Preface

"We are entering a new food era, one marked by higher food prices, rapidly growing numbers of hungry people, and an intensifying competition for land and water resources..." (Brown, xi)

Internationally negotiated climate agreements are becoming obsolete:

1. No government wants to concede too much compared with other governments.
2. It takes years to negotiate and ratify these agreements; we may simply run out of time.

"The question we face is not what we need to do, because that seems rather clear to those who are analyzing the global situation. The challenge is how to do it in the time available. Unfortunately we don't know how much time remains. Nature is the timekeeper but we cannot see the clock." (Brown, xiv)

Selling Our Future

Lester Brown explains that as a result of persistently high food prices, hunger is spreading on page 4 of Plan B 4.0

One of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals is to reduce hunger and malnutrition

• In the mid-1990s, the number of people in this category had fallen to 825 million.
• Reaching upward to 915 million at the end of 2008.
• Jumped to over 1 billion in 2009.

Brown projects that by 2015, the number of hungry people will be at 1.2 billion or more due to the diversion of grain to produce fuel for cars, spreading shortages of irrigation water, and other trends.

Food: The Weak Link

Farmers are facing many trying trends in the struggle to feel all of the worlds people.

Demand side:

1. Population growth
2. Growing consumption of grain-based animal protein
3. Massive use of grain to fuel cars

Supply side:

Environmental and Resource trends:

1. Soil erosion
2. Aquifer depletion
3. Crop-shrinking heat waves
4. Melting ice sheets and rising sea level
5. Melting of the mountain glaciers that feed major rivers and irrigation systems

Resource trends:

1. Loss of cropland to non-farm uses
2. Diversion of irrigation water to cities
3. Coming reduction in oil supplies

The Emerging Politics of Food Scarcity

"The inability to negotiate long-term trade agreements was accompanied by an entirely new genre of responses among the more affluent food-importing counties..." (Brown, page 10)

Our Global Ponzi Economy

"A Ponzi scheme takes payments from a broad base of investors and uses these to pay off returns. It creates the illusion that it is providing a highly attractive rate of return on investment as a result of savvy investment decisions when in fact these irresistibly high earning are in part the result of consuming the asset base itself." (Brown, page 14)

Mounting Stresses, Failing States

"As a number of failing states grows, dealing with various international crises becomes more difficult. Actions that may be relatively simple in a healthy world order, such as maintaining monetary stability or controlling an infectious disease outbreak, could become difficult or impossible in a world with numbers disintegrating states." (Brown, page 23)

Plan B - A Plan to Save Civilization

The goal of Plan B is to move the world from the current decline and collapse path onto a new path where food security can be restored and civilization can be sustained.

Reasons Plan B is far more ambitious than anything the world has ever undertaken:

1. Cutting net carbon dioxide emissions 80% by 2020
2. Stabilizing population at 8 billion or lower
3. Eradicating poverty
4. Restoring the earth's natural systems, including its soils, aquifers, forests, grasslands, and fisheries

"The challenge is not only to build a new economy but to do it at wartime speed before we miss so many of nature's deadlines that the economic system begins to unravel." (Brown, page 27)