Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era by Amory B. Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute

Oil and coal have built our civilization, created our wealth, and enriched the lives of billions. Yet their rising costs to our security, economy, health, and environment are eroding and starting to outweigh their benefits. The tipping point where alternatives work better and compete on cost is not decades in the future: it is here and now. And that tipping point has become the fulcrum of economic transformation.

Reinventing Fire offers market-based actionable solutions integrating transportation, buildings, industry, and electricity. Built on Rocky Mountain Institute’s http://rmi.org 30 years of research and collaboration in all four sectors, Reinventing Fire maps pathways for running a 158%-bigger U.S. economy in 2050 but needing no oil, no coal, no nuclear energy, one-third less natural gas, and no new inventions. This would cost $5 trillion less than business-as-usual—in addition to the value of avoiding fossil fuels’ huge but uncounted external costs. 

Due Diligence: An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance by David Roodman 

The idea that small loans can help poor families build businesses and exit poverty has blossomed into a global movement. The concept has captured the public imagination, drawn in billions of dollars, reached millions of customers, and garnered a Nobel Prize. Radical in its suggestion that the poor are creditworthy and conservative in its insistence on individual accountability, the idea has expanded beyond credit into savings, insurance, and money transfers, earning the name microfinance. But is it the boon so many think it is?

Readers of David Roodman's openbook blog http://blogs.cgdev.org/open_book/  will immediately recognize his thorough, straightforward, and trenchant analysis. Due Diligence, written entirely in public with input from readers, probes the truth about microfinance to guide governments, foundations, investors, and private citizens who support financial services for poor people. In particular, it explains the need to deemphasize microcredit in favor of other financial services for the poor.

The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity by Jeffrey Sachs 

In a forceful, impassioned, and personal voice, Sachs offers not only a searing and incisive diagnosis of our country’s economic ills but also an urgent call for Americans to restore the virtues of fairness, honesty, and foresight as the foundations of national prosperity.

As he has done in dozens of countries around the world in the midst of economic crises, Sachs turns his unique diagnostic skills to what ails the American economy. He finds that both political parties—and many leading economists—have missed the big picture, offering shortsighted solutions such as stimulus spending or tax cuts to address complex economic problems that require deeper solutions. 

By taking a broad, holistic approach—looking at domestic politics, geopolitics, social psychology, and the natural environment as well—Sachs reveals the larger fissures underlying our country’s current crisis. He shows how Washington has consistently failed to address America’s economic needs. He describes a political system that has lost its ethical moorings, in which ever-rising campaign contributions and lobbying outlays overpower the voice of the citizenry. 

Finally, Sachs offers a plan to turn the crisis around, one that will restore America to its great promise. 

Happy reading!

Reah Janise Kauffman

Note: Much of these descriptions come from the publishers’ book blurbs.

One that we hope you will especially like is a mobile website. Our Web Communications Coordinator, Kristina Taylor, took the lead on this initiative, putting in a lot of research and thought on how best to get our research onto mobile devices. She designed the initial pages, which were passed on to the tech and design specialists at Provoc.  Provoc is also the organization that redesigned our website a few years ago.

We are now moving rapidly on completing the mobile website, which should be live in a few weeks. We’ll keep you posted! 

The other change is two-fold and will be mostly invisible. When you order a book from us, it is processed by our in-house “team” of Millicent Johnson. However, the foundation of our in-house publications database started crumbling and so we began looking for an alternative, which is close to completion.

In the meantime, Kristina and Millicent teamed up to look for a new shopping cart solution, which also now is nearing completion. 

As for me, I have been delving into dusty files from 30, 40 and 50 years ago to glean information that Lester can incorporate into his autobiography. One of the treasures has been his report cards! He loved to read and would rush through his homework so he could devour yet another library book. His enthusiasm sometimes resulted in homework errors. Another fun item was finding the sari he brought back from his time in India as an IFYE (International Farm Youth Exchange) in 1956. When he gave his talks on life in the villages of India, he would demonstrate how to wrap a sari, which is how he met his wife, Shirley.

Cheers,

Reah Janise Kauffman

His first stop was Tokyo where he launched the Japanese edition of World on the Edge. The publisher is Diamond Inc., which has a long tradition of publishing books by Lester.

Other than media interviews, the main event in Tokyo was the symposium, World on the Edge, sponsored by Japan for Sustainability, headed by long-term associate Junko Edahiro, Aijinomoto, and Nippon Koa Insurance. Lester gave the keynote to a standing room only (and then some) crowd. We heard later that the feedback from the audience was “overwhelmingly positive.”

Click for larger image.

Lester then went on to Kyoto where he and Klaus Topfer were inducted into the prestigious Earth Hall of Fame Kyoto (see previous blog). The response to his presence in Kyoto was that every bookstore in Kyoto sold out of the Japanese edition of World on the Edge.

From Kyoto, Lester headed to Beijing to launch the Chinese edition of World on the Edge, published by Shanghai Scientific & Technological Education. His first stop was to keynote a conference on alternative fuels at Beihang University’s Energy and Environment International Center, where he was appointed an advisor. Afterwards, he was interviewed by CCTV News. 

