Lester R. Brown's Climate Chronicles

We are an oil-based civilization, one that is heavily dependent on a resource whose production will soon be falling.

Since 1981, the quantity of oil extracted has exceeded new discoveries by an ever-widening margin. In 2008, the world pumped 31 billion barrels of oil but discovered fewer than 9 billion barrels of new oil.

World reserves of conventional oil are in a free fall, dropping every year. As I note in my latest book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, discoveries of conventional oil total roughly 2 trillion barrels, of which 1 trillion have been extracted so far, with another trillion barrels to go.

By themselves, however, these numbers miss a central point:

As security analyst Michael Klare notes, the first trillion barrels was easy oil, “oil that’s found on shore or near to shore; oil close to the surface and concentrated in large reservoirs; oil produced in friendly, safe, and welcoming places.”

The other half is tough oil, “oil that’s buried far offshore or deep underground; oil scattered in small, hard-to-find reservoirs; oil that must be obtained from unfriendly, politically dangerous, or hazardous places.”

This prospect of oil production peaking and countries at the same time failing to establish greater energy efficiency and renewable energy sources has direct consequences for world food security.

Elevated global temperatures bring a number of threats, including rising seas and more crop-withering heat waves. Higher surface water temperatures in the tropical oceans also provide more energy to drive tropical storm systems, leading to more-destructive hurricanes and typhoons.

The combination of rising seas, more powerful storms, and stronger storm surges can be devastating.

As noted in my most recent book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, just how devastating this combination can be became evident in late August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina came onshore on the U.S. Gulf Coast near New Orleans. It was a powerful example of recent storms that have destroyed lives, swamped economies and forced insurers to reassess how they calculate risk.

As the Earth warms, the melting of its two massive ice sheets—Antarctica and Greenland—could raise sea level enormously.

If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt, it would raise sea level 7 meters (23 feet). Melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise sea level 5 meters (16 feet). But even just partial melting of these ice sheets will have a dramatic effect on sea level rise.

Senior scientists are noting that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections of sea level rise during this century of 18 to 59 centimeters are already obsolete and that a rise of 2 meters during this time is within range.

As I note in Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, assessing the prospects for the Greenland ice sheet—and its impact on hundreds of millions of people in the world's Arctic and coastal communities—begins with looking at the warming of the Arctic region.

In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres,” in which he challenged the view that the Sun revolved around the Earth, arguing instead that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

With his new model of the solar system, he began a wide-ranging debate among scientists, theologians, and others. His alternative to the earlier Ptolemaic model, which had the Earth at the center of the universe, led to a revolution in thinking, to a new worldview.

Today, we need a similar shift in our worldview, in how we think about the relationship between the Earth and the economy.

The issue now is not which celestial sphere revolves around the other but whether the environment is part of the economy or the economy is part of the environment: Economists see the environment as a subset of the economy; ecologists, see the economy as a subset of the environment.

Like Ptolemy’s view of the solar system, the economists’ view is confusing efforts to understand our modern world. It has created an economy that is out of sync with the ecosystem on which it depends.

There is a vast unrealized potential in all countries to lessen the demands that are shrinking the earth’s forest cover. In industrial nations the greatest opportunity lies in reducing the quantity of wood used to make paper, and in developing countries it depends on reducing fuelwood use.

The rates of paper recycling in the top 10 paper-producing countries range widely, from China and Finland on the low end, recycling 33 and 38 percent of the paper they use, to South Korea and Germany on the high end, at 77 and 66 percent.

The United States, the world’s largest paper consumer, is far behind South Korea, but it has raised the share of paper recycled from roughly one fourth in the early 1980s to 50 percent in 2005. If every country recycled as much of its paper as South Korea does, the amount of wood pulp used to produce paper worldwide would drop by one third.

The use of paper, perhaps more than any other single product, reflects the throwaway mentality that evolved during the last century. There is an enormous possibility for reducing paper use simply by replacing facial tissues, paper napkins, disposable diapers, and paper shopping bags with reusable cloth alternatives.

In early December 2004, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ordered a police crackdown on illegal logging after flash floods and landslides, made by worse by deforestation, killed more than 300 people, according to news reports.

Fifteen years earlier, in 1989, the government of Thailand announced a nationwide ban on tree cutting following severe flooding and the heavy loss of life in landslides. And in August 1998, following several weeks of record flooding in the Yangtze River basin and a staggering $30 billion worth of damage, the Chinese government banned all tree cutting in the upper reaches of the basin.

Each of these governments belatedly learned a costly lesson, namely that services provided by forests, such as flood control, may be far more valuable to society than the lumber in those forests.