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

by Laurence C. Smith

  3. No Hidden Genies. A decades-long global depression, an unstoppable killer disease pandemic, a meteorite impact, or other low-probability, high-impact event is not imagined here. However, this rule is relaxed in Chapter 9 to explore six plausible, if unlikely, outcomes, like an abrupt climate change or the collapse of global trade—both of which have happened before and could happen again.

  4. The Models Are Good Enough. Some of the conclusions reached in this book stem from experiments using computer models of complex phenomena, like climate and economies. Models are tools, not oracles. All have their flaws and limitations.10 But for the broad-scale purposes of this book, they are excellent. I will focus on the robust, uncontroversial messages of these models rather than push the limits of their capabilities. As before, this rule is relaxed in Chapter 9 to explore some plausible outcomes lying outside our current modeling capacity.

  The purpose of these rules is to introduce conservatism to the thought experiment. By favoring likely, forseeable trajectories over unlikely, exciting ones, we avoid sacrificing a more probable outcome to a good story. By pursuing multiple lines of argument rather than one grand idea, we avoid the so-called “foxes and hedgehogs” trap, by lessening the likelihood that an important actor will be overlooked.11 By concentrating on the most robust simulations of computer models, we steer the conversation toward the science that is best understood, rather than poorly understood.

  Why even try to project forty years into the future anyway? To imagine the world in 2050, we must closely study what is happening today, and why. By forcing our minds to take the long view, we can identify factors that might seem beneficial in the near term, but lead to undesired consequences in the long term, and vice versa. After all, doing good things (or at least, less bad things) for the long term is a worthy goal. I certainly don’t believe the future is predetermined: Much of what does or does not happen forty years from now rests on actions or inactions taken between now and then.

  Some of the changes I will present will be perceived as good or bad, depending on the reader’s own perspective. To be sure, some of them, like species extinctions, no one wishes to see. But others, like military spending and energy development, evoke valid, strongly opposed reactions. My goal is not to argue one side or another, but to pull together trends and evidence into a bigger picture as well and objectively as I can. The reader can take it from there.

  But before we can intelligently discuss the future, we must first understand the past. In roughly historical order of their rise in significance, here are four global forces that have been busily shaping our 2050 world for tens to hundreds of years.

  FOUR GLOBAL FORCES

  The first global force is demography, which essentially means the ups, downs, and movements of different population groups within the human race. Demographic measures include things like birth rates, income, age structure, ethnicity, and migration flows. We shall examine all of these in due course but for now, let us start with the most basic yet profound measure of all: the total number of people living on Earth.

  Before the invention of agriculture some twelve thousand years ago, there were perhaps one million persons in the world.12 That is roughly the present-day population of San Jose, California. People foraged and hunted the land, living in small mobile clans. It took twelve thousand years (until about 1800 A.D.) for our numbers to grow to one billion. But then, oh boy, liftoff.

  Our second billion arrived in 1930, a mere 130 years later. The global Great Depression was under way. Adolf Hitler led his Nazi Party to stunning victory in Germany’s Reichstag elections. My Italian immigrant grandfather, then living in Philadelphia, was thirty-three years old.

  Our third billion came just thirty years later in 1960. John Kennedy beat Richard Nixon in the U.S. presidential race, the first satellites were orbiting the Earth, and I was a scant seven years from being born.

  Our fourth billion took just fifteen more years. It was 1975 and I was eight. The U.S. president Gerald Ford escaped two assassination attempts (one by Charles Manson’s murderous henchwoman Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme), the Khmer Rouge had taken over Cambodia, and the movie Godfather II ran away with six Academy Awards, including one to the Italian-American actor Robert De Niro.

  Our fifth billion came in 1987, now just twelve years after the fourth. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 2,000 for the first time in history and the Irish rock band U2 released their fifth album, The Joshua Tree. Standing outside Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, U.S. president Ronald Reagan exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” The world’s last dusky seaside sparrow died of old age on a tiny island preserve in Florida’s Walt Disney World Resort. A self-absorbed college sophomore at the time, I only noticed The Joshua Tree.

  Our sixth billion arrived in 1999. This is now very recent history. The United Nations declared 1999 the International Year of Older Persons. The Dow Jones climbed above 11,000 for the first time in history. Internet hookups ballooned and millions of songs, to the dismay of U2 and the rest of the music industry, were swapped for free on Napster. Hugo Chávez became president of Venezuela, and a huge chunk of northern Canada quietly assumed self-rule as the new territory of Nunavut. By then, I was a young professor at UCLA, working toward tenure and starting to notice things. The world vacillated between nervous fretting about Y2K and excitement over the dawn of a new millennium.

  11,800 years . . . 130 years . . . 30 years . . . 15 years . . . 12 years. . . . The length of time we need to add another billion has petered down to nearly nothing. One billion is more than triple the 2010 population of the United States, the third most populous country on Earth. Imagine a world in which we added one-plus USA, or two Pakistans, or three Mexicos, every four years. . . . Actually, this requires no imagination at all. It is reality. We will add our seventh billion some time in 2011.

