The Future  

This month's "Big Issues for 2006" edition of Future Edition from the Arlington Institute takes a look at both global warming and peak oil as key issues for the coming year (linking to LATOC as their introduction to peak oil for the uninitiated, which I'm not entirely sure is a good idea - no disprespect to Matt of course).

The text for this newsletter doesn't appear to be online yet, so I'll quote the relevant sections below.

I’d like to send along to you my best wishes for 2006. It really is a cliché, but it is kind of amazing how time flies. It doesn’t seem very long ago that we were working very hard getting ready for the turnover of the century, wondering what might happen if there was large-scale computer failure. Now we have another set of equally important issues that are moving off the horizon into our near-term field of concern.

For a number of years now here at The Arlington Institute we have been talking about the increasing rate of change and the growing significance and implications of the big issues on our global horizon. From our point of view, we’re now watching it all happen – big, accelerating change with more potential wild card surprises.

The best books that I’ve read that discuss the technological drivers of the change is Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology and Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution : The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human. Both are very important overviews of where we’re going in terms of modifying ourselves. The first two chapters of Kurzweil alone are worth the cost of the book. I highly recommend them both.

Although technology is clearly one of the major change drivers that we are living with, it is not the only one – by any means. The changing climate has extraordinary near-term potential implications for all of us who live on this planet. Last year Walter Cronkite wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer that “Global warming is at least as important as gay marriage or the cost of Social Security. And if it is not seriously debated in the general election, it will measure the irresponsibility of the entire political class. This is an issue that cannot, and must not, be ignored any longer.” If you do not remember the debate on global warming, you are forgiven, because it has never taken place.

The lack of US governmental interest and concern for effectively confronting this issue is convincing growing numbers of people that they cannot presume that the government will fulfill their obligation to provide for the national security of the country in this instance and initiate policies to effectively offset the clear trend and develop contingencies for possible climate shift. Let me recommend two recent sources in this regard.

The New York Times had a very good December book review by Bill McKibben called The Coming Meltdown that serves up the magnitude of the issue and how climate change (particularly rapid climate change) is so huge in its implications that it is hard to effectively comprehend the potential scope of the problem. If you think Katrina was bad, wait until the climate rapidly changes and among other things, food doesn’t grow where and how it used to.

This is not a farfetched idea. Whitley Streiber has written about a scenario where the rapidly warming arctic surface air (the subject of McKibben’s review) that has been held down by the denser cold artic upper air masses, suddenly rises – like warm air does – and a huge amount of frigid air displaces it at the surface and sweeps down from the pole, initiating a mini ice age . . . in a matter of months.

It seems to me that another issue that has the same architecture – common structure – as climate change is peak oil. The notion that we are rapidly approaching the point in time where we will begin, for the first time, to extract less and less of the energy source that has fundamentally fueled the industrial revolution (i.e. that life that most people reading this enjoy) is profound in its implications.

The problem is that the demand, driven by population growth and economic development of countries like the U.S. and China, continues to expand rapidly even though the supply suddenly starts to decrease. Like climate change this is a very fundamental factor (energy) that defines our options for living on this planet. The notion that the most important energy source in the world for which there is no clear alternative would rapidly start to go away, is enough to keep thoughtful people up late at night writing scenarios of doom.

They’re doing that, of course. If you’re not familiar with the peak oil issue, you should be. Here’s one of quite a few sources that are painting the pictures that will remind you of Y2K scenarios.

There are those, of course, who say we will keep finding cheap oil and that the peak is decades away. But if they’re wrong (and so far, the trends appear to be against them) then the whole world could be on the verge of a major shift that, absent the rapid integration of a new global energy source, could be quite painful.

Rapid climate change and peak oil are so big that they have the fundamental requirement that you need to be working on an alternative long before the actual event takes place or things come unraveled rather fast. To give you a sense of that, check out this study by SAIC for “a government agency” outlining three different scenarios based upon actively responding to peak oil twenty years before the peak, ten years before, and at the time of identifying the peak. The bottom line is that if you don’t actively start to put in place alternatives two decades before the peak, the underlying infrastructure and economies are very badly damaged. It is catastrophic if you wait until the peak is obvious. It’s the same for rapid climate change.

There are big, deep forces at play here, committed to changing the way humans live on this earth. Lindsey Grant, former deputy assistant secretary for environment and population affairs at the State Department and National Security Council staffer has written a very persuasive little tome called The Collapsing Bubble: Growth and Fossil Energy. Grant writes things like, “World population quadrupled in one century, a change so astonishing that it has altered – or should have altered – our assumptions as to the human connection to the rest of the planet.” He put together his own projection on how energy and population might interact in the U.S. in the coming half century which is shown below.



You can see that he presumes that oil peaks about now and that coal takes over as the major fuel supporting our economy until the coal peaks about 2075 and then everything comes apart. I think it is interesting think about how the use of coal might (or most likely might not) expand so quickly to take up the slack from the petroleum peak.

There are other systemic issues that are not being effectively addressed which promise to scuttle our economic ship if we don’t do something pretty different, pretty fast. In this country there’s social security and our other big problem, health care costs. General Motors appears to be a vulnerable to be bought by someone like Toyota in part because they have a $65 billion unfunded health care obligation, mostly for retired employees. As former Colorado governor Richard Lamm says in The Brave New World of Health Care: “No trees grow to the sky and no element of the U.S. national budget can grow at over twice the rate of inflation. Yet that is the rate of growth of health car during my professional lifetime.” Lamm’s book is full of provocative but solid policy suggestions for dealing with the future of health care. It’s a great place to not only understand the problem but to find potential solutions.

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So to put it far less elegantly than Dr. O’Hara does, if we keep doing what we have been doing, we will keep getting what we have been getting . . . so we need to be about seeing this world in new and different ways that allow us to behave differently. That’s the only way that we’ll be able to effectively deal with the extraordinary change that is working its way toward us.

My hope is that you and far more or your and my friends begin to seriously understand this in the coming months. As the SAIC study says, there comes a time when no matter how well meaning our activities are, there just isn’t enough time left to influence the future that is exploding in front of us.