Lester Brown on rescuing our planet
Environmental trends might be undermining the world’s economic future, but there’s hope.
That’s according to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington D.C. Brown spoke of rampant deforestation, collapsing fisheries, falling water tables combined with changing patterns of consumption around the globe.
He said that China, for instance, has overtaken the U.S. today in consuming grain, meat, coal, and steel. If one day the Chinese drive cars at the same level as in the U.S., the global fleet of automobiles will double.
Lester Brown: What we’re faced with is the need to shift from a fossil fuel based automobile-centered throwaway economy to an economy that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and that recycles everything.
Brown said there are signs that a new, more sustainable economy is emerging.
Lester Brown: We see it in the wind farms of western Europe, in the solar rooftops of Japan, in the growing fleet of hybrid cars in the United States. The question is, can we complete the transition to the new economy before we get into serious trouble.
Lester Brown has a new book, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress, available for free download.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/03/why_did_global_warming_become.html
Try this posting…
J.D. Huggins
WARNING!!!!
JD’s link above is to a opinion essay about an imaginary liberal conspiracy theory to religionize global warming – as if there wasn’t enough disinformation on the subject…
JD,
The article you link to is about as well thought out as I would expect from a third grader; it’s hard to believe that a Hospital Chaplain with an undergraduate degree in science came up with it – or that such a person would call themselves a scientist (repeatedly).
The article you link to has a logical flaw (if you discount the factual errors); all of the essay is response to the self-posed title question, “Why Did Global Warming Become a Moral Matter?” Unfortunately for him, there is a more obvious answer than his political conspiracy theory: global warming is a moral matter because we as humans get to decide whether or not we destroy billions of years of God’s work and all life on Earth with it.
I do have to give credit for one factual tidbit accidently evident in the essay: he does point out that global warming deniers didn’t stop denying, even after global warming advocates showed them factually incorrect (which in laymen’s terms, is like saying that lying global warming deniers didn’t stop denying even after being shown that they were liars), but strangely, he uses this as part of an attack against his imagined, not referenced, liberal conspiracy.
For the sake of honesty and openness: do you know of any substantiated, factual, referenced, or scientifically sound arguments based on current knowledge that support any of this article’s claims? I would love to see what that would look like – but nothing like that exists, as far as I can tell.
The conspiracy is not imaginary. Please check out the following link: http://www.etherzone.com/2007/bren032107.shtml
The idea is to destroy capitalism and sepecially the United States. The serfs are to live the lifestyle ordered and the leaders will live like feudal kings. THe earth will continue on, but our culture, economy and lifestyle will not.
We haven’t the power, yet to destroy the earth. The climate is doing what it does, changing.
I would ask this question to all of you who know that mankind is the cause of killer global warming: What is the global average temperature supposed to be at this exact time? Of course, I mean absent man’s effect. If we have irrefutable that mankind is causing global warming, surely one of you folks out there can tell me what would have been had we not messed it up.
Dear Lester Brown,
Your research and body of work stands alone. Thank you for all of it.
Much in your recent writings has focused upon the industrialization of China, and the potential for their process of industrialization to produce dangers for humanity by ruining the environment as fit place human habitation, as we know it today.
As I understand the Chinese experience, China is copying the example provided by the Industrial Revolution in the US not so long ago.
Among other things, what you report about China today suggests that most of pollution of global ecosystems in our time is directly traceable to the untethered, maximal expansion of industrial capabilties from the period in American history between 1750 and 1850 when modern industrialism gave rise to a new pyramidal global economy, would it not? If this was so, does the US not have some degree of responsibity to bear for the present, degraded state of the environment. Ironically, the US has failed to participate in most major international treaties having to do with the protection of biodiversity and the environment as well as with the preservation of natural resources and the integrity of the Earth.
If you do not mind, could you comment on what US powerbrokers, the politicians and economists engineering the adamant and unbridled rush toward economic globalization, need to be doing now to rescue a planet in distress?
With thanks for your remarkable contributions to science and humanity,
Steve