  This extraordinary acceleration, foreseen over two centuries ago by Thomas Malthus,13 burst into popular culture again in 1968 when Paul Ehrlich, then a young biology professor at Stanford, jolted the world with The Population Bomb, a terrifying book forecasting global famines, “smog deaths,” and massive human die-offs if we didn’t somehow control our numbers.14 He became a frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and his ideas almost certainly helped nudge China toward its “One-Child” population control policy implemented in 1979.

  Arguments against Ehrlich’s ecological approach to human beings charged that it underestimated the limits of our technology and ingenuity. So far, these arguments appear to have been correct. Our numbers have surged on and Ehrlich’s scariest predictions have, as yet, failed to materialize. But even so, generations from now, our descendants will marvel at the twentieth century, a time when our numbers shot from 1.6 to 6.1 billion in a mere blink of time.

  What triggered this enormous twentieth-century population spurt? Why did it not happen before, and is it likely to continue into the future?

  Fast population growth behaves a lot like a personal savings account. Just as its account balance depends on the spread between the rates of deposit versus spending, the balance of people on Earth depends on the rates at which new people are created (the fertility rate) versus how fast existing people disappear (the death rate).15 When the two rates are equal, population holds steady. When they diverge or converge, population rises or falls accordingly. It doesn’t really matter whether birth rates rise or death rates fall; what matters is the spread and whether rate adjustments are staggered in time or happen simultaneously. Most importantly, once a run-up (or decline) has happened, we are stuck with the new population level, even if the gap between fertility and death rates is then closed and population stability is returned.

  From our earliest beginnings until the late nineteenth century, our fertility and death rates, on average, were both high. Mothers had more babies than today, but few of them survived to old age. In the preindustrial era, famine, warfare, and poor health kept death rates high, largely offsetting high fe
rtility. The global population of humans trickled higher, but only very slowly.

  However, by the late nineteenth century, industrialization had changed everything in Western Europe, North America, and Japan. Mechanized food production and distribution reduced famine deaths. Local warfare disappeared under the rising control of central governments. Death rates dropped as doctors discovered modern medical procedures and drugs. But fertility rates fell more slowly—cultural expectations are slower to change—so the human population took off. By 1950, New York was the first city in the world to break the ten million mark.

  Not only did the Industrial Age bring machines and medicine, it also spurred migration from farms to cities. People increasingly bought what they needed rather than growing or making things themselves. The cost of housing rose; the economy grew. More women entered college and the workplace, squeezing down the number of children families wanted or could afford. Fertility rates began to drop and families became smaller. When fertility rates at last fell to match the death rates, population growth halted, and the industrialized societies that had participated in all this were transformed. Instead of being small, poor, prolific, and death-prone they were now large, rich, and long-lived with few children.

  This chain of events, in which a population run-up is at first initiated, then later stabilized, by the forces of modernization is called the Demographic Transition and is a bedrock concept in demography.16 The Demographic Transition supposes that modernization tends to reduce death and fertility rates, but not simultaneously. Because people tend to readily adopt technological advances in medicine and food production, death rates fall first and quickly. But fertility reductions—which tend to be driven by increased education and empowerment of women, an urban lifestyle, access to contraception, downsized family expectations, and other cultural changes—take more time. And just like a bank account, when the death (spending) rate falls faster than the birth (savings) rate, the result is a rapid run-up in the sum total. Even if fertility rates later fall to match death rates—thus completing the Demographic Transition and halting further growth—a new, much larger population balance is then carried forward.

  In the twentieth century, one Demographic Transition concluded and another began. In Europe and North America it took from about 1750 to 1950 to complete, making these places the fastest-growing in the world while most of Asia and Africa grew slowly. This growth then slowed or stopped as industrialized countries completed the Demographic Transition, their fertility rates falling to near or even below the death rate.

  But in the developing world, a new Demographic Transition that began in the early twentieth century with the arrival of modern medicine has still not finished. Thanks to the inventions of antibiotics and vaccines, along with insecticides to control diseases like malaria, death rates have plummeted17 but fertility rates, while dropping, have fallen less quickly. In some countries they haven’t fallen at all, defying the classic Demographic Transition notion that all modernized women prefer fewer babies. Such discrepancies underline a known weakness of the Demographic Transition model: Not every culture will necessarily adopt the western ideal of a small nuclear family, even after women’s rights, health, and security conditions improve.

  So somewhere around 1950, our fastest population growth rates left the OECD countries18 and went to the developing world. Because the base population levels in the latter are so much larger, the resulting surge in world population has been nothing short of phenomenal. In most developing countries the spread between fertility and death rates, while narrowing, remains substantial. This second Demographic Transition is not yet finished, and unlike before, it involves the vast majority of the human race. Until a few decades after it ends—if it ends—world population will continue to grow.

  The second global force, only partly related to the first, is the growing demand that human desires place upon the natural resources, services, and gene pool of our planet. Natural resources means both finite assets like hydrocarbons, minerals, and fossil groundwater; and renewable assets like rivers, arable land, wildlife, and wood. Natural services include life essentials like photosynthesis, absorption of carbon dioxide by oceans, and the labors of bees to pollinate our crops. And by gene pool I mean exactly that—the diversity of genes being carried around by all living organisms still existing on Earth.

