Earth Policy Institute – Building a Sustainable Future

Lester R. Brown
President

”World on Edge details the vice closing around us: a quadruple squeeze of global warming and shortages in food, water and energy. Then it explains the path out—and how little time we have left to take that path. Got anything more important to read than that?” —Peter Goldmark, former head of the Port authority of New York and New Jersey, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, and CEO of the International Herald Tribune

Welcome to Earth Policy Institute, dedicated to planning a sustainable future as well as providing a roadmap of how to get from here to there.

Plan B is a plan to replace the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy with a new economic model. Instead of being based on fossil fuels, a Plan B economy will be powered by abundant sources of renewable energy: wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower, and biofuels. Read more...

Earth Policy Research | featured release

January 31, 2012

2011: A Year of Weather Extremes, with More to Come

The global average temperature in 2011 was 14.52 degrees Celsius (58.14 degrees Fahrenheit). According to NASA scientists, this was the ninth warmest year in 132 years of recordkeeping, despite the cooling influence of the La Niña atmospheric and oceanic circulation pattern and relatively low solar irradiance. Since the 1970s, each subsequent decade has gotten hotter—and 9 of the 10...