well i'm starvin to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture for this friday's edition of conversations with great minds i'm joined by world renowned environmentalist and author dr lester brown he'll weigh in on the fragile condition of our planet and possible ways to save us from the fire of mental and economic disaster plus our republican governor starting to feel the backlash against the radical right wing agenda oh group is in the putting the explorer new numbers of the like the g.o.p.'s plummeting approval ratings in our weekly rumble and finally if you have a problem with the recent spate of hacker attacks then blame reagan and tonight's daily take i'll tell you why the rise of activism coincides with the fall of real

journalism in america. for tonight's conversations of great minds i'm joined by one of the leading environmentalists not just in the united states but in the entire world a man who is described by the washington post as one of the world's most influential thinkers and is inside has been praised by not just the news media but also congress as well as the president as is bill clinton he's the founder of the world watch institute also founder and president of the earth policy institute he's written over fifty books on our planet me environment his most recent is titled world on the edge out of an environmental and economic collapse with our environment the midst of turmoil and uncertain future ahead he's the man i want to listen to that's why it's an item pleased to have here in the studio with me dr lester brown welcome. approach my pleasure it's actually not dr ok lester brown

cause me and i got honorary degrees together once an ohio state really and he of course being an actor wouldn't have a ph d. and i have a head research institute for thirty five years would have in reality bill cosby does have a p.h.d. in education university of massachusetts i don't have a state for the record right but it's clear we have what your books i will say in fact it was a book or article you wrote we will feed china when i was writing my starvation some like that it was an article that became a book that broke so deeply influenced my thinking and in the writing that is that you have influenced so many people in so many ways over so many years. and we have a feeling quotable civilization. would indicate how do you know if you're failing we've not had that experience before i mean the samarian side of

the mayan side it made you know all along the way but not now recent centers so now we're a global civilization so we either make it together or are we go down together. probably the best single indicator. of whether civilization global civilization is failing or not is failing states i mean if you are looking at global civilization and you're asking the question you know is it failing or could it fail the first thing you would look forward to is that the weak parts to see if they're failing and in fact they are the list if they only states it's getting longer now year by year and it raises the rather disturbing question of how many failing states before we have eventually ili civilization especially so what what provokes the failure of states. well there are mounting stresses on governments everywhere now it's resources it's water shortages and scarcity it's rising from

prices it's climate change it's rising oil prices the prospect of peak oil and peak water coming at about the same time so there are a whole series of stresses building on governments now and the weaker ones are beginning to break down in the face of this stress i mean a classic example is somalia somalia. in terms of population is a two bit country is very small i mean it's not a country anymore it's a place on the map but there's no government or you can send your bason or present his credentials that are on there's nothing there but they've created enormous having and the world with their their piracy in the last year were in something like a half billion dollars there are seventeen countries now that have neighbor units in the the gulf of suez of the indian ocean off the east coast of africa trying to protect ships. and not successfully feels for the bills that.

i see a variety of possible tipping points to clear power look at what we're seeing and focus shimmer right now we have two plants nebraska that were on this flood this last week water shortages overpopulation pollution variety of natural disasters particular those provoked by global warming do you see any of those as critical tipping points that could be the thing that flips the whole bunch of nation states into failure those creating. a worldwide civilizational collapse if so what do you think they are what kind of timelines typically well the indicators i would look at are one what's happening to the economy's environmental support systems forests crop plants aquifers fisheries graphs. times the road you curating in all cases there really crashes no civilization has ever survived the ongoing destruction of its natural support systems nor will ours so

that's the first level and second level if i were to pick an economic indicator to watch i think the grain prices. if i were to take a social indicator to watch that i think will tell us more about our future than the other be the number of hungry people in the world that was declining during the closing decades of the last century cut down about eight hundred twenty five million if the turn of the century and started rising it has risen rather rapidly in the last few years it's now over a billion it's climbing and there's nothing in prospect to address that that that that rise. and then the the fourth indicator and in many ways the bottom line indicator is the number of failing states in the world and that risk is scrolling longer and at some point there will be some of the failing states and the whole system begin to break down we don't know where that will be we haven't been here

before this is this is new territory which it will persevere make a picket rope of called spirit level the equality trust in the u.k. the trust or the u.k. i think it is and there are fundamental hypothesis was that the major a variable that produced all of the social ills was inequality that the greater inequality was and they did it both nation by nation rather world and state by state united states the greater the inequality the higher the rates of teen age her pregnancies s.t.d. is mental illness drug abuse is violence they went through it fifteen social indices. you did not include that your list where you were do you think that that fits in all of this is that it is that sometime or cause well one of the one of the causes one of the many causes of be unrest in the arab countries right now. has been the or is the huge gap that's developing between the few at the top.

