The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

by Laurence C. Smith

  If your consumption factor, like mine, is 32, that means you and I each consume thirty-two times more resources and produce thirty-two times more waste than the average citizen of Kenya, for example, with a consumption factor of 1. Put another way, in under two years we plow through more stuff than the average Kenyan does in his entire life. Of the 6.8+ billion of us alive on Earth now, only about a billion—15%—enjoy this lavish lifestyle. The vast majority of the human race lives in developing countries with consumption factors much lower than 32, mostly down toward 1.

  Places with a consumption factor of 1 are among the most impoverished, dangerous, and depressing on Earth. Regardless of what country we live in, we all want to see these conditions improve—for security as well as humanitarian reasons. Many charitable people and organizations are working toward this goal, from central governments and NGOs to the United Nations to local churches and individual donors. Most developing countries, too, are striving mightily to industrialize and improve their lot. Organizations large and small, from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), to the Grameen Bank and other microlenders, are providing loans to help. Who among us does not want to see such efforts succeed? Who does not want the world’s lingering poverty, hunger, and disease brought to an end?

  But therein lies a dilemma. What if you could play God and do the noble, ethically fair thing by converting the entire developing world’s level of material consumption to that now carried out by North Americans, Western Europeans, Japanese, and Australians today. By merely snapping your fingers you could eliminate this misery. Would you?

  I sure hope not. The world you just created would be frightening. Global consumption would rise elevenfold. It would be as if the world’s population suddenly went from under 7 billion today to 72 billion. Where would all that meat, fish, water, energy, plastic, metal, and wood come from?

  Now let us suppose that this transformation were to happen not instantly but gradually, over the next forty years. Demographers estimate that total world population might level off at around 9.2 billion by 2050. Therefore, if the end goal is for everyone on Earth to live as Americans, Western Europeans, Japanese, and Australians do today, then the natural world must step up to provide enough stuff to support the equivalent of 105 billion people today.

  Viewed in this light, lifestyle is an even more potent multiplier of human pressure on the world resource base than is total population itself. Global modernization and prosperity—an eminently laudable and desirable goal—are thus raising our demands upon the natural world now more than ever.

  The third global force is globalization. A big word spanning many things, it most commonly refers to increasingly international trade and capital flows but also has political, cultural, and ideological dimensions.26 Frankly, there are about as many definitions for globalization as there are experts who study it. For our purposes here let us simply think of “globalization” very broadly as a set of economic, social, and technological processes that are making the world more interconnected and interdependent.

  Most people were aware of how interconnected the world economy had become long before the 2008-09 global financial crisis laid it bare. In his 2006 book The World Is Flat, the New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman famously asked, “Where were you when the world went flat?”27Flat is Friedman’s simple metaphor for the opening and leveling of a global playing field for trade and commerce, one that in principle maximizes efficiency and profitability for all because the cheapest ore or cheapest labor can be hunted down to the last corners of Earth.

  No doubt everyone has a different answer to Friedman’s question. For me, it was in Burbank in 1998, while waiting in a queue at an IKEA home-furnishings store. It struck me that my arms were filled with products designed in Sweden, built in China, shipped to my store in California, and sold to me by a Mexican cashier. From a single store selling pens and seed packets in tiny Älmhult in 1958, IKEA had grown to three hundred franchises in thirty-seven countries by 2010. At €22 billion (USD $33 billion) annually its economy was bigger than that of the country of Jordan and adding twenty-plus new stores worldwide each year.28 Not only is this single company now a planetary economic force, it is globalizing Swedish culture by cultivating a taste for juicy meatballs and clean Scandinavian furniture design from the United States to China to Saudi Arabia.

  Globalization kills economies too. After years of slow bleeding, my wife’s hometown in Michigan crashed when Delphi, a major supplier of automotive parts to General Motors Corporation, went bankrupt. Also, globalization’s spread is very uneven: The world is not so much “flat” as it is lumpy. Some countries, like Singapore and Canada, are integrating broadly and rapidly whereas others, like Myanmar and North Korea, are isolated backwaters.

  Taking the long view, the world appears to be in the early phase of an economic transformation to something bigger and more integrated than anything ever seen before. It is more far-reaching and sophisticated than any previous alliance in human history. We will all be potential rivals, but also all potential friends. Alongside the demise of entire sectors will be new markets, new trade, and new partnerships. Gone are the days when General Motors could import rubber and steel and export automobiles. The design, raw materials, components, assembly, and marketing of today’s cars might come from fifty different countries around the world.

  But what unleashed this new era of global integration upon us? Was it the blazing speed and easy reach of the Internet—or something deeper? I only noticed it in 1998, but might this phenomenon be older than we think?

  Like rising world population and natural resource demand, the present global integration lifted off in the middle of the twentieth century. But unlike the first two, it happened deliberately. It all began with a big conference in the Mount Washington Resort near Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944. Over seven hundred delegates from forty-four countries—including Britain’s John Maynard Keynes (whose ideas later found new life in the wake of the 2008 global credit meltdown)—were in attendance.

