Gorbachev Chimes in on Climate Change; Maybe He’ll Go on Tour With Gore
Dec 10, 2009 – Who’s taking the lead in protecting the earth from climate change? Mikhail Gorbachev. You read it right, Mikhail Gorbachev. Read his Op-Ed piece in today’s The New York Times, titled, “We Have a Real Emergency.” He links climate change to “security issues and to increasingly dangerous ethnic and international conflicts; to mass migrations and displacements of people, which are already destabilizing politics and economics; to growing poverty and social inequality; to the water crisis and energy and food shortages.” Read the full Op-Ed piece. I agree with Gorbachev. Population growth is the biggest problem the earth is facing. If we reduce our per capita energy use by 20% in 30 years and we double our poplulation, we’re still up 60%. What about the billions of people with very low standard of living? Read that as bicycles rather than automobiles. We’ll be up over 60% with a 20% per capita reduction.
