Text 2 The best estimate of humanity’s ecological footprint suggests that it now exceeds the Earth’s regenerative capacity by around 20 percent. This fact is mentioned early on in the latest book from Lester R. Brown. The subtitle of Plan B 2.0 makes the bold claim of rescuing a planet under stress and a civilization in trouble. So will Brown’s Plan B work The green movement divides broadly into two camps technological optimists and social revolutionaries. For every person like Brown proposing new ways to produce protein, there is an indigenous movement in a developing country struggling for land redistribution. Another divide is between those who see the biggest environmental problem as population pressure in the developing South, and those who say it is consumption patterns in the rich North. When push comes to shove, Brown qualifies as a technological optimist who is worried about population. The giveaway is his eulogy to green techno-fixes, coupled with the fear of fast-growing developing countries copying Western consumer lifestyles. His optimism, though, appears forced as he rolls out a depressing litany of statistics describing species extinction, water shortage, economic upheaval resulting from the eventual decline of oil production and, of course, climate change. And his rescue plans Shoehorned into Brown’s book is a section headed "Eradicating poverty, stabilizing population". This relies heavily on the orthodox approach to human development that seeks to use aid to plug the income gap for poor countries. Enumerating the costs of attaining the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals on health, education and poverty reduction, Brown conveys a sense that a few new fiscal measures, combined with the goodwill of rich countries, will deliver. This is an approach that has been followed for the last three decades, and it has not worked. During the 1990s, the share of benefits from global economic growth reaching those living on less than a dollar a day fell by 73 percent, in spite of countless promises to end poverty. This is the problem with Plan B 2.0. Brown’s picture of climate-change-induced chaos is terrifying and convincing. It includes the awful image of the world’s poorest people competing for food with an ever-hungrier bio-fuels industry, whose job will be to keep the developed world’s SUVs on the road as oil becomes ever more expensive and then runs out. The combination of industrial inertia and the influence of industry on lobbyists is making this vision increasingly plausible. The poor get a bad deal because the world is run by the economic equivalent of gunboat diplomacy, as the recent World Tracie Organization talks showed. Technologically optimistic visions often have too much faith that change will flow from a rational discussion about sensible policies, while tiptoeing around the real problems of power and politics. Even with Brown’s Plan B to tell us which renewable energy technologies to use and which resilient food crops to grow, we are going to need a way to deal with economic vested interests and the democratic deficit in global financial institutions that excludes the poor. For that, we need Plan C.
Text 2 The best estimate of humanity’s ecological footprint suggests that it now exceeds the Earth’s regenerative capacity by around 20 percent. This fact is mentioned early on in the latest book from Lester R. Brown. The subtitle of Plan B 2.0 makes the bold claim of rescuing a planet under stress and a civilization in trouble. So will Brown’s Plan B work The green movement divides broadly into two camps technological optimists and social revolutionaries. For every person like Brown proposing new ways to produce protein, there is an indigenous movement in a developing country struggling for land redistribution. Another divide is between those who see the biggest environmental problem as population pressure in the developing South, and those who say it is consumption patterns in the rich North. When push comes to shove, Brown qualifies as a technological optimist who is worried about population. The giveaway is his eulogy to green techno-fixes, coupled with the fear of fast-growing developing countries copying Western consumer lifestyles. His optimism, though, appears forced as he rolls out a depressing litany of statistics describing species extinction, water shortage, economic upheaval resulting from the eventual decline of oil production and, of course, climate change. And his rescue plans Shoehorned into Brown’s book is a section headed "Eradicating poverty, stabilizing population". This relies heavily on the orthodox approach to human development that seeks to use aid to plug the income gap for poor countries. Enumerating the costs of attaining the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals on health, education and poverty reduction, Brown conveys a sense that a few new fiscal measures, combined with the goodwill of rich countries, will deliver. This is an approach that has been followed for the last three decades, and it has not worked. During the 1990s, the share of benefits from global economic growth reaching those living on less than a dollar a day fell by 73 percent, in spite of countless promises to end poverty. This is the problem with Plan B 2.0. Brown’s picture of climate-change-induced chaos is terrifying and convincing. It includes the awful image of the world’s poorest people competing for food with an ever-hungrier bio-fuels industry, whose job will be to keep the developed world’s SUVs on the road as oil becomes ever more expensive and then runs out. The combination of industrial inertia and the influence of industry on lobbyists is making this vision increasingly plausible. The poor get a bad deal because the world is run by the economic equivalent of gunboat diplomacy, as the recent World Tracie Organization talks showed. Technologically optimistic visions often have too much faith that change will flow from a rational discussion about sensible policies, while tiptoeing around the real problems of power and politics. Even with Brown’s Plan B to tell us which renewable energy technologies to use and which resilient food crops to grow, we are going to need a way to deal with economic vested interests and the democratic deficit in global financial institutions that excludes the poor. For that, we need Plan C.
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