In what has become a routine stop for Lester when in Beijing, he gave a presentation at Bookworm Bookstore, one of the gathering places for expats.

Concluding his time in Beijing, Lester spoke to the Foreign Correspondents Club of China at The Netherlands Embassy. His talk, which was well received by the correspondents, was on why food prices may keep rising.

Lester is now back at work on two books, one planned for release this September is entitled Full Planet, Empty Plates.

So stay in touch!

Sincerely,

Reah Janise Kauffman

P.S. JUST IN! The Spanish edition of World on the Edge is available. Copies can be ordered from the Centre of Studies for Sustainable Development (CEID), Carrera 7 # 237 – 04, Bogotá, Colombia Email: info@ceidcolombia.org

A few weeks ago I received a call from Jahad Daneshgahi, a semi-governmental organization that is the publisher of Plan B and other Lester books and is very close to Iran reformists, asking me when the translation of the World on the Edge would be finished. That was the third time they had called to ask this. I apologized for the delay and promised to deliver the edited text soon. This seldom happens in Iran, a country where the rate of book reading is terribly low. Normally it is writers and translators, especially for scientific books, who ask the publishers, many times, and insist a lot to convince them to publish their books. But for Lester books it is different. At the end, the caller said, "People want to know what will happen next." Around two weeks ago Farzaneh and I were invited to a meeting in which three distinguished agronomists and university professors were present. They had selected us to be honorary members of the board of a new organization established to issue licenses for bio farmers. [The first such organization in Iran.] At dinner, Professor Koochaki, one of the most prominent agronomy professors of Iran and author of many academic books, asked me about Plan B goals and said that your books—Lester's books—have been the most impressive books he had ever read in the environment field because they are so "comprehensive." A few months ago I was invited to a conference to talk about environmental ethics. I quoted Mones Sperber, the German psychologist and philosopher, who says “When a society is confronted with a crisis—environmental, social or political, like confronting a despotic government—the best way to get out of it is not to focus on misery, devastation, crime, etc.—bad news—but to show how we can get out of that, to create hope. Then people will move." People want to know what will happen to their life. They need to have a complete picture of what is happening, good or bad, and to know in what direction they should go. This is what Lester provides, and they absorb it with much enthusiasm. There are many scientists whose books are taught at Iran universities, but those who have read Lester's books have a prejudice to that. I am glad that Lester has started writing his autobiography and I think it will have an important effect on environmentalists. As the Board has discussed last year: "Lester has been one of the very first to promote sustainable development and making it popular."  People who have impressed the human community in their real life are the best candidates to write an autobiography. And I am glad that the book will be published by the EPI. I eagerly expect to receive it and start translating immediately. Another important point is that EPI always uses its own human resources for research and writing, so EPI is recognized as an independent center of producing new environmental reports and insight. This is a precious principle for every research institute. We live in a part of the globe where nothing comes to one's mind except bad thoughts! I think that in the coming year the world will be expecting horrific events—environmental and social. I hope they will not destroy everything we have. One of the most important is the food crisis.  The price of food is increasing so rapidly in this country that is worrisome. The price of a loaf of bread which used to be 45 Tooman is now 450 Tooman, ten times more. Also Iran is producing 1 million cars a year. It takes 12 to 14 hours to go from Tehran, the capital, to Chalus on the Caspian Sea, by car on holidays and the distance is only 150 Km [about 93 miles]. The reason is that there are too many cars. Finally I want to thank Lester, and all of you, for the great work that you are doing. We normally post an email each week to all the Iranian NGO's and to our fans and friends, containing an article from EPI or part of the Plan B's books. This is the only thing that can now be done here since nobody reads the existing newspapers. What I receive in response is very encouraging, supportive and comforting. I hope EPI will become more popular day by day and Lester, as one of the most influential thinkers of the world, will guide us to the new routes of breaking the vicious circle of population growth, poverty and environmental degradation. All the best, Hamid

Hamid and others like him are our inspiration. Through their personal sacrifices, they are making a difference. It is largely because of the work of Hamid and Farzaneh that environmental issues are front and center in Iran. They have provided the information.

So, to all who are similarly working, thank you!

Sincerely,

Reah Janise Kauffman

During the first six months of the year, the research team was focused on issues relating to food scarcity. It began with the release in early January of World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse. One of its main themes is the food production bubble, which has been created by unsustainable practices including overpumping aquifers, overplowing land, and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. The question is not whether the food bubble will burst but when.

The book received many favorable reviews, including Ed Crooks of the Financial Times, who called it “a provocative primer on some of the key global issues that businesses will face in the coming decades.”

In addition to posting a comprehensively endnoted edition of World on the Edge on EPI’s website and the immense database supporting the analyses, the research team developed two PowerPoint presentations relating to the book. The first focused on the food bubble, with the second an overview of the key topics and data. EPI’s PowerPoint presentations and data are some of the most downloaded items from the Institute’s website.

