Wanted: world environmental leader

Next president must emulate FDR, have courage to force change

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (MarketWatch) — To save the world, we need a leader who will make a stand as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did during World War II and force change upon us.

That pretty much sums up the conclusions of many of the world’s best thinkers who gathered last week at the Aspen Environment Forum. The meeting, held over the course of three days, included talks and discussions with E.O. Wilson, the eminent biologist; Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy and Worldwatch Institutes; Amory Lovins, chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute; and a host of scientists and leaders from government, the private sector and nonprofit organizations.

“Saving civilization is not a spectator sport,” Brown says. He says we must enact change for a better world now and lays out his thesis in a new book, “Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.”

Meanwhile, Lovins took a line straight out of “The Six Million Dollar Man:” “We have the technology to fix this.” Already, he says, we can “wring more work out of the energy we have.” Why don’t we, for instance, decouple utility profits from sales? Or create incentives for consumers to purchase more fuel-efficient vehicles? Commanding more efficiency from just those two sectors would cure two-fifths of the world’s carbon emissions problem, he says.

MarketWatch