A Brief History of Fossil Fuels - THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER RIDE

THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER RIDE: A Brief History of Fossil Fuels
by Richard Heinberg

Fossil fuels have powered human growth and ingenuity for centuries. Now that we're reaching the end of cheap and abundant oil and coal supplies, we're in for an exciting ride. While there's a real risk that we'll fall off a cliff, there's still time to control our transition to a post-carbon future.

And now, for your viewing and sharing pleasure we bring you 300 YEARS OF FOSSIL FUELED GROWTH IN 5 MINUTES:



Written and narrated by PCI Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg.
Animated by the wonderful team at MONSTRO DESIGN.

[via postcarbon.org]

The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future Of Our Economy, Energy, And Environment

Chris Martenson is now dedicating his life to educating people, or giving them a "Crash Course" on the three E's: the Economy, Energy, and the Environment, so they can make better choices in the future. He wants people to understand:

• How completely dependent the 3e’s are on each other
• The unsustainable current trajectory they are on
• The changes that could have on our future (not just another housing crisis or recession, but also things like food supply shortage due to contamination, like the one we recently experienced with eggs, but on a larger scale, or the likelihood of more big natural disasters or disease outbreaks because of environmental shifts caused by global warming, etc.)
• How to recognize those changes ahead of time and prepare yourself, BEFORE it happens

Chris first introduced this Crash Course as a video series which he offers on his website for free.

An Interview with Chris Martenson on the Survival Podcast

Jack Spirko of The Survival Podcast had interviewed Chris Martenson who is the creator of “The Crash Course”. They had a meaty exploration of the core tenets of the Three Es in light of recent developments, then delved pretty deeply into strategies for building personal resilience, which is the main focus of the regular podcasts.

The first “E” is the economy, which is the lens through which the Crash Course looks at everything, specifically exponential money, the first-ever collapse of a global credit binge, an aging population, and a national failure to save.

The second “E” is energy. The Crash Course explores what Peak Oil implies for an economic system that is based on continual expansion.

The third “E”, the environment, will be exerting its own unknowable but certainly significant economic burdens due to shrinking resources and other systemic pressures while the other two “E”s are clamoring for your money and attention.

Listen to the full inverview here.

"Better than Growth" released by Australian Conservation Foundation

Arguing for something beyond economic growth

Australian Conservation Foundation has published an outstandingly well produced paper on how we can redesign our ways of living based on something other than economic growth and all its attendant troubles.


"Most australians don’t agree that their only goal in life is to increase their financial wealth and consumption – but too often our economic policy treats us as if we do. in reality, our quality of life depends on having time for family and friends, a strong sense of community, and a healthy natural environment. our economy should help us achieve those goals.

We can do better than a narrow vision of economic growth, and this report shows us how. Better than Growth explores the best practical thinking from around the world about how to improve economic measurements and align our economies to long-term environmental and social wellbeing."

[via Transition Network]

Earth Day 2010

Earth Day is a day designed to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's environment. It was founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in held on April 22, 1970 and is celebrated in more than 175 countries every year. Earth Day is celebrated in spring in the Northern Hemisphere and autumn in the Southern Hemisphere. Many communities celebrate Earth Week, an entire week of activities focused on environmental issues. While the first Earth Day was focused entirely on the United States, an organization launched by Denis Hayes—the original national coordinator in 1970—took it international in 1990 and organized events in 141 nations.

Earth Day 2010

Earth Day 2010 will coincide with the World People's Conference on Climate Change, to be held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and with the International Year of Biodiversity.

The World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, better known by its Spanish acroynm CMPCC, is a conference organized by the Bolivian government to be held in Cochabamba, Bolivia April 19-22, 2010. Its objectives are the following:

1. Analyze the structural and systemic causes of climate change and propose substantive measures that facilitate the well-being of all mankind in harmony with nature.
2. Discuss and agree the draft Universal Declaration of rights of Mother Earth.
3. To agree on proposals for new commitments to the Kyoto Protocol and projects for a COP Decision under the United Nations Framework for Climate Change that will guide future actions in those countries that are engaged with life during climate change negotiation
4. Work on the organization of a people’s world referendum on climate change.
5. Analyze and draw up a plan of action to advance the establishment of a Climate Justice Tribunal;
6. Define strategies for action and mobilization in defense of life against climate change and for mother earth rights.