and the middle class if you will. if you look at the two most populous countries in the world not most parties the two largest economies in the world and the us and china both are experiencing this now both have very different political systems in the us that top one percent skinning a larger share each year of that of the pie if you will in the middle class has been much of the middle class has been stuck for twenty years with no real gains and in living standards and in china we have the same pattern. i mean if i were naming the political party of china today i would call it the communist party i'd call it the capitalist party i mean they're very good capitalist but wealth is accumulating at the top and they're beginning to face the same stresses and they're very worried about the effect them and and determined to keep off of out of the chinese media reports on what's happening and the arab countries because

they're afraid it would fuel the same sort of resting. is it too late is it or is it still is there still time for us to engage in positive strategies that that. you know your plan b. in the us i don't think it's too late. but i also think time may be our scarcest resource now. when i begin to realize how much we need to do to turn trends around before they begin to undermine civilization the very fundamental way. i go back and read some of the economic history of world war two. the sump are seven thank you for your very successful japanese attack on pearl harbor course obsessed with your terms and military strategy sunk a good part of the us pacific fleet in pearl harbor where they happen to be at anchor. a month later president roosevelt gave the state of the in your address.

and which he laid out us arms production goals we're going into a major war fighting on two fronts in asia and europe. he said we're going to produce forty five thousand tanks sixty thousand planes a few thousand ships and people couldn't relate to those numbers on the move still going to prussian mode economy at the time. but in the end we exceeded every one of those production goals and what roosevelt and this college realized when they were laying out these goals was that at that time the largest concentration of industrial power in the world was in the u.s. automobile industry so after stage of the union address laying out these extraordinary arms production goals unlike any of the world that same totally overwhelmed anything with germans or japanese that got up until that and cold in the leaders of the old will be able to stream instead because you guys are such a large share of our productive capacity we're going to rely heavily on you without

this reach these arms production goals and said well mr president we're going to do everything we can basically be a stretch to producing cars and all these arms to what they didn't know the very shortly rose about was going to ban the sale price of cars. yes so from early one thousand nine hundred eighteen of the under forty for nearly three years you didn't we censor didn't didn't make any course in the united states or made it we made everything else and so you're suggesting that we need to be that dramatic in in moving to for example solar power wind power. stop producing carbon. and dealing with. the environment dealing with population dealing with political crisis right i mean i remember seeing film footage might have been one of ken burns reading or two episodes of b. twenty four bombers rolling off the assembly line that words will run automobile

seventy eight acres it's a huge facility these bombers are just coming out. and i wonder you know we have so much slack in the automobile industry today why not produce wind turbines on the sunday times. a few million winter because we can generate all the right person in the world knew it's over by for the best believe it is and best of our kind of bestest as a listener and a spanish company. and other than a some parent siemens. where we're making a few here but it's a little you write it you write and talk about plan b. is there plenty. business as usual so let's plan a plan a which is kind of let's bumble through and this is what we ended up with and and what what's high profile change. where is the pressure point we've identified a bunch of different pressure points are what's the one that if you were going to

do a roosevelt ford airplanes tanks thing what would be the place where you would put that energy. i think. it would be an energy it would be and and very quickly shifting from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. climate. change is a much more serious issue i think for most people realize and particularly work food security is concerned and if i were to pick a single indicator that i think it's going to change our thinking in this country it will be one that's going to happen different prices in the years immediately have. its. i mean we know a few things about how climate change the effects grain production crop ecologists have a rule of thumb each one degree celsius rise in temperature one point eight degrees

fahrenheit. during the growing season lower screen yos by about ten percent we we saw that in spades in russia last summer. but more importantly agriculture as it exists in the world today evolved during a period of rather remarkable climate stability. i mean there was a mini ice age is the thirteenth or fourteenth century but basically for eleven thousand eleven thousand years since i quit culture began we've had a rather stayed what climate system so agriculture as it exists today was designed to maximize production with that system. we don't have that system anymore and it's not changing and there's changing year by year and we're getting here extreme weather events all over the place flooding droughts fires i mean you name it these are the these are what pundits scientists and the warning us about for decades more extreme events i mean it's you know another earthquake here or there didn't sound like that much but in fact it's a big change so what's happening in the world today is that with each passing year

