Brown that is, perennial millennial nut case, a repeat offender who committed the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute while spamming the world with his doom, gloom, and mistaken analyses and prescriptions. S.O.S. Jamais Cascio at World Whingeing points to Brown's newest book and swoons:

Brown has just come out with Plan B 2.0, updating the original work, and it looks to be one of the better summations of the WorldChanging perspective yet in print . . .

Just like peas and carrots.

This is a representative example of Brown's pervasive confusion.

Like earlier civilizations that got into environmental trouble, we can decide to stay with business as usual and watch our modern economy decline and eventually collapse, or we can consciously move onto a new path, one that will sustain economic progress. In this situation, no action is actually a decision to stay on the decline-and-collapse path.

Rubbish. The future is not a binary system. No one knows what our current "path" is or what business as usual means. What we do know is that Lester's ideas are kaka. The simple minded notion that "we can consciously move onto a new path" reveals profound ignorance of human social systems as well as natural systems of every type. It's steam age thinking, clockwork industrial thinking that was mistaken when it was fresh 150 years ago. It smells very, very over ripe at this late date.

Business as usual for humanity means surviving and thriving through the genius of diverse and decentralized experimentation. In the distant past there was no alternative since transportation and communication technologies were too primitive to do anything else. Allowing no centralized controls, and firmly refuting the antiquated ideas of those like Brown and WorldWhingeing, can be seen as a decision to continue using successful methods that have served well in the past. But it isn't just sticking to the tried and true, we have an ever better understanding of why these evolved methods work. But really, the whole trope of "we can decide" is just stupid. There's no we that can do this deciding and ever fewer even want one as the totalitarian ideals of past centuries - tarted up tribal thinking - appeal to an ever smaller sect of reactionaries.