A Green New Deal for Europe

The Green European Foundation (GEF) is the political foundation of the aisbl Green European Institute. It is one of the newly created political foundations on European level, and is funded on an annual basis by the European Parliament. GEF is publishing the Green New Deal series.
In the face of the current multiple crisis (financial, economic, social, environmental), the need for sustainable policies is self-evident. The Green New Deal is the integrated policy approach that Greens in Europe are putting forward as a solution to the crisis. The Towards Green Modernization in the face of Crisis report by the Wuppertal Institute analyzes in depth the climate, environment and energy aspects of this proposal.

Over the past year, billions of Euros have been spent in Europe, the US and other industrialised countries on so-called ‘recovery packages’ to overcome the economic crisis. However, these unprecedented amounts of public money could also be focused on fostering an ecological transformation of our economies, and not on safeguarding the economic patterns that brought about the crisis in the first place. Needless to say, this is no easy task. The present report by the Wuppertal Institute is meant to take stock of the current situation and identify the most suitable areas, the most effective instruments and the best practices for promoting this transformation.

Greening recovery packages

The report gives an overview of the “recovery packages” introduced by governments around the globe and reveals that the European Union is lagging behind the United States and Asia in terms of the Green share of those recovery plans. The authors show the economic and employment potential of a Green New Deal and that the EU has the possibility of leading the way.The report takes a pragmatic approach in the sense that it focuses primarily on how to ‘green’ immediate recovery activities in specific economic areas, and how to support the creation of framework conditions which initiate a dynamic for ecological modernisation and structural change. It also identifies key elements for the implementation of a Green New Deal.

Policy recommendations

The report ends with a series of recommendations that urge the European Union and its Member States to focus their programmes on investments that will kick-start a Green economy and provide sustainable ways out of the crisis.

Green New Deal series
The next volume of the series has also been published: Green New Deal and a European Response to the Crisis: towards ambitious macroeconomic governance of the EU

In this second volume, Francisco Padilla argues in favor of the idea of transforming the Stability and Growth Pact into a Sustainable Stability and Growth Pact.

In this recent article published by the Green European Foundation, the author argues that apart from the reforms of financial regulation that have already been announced, the European Union has to respond to the global crisis by pursuing a double objective. On the one hand, it should focus on economic reorganization, centered around eco-efficency and low carbon economy as engines of job creation. On the other hand, attention must be paid to the fight against unsustainable (public and private) debt and to the alarming increase in poverty rates, fostered in turn by wage deflation. The article maintains that only by focusing on these two conditions at the same time the European Union will be able to tackle the structural causes of systemic economic instability, exacerbated by the past 30 years of financial liberalisation.

This latter publication is so far only available in French on the GEF web page.

Ecological Economics - Revaluing the Environment

Growth for growth’s sake is no longer an option. Ecological economists are calling for a ‘green’ revision of incentives and investments, as the starting point for achieving societies that are sustainable in environmental, social as well as economic terms.

Peter May, past president of the International Society for Ecological Economics, has written an excellent summary of the role of ecological economics in the transition to a sustainable economy (appearing in the current issue of The Broker). He contrasts the principles of ecological economics (EE) with those of mainstream economics and points out the key fundamental difference — EE practitioners recognize that the economy is a subsystem of the biosphere, while mainstream economists tend to view the economy as the whole and the environment as the subsystem.

Principles of ecological economics

EE takes as its starting point the notion that the economy is situated within the biosphere (in contrast with mainstream economic theory in which environmental problems are considered only as external reflections of the larger economic system). Resources such as air, water, food, wood, fibre, minerals and energy sources are the foundation of the economy. The economy also draws on the Earth as a sink for its wastes, such as carbon dioxide, toxic chemicals and chloro-fluorocarbons.

Facing reality

What does all this imply for the green economy? From an EE perspective, business as usual is no longer an option. A return to the expectation that a bull market will allow us to ‘grow our way out’ of crisis would mean we have learned nothing.

Rather, it is time to face the reality of biophysical limits and to find institutional and behavioural responses to the underlying contradictions that have brought the global economy to its knees, and that have degraded biodiversity and overheated the planet.

