Given all these uncertainties, our current generation of computer models contain significant knowledge gaps. I’d wager we have twenty years’ work ahead of us before a solid scientific consensus can be reached on what will happen to this big mess of carbon as it defrosts.509
We do know this very same landscape switched on to become a major source of greenhouse gas once before—at the end of the last ice age, when northern peatlands first began to form. About 11,700 years ago, as temperatures rose at the end of the Younger Dryas cold shudder, a threshold was crossed, plants began growing, and peatlands sprang up all around the Arctic, pumping out enormous volumes of methane.510 We also know, from a single study in Sweden, that rising air temperatures penetrate permafrost soils more quickly and deeply than we thought. From two other studies in West Siberia, we know that although thawed soils ooze up to six times more dissolved carbon into rivers and lakes than frozen soils, they also store carbon faster—or at least they did for the past 2,000 years. This is at odds with a different study in Alaska, which suggests that faster-growing plants will not be able to outpace the faster-decomposing microbes once the permafrost disappears. Finally, we know some simple math: If even 2% of this frozen carbon stock somehow returns to the atmosphere between now and 2050, it will cancel out the Kyoto Protocol Annex 1 target reductions more than four times over. Like the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, this is one genie with global repercussions that we should all hope stays asleep.
Globalization Reversal
Might any of the four global forces of demography, natural resource pressure, globalization, and climate change screech to a halt between now and 2050, thus ruining all of our best projections?
Three of these have tremendous inertia. Demographic trends are a slow-moving ship, taking a generation— fifteen to twenty years—before even major course corrections will be felt. Population momentum ensures that our fastest-growing countries will keep growing for decades, even if their fertility rates fall to 2.1 tomorrow (replacement level), because their age structures are so youthful.511 And with a projected population increase to around 9.2 billion by 2050—especially a modernized, urban, consumptive one—it’s hard to envision how our demand for water, energy, and minerals will decrease from what it is today, even with great strides in conservation and recycling. Greenhouse physics dictates that we are locked in to at least some climate change and higher global sea level no matter what; the big uncertainties are how far we will allow greenhouse loading to go, what the impacts on global rainfall patterns and hurricanes will be, and lurking climate genies.
That leaves globalization. In today’s world of Walmart and iPhones, it’s easy to take our continued economic integration for granted. But as discussed in Chapter 1, the current globalization megatrend did not simply happen by itself. It was set into motion by the United States and Britain very deliberately, with a long string of new policies dating to the Bretton Woods summit in 1944. While the Internet and other information technology have enhanced globalization, they did not create it. Global social and information networks surely seem here to stay, but unlike population momentum or greenhouse gas physics, there is no natural law commanding that current policies favoring our global economic integration must continue.
History tells us of past balloons of economic integration and technological advance followed by puncture. In 221 B.C. the Qin armies first unified northeastern China out of a bedlam of warring fiefdoms. Successive Han, Sui, T’ang, Yuan, and Ming dynasties then expanded the world’s biggest trade empire into central and southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. By the fifteenth century, China had trade outposts in Africa and led the world in medicine, printing, explosives, banking, and centralized government. But then, its rulers lost interest in a global empire. They began a series of fateful political decisions that shut down China’s overseas trade while discouraging scientific advances at home. Its nascent industrialization cut short, China stood frozen in time, and the much smaller European states commenced to take over the world.
Europe wasted little time ramping up the next round of globalization. By the 1600s colonialist governments were working hand in hand with private corporations like the Dutch and British East India companies—the equivalent of today’s multinational corporations—setting up remote trading posts and shipping routes. Merchant capitalism flourished, fueled by furs, timber, gold, spices, and coal imported from overseas. Guided by multinational banks, by the 1870s goods and capital were flowing across national borders as freely as they do today. Steamships, the telegraph, and railroads were opening up the world just as standardized shipping containers, jet aircraft, and the Internet would do again a century later. Many countries decided to peg their paper currencies to a gold standard, creating fluid international currency markets and huge flows of cross-border capital. The British pound became the dominant circulating world currency much as the U.S. dollar is now. Remarkably, by 1913 the industrialized national economies were enjoying even greater levels of foreign investment than today.512 It was a golden age of economic globalization.
It unraveled surprisingly fast. The June 28, 1914, assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo initiated a chain of events setting off a world war, the suspension of gold-backed currencies, and a near-total collapse in global investment and trade. Even after hostilities ended, former trading partners remained bitterly divided, a collection of protectionist states heaping tariffs upon one another. Only after a second world war, followed by the United States and Britain’s deliberate reboot of the global economic order at Bretton Woods, did things start to recover. It took sixty years for merchandise exports to regain the levels of 1914.513 The rapidity of this collapse proves that unlike the three other global forces, it is possible for globalization to come to a fast halt. It is also a sobering reminder that national leaders can, on rare occasions, take their countries to war with trade partners even if it means gutting their own economies in the process.
Besides another world war, at least two things could plausibly weaken or halt the global economic integration of today. The first is obvious: Central governments could decide to abandon proglobalization policies in favor of a return to economic protectionism. A variant of this would be a shift from “globalization” to “regionalization,” with separate economic blocs emerging in North America, Europe, and East Asia.514 Some economists have argued that the 2008-09 global financial crisis will mark the end of an era for twentieth-century globalization and neoliberal policies. It is even conceivable that well-meaning carbon- reduction policies, by penalizing emissions by different amounts in different countries, could trigger tariff wars if countries respond by imposing border taxes to recoup their losses.515
A second possibility is the rising cost of oil. Global trade is fueled by cheap energy, and container ships and long-haul cargo trucks cannot readily be electrified like passenger cars as described in Chapter 3. And as environmental damages, too, are increasingly priced into production costs in manufacturing countries like China, the apparent profit margin of a global versus local trade network will narrow.
A deglobalized world with extremely high energy prices might be an oddly familiar one, with local farmers feeding compact walking cities, a return to domestic manufacturing, and airplane travel afforded only by rich elites. One could even imagine a reversal of the urbanization trend as farming returns to being a labor-intensive industry, no longer propped by cheap hydrocarbon for fuel, fertilizers, and pesticides. Overseas tourism would fade, perhaps to be replaced by virtual experiences or even uninterest and disengagement from foreign affairs.
Political genies are even harder to anticipate than permafrost genies. In my mind’s eye I imagine an even more integrated world in 2050 than 2010. But no one really knows if our globalization megatrend will accelerate, slow, or reverse over the next forty years. Of the four global forces, this one is the hardest to foresee.
Dragon Swallows Bear
At the smaller, more regional scale, the future of the Russian Far East is similarly murky.
This region is Russia’s gateway to eastern Asia. By any measure it is vast, resource-laden, and practically empty of people. It covers some 6.2 million square kilometers, about two-thirds the size of the United States and triple the area of Britain, France, and Germany combined. It is rich in oil and natural gas (especially Sakhalin Island and the Sea of Okhotsk), minerals, fish, timber, and a surprising amount of farmland. It holds one-third of Russia’s landmass but, with just 6.6 million people and falling, less than 5% of its population. Averaging barely one person per square kilometer, the Russian Far East has one of the lowest population densities on Earth.
Except for a tiny 20-kilometer border with North Korea, its main southern neighbor, following a 3,000-
