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

by Laurence C. Smith

  Blue Oil

  Demographic models tell us that billions of new people are coming around the hot, dry southern latitudes of our planet, places water-stressed today that will be even more stressed in the future. With a few notable exceptions the water-rich North, in contrast, is expected to become even wetter. Given this obvious mismatch, might northern countries one day sell their water to southern ones?

  The idea is not crazy. International bulk water sales have been popping up elsewhere, for example from Lesotho to South Africa and from Turkey to Israel. Indeed, Turkey built a $150-million water export facility at the mouth of the Manavgat River to sell water to regional buyers by tanker.520 A French company is considering an underground canal to send Rhône River water from France to Spain.

  The most ambitious example of all is in China, where a massive, decades-long reengineering of its river networks to shunt water from its wet south to the parched north is now under way. This “South-to-North Water Diversion” megaproject will link together four major drainage basins and build three long canals running through the eastern, central, and western parts of the country. Its costs will include at least USD $62 billion—more than three times the cost of China’s Three Gorges Dam—the relocation of three hundred thousand people, and many negative environmental impacts. When finished, the amount of water artificially transferred from south to north each year will total more than half of all water consumption in California.521

  Might another megaproject emerge to redirect water from north to south, say from Canada to the United States, or from Russia to the dry steppes of central Asia? There are certainly some precedents, and not just the one going on now in China. The last century saw the construction of many major engineering projects in the Soviet Union and North America, including two huge schemes to transfer water from one drainage basin to another: Canada’s James Bay Project for hydropower, and California’s State Water Project, a massive system of canals, reservoirs, and pumping stations to divert water from the northern to southern ends of the state.

  Most audacious of all were two megaprojects designed in the 1960s but never built. Both proposed the massive use of dams, canals, and pumping stations to replumb the hydrology of the North American continent and shunt its water from north to south. They were the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), proposed by the Ralph M. Parsons engineering company in Pasadena, California (now Parsons Corporation); and the Great Recycling and Northern Development (GRAND) Canal, proposed by a Canadian engineer named Tom Kierans.

  NAWAPA was colossal in scale. It proposed redirecting north-flowing rivers headed to Alaska and northern Canada into the Rocky Mountain Trench—thus forming a giant inland sea—then pumping the water south through connections linking all of the major drainage basins of western North America and the Great Lakes. Flows in the Yukon, Peace, and other distant northern rivers could end up in the Great Lakes, California, or Mexico.

  NAWAPA’s price tag and ecological damages were immense. Reviled by environmental groups and most Canadians, and with an estimated cost of $100 to $300 billion in 1960s dollars,522 this grandiose plan did better at attracting media attention than financial backing. But NAWAPA firmly planted the idea of massive north-south water transfers in the minds of generations of engineers and politicians. A half-century later, it continues to inspire revulsion, awe, and smaller spin-off project concepts.

  The second immense north-south water scheme of the 1960s, the GRAND Canal, continues to have its advocates today. Its idea is to build a dike across James Bay (the large cove at the southern end of Hudson Bay, see map on p. ix), thus retaining runoff from this lowland’s many north-flowing rivers prior to their entering the ocean. The enclosed part of James Bay would become a giant freshwater lake, and its water then pumped back south again toward Lake Huron.

  The GRAND Canal plan’s inventor, Tom Kierans, now in his nineties, remains its tireless proponent. He points out that the only place the project would deprive of water is Hudson Bay, a brackish sea overwhelmed by jellyfish. Every now and then the plan is resurrected by Canadian politicians.523 But with a current estimated cost of USD $175 billion—not to mention many environmental impacts and a local climate change over the region524—its revival seems distant, at least for now.

  Smaller projects in the same area, like the very recently proposed “Northern Waters Complex” concept525 (see maps on pp. viii-xi), could realistically win support sooner. This particular plan is to impound seasonal floodwater from three north-flowing rivers, temporarily inundating about eleven hundred square kilometers of land before pumping it south again. According to its proponents, the Northern Waters Complex would cost only USD $15 billion, could be finished by 2022, and would generate $2 billion annually in hydropower and perhaps another $20 billion annually in water sales. With economic incentives like these, the great sucking sound from the United States could start sounding better to many Canadians.

  Giant water projects cause significant environmental damage and are no longer popular in either the United States or Canada. In fact, the American trend today is to remove dams, not build them. But smaller-scale water exports can happen with pipelines, tanker ships, and bottling plants. The Great Lakes, fronted and shared by both countries, can be replenished at one end and decanted from another, for example at the Chicago Diversion. In his book The Great Lakes Water Wars, author Peter Annin describes how Great Lakes governors and premiers—fearing the specter of long, greedy straws coming at them from the American Southwest—are engaged in a flurry of cooperative lawmaking, hoping to barricade themselves against future water diversions out of the region.

