energy.

Is it scaleable quickly enough?

Oh yeah. There's a lot of momentum building behind plug-in hybrids. There was a conference organized [a month] ago in Washington on plug-ins. It was organized by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, the NGO that organizes these things for Congress. [Sen.] Orrin Hatch [R-Utah] left the Alito hearings to come and make a statement.

The interesting thing about the plug-in effort is that the neocons and the environmentalists are both supporting it, and that's a unique combination. There were more neocons speaking at the conference than environmentalists; they want to break dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

What are your thoughts on this idea of breaking our dependence on Middle East oil?

Middle East oil accounts for 15, at most 20 percent [PDF] of our oil. But it's far more important to other parts of the world, and we're all in this together. We have to think about it broadly.

One of the attractive features of moving toward gas-electric hybrids and wind power is that we have the infrastructure already in place. In Plan B, the original, I talk about a hydrogen fuel-cell automotive-energy economy. And that may come, but it's a generation down the road. With the gas-electric hybrids, you need gasoline service stations and you need an electrical grid. We have both.

It's relatively easy to increase wind-generating capacity tenfold. The companies are there, the technologies are there -- it's just a matter of incentives. We might not even need many of those now. We could start doubling each year.

One of the neat things about the gas-electric hybrid plug-in is that the batteries in the vehicle fleet become a storage facility for wind energy. And there's a tank of gasoline as additional backup. So it's really an ideal marriage, a great way of rapidly exploiting wind. And wind is such a huge resource.

Is there a reason that you seem so much more enthusiastic about wind than solar?

It's mostly timing. If you look at the cost curves, wind is roughly a decade ahead of solar. It's just a matter of time.

One knock you often hear on environmentalists is that they care more about flora and fauna than human beings. But it strikes me that your book is extremely humanist, centered on human welfare.

One of the strengths of the book is that it integrates economics and the environment in a socially responsible way. One of the important developments of the past year was Jared Diamond's book Collapse. He legitimized the discussion of early 21st century global civilization, in terms of where we're headed and what the prospects are. You can talk about that now in a way that you couldn't before.

How do you maintain your optimism?

Social change comes rapidly and unexpectedly sometimes.

The Berlin wall coming down was essentially a bloodless political revolution in Eastern Europe. There were no articles in political science journals in the '80s that said, hey, keep an eye on Eastern Europe, big change is coming there. But one morning people woke up and realized the great socialist experiment was over.

What if we'd been sitting at this table 10 years ago and I had said, "I think that the tobacco industry is going to cave"? It was the most powerful lobby in Washington. It controlled committee chairs. But there was a steady flow of articles on smoking and health over a period of a few decades, along with persistent denial. The industry just lost its credibility.

The two things looming large are oil -- security of supply, disruptions around the world, a vague notion that China's out there now competing for it, the price of gasoline, the price of home heating oil -- and the climate issue, the steady drumbeat. Every week or two another major study comes out, nailing down another piece of the climate puzzle. People are beginning to feel uncertain now.

Is it frustrating to you that people seem to need human enemies, human bogeymen?

To a very substantial degree that's a cultivated anxiety. It doesn't exist in Europe, or elsewhere, the way it does here. They're concerned, but they're not preoccupied with it. And if I had to make a list of the top 10 threats to our future in the world, terrorism would be on the list, but it would be in the lower part of the list.

All this leads me to sense that we're moving toward one of those thresholds that are hard to define, at least until you cross them. Among the manifestations are the 100 mayors -- maybe more than that now -- who've signed on to the Kyoto Protocol. This is a grassroots political revolution.

I don't think we realize yet what Katrina is. Most of us had assumed the first climate refugees would be from Tuvalu and the Maldive Islands. But it's the U.S. Gulf Coast. There are a few hundred thousand environmental refugees there -- climate refugees.

One of the lessons of Katrina is how grossly unprepared we were for something that could easily be worse next time, or happen two places simultaneously next time.

The interesting thing about this current administration is they don't seem to be interested in governing, in trying to make things work. FEMA's a classic case, symbolic of this entire government.

Plan B seems deliberately apolitical.

I didn't want it to be a political tract. But I could happily have weighed in on [politics]. When societies are in trouble, sometimes they have a Nero and sometimes they have a Churchill. One of the questions is how this administration will respond to the mounting pressure to do something about these issues.

However little competence they've shown in other areas, they've certainly demonstrated an amazing talent for avoiding moments of accountability. It's like performance art.

It's a public-relations operation with a hidden agenda.

Does anybody know the concrete political, media, and advocacy steps needed to pull off a fundamental transition to a sustainable economy?

In order for these changes to occur, we have to cross a social threshold, and societies don't cross those easily or quickly. Things have to build up enough steam ... and then suddenly it just goes.

