The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future (36 page)

Many of the transformations I’ve presented in this book are negative, and most that are positive exact a toll someplace else. And as painfully demonstrated by the 2008-09 economic contraction, in a globally integrated world, even “winners” suffer pain from the losers. More hydrocarbon development risks not just local damages to northern ecosystems, but global damages through still more greenhouse gases released. For most NORC residents, the downside of milder winters is more rain instead of snow, making them dark, wet, and depressing; while farther north it means conversion of land that is barely livable to land that is hardly livable. The 23.5° tilt in the Earth’s axis of rotation commands that there will always be darkness and cold at high latitudes, even if climate warming causes Februaries in Churchill to warm up to Februaries in Minneapolis.

The identified trends have strong inertia, but none are inevitable. The projections of computer models are not edicts, but bent by social choices. Africa’s violent cities can be changed. Even the four global forces of demographics, resource demand, globalization, and climate change, being human-generated, must—by definition—lie within human control. And through personal choices, everyone has the ability to shape the perceptions and choices of others. Recent studies, using public data posted on Facebook, have shown that individual actions disseminate unexpected influence over strangers by blazing quickly and deeply through extended social networks. Put simply, a surprising number of one’s personal decisions are swayed not deliberately by an advertising billboard, but unintentionally by an unknown friend of a friend of a friend. So each day, by choosing the red pill or blue, we also shape the actions of others. And in turn, the course of history.

To me, the old debates of Malthus and Marx, of Ehrlich and Simon, miss the point. The question is not how many people there are versus barrels of oil remaining, or acres of arable land, or drops of water churning through the hydrologic cycle. The question is not how much resource consumption the global ecosystem can or cannot absorb. It’s moot to wonder whether the world should optimally hold nine billion people or nine million, colonize the sea, or all move to Yakutsk. No doubt we humans will survive anything, even if polar bears and Arctic cod do not. Perhaps we could support nine hundred billion if we choose a world with no large animals, pod apartments, genetically engineered algae to eat, and desalinized toilet water to drink. Or perhaps nine hundred million if we choose a wilder planet, generously restocked with the creatures of our design. To me, the more important question is not of capacity, but of desire:
What kind of world do we want?

NOTES

1
The October 2008 median home price in Los Angeles County, California, was $355,000.
Los Angeles Times,
November 19, 2008.

2
Personal communication with Marsha Branigan, Manager, Wildlife Management Environment and Natural Resources, Inuvik, NWT, December 4, 2007.

3
“Hairy Hybrid: Half Grizzly, Half Polar Bear,”
MSNBC World Environment,
May 11, 2006.

4
Of particular relevance to the pizzly story is the recent discovery that transient grizzly bears are now regular visitors to Canada’s Arctic Archipelago, and a small but viable population may be establishing itself in or around Melville Island. See J. P. Doupé, J. H. England, M. Furze, D. Paetkau, “Most Northerly Observation of a Grizzly Bear
(Ursus arctos)
in Canada: Photographic and DNA Evidence from Melville Island, Northwest Territories,”
Arctic
60, no. 3 (September 2007): 271-276. The second hybrid animal was shot April 8, 2010, near the Canadian town of Ulukhaktok. Genetic tests confirmed it was the offspring of a polar-grizzly mother and a grizzly father. “Bear shot in N.W.T. was grizzly-polar hyprid,” CBC News, April 30, 2010,
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2010/04/30/nwt-grolar-bear.html?ref-rsss
; also “Grizzy-polar bear cross confirmed,”
Vancouver Sun,
May 3, 2010; “Tests confirm offspring of hybrid polar-grizzly bear;” CTV News, May 2, 2010.

5
6.1 km/yr average range shift from a quantitative assessment examining historical data for >1,046 species. C. Parmesan, G. Yohe, “A Globally Coherent Fingerprint of Climate Change Impacts across Natural Systems,”
Nature
421 (2003): 37-42. Springtime phenological shifts averaged 4.2 days earlier per decade between 32° and 49° N latitude, and 5.5 days earlier per decade from 50° to 72° N latitude. T. L. Root et al., “Fingerprints of Global Warming on Wild Animals and Plants,”
Nature
42 (2003): 57-60.

