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

Gas molecules are impervious to politics, so all of this is really just the beginning. To underscore just how dramatic our run-up of CO₂, methane, and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere is, let’s place it within the much longer context of geological time. Greenhouse gases follow both natural cycles—which fall and rise with ice ages and warm interglacial periods, respectively—and human activity, which proceeds much faster. These two actors operate over totally different time scales, with the ice age variations happening over tens of thousands of years but our human excursion unfolding over tens of years. The natural processes that drive greenhouse-gas shifts—rock weathering, astronomical cycles, the spread of forests or wetlands, ocean turnover, and others—take thousands of years, whereas human excavation and burning of old buried carbon—as illustrated earlier from U.S. history—is an action both massive and brief. And because our human-generated carbon burst is perched atop an already large, slow-moving natural interglacial peak, we are taking the atmosphere to a place the Earth has not seen for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years. ⁴²

We know this from the ancient memories of glaciers, deep ocean sediments, tree rings, cave speleothems, and other natural archives. Most spectacular are tiny air bubbles trapped within Greenland and Antarctic ice, each a hermetically sealed air sample from the past. Loose air inside a glacier’s surface snowpack gets closed off into bubbles as the weight of still more snowfall fuses it into ice. Annual layers of these bubbles have been quietly laid down for hundreds of thousands of years, before being drilled from the guts of Greenland and Antarctica by a rare breed of scientist. The gas levels inside them prove we have now elevated the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere higher than they’ve been for at least eight hundred thousand years.

Eight hundred thousand years. Jesus Christ walked barely two thousand years ago, Egypt’s pharaohs four. Our first agricultural civilizations began ten thousand years ago; twenty thousand years before that, there still were Neanderthals alive. But the world has not seen atmospheric CO₂ levels like today’s for eight hundred thousand years—and they are now approaching those of fifteen million years ago in the Miocene Epoch, when the world’s temperatures were 3° to 6°C warmer, its oceans acidic, polar ice caps diminished, and sea levels twenty-five to forty meters higher than today.⁴³

This, too, is a global force to be reckoned with.

These four global forces—demographics, resource demand, globalization, and climate change—will shape our future and are recurring themes throughout this book. As each force comes up, the corresponding icon from the set that headed the four preceding sections will head the discussion. While I have described these forces separately they are, of course, intimately intertwined. Greenhouse gas comes from the exploitation of natural resources, which in turn tracks the global economy, which in turn relates partly to population dynamics, and so on.

A fifth force twining through the first four is technology. Fast global communications facilitate global financial markets and trade. Modern health care and pharmacology are shifting population age structures in the developing world. Advances in biotech, nanotech, and materials science affect demand for different resource stocks. Smart grids, solar panels, and geoengineering might combat climate change, and so on. Under our “No Silver Bullets” rule, technological advances like these are evaluated as enablers or brake pads on the four global forces, rather than as an independent force of its own.

The thought experiment is begun. Its assumptions and ground rules are stated, its four overarching themes defined. Let us turn now to the first subject of scrutiny for the year 2050—ourselves.

Part One THE PUSH

CHAPTER 2 A Tale of Teeming Cities

“Tomorrow morning we will release our sales numbers for the month of November.

This event is overshadowed by the tragic death of Jdimytai Damour at our Valley Stream, New York, store on November 28. . . .”

—Statement from the president of the Northeast Division, Walmart USA (December 3, 2008)

Italy, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and the United States.

—Economies projected by Goldman Sachs to be overtaken by one or more of China, India, Russia, or Brazil before 2050

“From here on out, it’s an urban world.”

—Joel E. Cohen, Professor of Populations, Rockefeller University and Columbia University

It was one o’clock in the morning when Leana Lockley, twenty-eight years old and five months pregnant, lined up with her husband and two family members outside the Green Acres Mall Walmart store in Valley Stream, New York. Whining engines and lights pierced the night as jets came and went from nearby JFK Airport. It was November 28, 2008, the day following Thanksgiving called “Black Friday,” the busiest American shopping day of the year. The global economy was crashing, everyone was looking for bargains, and Walmart was cutting its prices for six hours only. By the time the store opened at five o’clock a.m. there were two thousand people crowded restlessly against the glass storefront, waiting to get in.

The doors unlocked and people surged forward. Lockley was literally picked up off her feet and carried through the door opening. There were loud cracking noises as hinges broke off, and the sounds of crashing glass. An older woman fell. Lockley tried to pick her up but was knocked to her knees. A large man saw her and tried to help. “He was facing the crowd, and he had his hands up, trying to push them back in order for me to escape,” she later recounted on Fox News. “He was trying to block the people from pushing me to the ground and trampling me . . . he was on his knees, I could look at him eye to eye, and he was trying to push them back and then the crowd pushed him down, and he fell on top of me.”⁴⁴ His body covering hers, hundreds of deal-hungry shoppers stomped and shoved over them and streamed into the store.

Lockley and her unborn daughter survived, as did three other injured shoppers sent to area hospitals. But the man who saved her life, thirty-four-year-old Jdimytai Damour, was killed. As paramedics attempted to resuscitate him, shoppers continued to jostle past; then became irate when officials announced the store was being closed.

The only son of Haitian immigrants, Jdimytai Damour was a very large but gentle man who enjoyed watching football and talked about being a teacher one day. The reason he was there that morning was not to buy, but to work. Because of his size—he was six feet five inches tall and weighed 270 pounds—he had been assigned to the front door. But he wasn’t a trained security officer. He was a temporary worker, a subcontractor, hired by Walmart to help them help us to consume more stuff during the busiest retail season of the year.

Far less tragic—and certainly less attention-grabbing—was a second, very profound event that also happened in 2008. Its exact timing will never be known, but at some instant during the year, the number of people living in urban areas grew to briefly match, for a few seconds, the number of people living in rural areas. Then, somewhere, a city baby was born. From that child forward, for the first time in our history, the human race became urban in its majority.