Spinoff articles from the book quickly followed, most relating to the food issue. In rapid succession, Lester wrote “The 2011 World Food Crisis,” which Foreign Policy posted on its website. The LA Times Syndicate released “World One Poor Harvest from Chaos” in early March. The Guardian issued two articles by Lester, one in January entitled “Will climate change burst the global 'food bubble'?” and one in April entitled “This will be the Arab world's next battle" referring to water shortages. Meanwhile, the Washington Post published “Can the United States Feed China?” in its Outlook section in March, which was followed by his op-ed, “When the Nile Goes Dry,” in the New York Times in June.

Of special note was a piece Foreign Policy requested he write for its May/June issue on food. His was the cover article, entitled “The New Geopolitics of Food.” The article made three “top news” of the week lists: the Daily Beast, Mother Jones, and Business Insider. It also received more Facebook “likes” than any other Foreign Policy article in 2011: nearly 11,000 likes compared to the next highest of some 7,000. Even Lester’s January article that was posted online garnered 4,666 likes—more than most of Foreign Policy’s other articles.

The Plan B film which aired nationwide on PBS the end of March brought EPI’s work to the attention of Playboy. Shortly after it aired, Lester got a call from an editor at Playboy asking if he could write a piece for the magazine on the failing states issue. The article, entitled "Failed States," ran in the September issue.

The second half of the year, the research team examined energy issues, such as the Keystone XL pipeline, the $50 million gift by Michael Bloomberg to the Sierra Club for its Beyond Coal campaign, and the drop in carbon emissions in the United States from 2007 to 2011.

With October the month when world population would top 7 billion, reporters began contacting the Institute. Brigid Fitzgerald Reading wrote an Eco-Economy Indicator, “World Population Hitting 7 Billion” that was picked up in a number of places and triggered additional media calls. Meanwhile, two articles by the Associated Press and Reuters quoting Lester packed the Institute’s clipping service with close to 600 online articles as of the end of October. Television interviews included Associated Press, Canadian Broadcasting, Canadian TV, and NBC Nightly News. The NBC segment aired not only on the evening program, but the next morning on the local affiliate followed by the weekend program. We also posted a blog discussing this milestone.

Throughout 2011, the team maintained a flow of Plan B Updates, Eco-Economy Indicators, Book Bytes, and Data Highlights—nearly one a week. Twelve Plan B Updates were released, 11 Book Bytes, and three Eco-Economy Indicators (temperature, population, and solar power). A few of the 12 Data Highlights that were released received particular attention, perhaps because of the unusual nature of the material, such as “Growing Goat Herds Signal Growing Grassland Decline,” “Demographics Loom Large in State Failure,” and “Learning From China: Why the Existing Economic Model Will Fail.”

We release all of our information via our listserv as well as posting them for free on our website. As our researchers are busy working on new articles, if you aren't already subscribed on our listserv or RSS feeds, you might want to do so now.

Next blog: our outreach effort.

Cheers,

Reah Janise Kauffman

Cheers!

Reah Janise Kauffman

• There will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night—many of them with empty plates.
• Over the course of a year, we are adding 78 million new people, or an entire Ethiopia.
• Virtually all of the top 20 countries considered to be “failing states” are depleting their natural assets—forests, grasslands, soils, and aquifers—to sustain their rapidly growing populations. And in these countries, over 50 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty.
• Some 1.4 billion people live in extreme poverty.
• Twenty-two percent of the children in the United States—the richest nation in the world—live in poverty. One fifth are chronically hungry.
• Half the world’s people live in countries where water tables are falling as aquifers are being depleted. Since 70 percent of world water use is for irrigation, water shortages translate into food shortages.
• Over 1 billion people in the world are chronically hungry and malnourished, a number that has been increasing in recent years.

As Brigid Fitzgerald Reading wrote in her recent piece World Population Hitting 7 Billion: “Supporting the world’s human population will mean eliminating poverty, transitioning to an economy that is in sync with the earth, and securing every person’s health, education, and reproductive choice. If we do not voluntarily stabilize population, we risk a much less humane end to growth as the ongoing destruction of the earth’s natural systems catches up with us.”

Lester Brown in World on the Edge writes, “we have the technological and financial resources to eradicate poverty. Investments in education, health, family planning, and school lunches are in a sense a humanitarian response to the plight of the world’s poorest countries. But in the economically and politically integrated world of the twenty-first century, they are also an investment in our future.”

To find out more about our global population and solutions, check out these links.
“Population Pressure: Land and Water,” from Plan B 4.0 by Lester Brown

"Eradicating Poverty and Stabilizing Population," from Plan B 4.0 by Lester Brown

Population Connection
See also the wall chart produced by Population Connection

Population Media Center

Population Action International

Article “Are There Too Many People on the Planet?,” National Geographic

7 Billion: It's Time to Talk campaign working to open up the conversation on population to new audiences around the globe

Sincerely,

Reah Janise Kauffman