Lester Brown launches Plan B: 3.0

This week Academy Fellow Lester R. Brown published Plan B: 3.0 Mobilizing to Save Civilization. He believes the world’s situation to be as dire as the subtitle suggests. But he also lays out a specific plan to pull us back from the brink of extinction.

“The world faces many environmental trends of disruption and decline,” he says, “including rising temperatures and spreading water shortage. In addition to these looming threats, we face the peaking of oil, annual population growth of 70 million, a widening global economic divide, and a growing list of failing states. The scale and complexity of issues facing our fast-forward world have no precedent.”

The only “effective response now is a World War II-type mobilization like that in the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

Dr. Lester Brown’s latest book points to the proliferation of carbon dioxide in the environment as the single greatest threat to mankind and calls for a reduction of 80% by 2020.

The plan’s prescriptions include: wind generation; lowering income taxes while levying a carbon tax that progressively grows to $240 a ton of CO2; more solar and geothermal power; hybrid cars; and less meat in our diet. (Switching from a meat-rich diet to a vegetarian diet has the same CO2 impact as switching from a SUV to a Prius.)

While this may sound radical, Brown points out first that it’s necessary to our very survival, and second that great progress is already being made on all these fronts.

Time Magazine’s website created an audio podcast with Lester Brown, click here to play.

Purchase book: www.amazon.com/Plan-3-0-Mobilizing-Civilization-Third/dp/0393330877

Original source: www.worldbusiness.org