6
In February 2010 successive blizzards buried Washington, D.C., and were followed by snowstorms that closed schools from Texas to the Florida Panhandle to the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina, whitening places that hadn’t seen snow in a decade or more. Classes were canceled in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. M. Nelson, “Rare snowflakes start falling from Miss. to Fla.,” Associated Press, February 12, 2010,
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5glTiXzN068z_xAn_fl4DY8L-fpnQD9DQT2J00
. The collection of storms was dubbed “Snowpocalypse” and “Snowmageddon” by pundits, e.g., S. Bezrob, “Covering the Snowpocalypse,” FoxNews .com, February 10, 2010,
http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/02/10/covering-the-snowpocalypse/?test=latestnews
. Meanwhile, snow sport events at the Vancouver Winter Olympics were mired in rain, e.g., S. Almasy, “4,000 to miss out on snowboard cross because of rain,”
CNN.com
, February 15, 2010,
http://www.cnn.com/2010/SPORT/02/15/snowcross.refund/?hpt=T3
.

7
This is an actual supply chain. For an in-depth examination of the globalization of the tomato, see Bill Pritchard, David Burch,
Agri-Food Globalization in Perspective: International Restructuring in the Processing Tomato Industry
(Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 308 pp.

8
G. A. Strobel et al., “The Production of Myco-diesel Hydrocarbons and Their Derivatives by the Endophytic Fungus
Gliocladium roseum,
”
Microbiology
154 (2008): 3319-3328, DOI:10.1099/mic.0.2008/022186-0.

9
S. Pinker, “A History of Violence,”
The New Republic
236 (March 19, 2007): 18-21; D. Jones, “Human Behaviour: Killer Instincts,”
Nature
451, no. 7178 (2008): 512-515.

10
To name just two examples, economic growth models seldom consider political changes to immigration policy; climate model projections depend strongly on their assumptions about cloud physics.

11
“The Fox knows many things, but the Hedgehog knows one big thing.” This phenomenon has been statistically studied by Philip Tetlock at UC Berkeley, who discovered predictions made by economic and political pundits often fare little better than flipping a coin. But by casting a wide net for subject matter, the probability that an important factor will be missed is reduced. P. E. Tetlock,
Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 352 pp.

12
The following global population estimates are taken from the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base (updated June 18, 2008),
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpop.html
(accessed September 26, 2008).

13
We will return to Thomas Malthus and his 1798
An Essay on the Principle of Population
in Chapter 3.

14
Paul R. Ehrlich,
The Population Bomb
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).

15
The term
death rate
usually refers to the crude death rate, measured as the number of deaths per thousand people in a population. There are different measures of population fertility; this book uses the total fertility rate (TFR), which is the average number of children for a woman within that population. Because it is a statistical average, it is possible to have noninteger values of TFR, for example 1.7 children per woman, a real-world impossibility. I also use the term
birth rate
to refer to TFR, not to be confused with crude birth rate, the raw number of births per thousand people. For a good introduction to population demography, including its definitions, the demographic balancing equation, and data collection issues, see J. A. McFalls Jr., “Population: A Lively Introduction,” 5th ed.,
Population Bulletin
62, no. 1 (March 2007).

16
W. Thompson, “Population,” American
Journal of Sociology
34 (1929): 959-975. See also M. L. Bacci,
A Concise History of World population,
4th ed. (Wiley-Blackwell), 296 pp.

17
For a good discussion of how the Demographic Transition unfolded differently in developing countries than it did in Europe and North America, see the unparalleled book by J. E. Cohen,
How Many People Can the World Support?
(New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1995), 532 pp.

18
The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), a group of thirty developed and emerging-market countries with high global integration. Throughout this book I use
OECD
or
developed
to refer to this cohort rather than the term
first-world
. Today’s OECD originated in the post-World War II Marshall Plan as the Organization of European Economic Cooperation, which later expanded to include non-European countries. OECD members as of April 2010 were Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

19
83%, computed from Human Influence Index (HII) grids, NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC),
http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/wildareas/
(accessed October 8, 2008).

