Brown offers dire warnings about climate change

He made it sound like the end of the world could be right around the corner.

Left unchecked, climate change would trigger a series of events that could mean the end of civilization, Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, told about 300 people who attended the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC) annual meeting on Saturday in Rappahannock County.

He warned of rising sea levels because melting ice in Arctic, on Greenland and elsewhere, people migrating to higher land in search of personal safety and food, poverty and political instability on a global scale.

"Everything is affected by climate change," Brown said.

During World War Two, a "way of life" was at stake, he said. "The challenge today is not merely a way of life, or saving a way of life," Brown said, underscoring the threat of climate change. "The challenge today is saving civilization itself."

A tall order, to be sure, Brown admitted.

The challenge will require quick, decisive and radically different responses, including a restructuring of the U.S. tax system that would discourage continued dependence on oil and coal and encourage the use of clean, renewable energy resources to satisfy electricity needs, he said.

Brown believes mankind possesses the smarts and technology to turn things around.

It calls for reducing worldwide carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2020, stabilizing population, eliminating poverty and "restoring the earth’s natural systems."

"If we don’t reach all of these goals, we’re probably not going to reach any of them," Brown said.

In his remarks, Brown focused on climate change and the reduction of carbon emissions.

Renewable energy resources like wind and the sun represent "enormous potential" to oil, Brown said.

Texas leads the country in producing wind-generated electricity, he said. Wind farms in place, under construction or planned would "more than satisfy" the household electricity needs of the state’s 24 million residents, Brown said.

"That’s extraordinary," he said of Texas’ efforts. "When you invest in a wind farm and the transmission infrastructure, you’re investing in an energy system that can last as long as the earth itself."

Wyoming, South Dakota, Maine and a number of European countries either operate or have plans for wind farms, Brown said.

He believes its possible for wind farms ("thousands of them") to provide clean energy to power hybrid cars.

"We could run our cars largely on wind energy and at a gasoline equivalent cost of less than $1 a gallon," Brown said. "We have the technology now to do this. It’s just a matter of getting our act together and both building the wind farms and getting the plug-in hybrids off the assembly lines in the millions."

He also heralded the benefits of switching from incandescent to compact fluorescent bulbs. Fluorescent bulbs require one-quarter the electricity of incandescent ones, Brown said. A global shift from incandescent to fluorescent bulbs would reduce worldwide electricity consumption by 12 percent, he said.

That would allow the closure of 705 to the world’s nearly 2,400 coal-fired plants, Brown said.

Solar energy would provide limitless opportunities, he said. "The sunlight striking the earth in one hour is enough to power the world economy for one year."

Meanwhile, ice in the Arctic Sea and on Greenland continue to melt at a record clip, Brown said.

He spoke of scientists who reported that last summer Arctic Sea ice the size of the United Kingdom disappeared in a week. "They were stunned by this, because they had never seen Arctic Sea ice melt so fast," Brown said of the scientists.

He talked about the accelerated rate of glaciers separating from Greenland. Brown described it as typically a "very slow process," with glaciers traveling moving 100 to 200 meters per year.

Last year, he attended a meteorologists conference in Washington, D.C. An audience member asked a panelist how the loss of the Greenland ice scape would affect sea levels. A meteorologist said it would reach the middle of the first floor of the White House. "And the audience broke into applause," Brown said, smiling.

The PEC audience laughed and clapped.

Technology and tax incentives would accomplish only so much, Brown said. He believes the challenges of climate change also demand the kind of political leadership and pluck that saw America through World War Two.

Weeks after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, President Roosevelt convened a meeting of the country’s automobile makers, Brown said. Roosevelt told them the nation needed their factories’ production capacity to quickly build 60,000 warplanes, 45,000 tanks, 20,000 antiaircraft artillery guns and thousands of ships.

But the auto industry leaders told Roosevelt it would be impossible to build cars and at the same time meet his goals.

The president told them that they obviously didn’t get it.

Roosevelt explained that all of the auto manufacturing plants would be converted to produce the weaponry necessary to stop Nazi Germany’s quest of global domination. In the end, Detroit far exceeded Roosevelt's armament goals, Brown said.

The world must bring the same urgency and single-mindedness to reducing carbon emission levels, Brown said.

"We don’t have a lot of time," he said. "One of the problems is we don’t know exactly how much time we have left....Nature’s the timekeeper, and we can’t see the clock."

E-mail the reporter: ddelrosso@timespapers.com