  An open question—one feared by many environmentalists—is whether Canada could in fact become obligated to sell bulk water to the United States and Mexico under NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Unlike oil, the much more controversial issue of water was deliberately left unaddressed during the writing and ratification of this treaty. Legal scholars point out that if even one province, say Quebec, were to start selling bulk water to the United States, it could establish legal precedent, thus committing Canadian water providers to sell to U.S. or Mexican customers as well as their own. In such a world, North America would grow accustomed to buying not only oil, but also water, from its northernmost country.

  Most Canadians oppose the idea of becoming water purveyors to the United States, although their provincial governments are generally more open to the idea. Alongside environmental concerns, Canada suffers water shortages of its own. A water-rich country on paper, most of its uncommitted surplus lies in the far north, flowing over thinly populated permafrost to the Arctic Ocean or Hudson Bay. The south-central prairies are prone to drought, with spotty rainfall and heavy reliance on a few long, oversubscribed rivers fed by distant melting snow and glaciers. If any future megaprojects arise to divert water from northern Canada to the United States, a cut will likely go to southern Canada.

  One place where we could well see the resurrection of a massive twentieth-century water-transfer idea by 2050 is in Russia. Siberia’s mighty rivers, flowing untouched to the Arctic Ocean, have long been contemplated as a potential water source for the dry steppes and deserts of central Asia. In the 1870s, tsarist engineers noted the favorable, if long, topographic gateway linking wet western Siberia with the Aral-Caspian lowland, in what is now Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. By the 1940s the Soviet engineer M. M. Davydov had drawn up a grand plan for north-south water transfers out of western Siberia, complete with canals, pumping stations, and the creation of a giant inland lake that would have inundated the same area that is plastered in oil and gas wells today.

  From the late 1960s to the early 1980s the USSR studied, revised, and finalized a scaled-down version of Davydov’s plan. The idea was to tap Siberia’s mighty Ob’, Irtysh, and Yenisei rivers using a 2,544-kilometer-long canal to irrigate cotton fields around the Aral Sea (see map on page xii). Diversion of the Aral’s feeder rivers was already careening the region toward the desiccated d
isaster it is today. By 1985 the canal’s route had been surveyed and the first work crews arrived in Siberia to commence the “project of the century,” known by then as “Sibaral” (short for Siberia to Aral Sea Canal).526 But then, the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, abruptly halted the project in 1986, citing a need for further study of Sibaral’s environmental and economic impacts. Nothing further happened and when the Soviet Union collapsed, the project, after decades of planning, was abandoned.

  Today, Sibaral continues to rear up from the grave with surprising regularity. The megaproject is more politically awkward than before because six sovereign countries—Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—are now involved instead of one. However, all five former Soviet republics want Sibaral to happen and continue to clamor for it.

  Support for this in Russia is mixed. In 2002 Moscow’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, wrote a letter to President Vladimir Putin urging the plan’s revival, citing destabilization of Central Asia over water shortages and the specter of refugees pouring across the Russian border. Russia’s deputy minister of natural resources also wrote support for the plan.527 By 2004 Luzhkov was stumping the project in Kazakhstan; and the director of Soyuzvodproject, a government water agency, said they were assembling archived project materials from more than three hundred institutes in order to revisit and revise the old plans. Most Russian scientists are opposed to Sibaral but some note that reducing river runoff to the Arctic Ocean could slightly mitigate the anticipated weakening of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation described earlier in this chapter.528 Modeling studies are needed to confirm or disprove this hypothesis, but if correct, Sibaral could conceivably win the support of environmental groups worried more about global climate change than ecological damages in Siberia.

  It remains to be seen if China’s ongoing South-to-North Water Diversion will rekindle humanity’s past passion for massive water projects. Given the enormous obstacles—financial, environmental, and political—I am skeptical that any of these north-to-south water transfer megaprojects will materialize by 2050. But of the ones described here, Sibaral is the most developed. Central Asia is getting very, very dry, and its population is growing. Unlike the North American schemes, something about this project refuses to die. Despite serious likely environmental damages, it really could happen one day.

  Regardless of whatever water engineering schemes are or are not undertaken by 2050, one thing remains clear. When it comes to water, the NORCs will be the envy of the world.

  CHAPTER 10

  The New North

  Within hours after the CCGS Amundsen docked at Churchill, my life had changed completely. After months of railroads through desolate boreal forest, long empty coastlines, and the cold salt air of Hudson Bay, I sank back into the smog-choked din of my sweating desert megacity. It was familiar but surreal, exhilarating but perturbing, all at once—in short, the typical reaction most Arctic scientists have at summer’s end when they migrate from north to south, like overeducated birds, to reintroduce themselves to society.

  What makes coming home so jarring, compared to other returns from other exotic places—isn’t simply culture shock. It’s human shock, seeing so many people again after dwelling in a place so empty of them. Even Iowa farmlands seem crowded after one has steamed for days along the Labrador coast or flown hundreds of miles overland, seeing virtually no trace of humans. To experience true northern solitude is both spooky and thrilling, like being time-warped to another planet without us. The question is how many more years things will remain like this.