20
The following historical data on U.S. energy consumption taken from Appendix F, EIA (Energy Information Administration)
Annual Energy Review 2001,
U.S Department of Energy,
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/multifuel/038401.pdf
(accessed October 9, 2008).

21
The following numbers are calculated from British thermal unit (Btu) data. One Btu is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. One barrel of crude oil = 5,800,000 Btu, one short ton of coal = 20,754,000 Btu, one cubic foot of natural gas = 1,031 Btu, one cord wood=20,000,000 Btu.

22
Coal increased from 6,841 to 22,580 trillion Btu/year. Appendix F, EIA
Annual Energy Review,
2001.

23
Oil increased from 229 to 38,404 trillion Btu/year. Ibid.

24
Wood-fuel increased from 2,015 to 2,257 trillion Btu/year. Ibid.

25
Jared Diamond, “What’s Your Consumption Factor?”
The New York Times
, January 2, 2008.

26
For a brief introduction to globalization see Manfred Steger’s
Globalization: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also
Global Transformations
by David Held et al., eds. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999);
Runaway World
by Anthony Giddens (New York: Routledge, 2000);
Why Globalization Works
by Martin Wolf (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004);
Globalization and the Race for Resources
by Steven Bunker and Paul Ciccantell (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005);
Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power
by John A. Agnew (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005);
In Defense of Globalization
by Jagdish Bhagwati (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);
The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape
by Harm de Blij (USA: Oxford University Press, 2008);
Social Economy of the Metropolis: Cognitive-Cultural Capitalism and the Global Resurgence of Cities
by Allen J. Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and
Globalization and Sovereignty
by John A. Agnew (Lanham, Md., and Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009).

27
T. L. Friedman,
The World Is Flat
(Gordonsville, Va.: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005).

28
From “Store Openings,”
http://franchisor.ikea.com/
(accessed November 13, 2009).

29
P. 38, Steger,
Globalization: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

30
For more on how the United States exported its business model to the world, see J. A. Agnew,
Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).

31
The Washington Consensus is attributed to John Williamson of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a think tank in Washington, D.C. (
www.iie.com
). Its policies have now been adopted by (or forced onto, depending on one’s point of view) many developing countries. Neoliberals praise these reforms, citing new markets and jobs for struggling people. Critics point to two-dollar-a-day wages while multinational corporations grow rich. The Washington Consensus and similar policies remain highly controversial. If you have any antiglobalization friends, mention it to them sometime and watch their mouths foam.

32
“Expanding trade and investment has been one of the highest priorities of my administration. . . . When I took office, America had free trade agreements in force with only three nations. Today, we have agreements in force with fourteen.” From November 22, 2008, speech in Lima, Peru, by outgoing U.S. president George W. Bush to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, his final summit gathering as president. See transcript
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/11/20081122-7.html
, Office of the Press Secretary (accessed November 23, 2008). See also “At Summit, Bush Touts Free-Trade Record,”
www.cnn.com
, November 22, 2008; and “Bush Wraps Up Asia Economic Meeting,”
The New York Times,
November 23, 2008.

33
Some economists speculated the 2008-09 global financial crisis might tilt the world back toward tariffs and protectionism. This notion was rebuffed at a September 2009 G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, billed as a sort of “Bretton Woods II,” which was toothless on banking regulations but strongly reaffirmed a common goal of continued free trade expansion in the developing world.

34
The most important greenhouse gas is water vapor, but unlike carbon dioxide its residence time in the atmosphere is extremely short. Without the greenhouse effect, global temperatures would average about 0°F (-18°C) versus 59°F (15°C) today. Some details of this section drawn from Tim Hall’s chapter on climate drivers, in G. Schmidt and J. Wolfe,
Climate Change: Picturing the Science
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009), 320 pp. See also R. Henson,
The Rough Guide to Climate Change
(London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2008), 374 pp. Both books provide very accessible introductions to the physics of climate and climate change.

35
The analogy to a closed car or glass greenhouse is imperfect because air circulation is not trapped in a moving atmosphere, but it’s close enough for our purposes here.