Review of Plan B3.0
By Lester Brown
“If we assume that in 2030 there are three cars for every four people
in China, as there are in the US now. China will have 1.1 billion
cars. The World currently has 860 million cars. To provide the needed
roads, highways, and parking lots, China will have to pave an area
comparable to what it now plants in rice.
By 2030 China would need 98 million barrels of oil a day. The World is
currently producing 85 million barrels a day and may never product much
more than that. There goes the World’s oil reserves.
What China is teaching us is that the western economic model—the
fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy—is not going
to work for China. If it does not work for China it will not work for
India, which by 2030 may have an even larger population than China.
Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries
who are also dreaming the “American Dream”. And, in an increasingly
integrated global economy, where we all depend on the same oil, grain
and steel, the western economic model will no longer work for the
industrial countries either.
The overriding challenge for our generation is to build a new economy –
one that is largely powered by renewable sources of energy, that has a
much more diversified transport system, and that uses and recycles
everything. We have the technology that will allow us to sustain
economic progress. Can we do it fast enough to avoid breakdown of
social systems?"
Elsewhere it quotes specific advice, keep the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere below 400 ppm. If nothing is done over 500 ppm is expected by 2050."
This reviewer, GE, the Chairman of RDL, finds this book very difficult.
Everything about it is obvious, largely accepted by over 99% of the
scientists who have every written a paper about global warming. What is
the point of writing, or publishing, a book like this? Unfortunately,
the answer is just as obvious. Almost no politicians, or voters who
elect them, even know these facts, or act, or vote, accordingly. There
is even a newly established political pressure group which is trying to
get voters to write letters to reporters to ask them to starting asking
candidates to state their positions on global warming. Here is the result: www.chasingsustainability.blogspot.com/2008/01/demand-that-our-journalists-address.html.
What the pressure group is asking for, in a somewhat recondite way, is, more directly, just click on:
whataretheywaitingfor.com and sign your name. Obviously, this is absolutely necessary before the November election. Equally obviously, the aim of Plan B3.0 is the same, to get more people aware of the problem, and maybe they will get something done about it. Again, the aim of GE's company, RDL, is the same but much more direct. The pages of this website describes the solution in detail: How many people have to do what, when and how, and within what milestones, essentially within the next 22 years. Still obvious, until Lester Brown's objective, to get people to take action, is met, RDL's goals will not even be started to be realized.
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