Global economy consuming more than earth can yield,
expert warns
Thu Sep 4, 6:11 PM ET
story.news.yahoo.com
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The hungry global economy is eating up the
earth's natural resources at a far faster rate than they can be renewed, a US
environmental expert warned.
The bleak warning was made by Lester Brown,
president and founder of the Washington-based
Earth Policy Institute, who has published his
findings in a United Nations funded book.
"We are releasing carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere faster than the earth can absorb it,
creating a greenhouse effect," Brown said.
"Our existing economic output is based in part on
cutting trees faster than they can grow, overpumping acquifers, and draining
rivers dry. On much of our cropland, soil erosion exceeds new soil
formation. We are taking fish from the ocean faster than they can
reproduce," he cautioned.
"We are creating a bubble economy, an economy whose output is artificially
inflated by drawing down the earth's natural capital," Brown wrote in his
book which was funded by the United Nation's Population Fund.
"Each year the bubble grows larger as our demands on the earth expand.
The challenge for our generation is to deflate the global economic bubble
before it bursts."
Brown explained that economic bubbles are not new, and recalled the
Internet bubble of 2000 and Japan's real estate bubble of 1989.
Unlike those bubbles, however, Brown warned that if the global economic
bubble bursts, "it will affect the entire world" with repercussions for the
whole planet.
In order to avoid this, Brown said political action must be taken immediately
to reduce water consumption to a more sustainable level.
He also called on governments to address population stability, particularly in
developing countries, as well as urging them to stabilize industrial
emissions.
In sum, "avoiding the damaging effects of higher temperatures on crop yields
means moving quickly to stabilize climate," he said adding "I suggest
cutting global carbon emissions in half by 2015."
Brown's book, "Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in
Trouble," has been published by W.W. Norton in New York and London.
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