Recently Cyndy sent me the link to this prediction
of life in the year 2000, written in 1961, before the Beatles, before
the Kennedy assassination, and before personal computers and the
Internet. Like most futuristic predictions of the time it was
optimistic, focused on domestic life and heavily laced with amazing
technology, especially transportation technology. It was mostly about
having more, fancier stuff.
And like most short-term predictions, it forecast more dramatic changes
in the next X years than had been seen in the previous X years.
Cyndy also links us to this extraordinary article by Ran Prieur, The Slow Crash, which predicts civilization will end not with a bang but with a whimper:
What I'm focusing on here is the
scenario that includes only events we're reasonably sure about: the end
of cheap energy, the decline of industrial agriculture, currency
collapse, economic "depression," wars, famines, disease epidemics,
infrastructure failures, and extreme unpredictable weather.
If that's all we get, the crash will be slower and more complex than
the kind of people who predict crashes like to predict. There won't be
any clear before, during, or after. Most people living during the
decline and fall of Rome didn't even know it. After the 1929 stock
market crash, respectable voices said it was a temporary adjustment,
that the economy was still strong. Only years later, when we knew they
were wrong, could we draw a line at 1929.
I suggest we're already in the fall of civilization. In 2004 the price
of oil doubled, bankruptcies and foreclosures accelerated, global food
stockpiles fell to record lows despite high harvests, an apocalyptic
religious cult hacked an election to tighten their control of the
world's most powerful country, and we had record numbers of hurricanes
and tornadoes -- and a big tsunami to top it off. If every year from
here to 2020 is half as eventful, we'll be living in railroad cars,
eating grass, and still waiting for the big crash we've been led to
expect from watching movies designed to push our emotional buttons and
be over in two hours.
You know how it goes: Electricity and water and heat are off and not
coming back on. Food and fuel will never again be coming into the
cities. People "revert to savagery" or "anarchy," running wild in the
streets killing and looting. If you live in the city, you will have to
kill people to steal their food, or even eat them, and they'll be
trying to do the same to you. If you live in the country, you'd better
have a big gun to fend off the hordes of starving urbanites scouring
the countryside. This condition will last until a strong leader
rebuilds "civilization."
I'm not entirely sure that the election was stolen, although Rayne has got me deeply worried about it.
But the fact that both the US and China became net importers of food
last year for the first time in half a century should be setting off
alarm bells. So should the re-election in the most affluent country in
the history of the world of a self-proclaimed "war president". So
should the break-up of arctic and antarctic ice, and the plan by China
to achieve US per-capita levels of wealth (and hence consumption) by
burning huge amounts of coal and continuing to increase its use of oil,
mostly from the Mideast, by 16% per year. So should the corporatists'
rejection of Kyoto and of any limitations whatever to its staggering
economic domination and the resultant subjugation and exploitation of
much of the third world as impoverished, horrifically polluted,
downtrodden economic colonies.
Here are some of the key points that Ran makes about The Slow Crash, with my own two cents thrown in:
- Peak Oil won't lead to Mad Max-style gangs stealing
gasoline, but rather increasing unreliability of electrical power in
the West (especially in poor areas, where residents will, like they do
now in poor countries, find other make-shift ways to keep warm and heat
their food), long line-ups, and (at last) conservation. "When the
lights go out, we won't go berserk, we'll just go to bed earlier." We
waste so much energy, that we can do with a lot less without hardship.
But look for the suburbs, where dependence on oil is heaviest, to be
hard hit by the resulting depression.
- There will be famines, but they'll be like famines in the
past -- isolated, endured, and mostly peaceful. They'll just be more
frequent, so the 80 million who starved in Mao's China won't seem so
remarkable or unusual. We'll see a huge increase in food costs, because
oil is such a key component of the modern Western food system, and
we'll get less variety in the stores and some rationing, but we'll also
see a huge shift away from extravagantly wasteful agricultural
practices (such as the use of 70% of farmland for animal feed and
grazing). But except for the rich, we'll go vegetarian, we'll adapt,
there will be no suffering here.
