Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Lester Brown – Plan B 3.0 (Audio interview)
Ira Flatow, Science Friday
Food shortages, water battles, growing population, and an emerging energy crisis. Ira talks with Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute about the environmental problems facing the globe, and what can be done to take action to fix them. Brown has just published ‘Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.’ He has a plan to save the planet from global warming. But–with calls for a carbon tax, and more gasoline taxes–it’s not going to be easy or cheap.
(11 January 2008)
In the early part of the interview, Mr. Brown mentions that world oil production may have peaked, or in any case, it probably will not increase much more. The peak, he says, “will force us to re-think so many things.” He also says that the entire text of the new book will soon be online for public access at earthpolicy.org/ .
Related:
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (page devoted to Lester Brown’s new book)
TIME article and Podcast interview
The Sixth Extinction — It Happened to Him. It’s Happening to You
Michael Novacek, Washington Post
…Are we experiencing one of those major shocks to life on Earth that rocked the planet in the past?
That’s just doomsaying, say those who insist that economic growth and human technological ingenuity will eventually solve our problems. But in fact, the scientific take on our current environmental mess is hardly so upbeat.
More than a decade ago, many scientists claimed that humans were demonstrating a capacity to force a major global catastrophe that would lead to a traumatic shift in climate, an intolerable level of destruction of natural habitats, and an extinction event that could eliminate 30 to 50 percent of all living species by the middle of the 21st century. Now those predictions are coming true. The evidence shows that species loss today is accelerating. We find ourselves uncomfortably privileged to be witnessing a mass extinction event as it’s taking place, in real time.
The fossil record reveals some extraordinarily destructive events in the past, when species losses were huge, synchronous and global in scale. Paleontologists recognize at least five of these mass extinction events, the last of which occurred about 65 million years ago and wiped out all those big, charismatic dinosaurs (except their bird descendants) and at least 70 percent of all other species. The primary suspect for this catastrophe is a six-mile-wide asteroid (a mile higher than Mount Everest) whose rear end was still sticking out of the atmosphere as its nose augered into the crust a number of miles off the shore of the present-day Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Earth’s atmosphere became a hell furnace, with super-broiler temperatures sufficient not only to kill exposed organisms, but also to incinerate virtually every forest on the planet.
For several million years, a period 100 times greater than the entire known history of Homo sapiens, the planet’s destroyed ecosystems underwent a slow, laborious recovery. The earliest colonizers after the catastrophe were populous species that quickly adapted to degraded environments, the ancient analogues of rats, cockroaches and weeds. But many of the original species that occupied these ecosystems were gone and did not come back. They’ll never come back. The extinction of a species, whether in an incinerated 65-million-year-old reef or in a bleached modern-day reef of the Caribbean, is forever.
Now we face the possibility of mass extinction event No. 6. No big killer asteroid is in sight. Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are not of the scale to cause mass extinction. Yet recent studies show that troubling earlier projections about rampant extinction aren’t exaggerated.
Michael Novacek, a paleontologist, is senior vice president and provost of the American Museum of Natural History. He is the author of “Terra: Our 100-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem — and the Threats That Now Put It at Risk.”
(13 January 2008)
Rich countries owe poor a huge environmental debt
Guardian
The environmental damage caused to developing nations by the world’s richest countries amounts to more than the entire third world debt of $1.8 trillion, according to the first systematic global analysis of the ecological damage imposed by rich countries.
The study found that there are huge disparities in the ecological footprint inflicted by rich and poor countries on the rest of the world because of differences in consumption. The authors say that the west’s high living standards are maintained in part through the huge unrecognised ecological debts it has built up with developing countries.
“At least to some extent, the rich nations have developed at the expense of the poor and, in effect, there is a debt to the poor,” said Prof Richard Norgaard, an ecological economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study. “That, perhaps, is one reason that they are poor. You don’t see it until you do the kind of accounting that we do here.”
Using data from the World Bank and the UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the researchers examined so-called “environmental externalities” or costs that are not included in the prices paid for goods but which cover ecological damage linked to their consumption.
(21 January 2008)
