well i'm sorry but a larger than d.c. here's what's coming up tonight 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 will weigh in on the fragile condition of our planet and possible ways to save us from environmental and economic disasters plus our republican governor starting to feel the backlash against the radical right wing agenda oh group is in the putting will explore 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 internet'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 with great minds i'm joined by one of the leading environmentalists not just in the united states but in the entire world and man who is described by the washington post as one of the world's most influential thinkers and insight has been praised by not just the news media but also congress as well as the president says bill clinton he's the founder of the world watch institute and also founder and president of the earth policy institute it over fifty books on our planet and the environment his most recent is titled world on the edge of an environmental and economic collapse but 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. welcome to the program my pleasure it's

actually not done. ok lester brown who caused it 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 had 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 school for the record right it's great that we have but but your books i would say in fact it was in a book or article you wrote who we will feed china when i was writing last starvation sunlight but it was an article that became a book that that book 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. but anyway we have a feeling of global civilization. what indicators three years how do you know if you're failing we've not had that experience before i mean the samarian south of

my inside it and you know all along the way they're not not recent centers so now we're global civilization so we either make it together or or we go down together. probably the best single indicator. of whether civilization or global civilization is failing or not is failing states i mean if you are looking a cold war civilization and you're asking the question you know is it failing or could it fail the first thing we 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 you're by a year and it raises the rather disturbing question of how many failing states before we have eventually ili civilization essentially so what what provokes the failure of states will their mounting stresses on governments everywhere now its resources its water shortages and scarcity it's rising from prices 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 that somalia somalia. in terms of population is a big country is very small i mean it's not a country anymore it's a place on the map that there is no government you can send your bason or present his credentials not on there's nothing there that they've created enormous having and the world with their their piracy i mean last year when something like a half billion dollars or seventeen countries now. that have naval units in the. gulf of suez of the indian ocean off the east coast of africa trying to protect ships. and not successfully fields from fields that.

i see a variety of possible tipping points nuclear power look at what we're seeing is the question right now we have two plants nebraska the world was flooded this last week about water shortages overpopulation pollution a 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 a whole bunch of mission states into failure thus creating. a worldwide civilizational collapse if so what do you think they are and what kind of timeline sticker well the indicators i would look at are one what's happening to the economies environmental support systems forests crop plants aquifers histories grasslands throwed you curating places they're nearly crashing since no civilization has ever survived the ongoing destruction of its natural support

systems nor will ours so that's the first level the second level if i were to pick an economic indicator to not much i think would be great prices. if i were to pick a social indicator to watch. and i think it's how it's more about our future than the other to 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 at 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 at that rise. and then the the fourth indicator and in many ways the bottom line in the cage are is the number of failing states in the world today and that list is growing longer and at some point there will be so many failing states and so systems 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 be soon then kate pickett robocall the spirit level the quality trust in the u.k. quality 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 around the world and state by state united states the greater the inequality the higher the rates of teen age her pregnancies s t v mental illness drug abuse is violence it went through like 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 simpler because well one of the one of the causes one of the many causes of the unrest in the arab countries right now. has been the or is the huge gap that's developing between the

lead fuel at the top. and the middle class if you will. if you look at the two most populous countries in the world not the most part is the two largest economies in the world the us and china both really experiencing this now both have very different political systems in the us that top one percent scamming a larger share each year of that of the pie if you will in the middle class has been much the middle class has been stuck for twenty years with no real caves and in living standards and in china we have the same pattern. i mean if i were naming the political party in 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 and and determined to keep off of out of the chinese media reports

on what's happening in the arab countries because they're afraid it will fuel the same sort of unrest. is it too late is it or is it still is there still time for us to engage in positive strategies 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 became to undermine civilization the very fundamental way . i go back and read some of the economic history of world war two. december seventh one thousand forty one very successful japanese attack on pearl harbor are successful in terms of military strategy sunk a good part of us specifically in pearl harbor where they happened to be at anchor . a month later president roosevelt gave

a state of the union address. and which he laid out u.s. arms production goals were 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 i mean we were still going to crush it mode economy at the time. but in the end we exceeded every one of those production goals and what roosevelt and this colleagues 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 state of the union address writing out these extraordinary arms production goals unlike any the world would see me totally overwhelmed anything the germans or japanese and done up until that and cold in the leaders of the old will be a ministry and said because you guys represent 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 producing cars and all these arms to what they didn't know very shortly rose about was going to ban the sale price of cars stay. so from early nine hundred forty two of the under forty for nearly three years you didn't we really we essentially didn't didn't make any course in the united states with it we made everything else and so you're suggesting that we need to be that dramatic and in moving to for example solar power wind power. stop reducing carbon. dealing with. the environment dealing with population you know dealing with political crisis right i mean i remember seeing them footage might have been morning ken burns rubble were two episodes of the twenty four bombers rolling off the assembly line at ford will run on immobile seventy eight acres huge facility

these bombers are just coming on. 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 electricity the world news it's over by the best believe it is and best of all are now vestas as innocent as a spanish public. and other than a some here of siemens and. were making a few here but it's about you you write it you write and talk about plan b. is there planning. business as usual so let's plan a plan a which is kind of let's bumble through and this is what we had up with and and what what type of change. what 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's 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 possible kills to renewable sources of energy and. climate. change is a much more serious issue i think the most people realize and particularly where 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 what it's going to happen to from prices in the years immediately have. it's. i mean we know a few things about how climate change the facts grain production crop ecologists have a rule with each one degree celsius rise in temperature one point eight grease fire

