Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "quick-fixes"

New York, W.W.Norton and Company, 2011
Do re-read this book. It’s 200 pages filled with data --all confirmed and expanded by recent events--erratic weather extremes, water loss, expanding deserts, rising temperatures, refugees and failed states.

The Earth Policy Institutes “Plan B” is simple--its conclusions all too obvious: “…we need to build an economy…powered [by] wind, solar and geothermal--one that has a diversified transparent system that reuses and recycles everything.

Changing our current economy requires “full-cost pricing.” Economists must calculate indirect costs and restructure taxes. Cutting income taxes while increasing gasoline taxes would provide “rapid economic growth.” Taxing carbon emissions is an obvious need-- being honest about costs of “…burning gasoline or coal…deforestation…over pumping aquifers and …overfishing.” We need to recognize the “sustainable yield limits of natural systems.”

In 2007 a Florida coal plant license was refused because “…the utility proposing it could not prove that building the plant would be cheaper than investing in conservation, efficiency, or renewable energy sources.”

The obvious quick fixes are “…eliminating fossil fuel subsidies…build[ing] together” instead of spending so much on the military, and “taxing each tree cut” and cutting only mature trees.

The extreme storms had already begun when this book was written. Surely Lester Brown’s Plan B makes a lot more sense than blindly assuming we must grow the economy, regardless. See Lester Brown