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

by Laurence C. Smith

  It’s enough to make you wish there was more oil. Coal is the dirtiest and most environmentally damaging fuel on Earth. Entire mountaintops are leveled to obtain it. Coal mining pollutes water and devastates the landscape, covering it with toxic slurry pools and leaving behind acidic, eroding deposits upon which nothing will grow. I studied one of these places for my rather traumatizing master’s thesis. An hour’s fieldwork would leave me covered in black grime, hands and clothing stained orange from an acidic creek full of chemical leachate.176 Coal mining also releases trapped methane, a powerful greenhouse gas and even more powerful explosive inside subterranean mines. Several thousand coal miners are killed each year in China.

  Coal is worse than oil and much worse than natural gas when it comes to emissions of greenhouse gas, because its carbon content is the highest of all fossil fuels. To produce an equivalent amount of useful energy, burned coal unleashes roughly twice as much carbon dioxide as burned natural gas. It also releases a host of irritating or toxic air pollutants, including sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NO and NO2), particulates, and mercury. It makes acid rain. If converted to a liquid, it releases 150% more carbon dioxide than oil fuels. To people hoping to bring our escalating release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere under control, coal is Public Enemy Number One.

  As my University of California colleague Catherine Gautier writes, “Were it not for its environmental impact, coal would be the obvious choice to replacing oil.”177 From a geological perspective, there will be no scarcity of the stuff anytime before 2100.178 And therein is the problem: From nearly all model projections, coal is slated to replace oil. By the year 2030 its consumption in the United States is projected to rise nearly 40% over 2010 levels. In China, which already burns twice as much coal as the United States, consumption is projected to nearly double.

  Other than banning the stuff, the only thin hope lying between this future and a giant upward lurch in the atmosphere’s greenhouse gas concentrations is something called Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), often called “clean coal” technology. There’s no such thing as clean coal, but CCS does appear technically possible and, at first blush, alluringly simple: Rather than send carbon dioxide up the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants, use chemical scrubbers to capture it, compress it to a high-pressure liquid, then pipe the liquid someplace else to pump deep underground. Oil companies already use a similar process to force more petroleum out of declining oil fields. Successful pilot demonstrations of CCS technology are under way in Norway, Sweden, and Wyoming, the longest running for more than a decade without mishap.

  The main problem with CCS is one of scale, and therefore cost. First, the “capture” process consumes energy itself, requiring significantly bigger plants burning even more coal to generate the same quantity of electricity. Second, a vast network of pipelines is needed to transport staggering volumes of liquid CO2 away from the power plants to suitable burial sites (abandoned oil fields or deep, salty aquifers). The United States alone produces about 1.5 billion tons of CO2 per year from coal-fired power plants. Capturing and storing just 60% of that means burying twenty million barrels of liquid per day—about the same as the country’s entire consumption of oil.179 Small pilot demonstrations are one thing, but a demonstration of CCS at the scale of even one full-sized power plant has yet to be attempted. FutureGen, the only proposed prototype, was scrapped in 2008 when its estimated cost swelled to $1.8 billion (the project has since been revived). Finally, there are no guarantees that the stuff won’t leak back out to the atmosphere. A leakage rate of just 1% per year would lead to 63% of the stored carbon dioxide being released within a century, undoing much of the supposed environmental benefit.180

  Carbon Capture and Storage has become a commonly accepted bullet point among proponents of coal, as if all of the above problems have somehow been worked out. Politicians and many scientists have dutifully lined up behind it. It figures prominently in all of our biggest blueprints for reducing greenhouse gases, including model scenarios of the Stern Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the International Energy Agency projections outlined above. CCS is embraced by Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, and other leaders of the G8. It is the single strand of hope upon which a thunderous increase in carbon emissions from our coming coal boom might possibly be restrained.

  I’m not holding my breath.

  CHAPTER 4

  California Browning, Shanghai Drowning

  “Behold, he withholdeth the waters, and they dry up: also he sendeth them out, and they overturn the earth.”

  —Job 12:15

  In January 2008, the U.S. state of Iowa was on the front pages of newspapers all around the world. Ninety-four thousand voters of the Iowa Democratic Party had just propelled Barack Obama—a freshman Illinois senator who was virtually unknown just two years earlier—over the longtime national front-runner, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. The Iowa caucuses are the first major electoral event in the U.S. presidential race and are widely believed to influence its outcome. Iowa’s voters had delivered a stunning upset and the opening salvo of one of the most exciting and protracted primary battles in U.S. electoral history. Little did they know that only five months later, their state would be on the front pages of newspapers around the world once again.