[via SteadyState.org]

Environment, power, and society for the twenty-first century

"Get a rare, fresh, enlightening glimpse of the Big Picture of our environmental and energy problems - Highly recommended." -- Choice

Howard T. Odum possessed one of the most innovative minds of the twentieth century. He pioneered the fields of ecological engineering, ecological economics, and environmental accounting, working throughout his life to better understand the interrelationships of energy, environment, and society and their importance to the well-being of humanity and the planet.

Environment, Power and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy is a major modernization of Odum's classic work on the significance of power and its role in society, bringing his approach and insight to a whole new generation of students and scholars. For this edition Odum refines his original theories and introduces two new measures: emergy and transformity. These concepts can be used to evaluate and compare systems and their transformation and use of resources by accounting for all the energies and materials that flow in and out and expressing them in equivalent ability to do work. Natural energies such as solar radiation and the cycling of water, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen are diagrammed in terms of energy and emergy flow. Through this method Odum reveals the similarities between human economic and social systems and the ecosystems of the natural world. In the process, we discover that our survival and prosperity are regulated as much by the laws of energetics as are systems of the physical and chemical world.


The Book Environment, Power and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy is available on Google Books with limited preview.

Climax and Descent (Chapter 13)

The growth of civilisation on the nonrenewable reserves of the earth is surging to a climax of information miracles, stormy economics, turbulent populations, concentrated wealth, and bewildering complexity. Although the future is always masked by the oscillations of smaller scale, the empower of society may be at climax in transition to times of receding energy. This last chapter uses principles of energy hierarchy and pulsing to anticipate the future, suggest adaptive policies, and seek a prosperous way down.

...

By developing explanations and plans now for making descent prosperous, we can be ready when the shocks of change galvanize the attention of society. Some can have faith in the future from understanding energy principles. Other will find faith in religions that adapt the necessary commandments for once again fitting culture to the earth. The people of Easter Island disappeared, leaving only their monuments as an example to the world of what happens when culture cannot downsize to fit its environmental production.

Environmental and Energy Policy Challenges in the EU

The website of the President of the European Parliament has two key documents on some of the forward policy challenges and choices that are likely to face the European Union in the coming decade from 2009-2019.

The first document is a compendium of papers on policy challenges and choices. These papers provide a valuable overview of multiple issues which the EU in general is likely to confront over coming years, together with a series of useful pointers as to how the EU institutions might choose to respond.

The second document is much shorter, and is a synoptic 'EU Policy Challenges', which is a check-list of 69 possible areas for future policy work. These challenges include the following three areas related to the environment and energy.

Tackling climate change effectively

• The European Parliament will need to work towards reaching the 20-20-20 target (20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (possibly 30%), 20% improvement in energy efficiency and 20% renewables in the energy mix) by 2020. The following four steps of the climate energy package of December 2008 will be on the agenda:
  1) revision of the directive on EU emission Trading System;
  2) creation of a directive for pilot projects on carbon storage;
  3) creation of a directive on renewable energy in electricity, transportation and heating and cooling;
  4) setting binding national targets for CO2 reduction.
  
• A future financial framework will need to be created so that EU budget lines can be adapted in line with the requirements of climate policy. The European Parliament can no longer redistribute existing resources but could propose the creation of new resources to finance the cross-sectoral nature of the fight against climate change.
• The Parliament could consider using 'green diplomacy', by regularly raising the issue of the EU climate targets, and defending those targets, in its contacts with parliamentarians from other countries. In addition, it could prompt the Commission and the Member States to construct a foreign policy on climate change and repeatedly draw attention to the EU climate targets in the EU's and the Member States' diplomatic missions.
• International cooperation is crucial. Building an effective global carbon market will help achieve sustainable globalization. Also, the Parliament could push for placing climate change at the core of the development policy. The EU will need to give assistance to developing countries to draw up targets, to adopt new technologies and to stop deforestation.
• Mitigation and adaptation policies will lead to a new model of sustainable development, where the social character could be promoted in order to secure the necessary social consensus. Thus the European Parliament could fully involve citizens in the process of combating climate change.
  