And when you cross them, it's not always clear what the response will be; there's enough energy driving things that it can go in many directions. You can't plan that change. You can offer a new model for an automotive fuel economy, and these sorts of things, so when the time comes there'll be some sense of what to do.

It's at least as possible that Americans will react with retrenchment, defensiveness, trade barriers, and military buildup -- an island mentality.

Right. It could happen that way. The reason for doing a book like Plan B is to make it clear that we're all in this together. If our civilization goes down, it's not going to be pieces of it here and there -- the whole thing's going to go down.

Does it concern you that many of your book's exemplary solutions come out of semi-authoritarian political situations?

I was looking for success stories, whether it's breakthroughs in fish farming in China or dairy production in India overtaking the U.S. Wind energy in Western Europe. Solar-cell manufacturing in Japan. Reforestation in South Korea. I didn't look at the form of government to sort out what would work. Carp polyculture's roots go back 2,000 years; it doesn't require a one-party dictatorship.

I remember when the Soviets beat us into space with Sputnik. A lot of Americans were despairing, and said the Soviets have a command economy, they can beat us at anything they want. But what that system lacked was a free flow of information and ideas, and in the end that's what really weakened them. We were on the moon 10 years later, and now it's been almost half a century and the Russians still haven't gotten there.

Does it worry you that China's ultimate success may be hampered in the same way, by inhibited flow of information and political freedom?

The answer is, I don't know. They're having great trouble. We tend to think of China as this monolith: You have the party in Beijing sending down regulations. But at the grassroots there are no enforcement mechanisms. The Chinese EPA is at most 600 people. That's a tiny organization. They can't do anything about this in any meaningful way. There are hundreds of thousands of factories to be monitored. They're a long way from doing that.

What's the most important thing for humanity to start doing?

Get the market to tell the ecological truth. Calculate the cost of burning a gallon of gasoline, for example, and incorporate the indirect cost in the form of a tax. We're all economic decision-makers -- consumers, corporate planners, government policymakers, investment bankers -- and we respond to market signals. But the market's giving us bad information. I mean grossly distorted information. So we're making bad decisions and getting in more and more trouble every day. Whether we can pull out of that or not, I'm not sure.

What should I do? Talk to congressfolk? Write a letter to the editor? Buy a hybrid?

Most of the people in audiences I'm talking with have been asking themselves that question. Recycle paper, buy a Prius, whatever -- lifestyle changes. But we've reached the point where we have to go beyond that. We now have to go for systemic change; otherwise we're not going to make it. That's why tax restructuring is so important. (Incidentally, the Chinese authorities are studying and working on a major tax restructuring just for this purpose.)

That means becoming politically active. Each of us is going to have to define that in our own terms. Maybe it's lobbying city council or representatives in Washington, letting them know what we think, what we want them to do. If enough of us do that, change will begin.

We're seeing signs that Republicans are beginning to cross over on some of these issues, because of the concerns of their constituents. We're getting some major corporate crossovers. GE is now a major player in wind energy. They are cranking up 300 turbines year before last, 600 last year, 1,200 this year -- they're just going. And Goldman Sachs is beginning to invest heavily. When I talk about Goldman Sachs, it changes the way people think about wind energy.

Things may be starting to change.

Related Links:

Is there a tradeoff between economics and the environment?

City preps and countries posture ahead of Copenhagen talks

Water, conflict, and security on the banks of the Hudson

Related Links:

Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

Lester Brown and I, diavlogging

The Copenhagen Conference on food security

Related Links:

Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

Lester Brown and I, diavlogging

The Copenhagen Conference on food security

Grist succumbs to millennial fever with this rendition of the classic what's-gonna-be-hot-in-the-new-year roundup. At a recent D.C. chat session organized by Environmental Media Services, enviro leaders shared their thoughts on where the movement is headed in the coming century, what big, scary issues are lurking on the horizon, and what we need to do to slay those dragons. Here's the Cliffs Notes version.

Lester Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute

As the human population reached 6 billion on Oct. 12, we could see evidence of water scarcity emerging on every continent. Rivers running dry, no longer making it to the sea, water tables falling. As globalization proceeds, water scarcity will cross international boundaries through international grain trade. Falling water tables in China could mean rising food prices for the world. We need to begin thinking in a systematic way about how to raise the water productivity of the global economy, in much the same way that in the '70s, when the price of oil tripled, we began thinking about energy efficiency or energy productivity. The key to increased water efficiency is the same key to increased energy efficiency -- getting the market to tell the truth about the value or the cost of various resources. Water is grossly underpriced now in most of the world.

Bill McKibben, former New Yorker writer and author of The End of Nature and Maybe One

Climate change is the one issue which -- if we don't take care of it -- might cause the whole game to be up. In the last decade, human beings crossed a certain threshold in our relationship to the natural world. For the first time in human history, we became big enough as a species to affect everything around us. The story of the next decade is increasingly going to be the story of the effects of crossing that threshold. The other story in the next decade is going to be what the political response to those effects and changes are. And the pressure on corporations will be at least as intense as the pressure on politicians.

