The biggest risk of all, as I see it, is that the industrial economy will blunder on for a few more years, perhaps even a decade or more, leaving environmental and social devastation in its wake. Once it finally gives up the ghost, hardly anything will be left with which to start over. To mitigate against this risk, we have to create alternatives, on a small scale, that do not perpetuate this system and that can function without it.

1. Reduce the industrialized world's carbon footprint 80 percent by 2050.
2. Prevent the projected 3 billion increase in human population over the next 30 years and actually reduce population by 2110 without famine, disease or war while preserving human dignity.
3. Revise the scientific method so that it better balances the goal of discovery with moral considerations and precaution.
4. Switch our economy to sustainable energy: solar, wind, hydro.
5. Make that economy one in which happiness and success do not require increased consumption.

It's time to accept the creative limits and boundaries that gave us sun-powered Earth in the first place. It's time to change our minds and our lives.

by Bill Vitek | August 20, 2008

Instead of proliferating technology, we ought to confine its use for the sole purpose of erasing the recent past mistakes and not as a means to satisfy future greed.

The renewable and efficiency sectors may account for as many as 1 in 4 jobs by 2030. A large part this promise is based on the reality that green-collar jobs are community-based: because they focus on transforming the immediate natural and built environment, they are harder, in some cases impossible, to offshore.

Carbon productivity must increase from approximately $740 GDP per ton of CO2e today to $7,300 GDP per ton of CO2e by 2050—a tenfold increase. This is comparable in magnitude to the labor productivity increases of the Industrial Revolution. However, the carbon revolution must be achieved in one-third of the time. The macroeconomic costs of this carbon revolution are likely to be manageable, being on the order of 0.6–1.4 percent of global GDP by 2030:

• capturing available opportunities to increase energy efficiency in a cost-effective way
• decarbonizing energy sources
• accelerating the development and deployment of new low-carbon technologies
• changing the behaviors of businesses and consumers
• and preserving and expanding the world's carbon sinks, most notably its forests.

A wide range of energy-market failures currently discourage consumers and businesses from embracing higher energy productivity, and they deter investors from making the capital outlays that would help end users to overcome initial financing barriers. These market failures include fuel subsidies that directly discourage productive energy use, a lack of information available to consumers about the kinds of energy productivity choices that are available to them, and agency issues in high-turnover commercial businesses.

The time for easy is over. We're grown-ups who understand the necessity of hard work and difficult choices. We're ready for frank talk about how we best confront -- in ways rewarding, confusing, creative and hard -- the planetary emergency before us.

If we want to meet all the goals for development of human society, nine billion people are too many for that to happen. The ecological limits of the planet say that, and there's really nothing we can do about it.

Capt. Charles Moore on the seas of plastic

Humanity is no longer living off nature's interest, but drawing down its capital. This growing pressure on ecosystems is causing habitat destruction or degradation and permanent loss of productivity, threatening both biodiversity and human well-being.