Shaking up EU biodiversity policy

• The European Parliament could push for the development of a more coherent European integrated approach for halting the biodiversity loss. A clear post 2010 target could be set by the Member States and new funding opportunities could be established under the Common Agriculture Policy, the Common Fisheries Policy, and the Cohesion and Structural Funds.
• The Parliament could take the global initiative of proposing the creation, based on the model of IPCC, of an Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity Loss, which would be responsible for the coordination of the activities of the Member States and for the monitoring of the progress made in this area.
  

Transforming the EU into a sustainable and efficient energy system

• The European Parliament can encourage Member States to devise a forward-looking common energy policy both within the EU and in external relations, so as to ensure a high level of security of energy supply. The proposal of the Parliament to form solar energy partnerships with third countries in the Mediterranean region could be taken forward.
• The Parliament will need to promote further research and pilot projects in this field, as well as the development of the grid so as to allow for the optimal integration of renewable energy resources.
• The transformation of the energy system will require the adjustment of the fiscal and market instrument. The Parliament could call on the Member States and the other institutions to introduce reduced rates of VAT for renewable energy and for energy-saving goods and services and to create incentives to modernisation by means of VAT reductions.
• The growing energy dependence on fossil fuels will have to be limited and managed through diversification. The Parliament could stimulate investments in renewables and upgraded energy infrastructure, whilst developing a common approach towards Russia's influence on the gas market.
• It could be important that the Parliament supports the restructuring of the industrial system (buildings, transport and manufacturing) with reinforced innovation. This includes strengthening existing measures, continuing public intervention and the increasing of financial resources for eco-innovation.

The Future is All About Resilience

Asher Miller has recently gave a presentation about resilience. He became the Executive Director of Post Carbon Institute in October 2008, after having served as the manager of the Relocalization Network.

His presentation sets out Transition Towns as a response to the converging crises in the economy, energy and the environment.

The future is all about resilience

View more documents from Post Carbon Institute.

Crash Course on Economy, Energy, and the Environment

Chris Martenson is not an economist. He is a trained research scientist, and a former Fortune 300 VP. Most importantly, though, he is a concerned citizen.

He thinks the next twenty years are going to look very different from the last twenty years. His site is an attempt to explain why.

You should start with the Crash Course. This series of videos is, he thinks, the clearest and most straightforward explanation of how our economy, energy systems and environment interact -- how we got to where we are today, and some reasonable expectations for the future.

Massive change is upon us. To understand the nature of this change, we need to understand the three “E”s – the Economy, Energy, and the Environment...

• The first “E” is the economy, which is the lens through which the Crash Course looks at everything, specifically exponential money, the first-ever collapse of a global credit binge, an aging population, and a national failure to save.
• The second “E” is energy. We will explore what Peak Oil implies for an economic system that is based on continual expansion.
• The third “E”, the environment, will be exerting its own unknowable but certainly significant economic burdens due to shrinking resources and other systemic pressures while the other two “E”s are clamoring for your money and attention.

The Limits to Growth and Beyond Growth

The Limits to Growth is a famous 1972 book modeling the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies, commissioned by the Club of Rome. Its authors were Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III. The book used the World3 model to simulate[1] the consequence of interactions between the Earth's and human systems.

Five variables were examined in the original model, on the assumptions that exponential growth accurately described their patterns of increase, and that the ability of technology to increase the availability of resources grows only linearly. These variables are: world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion. The authors intended to explore the possibility of a sustainable feedback pattern that would be achieved by altering growth trends among the five variables.

The most recent updated version was published on June 1, 2004 by Chelsea Green Publishing Company and Earthscan under the name Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. Donnella Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows have updated and expanded the original version. They had previously published Beyond the Limits in 1993 as a 20 year update on the original material.

In 2008 Graham Turner at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia published a paper called "A Comparison of `The Limits to Growth` with Thirty Years of Reality". It examined the past thirty years of reality with the predictions made in 1972 and found that changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the book's predictions of economic and societal collapse in the 21st century.

"For the first 30 years of the model, the world has been tracking along an unsustainable trajectory," Turner concludes. Herman Daly of the University of Maryland says these results show that we "must get off the growth path of business as usual, and move to a steady state economy", stopping population growth, resource depletion, and pollution.

Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

Plan B 3.0 by Lester R. Brown is the updated edition of Plan B 2.0. Excerpts from the preface:

Perhaps the most revealing difference between Plan B 2.0 and Plan B 3.0 is the change of the subtitle from “Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble” to simply “Mobilizing to Save Civilization.” The new subtitle better reflects both the scale of the challenge we face and the wartime speed of the response it calls for.

Our world is changing fast. When Plan B 2.0 went to press two years ago, the data on ice melting were worrying. Now they are scary.

Two years ago, we knew there were a number of failing states. Now we know that number is increasing each year. Failing states are an early sign of a failing civilization.

Two years ago there was early evidence that the potential for expanding oil production was much less than officially projected. Now, we know that peak oil could be on our doorstep. Two years ago oil was $50 a barrel. As of this writing in late 2007, it is over $90 a barrel [it is now around $70 in July 2009].

In Plan B 2.0, we speculated that if we continued to build ethanol distilleries to convert grain into fuel for cars, the price of grain would move up toward its oil-equivalent value. Now that the United States has enough distilleries to convert one fifth of its grain crop into fuel for cars, this is exactly what is happening. Corn prices have nearly doubled. Wheat prices have more than doubled.

Two years ago, we reported that in five of the last six years world grain production had fallen short of consumption. Now, it has done so in seven of the past eight years, and world grain stocks are dropping toward all-time lows.

As the backlog of unresolved problems grows, including continuing rapid population growth, spreading water shortages, shrinking forests, eroding soils, and grasslands turning to desert, weaker governments are breaking down under the mounting stress. If we cannot reverse the trends that are driving states to failure, we will not be able to stop the growth in their numbers.

Some of the newly emerging trends—such as the coming decline in world oil production, the new stresses from global warming, and rising food prices—could push even some of the stronger states to the breaking point.

The challenge for our generation is to build a new economy, one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a highly diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. And to do it with unprecedented speed.

Continuing with business as usual (Plan A), which is destroying the economy’s eco-supports and setting the stage for dangerous climate change, is no longer a viable option. It is time for Plan B.

There are four overriding goals in Plan B 3.0: stabilizing climate, stabilizing population, eradicating poverty, and restoring the earth’s ecosystems. At the heart of the climate-stabilizing initiative is a detailed plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent by 2020 in order to hold the global temperature rise to a minimum. The climate initiative has three components: raising energy efficiency, developing renewable sources of energy, and expanding the earth’s forest cover both by banning deforestation and by planting billions of trees to sequester carbon.

We are in a race between tipping points in nature and our political systems. Can we phase out coal-fired power plants before the melting of the Greenland ice sheet becomes irreversible? Can we gather the political will to halt deforestation in the Amazon before its growing vulnerability to fire takes it to the point of no return? Can we help countries stabilize population before they become failing states?

In Plan B 2.0, we talked about the enormous potential of renewable sources of energy, especially wind power. Since then we’ve seen proposed projects to generate electricity from such resources on a scale never seen with fossil fuel power plants. For example, the state of Texas is coordinating a vast expansion of wind farms that will yield up to 23,000 megawatts of new electrical generating capacity, an amount equal to 23 coal-fired power plants.

Two years ago, the notion of plug-in gas-electric hybrid cars was little more than a concept. Today five leading automobile manufacturers are moving to market with plug-in hybrids, with the first ones expected in 2010.

We have the technologies to restructure the world energy economy and stabilize climate. The challenge now is to build the political will to do so. Saving civilization is not a spectator sport. Each of us has a leading role to play.

And finally, there is not anything sacred about Plan B. It is our best effort to lay out an alternative to business as usual, one that we hope will help save our civilization. If anyone can come up with a better plan, we will welcome it. The world needs the best plan possible.

The Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization book can be downloaded without charge from the Web site of the Earth Policy Institute.

Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble

Plan A, business-as-usual, has the world on an environmental path that is leading toward economic decline and eventual collapse. If our goal is to sustain economic progress, we have no choice other than move onto a new path—Plan B. This is why Lester R. Brown of the Earth Policy Institute wrote the original Plan B in 2003. The preface of the updated 2006 edition summarizes the situation as follows:

There are many reasons why they have updated and expanded the 2003 edition into Plan B 2.0. Most fundamentally, there still is no widely shared sense that we need to build a new economy—and even less, a vision of what it might look like. The purpose of this book is to make a convincing case for building the new economy, to offer a more detailed vision of what it would look like, and to provide a roadmap of how to get from here to there.