the the the agricultural system the climate system are more murky out of sync with each other. and but we can't change the climate can't change the agricultural system to fit the climate system because we don't know exactly what the changes will be in the climate system so we have to wait but it's a moving target it keeps changing all the time and so i think we were probably in scramble time on the from front i hadn't realized yet how but i see now that our g we can stabilize we're talking with with lester brown we'll have more of our conversations with great minds with lester brown right after her. web site gets twenty four seven live streaming news towns what to do about the ongoing financial hardship unlimited free high quality videos for download. and stories you never find on mainstream news. so

a family or a political. person more on our team talked. face . to. face. back to conversations of great minds i'm joined by lester brown one of the leading environmentalist's around the world the author of more than fifty books and globe or global environmental issues is most recent title world on the edge how to

prevent economic and environmental and economic collapse so for prices going up on the one hand we're seen in fact right now we're seeing food prices going up the commodity bubble and yet they're going up along with things like gold prices which we're not. some would argue we have a scarcity of but you know there is another school of thought which suggests that what's happening is that because of the whole naugle of deregulation of financial markets and that the banks do is basically if taken over our economy that the rise in food prices is just another bubble. to what extent do you think that the rise in food prices that we're seeing around the world right now is a bubble the result of financialization versus genuine supply and demand and at what point is it is supply and demand just going to overwhelm any possibility of financial markets manipulating. the world's farmers are scrambling now to keep up

with the growth in demand. a decade ago world grain demand was rising but out twenty one million tons a year the last five years it's been going up by forty one million tons here we've always had population growth eighty million larry that we have rising affluence and maybe three billion people trying to move up the food chain consuming more grain intensive livestock that's and thirdly we have huge amounts of grains going to produce fuel for cars in this country last year we harvest. four hundred million tons of grain of that one hundred twenty six million pounds are good as are going to ethanol distilleries. so that's one of the studies that we're at that all the united states are you can you hear people who are showing the opponents of ethanol back to opponents of green energy in general but all that's terrible it's you know subsidized by the experience that it's a very inefficient is are you suggesting that that ethanol is in fact part of the

food problem or it is and it's not a it's not an official source of fuel i mean just a quick example if you have an acre of land in northern iowa you can go crawl on corn on that land to produce ethanol you might get a thousand dollars worth of corn if you have a good deal on a good price you put a winter been on that acre of land and you can produce at least three hundred thousand dollars worth of electricity here so he that tricity is the way to go not happening and not even an interim step like for example you know which is so much about the marijuana stuff that you know the hunt for diesel oil is so much it's i believe the most efficient plant in in this climate for converting sunlight into right diesel fuel but the economics of producing ethanol from. from fibrous plants is just not there yet corn has still much more if it's a much cheaper source at this point but i don't think ethanol is from biological

sources as useful as it's going to be part of the competition areas and so what we produce the electricity and then we convert that to hydrogen for example without are also seraglio directly to electrifying our transport system which we do now with like rail and subways here in washington for example and moving toward plug in hybrids and all the electric cars run on everything on electricity from from the lectures to becoming mostly from wind farms this is this is you're outlining what denmark is still there is where the government is so the. as in the manufacture of electric cars so that people can and they're getting about what thirty percent of there are thirty not thirty or so above twenty little book from a percent of their electricity from that was windmills and copenhagen harbor and and they're going to have at least this we did a show from denmark last year i interviewed one of the politicians about this program together they're investing a few billion dollars in the manufacture of your car so that they can sell

a tricity of people at night cheap and they'll charge their cars then they drive their car to work plug it in and then the state until it will buy the electricity back from them at a at a higher price people can actually make a profit on using their car as a storage system they can double their capacity without adding more windows and the other important part of this is that. electric motors are three times as efficient as internal combustion engines and i mean internal combustion engines produce mostly heat i mean so much heat that if you didn't have a cooling system in your car by the time you got it from the showroom a new car and got it home the engine would be destroyed if that cooling system right there were a generates so much heat an electric motor you can put your hand out i mean it's warm enough something's happening but it doesn't generate all the c so it's not extraordinary efficiency if you like trick motors versus internal combustion engines that really makes cars very appealing and if we were to run our cars on

electricity from wind farms plugging in at night as you said the gasoline equivalent costs would be less than a dollar a gallon right now right now using existing technology for wind and what about p.v. solar. it's coming but the cost is not is it's not it's great for rooftops because they're right and and solar thermal and and photovoltaic cells are both coming at the utility scale we're building power plants literally out. based on solar thermal energy have and solar cells and california and arizona but by and large wind is is now our cheapest source of energy and especially if we have a carbon tax if we if we if the market causes the truth about the full costs of burning coal or oil or what have you wind is the winner well and in fact i think this is one of the big political issues both worldwide and in the united states and

