The second in a three-part interview with economist Nicholas Stern on climate policy. Read the first part, in which he argued that failure to address global warming could eventually lead to World War Three.

Nicholas Stern, one of the world’s most prominent climate economists, believes that the fight against global warming will lead to the next industrial revolution.

In the second part of an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress, Stern describes the scale of the challenge to wean civilization off its dependence of unsustainable fossil fuels. Since the consequences of failure are on the almost unimaginable scale of global war, this challenge is a necessary one. Stern is actually inspired by the scope of action, recognizing that the investment to transform the global economy to be cleaner, safer, and healthier will unleash a new industrial revolution:

We essentially, if we’re to give us say any reasonable chance, call it fifty-fifty, for two degrees centigrade as the limit on the temperature increase — of course, it’s only a probability. Nothing is certain in risk management. If we were to try to do that — it’s a bit ambitious from where we are. If we were to try to do that, and I think we should, we would see emissions having to fall from close to fifty billion tons of CO2 equivalent down to below twenty over forty years, between now and 2050. If we manage ourselves sensibly as a world including our climate, of course, in other ways too, you might see world income grow by a factor of three over forty years. So you’ve got to divide emissions per unit of output by three times 2.5: by a factor of seven or eight. Divide by seven or eight.

That, by anybody’s standards, is an industrial revolution.

So, action is to promote an industrial revolution.

So that’s what we’ve got to look at to see what that means. We probably would have to invest as a world one or two percent more for some decades, maybe two, three decades. We’ll find out how many as we work our way through. You’ll probably have to invest one or two percent of GDP extra, which is quite a significant story. But a pretty minor investment to make for the kind of massive risk reduction I’ve just described.

Watch it:

Although there is growing recognition that “leadership in the new clean energy economy” is “a contest that America cannot afford to lose,” too many politicians in Washington are committed to the defense of the oil and coal industries against any change. The belief that the fight against carbon pollution is a threat to the economy is still pervasive, when the very opposite is the reality.

UPDATE2: Explosion rocks plant, officials assume partial meltdown

UPDATE:  Japanese officials, “are working under the presumption” that there have been partial meltdowns at two reactors, said Yukio Edano, the Chief Cabinet Secretary.

An explosion rocked one of Japan’s nuclear power plants, causing a portion of a building to crumble, sending white smoke billowing into the air and prompting Japanese officials to warn those in the vicinity to cover their mouths and stay indoors.

In what may become the most serious nuclear power crisis since the Chernobyl disaster, the explosion followed large tremors at the Fukushima Daiichi No. 1 reactor Saturday afternoon, injuring four workers who were struggling to get the quake-stricken unit under control.

Earlier, Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency had warned that the reactor, whose cooling system had been crippled by the giant earthquake on Friday, could be nearing a meltdown and that two radioactive substances, cesium and radioactive iodine, had already been detected nearby.

The full extent of the blast remained unclear, but footage on Japanese television showed that the walls of the building housing the reactor crumpled, leaving a skeletal metal frame, according to the Associated Press.

UPDATE:  That’s the WashPost at 8:04 AM EST Saturday.   It doesn’t appear the siting and fail-safe design of this plant was sufficiently thought out, given that Japan is situated along the Ring of Fire, “where large numbers of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur.”

Here’s ABC News, which notes in its sub-hed “Nuclear Scientists Warn of ‘Very Serious’ Radioactive Event if Japanese Reactor Not Cooled”:

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Yesterday, while the House Republican controlled Energy and Power Subcommittee passed the Upton-Inhofe bill to kill greenhouse pollution rules, a commissioned report by the Navy concluded that climate change will present national security and economic challenges:

U.S. allies and their militaries will face national security challenges similar to those faced by the United States and its naval forces as a result of climate change. [...] Among the many manifestations of climate change projected for the next several decades, sea-level rise is both highly certain to occur and highly certain to come with economic costs. [...] As a result of reduced multiyear ice, the Arctic Ocean is rapidly acquiring the types of maritime activities in the summer months that normally occur elsewhere in the world’s ice-free oceans.

The Department of Defense has also found that global warming poses a threat to national security, and concluded that climate-induced crises could destabilize entire regions and increase the power of terrorist organizations.

The military, as opposed to the climate denying Republicans, have realized that respected scientific bodies across the world have unequivocally concluded that global warming is occuring. Navy Rear Admiral David Tilley, a meteorologist and Navy oceanographer, has said that global warming is real, “an issue that affects our national security,” and the “greatest challenge of the 21st century.”

-Paul Breer

To get daily updates on all things climate and energy, click here.

With sardonic humor, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) mocked yesterday’s markup of legislation to overturn the scientific finding that fossil fuel pollution is causing dangerous climate change.  Brad Johnson has the hilarious story (with video).

Markey, who championed climate legislation that passed the House of Representatives in 2009, protested the energy subcommittee’s consideration of the Upton-Inhofe bill to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules on climate pollution, including its endangerment finding:

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EPA’s Jackson lays out five ‘fictions’ about the agency’s agenda

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson sought Thursday to debunk a series of “fictions” about agency regulations that she said were pushed by “special interests with an investment in the outcome.”

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Coffee production in Colombia and Latin America is plummeting because of rising temperatures and extreme precipitation related to carbon pollution, the New York Times reports. “Coffee production is under threat from global warming, and the outlook for Arabica in particular is not good,” Peter Baker, a coffee specialist, told the Times. “Average temperatures in Colombia’s coffee growing regions have risen nearly one degree in the last 30 years, and in some mountain areas the increase has been double that,” according to Cenicafé, the national coffee research center:

Purveyors fear that the Arabica coffee supply from Colombia may never rebound — that the world might, in effect, hit “peak coffee.” In 2006, Colombia produced more than 12 million of 132-pound bags of coffee, and set a goal of 17 million for 2014. Last year the yield was nine million bags.

The threat of fossil-fueled weather to Colombia is not simply to coffee production, of course — record floods in the past year have left 311 people dead and over two million people affected.

Our guest blogger is Bill Becker

Watching the debate over climate science in Congress these days is like watching butchers, bakers and candlestick makers debate brain surgery.  At the moment, no other conversation in American politics is so filled with willful misconceptions or so large a waste of time.

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Nicholas Stern, one of the world’s most prominent climate economists, believes that failure to address global warming could eventually lead to World War III.  Brad Johnson has the exclusive interview and video.

In 2006, he produced the Stern Review on behalf of the British government, clearly laying out the potentially catastrophic economic consequences of failing to address climate pollution. Since then, the scientific understanding of the damages from global warming has grown, and Stern has warned that his report “underestimated the risks.”

In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress, Stern described his current understanding of the stark consequences of inaction, which defy the scope of standard economic language. If no global policy to cut carbon pollution is enacted, there is about a 50 percent risk that global temperatures would rise above levels not seen for 30 million years by 2100, an extraordinary rate of change [see M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F "” with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F].

The “potentially immense” consequences of this radical transformation of our planet, Stern explained, include the “serious risk of global war”:

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