There are several other reasons for this new edition. One, there is strong new evidence that the western economic model will not work for China. Two, the tightening oil supply raises challenging new issues that deserve attention. Three, since poverty cannot be eradicated if the economy’s natural support systems continue to deteriorate, we have also included here an earth restoration budget to complement the poverty eradication budget in the first edition. Four, technological advances in the last few years offer exciting new possibilities for reversing the environmental trends that are undermining our future. And, five, we wanted to do a new edition simply because of the unexpectedly enthusiastic response to the first edition.

To elaborate on the first of these points, China has now overtaken the United States in the consumption of most basic resources. Among the leading commodities in the food sector (grain and meat), in the energy sector (oil and coal), and in the industrial economy (steel), China now leads the United States in consumption of all except oil.

What if China catches up to the United States in consumption per person? If China’s economy continues to expand at 8 percent per year, its income per person will reach the current U.S. level in 2031. If we assume that Chinese consumption levels per person in 2031 are the same as those in the United States today, then the country’s projected population of 1.45 billion would consume an amount of grain equal to two thirds of the current world grain harvest, its paper consumption would be double current world production, and it would use 99 million barrels of oil per day—well above current world production of 84 million barrels.

The western economic model is not going to work for China. Nor will it work for India, which by 2031 is projected to have a population even larger than China’s, or for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the “American dream.” And in an increasingly integrated world economy, where all countries are competing for the same oil, grain, and mineral resources, the existing economic model will not work for industrial countries either. The days of the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy are numbered.

Closely related to China’s expanding resource consumption is the world’s fast-changing oil outlook and the new issues it generates. For example, we have long been concerned about the effect of rising oil prices on food production costs, but of even more concern is the effect on the demand for food commodities. Since virtually everything we eat can be converted into automotive fuel either in ethanol distilleries or biodiesel refineries, high oil prices are opening a vast new market for farm products. Those buying commodities for fuel producers are competing directly with food processors for supplies of wheat, corn, soybeans, sugarcane, and other foodstuffs. In effect, supermarkets and service stations are now competing for the same commodities.

The price of oil is setting the price for food simply because if the fuel value of a commodity exceeds its value as food, it will be converted into fuel. As more and more ethanol distilleries and biodiesel refineries are built, the world’s affluent automobile owners will be competing with the world’s poor for the same commodities.

In the original Plan B, we had a budget for eradicating poverty, but if the economy’s environmental support systems are collapsing, poverty eradication will not be possible. If croplands are eroding and harvests are shrinking, if water tables are falling and wells are going dry, if rangelands are turning to desert and livestock are dying, if fisheries are collapsing, if forests are shrinking, and if rising temperatures are scorching crops, a poverty eradication program—no matter how carefully crafted and well implemented—will not succeed.

For this reason, we have added an earth restoration budget to restore the earth’s productive health that parallels the budget for poverty eradication. It includes the costs of protecting and restoring soils, forests, rangelands, and oceanic fisheries, plus conserving the earth’s biological diversity. It also means halting advancing deserts that threaten to displace millions of people.

And finally, the good news—and another reason for updating Plan B—is that new technologies offer hope in dealing with the mounting challenges we face on the environmental front. For example, advances in gas-electric hybrid cars and in wind turbine design have set the stage for the evolution of a new automotive fuel economy. Using gas-electric hybrids with an extra storage battery plus a plug-in capacity enables us to do our short-distance driving largely with electricity. If we combine this with investment in wind farms to feed cheap electricity into the grid, we can largely power automobiles with wind energy. Using cheap wind-generated electricity to recharge batteries during off-peak hours costs the equivalent of 50¢-a-gallon gasoline! This is but one example of the possibilities for building a new economy, one that can sustain economic progress while saving money, reducing oil dependence, and cutting carbon emissions.

The Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble book can be downloaded without charge from the Web site of the Earth Policy Institute.