and i. during the growing season lowers cranio 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 the pall of touring a period of rather remarkable climate stability. i mean there was a mini ice age of the thirteenth or fourteenth century but basically for eleven thousand eleven thousand years and cycle culture began we had a rather stable climate system so i grew culture as it exists today was designed to maximize production with that system. we don't have that system anymore it is changing and it's changing year by year and we're getting work stream weather events all over the place flooding droughts fires i mean you name it these are the these are what climate scientists have been warning us about for decades more extreme events i mean it's you know another earthquake here and 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 near

the the the agricultural system the kind of system are more more out of sync with each other. and we can't change the con 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're we're probably in scramble time on the from front and i hadn't realized yet how but focusing on energy 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 the break. but 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 may never find on mainstream news. media so the need for

a political. question more on our team doctor just a. few. feet. back to conversations of great minds i'm joined by lester brown of the leading environmentalists around the world the author of more than fifty books on global global environmental issues its most recent title world on the edge how to prevent

economic and environmental and economic collapse so food prices going up on the one hand were 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 model of deregulation of financial markets and that the banks do stray sickly of taking over our economy and 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 a result of financial position versus genuine supply and demand and at what point is it is supply and demand is 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 by about twenty one million tonnes here the last five years it's been going up by forty one million tons a year we've always had population growth eighty million more ear than 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 hardly. four hundred million tons of grain of that one hundred twenty six million tons are good as are going to ethanol distilleries. so that's one of the studies that at all the united states if you hear people who are shows the opponents about the effect of promising green energy in general when 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 corn on that land to produce ethanol you might get a thousand dollars worth of corn if you have a good yield in a good price you put a wind turbine 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 ethanol and not even an interim step like for example which is so much not the marijuana stuff but very you know they have it for diesel oil it's 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 efficient it's a much cheaper source at this point but i don't think ethanol is from biological

sort of this is 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 would also sort of how do you know directly to. electrifying our transport system which we can do now with light 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 what they've actually coming mostly from wind farms this is this is you're outlining what denmark is doing there is there would be a government of some. in the manufacture of electric cars so that people can and they're getting about it thirty percent of there are thirty now thirty one of about twenty twenty percent of their electricity from it was windows and copenhagen harbor and and they're going to have at least this we did our show from denmark last year i interviewed one of the politicians up with this program together they're investing a few billion dollars in the manufacture electric car so that they can sell extra

city of people at night cheaper and they'll charge their cars that will drive your car to work plug it in and then the states already will buy electricity back from them at a higher price people can actually make a profit on using their car as a source and they can double that pasty without adding more windows so they can and the other important part of this is that. electric motors are three times as efficient as internal combustion engines but what 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 brought it home the engine would be destroyed if that cooling system or if there were a generate so much meat an electric motor you can put your hand on is 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 a doctor a car is 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 photovoltaic it's coming but the cost is not it's not that it's great for rooftops because they're right and and solar thermal and and cells are both coming out of the utilities were building power plants literally out. based on solar thermal energy hand and solar cells in 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 we if we if the market comes to truth about the full costs of burning coal or oil or what have you wind is the winner 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 again 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 jacked the tax up a little to pay for their health care system and all these other externalities were not capturing any of those extra calories exxon mobil and all these other companies they're not paying for the cost of climate change there are plenty of pain for the cause of the cancers in the out as well as in everything else. we're how do we generate the political will in the united states to to have to attach to that the cost of those extra calories to the cost of fossil fuels the biggest one of those indirect cost or extra now at least is climate change by far. and. what i think is going to happen is that rising prices is going to drive this to address

this issue and recognize that 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 from 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 but we have a political system where. the people in the fossil fuel industry have a city of enormous piles of money that they can use to basically bribe politicians or by political debates and there's no natural constituency on the other side of that short of disaster short of recognition of disaster so are we are we basically doomed to hit. a threshold a tipping point 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 sure there's no proof of a link between smoking and health and finally everyone knew the us and they just lost lost face and suddenly i mean we've reached a lawsuit to go to i just i mean two hundred fifty four billion dollars almost one thousand dollars per person in the united states who reached a tipping point on that issue and suddenly everything changed i mean it 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 you know through. the. the the in fukushima right now in japan the nuclear power plants are continuing to actually it seems the situation even 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 in the contact with air or water it explodes. what's the fate and future of nuclear power we just had a report this week up with it was indicated that over seventy five seventy eight nuclear power plants the united states have leaked significant amounts of radiation over the last decade where are we going without 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 doing are they taking it seriously are they investing if you look at wind power they are a lot of capital going into it and to win even oil money and texas going into wind up but if you look for. wall street investing in a nuclear reactor you have to go back because you have thirty seven years you have

to go back way back and they're not going to and there's a reason they well it's not economic and and even with a lot of the costs the motor gone 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 move on taxpayer what is it we spend and in the bada. you know ninety eight billion dollar export allergies again and the cost of insurance against an accident the cost of dismantling a nuclear power plant it's 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 ever for much more so so so. how long we have just

a little personal wealth how long do you see this transition happening in the united states or all the world and. obviously that it's probably going to move much faster than we realize and i mean i think most americans i haven't seen any polls recently but i would guess that overwhelmingly people think nuclear is not here and creasing 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 can you. anticipate them and and is difficult to define them i mean who among us saw the arab spring make them i mean and virtually every country in the arab world who saw the bird and 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 and in the climate area in the united states despite all the back

and forth here in washington i think you're right very pleased to have you with us tonight almost a break but thanks thank you very much for watch this conversation again as well as more conversations with great minds go to our web site of conversations with great minds dot com. it's been a long week so what better time than to rob all i guess panels jamie weinstein kerry fit karen finney and katie join me after the break to debate the week's hottest topics. let's not forget that we had an apartheid museum right.