  World War II was drawing to a close. Governments were turning their attention to their shattered economies and how to rebuild them after two catastrophic wars, a global depression, a long escalation of protectionist tariffs, and some crazy currency devaluations. Everyone at the conference wanted to figure out how to stabilize currencies, get loans to war-ravaged countries for rebuilding, and get international trade moving again.

  The outcome of this conference was something called the Bretton Woods Agreement. Among other things, it stabilized international currencies by pegging them to the value of gold (which lasted until 1971, when President Richard Nixon dropped the U.S. dollar from the gold standard). But its most persistent legacy was the birth of three new international institutions: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to administer a new monetary system; the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) to provide loans—today, the World Bank; and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to fashion and enforce trade agreements—today, the World Trade Organization (WTO). These three institutions guided much of the global reconstruction effort after the war; and during the 1950s their purpose expanded to giving loans to developing countries to help them industrialize. Today these three powerful institutions—the IMF, World Bank, and WTO—are the prime actors making and enforcing the rules of our global economy.

  Up until the demise of the Bretton Woods monetary regulatory system in the early 1970s, it presided for three decades over what some have called the “golden age of controlled capitalism.”29 But by the 1980s, “controlled capitalism” had fallen to a revolution of “neoliberalism”—the deregulation and elimination of tariffs and other controls on international trade and capital flows. The neoliberalism movement was championed by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. president Ronald Reagan, but was rooted in the ideas of Adam Smith.

  Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the IMF, WTO, and World Bank aggressively pursued agendas of libe
ralizing (deregulating) trade markets around the world, vigorously urged on by the United States.30 A common tactic was to require developing countries to accept neoliberal reforms to qualify for IMF or World Bank loans. This practice was exemplified by the “Washington Consensus,” a controversial list of hard-nosed reforms including trade deregulation, opening to direct foreign investment, and privatization of state enterprises.31

  In the United States, presidents from both political parties also worked to dismantle international trade barriers. Of particular importance to this book was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), proposed in 1991 by President George Herbert Walker Bush to remove trade barriers between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Two years later, President Bill Clinton made NAFTA the cornerstone of his legacy. In his speech at the signing ceremony Clinton pressed the need “to create a new world economy,” with former presidents Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Gerald Ford nodding in attendance. Clinton’s successor also agreed: Fifteen years later, citing a near-quintupling of U.S. free-trade agreements under his watch, outgoing president George W. Bush stated that global trade expansion had been one of the “highest priorities of his administration.”32

  Notice that the origins of today’s great global integration are at odds with one of its most widely promulgated myths: that globalization has emerged organically, born from fast Internet technology and the “invisible hand” of free markets. In truth, this global force owes its existence to a long history of entirely purposeful policy decisions, championed especially by the United States and Britain, dating to the waning days of World War II. Many who write about globalization see it as exploding suddenly in the 1970s or 1980s, thus missing the institutional groundwork laid first under Bretton Woods, pressed upon the developing world by its daughter institutions the IMF, WTO, and World Bank, and subsequently advanced by U.S. presidential administrations of both political parties ever since. Its foundations are now codified into decades of historical precedent and a plethora of free-trade treaties. They are engrained in generations of politicians and business CEOs, and were reaffirmed even during the turmoil of the 2008-09 global financial crisis.33 This megatrend has roots going back more than sixty years and is now a deep, powerful global force already shaping the twenty-first century economy.

  The fourth global force is climate change. Quite simply, it is observed fact that human industrial activity is changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere such that its overall temperature must, on average, heat up.

  The power of greenhouse gases is simply beyond dispute. Their existence was deduced in the 1820s by the French mathematician Joseph Fourier, who noticed that the Earth is far warmer than it ought to be, given its distance from the Sun. Without greenhouse gases our planet would be an icebox, like the Moon and Mars, with temperatures some 60° Fahrenheit colder than today.34 Their magic comes from letting solar radiation easily in but not easily out, roughly analogous to how a closed-up car becomes hotter inside than out from sunlight passing through the window glass.35

  The basic physics of this was worked out in the 1890s by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius.36 Like glass, greenhouse gases are transparent to short-wavelength sunlight, allowing it to pass unimpeded through the atmosphere to warm the Earth’s surface (unless blocked by a cloud). But they are opaque to the (invisible) long-wavelength infrared radiation returned from the warmed Earth back to space, instead absorbing it and thus becoming infrared radiators themselves.

