The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change

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The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change Page 59

by Al Gore


  James B. Twitchell, Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

  127 “it would seem that we can go on with increasing activity”

  Benjamin Hunnicutt, Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 44.

  128 “needs and wants of people have to be continuously stirred up”

  “Retail Therapy,” Economist, December 17, 2011.

  129 use of Bernays’s book Propaganda in organizing Hitler’s genocide

  Dennis W. Johnson, Routledge Handbook of Political Management (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 314 n. 3; see Edward Bernays, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965).

  130 “infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power”

  Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), p. 248.

  131 reinvigorated the use of subconscious analysis in the field of neuromarketing

  Natasha Singer, “Making Ads That Whisper to the Brain,” New York Times, November 14, 2010.

  132 an average of 2,000 commercial messages per day thirty-five years ago

  Louise Story, “Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad,” New York Times, January 15, 2007.

  133 the average city dweller now sees 5,000 commercial messages per day

  Ibid.

  134 the total volume is projected to increase by 70 percent in a dozen years

  Daniel Hoornweg and Perinaz Bhada-Tata, World Bank, “What a Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management,” March 2012.

  135 $375 billion per year—with most of the increase in developing countries

  Ibid.

  136 a .69 percent increase in municipal solid waste in developed countries

  Antonis Mavropoulos, “Waste Management 2030+,” http://www.waste-management-world.com.

  137 produced each day is more than the body weight of all seven billion people

  Alexandra Sifferlin, “Weight of the World: Globally, Adults Are 16.5 Million Tons Overweight,” Time, June 18, 2012; Paul Hawken, “Resource Waste,” Mother Jones, March/April 1997; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “Municipal Solid Waste,” http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/index.htm.

  138 increased by more than 250 percent in the last decade

  Mavropoulos, “Waste Management 2030+.”

  139 much larger volumes are on land in millions of waste dumps

  EPA, “Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2010,” November 2011, http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/pubs/msw_2010_rev_factsheet.pdf; NOAA Marine Debris Program, “De-mystifying the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch,’ ” http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/patch.html.

  140 decomposes to produce 4 percent of all the global warming pollution

  Ian Williams, University of Southampton, “Future of Waste: Initial Perspectives,” in Tim Jones and Caroline Dewing, eds., Future Agenda: Initial Perspectives (Newbury, UK: Vodafone Group, 2009), pp. 84–89.

  141 including pesticides, arsenic, cadmium, and flame retardants

  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, 2009, http://www.cdc.gov/exposurereport/pdf/FourthReport.pdf.

  142 smokers who fall asleep and drop their lit cigarettes

  Michael Hawthorne, “Testing Shows Treated Foam Offers No Safety Benefit,” Chicago Tribune, May 6, 2012.

  143 enough influence to require the addition of dangerous chemicals

  Nicholas D. Kristof, “Are You Safe on That Sofa?,” New York Times, May 19, 2012.

  144 exposure with evidence of cancer, reproductive disorders, and damage to fetuses

  Hawthorne, “Testing Shows Treated Foam Offers No Safety Benefit.”

  145 added to the foam in the furniture didn’t work

  Ibid.

  146 Toxic Substances Control Act, has never been truly implemented

  Bryan Walsh, “The Perils of Plastic,” Time, April 1, 2010.

  147 relevant information about these chemicals from regulators

  Ibid.

  148 was also the inventor of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer

  Diarmuid Jeffreys, Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008).

  149 South Asia, Africa, and portions of the Middle East

  John Cameron, Paul Hunter, Paul Jagals, and Katherine Pond, eds., Valuing Water, Valuing Livelihoods, World Health Organization, http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2011/9781843393108_eng.pdf.

  150 “one-half of the world’s major rivers”

  World Water Council, “Water and Nature,” http://www.worldwatercouncil.org/index.php?id=21.

  151 “This is asymmetric accounting”

  Jorgen Randers, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2012), p. 75.

