杏吧原创

IT HAS become increasingly popular to deride the negativity of environmentalists, but before policy-makers dismiss them as an incurable bunch of wailing Cassandras it is important to remember that Cassandra was right when she foresaw the destruction of Troy.

Climate change too is both real and nasty. Yet in spite of warnings of potentially catastrophic global warming from scientists and the green movement, the Kyoto protocol barely survived the last international climate conference, and most governments鈥� targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions are inadequate.

In the green camp, things are moving on from saving whales and punishing factories that spew pollution to something a little trickier: the fundamental re-engineering of the global economy. The aim is to find a way to meet the basic needs of the world鈥檚 people while squeezing all our economic activity back into the biosphere鈥檚 carrying capacity.

The best estimate of humanity鈥檚 ecological footprint suggests that it now exceeds the Earth鈥檚 regenerative capacity by around 20 per cent. This fact is mentioned early on in the latest book from arch eco-Cassandra (a category I probably also belong to) Lester R. Brown. The subtitle of Plan B 2.0 makes the bold claim of rescuing a planet under stress and a civilisation in trouble. So will Brown鈥檚 Plan B work?

The green movement divides broadly into two camps: technological optimists and social revolutionaries. For every Brown proposing new ways to produce protein there is an indigenous movement in a developing country struggling for land redistribution. Another divide is between those who see the biggest environmental problem as population pressure in the developing south, and those who say it is consumption patterns in the rich north. When push comes to shove, Brown qualifies as a technological optimist who is worried about population. The giveaway is his eulogy to green techno-fixes, coupled with the fear of a rampant China copying western consumer lifestyles.

His optimism, though, appears forced as he rolls out a depressing litany of statistics describing species extinction, water shortage, economic upheaval resulting from the eventual decline of oil production and, of course, climate change. And his rescue plans? Shoehorned into Brown鈥檚 book is a section headed 鈥淓radicating poverty, stabilizing population鈥�. This relies heavily on the orthodox (some would say failed) approach to human development that seeks to use aid to plug the income gap for poor countries. Enumerating the costs of attaining the United Nations鈥� Millennium Development Goals on health, education and poverty reduction, Brown conveys a sense that a few new fiscal measures, combined with the goodwill of rich countries, will deliver.

This is an approach that has been followed for the last three decades, and it has not worked. During the 1990s the share of benefits from global economic growth reaching those living on less than a dollar a day fell by 73 per cent, in spite of countless promises to end poverty. This is the problem with Plan B 2.0.

鈥淗is vision of climate-change-induced chaos is terrifying鈥�

Brown is an effective Cassandra. His picture of climate-change-induced chaos is terrifying and convincing. It includes the awful image of the world鈥檚 poorest people competing for food with an ever-hungrier biofuels industry, whose job will be to keep the developed world鈥檚 SUVs on the road as oil becomes ever more expensive and then runs out. The combination of industrial inertia and the influence of industry lobbyists is making this vision increasingly plausible. The poor get a bad deal because the world is run by the economic equivalent of gunboat diplomacy, as the recent World Trade Organization talks showed.

Technologically optimistic visions often have too much faith that change will flow from a rational discussion about sensible policies, while tiptoeing around the real problems of power and politics. Even with Brown鈥檚 Plan B to tell us which renewable energy technologies to use and which resilient food crops to grow, we are going to need a way to deal with economic vested interests and the democratic deficit in global financial institutions that excludes the poor. For that, we need Plan C.