in other countries they understand externalities that with the fact that there are costs associated with a given back to denmark where we were there they have i believe the highest tax on gasoline in the e.u. and they said this politician told us that in part they realize that people get cancer from breathing gas fumes so they jack the tax up a little more to pay for their health care system and all these other extra now if we're not capturing those extra calories exxon mobil and all these other companies they're not paying for the cost of climate change that are playing for pain for the cause of the cancers and the asthma's and everything else. we are how do we generate the political will in the united states to to have to attach the cost of those externalities to the cost of fossil fuels the biggest one of those indirect cost or extra now excuse is climate change by far. and. what i think it's going to happen is not rising from price it's going to drive this to address this issue

and to recognize we've got to get out of fossil fuels in a hurry and the simplest way to do it is simply to lower income taxes and raise the tax on carbon so we don't change the amount of tax we pay on april fifteenth the total is the same but we we make labor cheaper which means we can create jobs more easily and we make carbon more expensive which makes it profitable both to invest in energy efficiency and also it will accelerate the shift into wind power solar power geothermal power but we have a political system where. the people in the fossil fuel industry have enormous piles of money that they can use to basically by politicians or by political debates and there's no natural constituency on the other side of that short of disaster short of recognition of distressed or so are we are we basically dooms to hit. a threshold which it would put a crash point before we do something you know fifteen years ago the most powerful

lobby in washington was the tobacco lobby. that's interesting. no longer i mean you know remember the executives testifying on here if there's no proof of a link between smoking and health and finally everyone knew the roughs and they just lost lost face and suddenly it was lisa was it to the large just i mean two hundred fifty four million dollars almost a thousand dollars person in the united states who reached tipping point on that issue and suddenly everything changed i mean was almost overnight and so you think you expect the same thing will happen with regard to this so-called debate on climate change and food. be. the be in fukushima right now in japan been the nuclear power plants are continuing to actually it seems the situation meeting getting worse and then there's a fast breeder reactor in the country that's got

a three ton piece of the reactor that's fallen down into the core there freaked out about it's a sodium cooled and so that gets to make contact with air or water it explodes. what's the fate and future of nuclear power we just had a real report this week up with was that indicated that over seventy five seventy eight nuclear power plants in the united states have leaked significant amounts of radiation over the last decade where are we going with that if you're talking about energy i think you know where. one of the things i do when i'm looking trying to evaluate a technology is to look at wall street and see what they're getting are they taking it seriously are they investing if you look at wind power they are a lot of capital going into into wind even oil money and texas going into wind but if you look for. wall street investing in a nuclear reactor you have to go back because we have these other bits you have to

go back way back and they're not going to and there's a reason they won't it's not economic and and even with a lot of the costs i'm loaded on consumers instead of rate payers for example if we were to include all the cost of nuclear power in the price of electricity including the cost of disposing of nuclear waste which the industry tries on load on taxpayer whether that we spend in in in in nevada. you know ninety eight billion dollars start allergies again and the cost of insurance against an accident the cost of dismantling the nuclear power plants more not if you put all of those things on the table at the beginning so we can see the full cost nuclear doesn't get out of the starting blocks it's much more expensive than any other form much more so so so . how long we have just

a minute or so left how long do you see this transition happening in the states or other world and but obviously it's probably going to move much faster than we realize and i mean i think most americans now i haven't seen a post recently but i would guess that overwhelmingly people think nuclear is not here and increasing if nuclear is not and if climate change is becoming such a threat to our day to day existence of existence in terms of rising food prices i think we're going to see a tipping point i mean tipping points are interesting because you. anticipate them then and is difficult to define them i mean who among us saw the arab spring but i mean you know i mean virtually every country in the arab world who saw the burning more coming out who saw the demise of the back of industry. tipping points are interesting because they're difficult when dissipate and they often come unexpectedly i think we're moving toward a tipping point in the in the climate area in the united states despite all the

back and forth here in washington i think you're right i'm very pleased to carry with us tonight almost a great thanks thank you very much to watch this conversation again as well as more conversations with great minds go to our website conversations with great minds by cop. it's been a long week so what better time than to wrong all i guess panels jamie weinstein kerry fit karen finney and katie out which join me after the break to debate the week's hottest topics. let's not forget that we have been apart parties even greater.