  152 “Of course from the government’s point of view”

  Keith Bradsher, “A Chinese City Moves to Limit Cars,” New York Times, September 4, 2012.

  153 exposed to chemical waste or other health threats in their drinking water

  Charles Duhigg, “Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering,” New York Times, September 13, 2009.

  154 “and 2.5 billion lack improved sanitation”

  World Health Organization, “Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation: 2012 Update,” http://www.wssinfo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/resources/JMP-report-2012-en.pdf.

  155 “2.4 billion people will lack access to improved sanitation facilities”

  Ibid.

  156 ill each year due to their drinking water, and tens of thousands die

  Jane Qiu, “China to Spend Billions Cleaning Up Groundwater,” Science, November 2011, p. 745.

  157 growing craze for deep shale gas

  Chesapeake Energy, “Water Use in Deep Shale Gas Exploration,” 2012, http://www.chk.com/Media/Educational-Library/Fact-Sheets/Corporate/Water_Use_Fact_Sheet.pdf; Jack Healy, “Struggle for Water in Colorado with Rise in Fracking,” New York Times, September 5, 2012.

  158 supplies in regions that were already experiencing shortages

  Chesapeake Energy, “Water Use in Deep Shale Gas Exploration”; Healy, “Struggle for Water in Colorado with Rise in Fracking.”

  159 water for energy production is projected to grow

  International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2012 (Paris: International Energy Agency, 2012).

  160 opening new fissures and modifying underground flow patterns

  Abrahm Lustgarten, “Are Fracking Wastewater Wells Poisoning the Ground beneath Our Feet?,” Scientific American, June 21, 2012.

  161 leaked waste upward into regions containing drinking water aquifers

  Ibid.

  162 one percent represented by all of the surface freshwater

  “Groundwater Depletion Rate Accelerating Worldwide,” ScienceDaily, September 23, 2010, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100923142503.htm.

  163 rate of shrinkage in groundwater aquifers has doubled

  Ibid.

  164 increases have proceeded at a much faster pace

  Ibid.

  165 have been drilled by the 100 million Indian farmers

  Lester Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: Norton, 2009), http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/book_files/pb4book.pdf.

  166 farmers must rely on increasingly unpredictable rainfall

  Ibid.

  167 Australia, the Yangtze and Yellow rivers in China, and the Elbe

  Geoffrey Lean, “Rivers: A Drying Shame,” Independent, March 12, 2006.

  168 estimated at between 10 and 15 billion

  United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Population to Reach 10 Billion by 2100 If Fertility in All Countries C
onverges to Replacement Level,” May 3, 2011, http://esa.un.org/wpp/Other-Information/Press_Release_WPP2010.pdf.

  169 that the most likely range is slightly above 10 billion

  Ibid.; United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision,” 2011, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_1.htm.

  170 at least the balance of the century as the most populous

  United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision,” 2011, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm.

  171 end of the century is projected to have more people than both combined

  Ibid.

  172 to an astonishing 3.6 billion, by the end of this century

  David E. Bloom, “Africa’s Daunting Challenges,” New York Times, May 5, 2011.

  173 fertility rate in scores of less developed countries—the majority of them in Africa

  United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Population to Reach 10 Billion by 2100 If Fertility in All Countries Converges to Replacement Level.”

  174 management knowledge and technology available to women

  Malcolm Potts and Martha Campbell, “The Myth of 9 Billion,” Foreign Policy, May 9, 2011; Justin Gillis and Celia W. Dugger, “U.N. Forecasts 10.1 Billion People by Century’s End,” New York Times, May 4, 2011.

  175 lowest level since the Great Depression

  Bonnie Kavousi, “Birth Rate Plunges, Projected to Reach Lowest Level in Decades,” Huffington Post, July 26, 2012.