Jane Lubchenco, professor of marine biology at Oregon State University and Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment

Ecosystem dysfunction presents one of the nation's and the world's most serious environmental challenges. Ecosystems provide us with multiple benefits ranging from purification of water and air, to regulation of climate, to the provision of pollinators, to the generation of fertile soil, to the control of pests and pathogens. We are disrupting the functioning of these systems upon which we depend, and scientists are only beginning to understand how these massive, unprecedented changes are playing out. We desperately need good, credible sources of information about what's happening, how things are changing, what the likely consequences of different choices might be. We've seen junk science, ignorance, disinformation play out, and it's a very serious threat to being able to deal with problems in a rational fashion. Second, we desperately need more comprehensive research on the causes and consequences of ecosystem dysfunction and what it means to people and how we can modify many of the changes that have already been set in motion.

Denis Hayes, chair of Earth Day Network and president of the Bullitt Foundation

The biggest threats and the biggest opportunities today probably lie in the international arena -- global warming, population growth, the epidemic of extinction, weapons of mass destruction. We need to figure out a way to forge a global majority around environmental values. The international environmental movement cannot be an exclusionary movement. Earth Day 2000 is pioneering a new model of international engagement. We are creating Internet links among disparate groups around the world, uniting around a common theme, global warming, and the need for a clean energy revolution. But the first task of American environmentalists interested in global affairs is to produce a vastly better record on those issues here in the United States.

John Passacantando, president of Ozone Action

The greatest challenge is finding a way to rein in the power of corporations operating around the globe avoiding labor, health, safety, and environmental laws. These corporations are keeping our politicians from solving problems like global warming. We will have to rein these corporations in much the way the founders of this country had to throw off the shackles of the British Empire in the 1700s.

Arlie Schardt, president of Environmental Media Services

Campaign finance reform is the number one problem that the environmental movement in the United States is facing. That, of course, has an effect on what role the American environmental movement can play in helping to achieve environmental gains around the world. Without campaign finance reform, we are going to see the power of very highly, lavishly financed special interests continue to dictate what Congress does. As long as that happens, there's no way that the environmental movement can hope to do much better than run in place, fight a defensive battle, tread water. We see examples of this in the energy crisis, where the combined resources of the automobile, highway, transportation, and oil lobbies can stave off any gains whatsoever on crucial problems. Until the environmental movement makes campaign finance reform as high a priority as water resources or clean air or safe food, we are not going to see the necessary progress to resolve these problems.

John Adams, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council

The issue of the day is climate change. We see hurricanes, we see 30 days in a row of over 100 degrees of heat in Texas, we see floods and mudslides and fires -- all of which are predicted to be part of the global warming theory by the world's leading scientists. We have to do something about this. We have to get cars that are fuel-efficient and clean, and get rid of sport utility vehicles that don't deliver good gas mileage. We need to get rid of polluting power plants; the power plants that are exempted from the Clean Air Act are the first ones to tackle. We need to get natural gas as a source of fuel in the short-term. Finally, we need to move very quickly with major investments in clean technologies that will give us solar power and wind power in a big way in this country.

Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth

As we look to the next century, the biggest problem we face to save the planet from pollution is to address the biggest source of pollution -- the large companies, the transnational corporations. The rules of the global economy that push for global competitiveness are driving them to plunder the planet. Think of what's happening in the United States. We have the mountains of West Virginia being blown apart by out-of-state and transnational corporations, big coal companies. We have North Carolina and the Midwest, victims of gigantic industrial hog operations that put pollution of biblical proportions in the water and the air. If we can't control them here, how are we going to control them any place else on the planet? We have got to rewrite the rules of the game so that corporations work for the community, for protection of the environment. If we don't deal with that, then we'll merely be putting Band-Aids on bleeding wounds.

Phil Shabecoff, former New York Times environmental reporter and founder of Greenwire news service

We know what the problems are and we have a pretty good idea what the solutions should be. The question then becomes what needs to be done to carry out those solutions. The political, economic, and social context for environmentalism is far different and far less hospitable than it was on the first Earth Day in 1970. The challenge for the environmental movement in the next century is to find ways to get at the root causes of environmental degradation instead of continuing to nibble around the edges. The movement will have to find ways to transform the latent support of the American people into a weapon with which to force change. The environmentalists will have to involve themselves in seeking basic reforms in our economy, our politics, our geopolitics, and our educational system. They will have to become more deeply involved in the life of communities and integrate their agenda with the broader struggle for social justice in this country and around the world.

Related Links:

Water, conflict, and security on the banks of the Hudson

Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

Tackling population rise would fight climate change