Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to save civilization

This publication argues that the roots of the current environmental dilemmas lie in the enormous growth of the human enterprise over the last century. The author presents an alternative plan to save civilisation, which is ambitious not only in scale, but also in the speed with which it must be implemented. The book is the third in a series of three Plan B books by the same author, the first of which was published in 2004.

"Plan B" is described as an alternative to the business as usual approach, and one which requires undertaking several actions simultaneously, including eradicating poverty, stabilizing population, and restoring the earth’s natural systems.

Following an introductory chapter, the book outlines the principal environmental, demographic, and economic challenges facing civilization. It is argued that the scale and complexity of these issues has no precedent.

The following seven chapters outline Plan B, the roadmap of where the world needs to go and how to get there. The author outlines an ambitious plan that includes cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020,  which he argues is achievable with existing technologies. Various examples are given of successful models that make up the various components of Plan B. These include:

• electricity generation from wind farms in Denmark and geothermal use in Iceland
• small-scale dairy production in India
• fish farming production in China
• restructuring of the transport system in Curitiba, Brazil

The author concludes that the key to building a global economy that can sustain economic progress is the creation of an honest market, one that tells the ecological truth. To create an honest market, he argues, there needs to be a restructuring of the tax system by reducing taxes on work and raising them on various environmentally destructive activities to incorporate indirect costs into the market price.