  176 creation of social conditions that can and do have an impact on population

  T. Paul Shultz, Yale Economic Growth Center, “Fertility and Income,” October 2005, www.econ.yale.edu/~pschultz/cdp925.pdf.

  177 thirteen of the fourteen are in sub-Saharan Africa

  Bloom, “Africa’s Daunting Challenge.”

  178 ability of girls to become literate and to obtain a good education

  United Nations, Report of the International Conference on Population and Development, Cairo, September 5–13, 1994, http://www.un.org/popin/icpd/conference/offeng/poa.html.

  179 about family size and other issues

  Ibid.

  180 how many children they wish to have and the spacing

  Ibid.

  181 “the most powerful contraceptive”

  Ibid.

  182 including 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women

  Nicholas D. Kristof, “Beyond Pelvic Politics,” New York Times, February 11, 2012.

  183 where thirty-nine out of the fifty-five African countries have high levels of fertility

  United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Population to Reach 10 Billion by 2100 If Fertility in All Countries Converges to Replacement Level.”

  184 population will triple in the balance of this century

  Ibid.

  185 2.5 children during their childbearing years

  Bloom, “Africa’s Daunting Challenge.”

  186 average is almost 4.5 children per woman

  Ibid.

  187 leading to disruptive and unsustainable population growth

  Ibid.

  188 by the end of the century to an estimated 129 million

  Gillis and Dugger, “U.N. Forecasts 10.1 Billion People by Century’s End.”

  189 to more than 730 million people by 2100

  Ibid.

  190 would put Nigeria’s population at the level of China in the mid-1960s

  “Total Population, CBR, CDR, NIR and TFR of China (1949–2000),” China Daily, August 20, 2010.

  191 significant declines in child and infant mortality

  Potts and Campbell, “The Myth of 9 Billion”; Robert Kunzig, “Population 7 Billion,” National Geographic, January 2011.

  192 beginning of the nineteenth century—from thirty-five to seventy-seven years

  Kunzig, “Population 7 Billion.”

  193 compared to 8 percent in 1970—of college students in Saudi Arabia were women

  UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Global Education Digest 2009: Comparing Education Statistics Across the World, 2009, http://www.uis.unesco.org/template/pdf/ged/2009/GED_2009_EN.pdf, p. 227.

  194 Arab states is now 48 percent; in Iran 51 percent

  UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Global Education Digest 2011, 2011, http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Pages/ged-2011.aspx.

  195 67 of the 120 nations for which statistics are available

  Gary S. Becker, William H. J. Hubbard, and Kevin M. Murphy, “The Market for College Graduates and the Worldwide Boom in Higher Education of Women,” American Economic Review 100, no. 2 (2010): 229–33.

  196 The world average is 51 percent

  Ibid.; World Bank, The Road Not Traveled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North Africa, MENA Development Report, 2008, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTMENA/Resources/EDU_Flagship_Full_ENG.pdf, p. 171.

  197 61 percent of master degrees, and 51 percent of doctoral degrees

  U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, “Fast Facts,” 2010, http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72.

  198 has announced plans to allow women to vote beginning in 2015

  “Saudi Women to Receive Right to Vote—in 2015,” NPR, September 26, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/09/26/140818249/saudi-women-get-the-vote.

  199 only 18 percent of the gap in political participation

  Ricardo Hausmann, Laura D. Tyson, and Saadia Zahidi, “The Global Gender Gap Index 2010,” Global Gender Gap Report 2010, 2010, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GenderGap_Report_2010.pdf.

  200 two women have entered the workplace for every man

  “A Guide to Womenomics,” Economist, April 12, 2006.

  201 with 83 women in the workforce for every 100 men

  Ibid.

  202 filling between 60 and 80 percent of the jobs

  Ibid.

  203 “has contributed much more to global growth than China has”

  Ibid.

  204 responsible for producing slightly less than 40 percent of GDP

  Ibid.

  205 contribution of women to GDP would be well over 50 percent

  Ibid.