  Within weeks after the political campaigns had left for other battles in other states, the snow started to fall. Two big storms dumped more than three feet of it around the little town of Oskaloosa. By March, Iowa had tied its third-highest monthly snowfall total in 121 years of record keeping. Then came the rain. April’s statewide average was the second-highest in 136 years. Twelve inches deluged the town of Fayette, obliterating its previous record of eight inches set back in 1909.181 Snowmelt and water ran everywhere, flooding cornfields and swelling streams and rivers. On May 25, a category F5 tornado—the strongest category of tornado and Iowa’s first F5 in forty years—leveled a forty-mile swath through tiny Parkersburg, killing eight people, destroying hundreds of homes, and narrowly missing populous Cedar Falls. President George W. Bush declared four counties federal disaster areas and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) dispatched thirty-nine relief workers to the state.182 Forty-eight other tornados followed in the month of June, killing four Boy Scouts and raising the state’s tornado fatalities to its highest since 1968.

  Then things got nasty. The wettest fifteen days in Iowa history began on May 29. Global food prices soared as farm fields in America’s top state producer of corn and soybeans melted away in the rain. In Cedar Rapids, thirteen hundred city blocks were inundated when the Cedar River leapt its banks and climbed eleven feet higher than had ever happened in the city’s 159-year existence. In Iowa City, parts of the University of Iowa campus were underwater. When I arrived in mid-July the university’s magnificent arts buildings and museum were trashed. Cedar Rapids was piled high with gutted wood, dead cars, and molding drywall. A train dangled crazily from a crushed bridge into the river. The little farming town of Oakville was simply wiped off the map—its former green fields cratered or buried in sand by the flood. There was nothing left but wrecked homes and fields, with plumes of black smoke rising from piles of burning wreckage.

  By August, eighty-five of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties had been declared federal disasters. FEMA’s response team had grown from thirty-nine to fifteen hundred. Two million acres of the world’s finest farmland had lost twenty tons or more of topsoil per acre; six hundred thousand acres of bottomland were simply scoured away. 183 The statewide damage estimates had swelled to $10 billion—roughly $3,500 for every man, woman, and child in Iowa—and would later go even higher. By 2009 damage estimates to the University of Iowa alone were approaching one billion dollars.184 Forty thousand Iowans—almost half the number of voters who in January helped send Barack Obama to the White House—had been displaced from their homes.

  Meanwhile, six states and eighteen hundred miles to the west, a very different water-r
elated disaster was unfolding. On June 4, 2008—right in the middle of those wettest fifteen days of Iowa history—Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger strode to a podium in Sacramento to declare an official state of drought in California, the largest total producer of agricultural products in the United States.

  Conditions in the Golden State had deteriorated rapidly in an already dry decade. The year before, rainfall in Southern California had been 80% below average. Statewide snowpack and rainfall levels were so low that farmers had begun abandoning their crops. By October, the extreme dryness had fueled a series of vicious wildfires, killing ten people and forcing almost a million more to evacuate. Thousands of homes were destroyed. 185 By May 2008, northern California was also suffering. In many areas its rainfall, too, fell 80% below normal. Flows in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers were critically low. Reservoir levels were down across the state, and Lake Oroville, a key supplier to California’s massive State Water Project, was half gone. More than a hundred thousand acres in California’s sprawling Central Valley—the very heart of the state’s gigantic agricultural engine—went unplanted.

  Schwarzenegger issued an executive order setting into motion water-transfers, conservation programs, and other measures to combat the crisis,186 but the drought deepened. Water levels fell further and more fires burned. Eight months later, in February 2009, he proclaimed a state of emergency. Citing “conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property” and “widespread harm to people, businesses, property, communities, wildlife, and recreation,”187 he ordered even more draconian measures to be taken. Experts were predicting that field fallowing would rise from one hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand acres—meaning that nearly 20% of the Central Valley’s farmland would go unplanted.188 Suddenly, on top of a historic economic crisis from collapsed housing and global credit markets, California was bracing to lose another eighty thousand jobs and $3 billion in agricultural revenue from drought.

  Iowa and California were not alone in their water-related crises. As Schwarzenegger mobilized California, the southeastern United States, which is usually moist, was also in historic drought, triggering a wave of outdoor-watering bans, withered crops, and unheard-of water battles between states like Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas.189 Mexico had been in severe drought, with only limited relief, for fifteen years.190 Exceptional droughts were under way in Brazil, Argentina, western Africa, Australia, the Middle East, Turkey, and Ukraine.191 Drought emergencies were triggering food aid in Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Mauritania, and Moldova.192 By February 2009, precipitation was 70%-90% below normal in northern and western China, threatening 10% of the country’s entire cereal production. 193 That same month, extreme dryness primed “Black Saturday,” when six hundred blazes killed two hundred people in the worst Australian wildfires in history. By April, crop failures in Chattisgarh state drove fifteen hundred Indian farmers—unable to repay their debts without water—to commit suicide.194

  Within days of the Iowa floods, heavy rains also struck eastern India and China, killing sixty-five people and displacing five hundred thousand in India. In China, floods in Guangdong and Guangxi Zhuang, Sansui City, and the Pearl River delta killed 176 and displaced 1.6 million. While America’s eyes were fixed on Sarah Palin, hydrologist Bob Brakenridge at Dartmouth was watching floods from space, using satellites to track them all over the world.195 In the ten months between Barack Obama’s winning the Iowa caucuses on January 3, and the general election on November 4, Brakenridge documented 145 major floods carving destruction around the planet. As Barack Obama took down first Hillary Clinton and then John McCain, those rivers took down lives and property from Taiwan to Togo. They killed almost five thousand people and washed seventeen million more from their homes.