  The number of people wishing to visit, exploit, or simply become informed about the Arctic grows larger every year. The count of prospective students contacting me to pursue graduate degrees has leapt from none to dozens per year. At annual conventions of the American Geophysical Union, research presentations about the Arctic now overflow giant convention halls where before there was a tiny room of lifers talking only to each other. Some ten thousand scientists and fifty thousand participants from sixty-three countries participated in the 2007-2o09 International Polar Year.

  Research and development spending is rising too. The U.S. National Science Foundation alone now funnels nearly a half-billion dollars annually toward polar research, more than double what it did in the 1990s. I wish that this trend meant winning a research grant was half as hard, but with so many new young scientists around, they are more competitive than ever. Global investments in the International Polar Year totaled some USD $1.2 billion. NASA and the European Space Agency are developing new satellites to map and comprehend the polar regions as never seen before. NASA’s investment alone will likely reach USD $2 billion by the middle of this decade.529

  Thanks to heavy media coverage, images of drowned polar bears, bewildered Inuit hunters, and satellite maps of shrinking sea ice are now commonplace in people’s minds. In a remarkably short span of years these phenomena have changed the world’s perception of the Arctic from unconquerable ice fortress, to militarized zone buffering two nuclear superpowers, to frail ecosystem on the verge of collapse (or business bonanza, depending on one’s point of view). A place perceived as a maritime graveyard and killer of men even into the 1980s is now perceived as dissolving into a frontier ocean, laden with natural-resource riches for the taking. With so few actual Arctic residents around to protest these frames, all of them have been freely cemented into public consciousness by the words and images of their times.

  On the following page, the image on the left reflects the height of the Arctic exploration craze in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The one on the right is a popular stock photo currently circulating on many climate-change Web sites and blogs. Both portray the same geographic location—the Arctic Ocean—but to very different effect. At left (Abandonment of the Jeannette, circa 1894) it is a darkly foreboding place, deadly and impregnable. At right (The Last Polar Bear, circa 2009) it is a place of sunny skies, an alluring glass-calm sea, and a magnificent animal doomed to extinction.

  Both are stylized, of course. The craggy spires ensnaring the Jeannette more closely resemble alpine mountains than sea ice; upon magnification, shadow angles and other subtle details in the photo reveal that the polar bear has almost surely been digitally inserted. Each has its own message it is trying to advance. But stylized or not, it is images like these that powerfully reflect—and shape—the perceptions of their times. And, as any good advertising executive knows, when it comes to spending money, perception is everything.

  Frames of the Arctic: (Left) impregnable killer of ships and brave men, ca. 1894; (Right) imperiled ecosystem or business bonanza, depending on one’s point of view, ca. 2009.

  In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, explorer accounts of glorious adversity shadowed by death persuaded urban donors around the world to loosen their wallets and fund expeditions to the Northwest Passage and North Pole. During World War II and the Cold War, fears of Japanese invasion, atomic bombs, and communist ideology loosened enormous national expenditures of blood and treasure to essentially open up the North for the first time. Today, scientists, through USGS oil and gas assessments and climate model projections, are convincing governments and investors that the region is a place of rising strategic value that is opening for business. And history tells us, when it comes to human decisions about spending money, this growing perception is as equally important—perhaps even more important—as the climate changes themselves.

  Viewed in this light, disappearing sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is profound—but so also are the decisions of NORC governments to begin military exercises there, to start buying frigates and F-35 fighter jets, or to commit to the long and costly process of filing UNCLOS claims to its seafloor. Thawing permafrost is profound—but so also are the business decisions of private capital to snap up Canada’s northernmost railroad and port of Churchill, to buy USD $2.8 billion in Arctic offshore energy leases, and to begin developing specialized LNG tanker ships and platform
s for offshore drilling in icy environments.530

  Environmental groups around the world, horrified at the prospect of an entire ecosystem going extinct, are raising money for, and awareness of, the Arctic. And unlike most other fields of geoscience, when yet another polar ice shelf crumbles the news media actually reports on it. My colleagues and I routinely field reporters’ questions on subjects, like soil carbon storage in permafrost, once relegated to the dusty bin of academic obscurity.

  All of this publicity has spurred a massive increase in tourism to the area. In 2004 more than 1.2 million passengers traveled to Arctic destinations on cruise ships. Just three years later the number more than doubled; by 2008 there were nearly four hundred cruise ship arrivals in Greenland alone.531 Many passengers cite the desire to “see the Arctic before it’s gone” as motivation for the pricey tickets. And while a liquid Arctic won’t arrive anytime soon, the new tourism companies, port-of-call businesses, and other new stakeholders springing up to meet this demand will.

  This tide of interest in the Arctic is being spurred by the dramatic climate-change impacts that are happening there. They are recasting the world’s perception of what the place is. By transforming its frame from empty fortress to ecological catastrophe, from military theater to business opportunity, climate change is triggering yet another powerful feedback loop in the region, a distinctly human one, that will transform it in very tangible ways. For the region’s development, its perceived strategic value, and its ties and economic linkages to the rest of the world, this may prove the most profound feedback of all.