  206 who work outside the home skyrocketed from 12 percent to 55 percent

  Robert R. Reich, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future (New York: Knopf, 2010), p. 61.

  207 rose during the same three decades from 20 to 60 percent

  Ibid.

  208 all adds up to what Kessler calls “conditioned hyper-eating”

  Tara Parker-Pope, “How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains,” New York Times, June 23, 2009.

  209 playing outside in neighborhoods that, relatively speaking, are prone to more violence

  Rebecca Cecil-Carb and Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, “Childhood Body Mass Index in Community Context: Neighborhood Safety, Television Viewing and Growth Trajectories of BMI,” Health and Social Work 34 (March 2009): 169–77.

  210 partly because of the increased participation of women in the workforce

  United Nations Division for Social Policy and Development Division, Family Unit, 2003–2004, Major Trends Affecting Families, “Introduction,” http://social.un.org/index/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=LJsVbHQC7Ss%3d&tabid=282.

  211 between 20 and 30 percent of all divorces

  Carl Bialik, “Irreconcilable Claim: Facebook Causes 1 in 5 Divorces,” Wall Street Journal, March 12, 2011; Carl Bialik, “Divorcing Hype from Reality in Facebook Stats,” Wall Street Journal blog, March 11, 2011, http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/divorcing-hype-from-reality-in-facebook-stats-1046/.

  212 Now, only one quarter are

  Pew Research Center, “The Decline of Marriage and Rise of New Families,” November 18, 2010, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1802/decline-marriage-rise-new-families.

  213 and having children—without getting married

  Ibid.

&nb
sp; 214 are now born to unmarried women

  Ibid.

  215 were born to unmarried mothers

  Ibid.

  216 among mothers under thirty is 50 percent

  Jason DeParle and Sabrina Tavernise, “For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage,” New York Times, February 17, 2012.

  217 Among African American mothers of all ages

  Ibid.

  218 the percentage is now 73 percent

  Ibid.

  219 Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden; the lowest rank goes to Yemen

  Hausmann, Tyson, and Zahidi, “The Global Gender Gap Index 2010.”

  220 the lowest percentage (11.4 percent) in the Arab states

  Inter-Parliamentary Union, “Women in National Parliaments,” April 30, 2011, http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/world.htm.

  221 a constitutional requirement that a minimum of 30 percent

  Catherine Rampell, “A Female Parliamentary Majority in Just One Country: Rwanda,” New York Times, Economix blog, March 9, 2010, http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/women-underrepresented-in-parliaments-around-the-world/; Inter-Parliamentary Union, “Women in National Parliaments.”

  222 only 7 percent of corporate boards in the world

  “A Guide to Womenomics,” Economist.

  223 have also fallen below the replacement rate

  Steven Philip Kramer, “Baby Gap: How to Boost Birthrates and Avoid Demographic Decline,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2012.

  224 The U.S. birthrate fell to an all-time low in 2011

  Terence P. Jeffrey, “CDC: U.S. Birth Rate Hits All-Time Low; 40.7% of Babies Born to Unmarried Women,” CNS News, October 31, 2012, http://cnsnews.com/news/article/cdc-us-birth-rate-hits-all-time-low-407-babies-born-unmarried-women.

  225 64 million by 2100

  Bryan Walsh, “Japan: Still Shrinking,” Time, August 28, 2006.

  226 career paths after having children, and other benefits

  Kramer, “Baby Gap.”

  227 now once again nearly at their replacement rate of fertility

  Ibid.

  228 not yet been able to slow their fertility declines

  Ibid.

  229 greater per capita expense of U.S. health care

  Simon Rogers, “Healthcare Spending Around the World, Country by Country,” Guardian, June 30, 2012; Harvey Morris, “U.S. Healthcare Costs More Than ‘Socialized’ European Medicine,” International Herald Tribune, June 28, 2012.

 

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