  Our Most Necessary Resource

  It’s hard to imagine anything humans need more than freshwater. If it were to all somehow vanish, the human race would be extinct in a matter of days. If it stopped flowing to our animals and fields, we would starve. If it became unclean, we would become sick or even die. Our societies need water in proper quantity, quality, and timing to preserve civilization as we know it. Too little, or at the wrong time of year, and our food dies off and industries fail. Too much, and our fields dissolve and people drown. For the past ten thousand years the very existence of permanent human settlements has depended upon having a consistent, dependable supply of usable water.

  What does the future hold? Are we running low on water, as we must ultimately run low on oil? In the past fifty years we’ve doubled our irrigated cropland and tripled our water consumption to meet global food demand. In the next fifty, we must double food production again.196 Is there really enough water to pull that off?

  In his book When the Rivers Run Dry environmental journalist Fred Pearce describes in vivid, firsthand detail the stark reality of impending water crises in more than thirty countries around the globe. We now withdraw so much water that many of our mightiest and most historic rivers—like the Nile, the Colorado, the Yellow, the Indus—have barely a trickle left to meet the sea.

  The good news is that, unlike oil, which is ultimately finite, water is endlessly returned to us by the hydrologic cycle. Except for fossil groundwater, there is no such thing as “Peak Water” in the same sense as “Peak Oil.” It always comes back—somewhere—as rain or snow. It may be too much, or too little, or come at the wrong time, but it does come back. The bad news is that in addition to the aforementioned problems of too much, too little, or bad timing, our water sources can also become polluted. Finally, while it’s true that there is plenty of water circulating out there someplace, nearly all of it is useless to us.

  The Russian hydrologist Igor Alexander Shiklomanov estimates that almost 97% of the world’s water is salty ocean, unfit for drinking or irrigation; 1% is salty groundwater, again useless. Of the 2.5% or so that is fresh, most would be salty if not for the glaciers of Antarctica, Greenland, and mountains that hold it up on land in the form of ice, rather than letting it run off into the ocean. Fresh groundwater holds about three-quarters of 1%. The minuscule remainder—about eight one-thousandths of 1%—is held in all the world’s lakes, wetlands, and rivers combined. Our atmosphere’s clouds, vapor, and rain hold even less, just one ten-thousandth of 1% of all water on Earth. 197

  There are three points to be taken from Shiklomanov’s numbers. The first is that the most important sources of water for people and terrestrial ecosystems—rivers, lakes, and rain—are actually fleetingly rare forms of H2O. If all the water in the world was a thousand-dollar bill, these sources would amount to about eight cents. The second point is that relative to rivers, lakes, and rain, far larger volumes of freshwater are frozen up inside glaciers, or stored underground in aquifers. These, too, are critically important to humanity and will be discussed shortly.

  The third point—and frankly one that is all too often neglected by policy makers and scientists alike—is that these numbers alone do not tell the whole story when it comes to human water supply. Recall that water, unlike oil, is a circulating resource. It recycles constantly through the hydrologic cycle, in infinite loops of rain, runoff, evaporation, and various storage compartments, like ice. From a practical standpoint the throughput of freshwater (or “flux”) is just as important as the absolute size of its various containers. The total volume of water held in rivers at any given instant is tiny, but it is replaced quickly, unlike, say, an ancient glacier or slowly oozing aquifer. A water droplet moves down a natural river in a few days, whereas the same droplet moving through glaciers, groundwater, and deep ocean currents could be stuck there for centuries to hundreds of thousands of years. This explains the seeming paradox that despite the world’s rivers’ instantaneous storage capacity of just two thousand cubic kilometers of water, we pull almost twice that amount from them every year.198

  This is why rainfall and surface water, despite their diminutive holdings, are so critically important to land-based ecosystems and people. The
ir fast throughput is what makes them so valuable. But because their storage capacities are so tiny, we are vulnerable to the smallest of variations in that throughput. Unlike an ocean or glacier, the atmosphere and rivers have no meaningful storage capacity from which to draw water in dry times or hoard it in wet times. Therefore, terrestrial life is highly sensitive to floods and droughts, whereas marine life is generally not. Tuna have plenty of worries, but droughts are not one of them. Battling this vulnerability is a prime reason why we have built millions of dams, reservoirs, lakes, and ponds throughout the world. Yet even after all this massive engineering, we still have only enough of these artificial impoundments to store slightly less than two years’ water supply.199