  Arrhenius was trying to solve the puzzle of ice ages, so was initially interested in global cooling, not warming, but his calculations worked easily well in either direction. He later wondered if humans, by adding carbon dioxide to the air through fossil-fuel burning, could also influence the planet’s climate. He ran the numbers and found that they certainly could, and substantially, too, if the gas’s concentration was raised high enough. His initial estimate of +5°C warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2, calculated by hand, was remarkably close to the ones generated by far more sophisticated computer models running today. But Arrhenius didn’t think much of this at the time, because he couldn’t imagine humans ever releasing that much carbon dioxide. For humans to double the atmosphere’s CO2, he reasoned, would take at least three thousand years .37

  Apparently, the physics of greenhouse gas warming is a lot easier to comprehend than the pace of human industrialization. We’ve already raised the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere nearly 40%, up from ~280 parts per million by volume (ppmv) in preindustrial times to ~387 ppmv as of 2009. Two-thirds of that rise has been carefully documented since 1958, when the first continuous air sample measurement program was begun by Charles Keeling at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory as part of the International Geophysical Year. Atmospheric measurements of two other powerful greenhouse gases also released by human activity, methane and nitrous oxide levels, have followed a similar rising pattern. Depending on the choices we make about carbon emissions, CO2 projections for century’s end range anywhere from 450 to 1,550 ppmv, corresponding to a +0.6 to +4.0°C increase in average global temperature on top of the +0.7°C increase already experienced in the twentieth century.38 Many policy pragmatists now feel a +2°C increase is all but assured, after the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference failed to produce anything resembling a binding international agreement to curb carbon emissions.

  These numbers may sound small but they’re not. At the height of the last ice age, when Chicago was buried under a mile-deep sheet of ice, global temperatures averaged just 5°C (9°F) cooler than today. From historical weather-station data the global average temperature is already +0.8°C warmer than in Arrhenius’ time, with most of that rise since the 1970s. An increase of that magnitude is already much larger than the difference between any one year and the next. As expected, this warming trend varies strongly with geography, with even some local cooling in some places (the details and reasons for this are known and discussed further in Chapter 5). But the global average is trending upward, along with the steady measured growth of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

  Not only are average temperatures rising, the way they are rising is consistent with the greenhouse effect but inconsistent with other natural cycles and processes also known to influence climate. Temperatures are warming more by night than by day; more in winter than in summer; more over oceans than over land; more at high latitudes than in the tropics; and in the troposphere but not the stratosphere. All of these are consistent with greenhouse gas forcing but inconsistent with other known causes, like urban heat islands, changing solar brightness, volcanic eruptions, and astronomical cycles. Those, too, influence climate, but none can fully explain what we are seeing today.

  In addition to number-crunching weather data, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that our climate is beginning to act strangely. A staggering thirty-five thousand people were killed in 2003 when a massive heat wave spilled across Europe. Lesser waves killed hundreds more in Japan, China, India, and the United States in the following summers, when the world suffered eleven of the top twelve hottest years ever recorded. That’s dating all the way back to the first weather stations of 1850, when Zachary Taylor was president of the United States, and Italy wasn’t even a country yet. Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans in 2005, a record year for tropical storms. Ironically, many of the displaced moved to Houston, where they got pounded again by Hurricane Ike in 2008. That one killed about two hundred people and put a tree through the roof of my best man, then proceeded to black out nearly a million homes across Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky.

  Like the pizzly bear, no one of these events is conclusive of anything. But after enough of them happen, the private sector gets moving. Goldman Sachs and the Harvard Business Review started writing reports on how to contain risk and maximize profits from climate change.39 Multinational corporations like General Electric, Duke Energy, and Dupont began stumping green technology and formed the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, calling on the U.S. federal government to “quickl
y enact strong national legislation to require significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.”40 By 2008 its membership included American International Group, Inc. (AIG), Boston Scientific Corporation, Chrysler LLC, ConocoPhillips, Deere & Company, the Dow Chemical Company, Exelon Corporation, Ford Motor Company, General Motors Corporation, Johnson & Johnson, Marsh, Inc., the National Wildlife Federation, the Nature Conservancy, NRG Energy, Inc., PepsiCo, Rio Tinto, Shell, Siemens Corporation, and Xerox Corporation.41 However, by late 2009 the rush of corporations to join the U.S. Climate Action Partnership had slowed, following the failed climate treaty conference at Copenhagen, some dumb e-mails circulated among a clique of climate scientists (the so-called Climategate scandal, a scientifically minor but politically devastating public-relations fiasco), and a moribund cap-and-trade bill in the U.S. Senate. By 2010 ConocoPhillips, BP America, Caterpillar, and Xerox had pulled out.

  Gas molecules are impervious to politics, so all of this is really just the beginning. To underscore just how dramatic our run-up of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere is, let’s place it within the much longer context of geological time. Greenhouse gases follow both natural cycles—which fall and rise with ice ages and warm interglacial periods, respectively—and human activity, which proceeds much faster. These two actors operate over totally different time scales, with the ice age variations happening over tens of thousands of years but our human excursion unfolding over tens of years. The natural processes that drive greenhouse-gas shifts—rock weathering, astronomical cycles, the spread of forests or wetlands, ocean turnover, and others—take thousands of years, whereas human excavation and burning of old buried carbon—as illustrated earlier from U.S. history—is an action both massive and brief. And because our human-generated carbon burst is perched atop an already large, slow-moving natural interglacial peak, we are taking the atmosphere to a place the Earth has not seen for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years. 42