  It’s difficult to comprehend how fully dependent we are upon these things. Steel machines burn oil to grow and harvest our grains, with fertilizers made from natural gas, generating many times over what a farmer and mules could produce on the same land. From the genetic code of organisms we take the building blocks for our food, biotech, and pharmaceutical industries. We frame our buildings with timber, steel, and cement. We take water from the ground or trap it behind dams to grow alfalfa and cotton in the desert. We need trucks and diesel and giant metal-hulled ships to move ores and fish and manufactured goods from the places that have them to places that want them. The resulting trade flows have grown entire economies and glittering cities, with their music and culture and technology. Coal-fired electricity zaps through billions of miles of metal cable to power buildings, electric cars, cell phones, and the Internet. Airplanes and cars burn the sludge of long-dead things, granting us personal freedom and the chance to see the world.

  It’s no secret that our twentieth-century expansions in population, modernization, trade, and technology have escalated demand for all of these. Public concern—both for the stability of raw commodity supplies and for the health of the natural world—has been high since the 1970s, especially after the OPEC oil embargo crisis of ’73-’74 and NASA’s launch of ERTS-1 (later renamed Landsat), the first civilian satellite to disseminate graphic images of clear-cuts gnawing away the vast rain forests of the Amazon basin. Today, news feeds crackle with stories about dwindling oil, fights over water, and soaring food prices. Many plants and animals are disappearing as their habitats are converted to plantations and parking lots. Still others have been harvested into oblivion. Fully four-fifths of the world’s land surface (excluding Antarctica) is now directly influenced by human activities.19 The lingering exceptions to this are those places that are truly remote: the northern forests and tundra, the shrinking rain-forest cores of the Congo and Amazon basins, and certain deserts of Africa and Australia and Tibet.

  Perhaps no resource pressure has grown faster than our demand for fossil hydrocarbon fuels. This began in Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan and has now spread to China, India, and other modernizing nations. Because the United States has been (and still is) the largest consumer of these fuels, let’s illustrate the rapacity of this phenomenon as it has unfolded there.

  In 1776, when the United States of America declared independence from Great Britain after a little over a year of war, most of the fledgling country’s energy came from wood and muscles. Yes, there were sawmills turning waterwheels to cut logs, and coal was used to make coke for casting iron cannons and tools, but the vast majority of America’s energy came from fuelwood, horses, mules, oxen, and human backs.

  By the late 1800s, the Industrial Revolution, steam locomotive, and westward expansion had changed all that. Dirty black coal was the shining new prince—fueling factories, coke ovens, foundries, and trains all across the young nation. Coal consumption grew from 10 million short tons per year in 1850, to 330 million short tons just fifty years later.20 Little mining towns sprang up all over Appalachia, like now-defunct Ramseytown in western Pennsylvania, where my grandmother was later born. Nearby Rossiter produced my grandfather, who worked in the coal mines as a teenager.

  But in the twentieth century, coal was surpassed. Oil, first drilled out of a quiet Pennsylvania farm in 1859 to make lamp kerosene, caught on slowly at first. Gasoline was originally a junk by-product that some people dumped into rivers to get rid of. But then someone thought of pouring it into a combustion engine, and gasoline became the fuel of Hercules.

  Packed inside a single barrel of oil is about the same amount of e
nergy as would be produced from eight years of day labor by an average-sized man. Seizing oil fields became a prime strategic objective in both world wars. The Baku fields of Azerbaijan were a prime reason that Hitler invaded Russia, and it was their oil supply, gushing north to the Russian army, that stopped him.

  By the end of World War II, cars and trucks had outgrown the rail system, locomotives had switched to diesel, and the liquid-fuels market was really taking off. Oil consumption surpassed coal in 1951, though sales of both—along with natural gas—continued to rise strongly. In just one hundred years (1900-2000) Americans ramped up their coal consumption from about 330 million to 1.1 billion short tons per year,21,22 a 230% increase. Oil-burning grew from 39 million to 6.6 billion barrels per year,23 a 16,700% increase. In comparison, that old stalwart fuelwood rose a measly 12%, from 101 million to just 113 million cords per year. 24

  Although the U.S. population also rose quickly over this same time period (from 76 to 281 million, or +270%), oil consumption rose far faster on a per capita basis. By the beginning of the twenty-first century the average American was burning through more than twenty-four steel drums of oil every year. In 1900, had my Italian grandfather already emigrated to the United States, he would have used just twenty-two gallons, about one-half of one steel drum.

  The twentieth century saw similar extraordinary growth in American consumption of iron, nickel, diamonds, water, softwood, salmon, you name it. To varying degrees, this rapid escalation of resource consumption has either happened or is now happening in the rest of the world.

  So we see that resource consumption, much like our global population, grew ridiculously fast in a single century. But while the two certainly feed off one another, rising resource demand has less to do with population growth per se than with modernization. My UCLA colleague Jared Diamond illustrates this by considering an individual’s “consumption factor.”25 For the average person living in North America, Western Europe, Japan, or Australia, his or her consumption factor is 32.