Study Calls for a Future of Fewer Autos, Births : Environment: The Worldwatch Institute says the next 40 years must see the end of the ‘throw-away society.’ But the group also notes some signs of hope.

For the human race to hold its own, the next 40 years must see an abandonment of fossil fuels, a downturn in birth rates, an end to forest and farmland destruction and a rejection of the “throw-away society,” according to the Worldwatch Institute.

No country in the world now approaches the minimal conditions necessary to support a sustainable world economy, the institute reports in “State of the World 1990,” its seventh annual assessment of the global environment.

Even so, such conditions can be satisfied with current technology, producing a strikingly more liveable society in the process, according to the institute’s 253-page study, which is being released today in about 20 languages.

“If we succeed in building a sustainable society, we will do so within the next 40 years,” said Lester R. Brown, the institute’s president and director of the report. “If we have not succeeded by 2030, environmental deterioration and economic decline will be feeding on each other, causing social structures to disintegrate.”

Based in Washington, Worldwatch Institute is a nonprofit organization that monitors global economic and environmental trends and attempts to project their future impact. The institute is supported by many of the world’s major charitable foundations.

The study by Brown and co-authors Christopher Flavin and Sandra Postel is not intended so much to forecast the course of events in the coming four decades as it is to describe the requirements of a society that can continue supporting succeeding generations.

Saying that “it is already accepted that continuing heavy reliance on fossil fuels will cause catastrophic changes in climate” and that nuclear power will remain politically unacceptable, the study envisions a massive shift to solar power in the years ahead.

“By 2030,” it states, “solar panels will heat most residential water around the world. A typical landscape will have thousands of collectors sprouting from rooftops much as television antennas do today.”

Noting that a solar power plant producing 80 megawatts of electricity went into operation in the Mojave Desert last year, the study envisions a time when “solar thermal plants may stretch across the deserts of the United States, North Africa and Central Asia.”

As the technology becomes widespread, it notes, these regions could become large exporters of electricity.

The conversion to solar and wind-generated electrical power will be driven less by the gradual depletion of coal and oil deposits than by the need to limit pollution of the atmosphere by carbon emissions, the study says.

World carbon emissions now reportedly exceed 5 billion tons per year and are increasing at a rate that will reach more than 12 billion tons by 2030. The institute contends that the level must be reduced to 2 billion tons per year to avoid a destructive warming of the atmosphere.

Consequently, the institute envisions not only a gradual move away from coal-fired and oil-fired power plants, but a significantly reduced role for gasoline-powered automobiles in industrialized countries.

Light trains would connect neighborhoods, computerized shopping from home would replace treks to the mall and daily trips to the office would give way to occasional visits. And instead of 25 miles per gallon, the institute suggests that cars would average 100 miles per gallon.

“Automobiles will undoubtedly still be in use four decades from now, but their numbers will be fewer and their role smaller,” the report states. “Within cities, only electric or clean hydrogen-powered vehicles are likely to be permitted, and most of these will be highly-efficient ‘city cars.’ The energy to run them may well come from solar power plants.”

Brown and his colleagues not only see the world of 2030 with fewer automobiles, they also assume that the global population will be about 8 billion, or roughly 1 billion fewer people than the figure projected by the United Nations.

The lower estimate reflects the contention that some countries with current birth rates that would double or triple their populations in 40 years--such as Ethiopia, Nigeria and India--have so overwhelmed their natural resources that such growth cannot be sustained.

“Either these societies will move quickly to encourage smaller families and bring birth rates down, or rising death rates from hunger and malnutrition will check population growth,” the report predicts. It suggests that by 2030, the global population may even be declining.

But even if its somewhat optimistic assumption about the population proves correct, the institute acknowledges that much of the planet will face “monumental challenges” to produce sufficient food.

In the more affluent nations of the world, the institute foresees a trend away from the eating of meat and the feeding of grain to livestock.

By 2030, the authors say, global livestock herds will be much smaller, and animals still raised for slaughter will be fed fodder from tree farms rather than allowed to overgraze the land, which in some cases speeds the process of turning grassland into desert.

As the last decade of the 20th Century begins, Brown said, not one country on Earth comes close to having what the institute would consider a sustainable economy.

Still, there are reasons to be optimistic, he said.

Populations are stable in 13 European nations, for example, and birth control programs have drastically reduced the birth rates in China and Thailand. Solar water heating is commonplace in Japan and Israel, and the process of deforestation has been reversed in South Korea. In Norway and Brazil, half of the energy consumed comes from renewable sources.

The most hopeful sign, according to the authors of the report, is the increasing evidence of worldwide public awareness of threats to the environment and an appreciation that the changes anticipated in the study cannot be long delayed.

“The alternative,” Flavin said, “is a world in which growing population, spreading deserts, rapidly changing climate and increased pollution leads to economic decline, beginning with the poorest countries but extending to them all.”