- There won't be anarchy. No need for a gun to protect you
from roving mobs, because individuals in desperate straits are smarter
and have always found better ways of making ends meet than attacking
rich white guys' houses. There will be lots
of people begging, though. In economic depressions, there always are.
"The function of propaganda is not to tell us what to think but to sink
us deeper in what we already thoughtlessly believe: in this case, that
in the absence of central control we get a dog-eat-dog universe full of
shocking crimes. That's what we have now.
The every-man-for-himself morality is a symptom of a culture that uses
excess wealth and zero-sum competition to maintain hierarchy. In the
absence of wealth and control, people get nicer. We learn to take
responsibility, to work together, to help each other." That's precisely
what happened in Argentina when the economy collapsed recently. Look
there to see our future.
- "I expect [ideologically-driven] genocide to compete with
famine for the number two spot, still well behind disease, which
historically has always been the biggest killer."
- The slow collapse of the US dollar will make most imported
goods unafffordable to most Americans, and lead to a rebirth of
entrepreneurship and home-grown manufacturing. It will crush the
economies (like China) dependent on US imports. Again as in Argentina
recently, self-employment will be the only option for most Americans,
and it will be subsistence but not uncomfortable. Interest rates will
spike as a result. The burst of the housing bubble will follow, and
after an initial rash of foreclosures we'll see what we always see when
creditors realize they can't get blood from a stone: debt forgiveness,
or at least indefinite deferral of repayment requirements. "One piece
of advice: If you can sell off your stocks and get enough money to pay
off your house, hurry!" Or you could be like Bush with his giant debt
and play chicken: Bet that when you and a few hundred million others
can't repay your mortgages that the banks will be forced to string you
along indefinitely, that the bluff is just too big to call.
At
this point I part company with Ran: He gets into secret weapons,
mass killings and even a "human consciousness shift". I know the
latter, a great global "awareness" and coming-together idea is very
popular among today's young, and among techies and sci-fi fans, but to
me it is the antithesis
of Ran's Slow Crash. If such a thing is possible it is far further in
the future than the bullet-points above, so far away that I think it is
foolish to think about it -- it's beyond the predictable 'event
horizon'. What Ran predicts in the five
bullets above: Oil crisis, large but localized famines and epidemic
diseases, global economic depression and a resultant interest rate and
debt crisis and 'pulling together' and more, local genocides,
makes sense to me, based on everything I've read, and on my instincts.
So I'm
going to pick up from that point, and make my prediction for 2045, the
same short-term forecast period as the 1961 technophile's prediction
with which I started this article. Here we go:
- Between now and 2045 the price of oil will whipsaw, caught
between the natural supply/demand upward pressure (which suggests it
should be selling for $160/bbl, not today's $45/bbl) and the political
pressure, short-term greed, and ultimately (when the depression hits)
inability of people to pay for it even though they need it to sustain
their economy, all of which will put downward pressure on the price.
Like the weather and currency and interest rates, we're in for a very
rocky ride. We will learn to conserve, ration, find other ways, some
healthy and some (burning coal, wood and nuclear) not, to get energy,
and we'll get used to long line-ups followed by brief periods of
surplus, and regular, lengthy blackouts.
- The immediate consequences of this instability will be: (a)
more political and military intervention by the West to try to control
supply and hence prices; (b) the end of low interest rates and low
inflation rates, as the oil price jumps trickle down through everything
we consume that depends on oil, from food to cars to plastics to
fabrics, but again, we'll see these rates whipsaw, and speculating and
hedging the sudden up-and-down changes will become a Western obsession;
(c) the demise of the US dollar as the dominant currency in favour of a
much more stable combo of the Euro and the proposed new all-Asian
currency unit, and the subsequent slow but steady decline in the value
of the US dollar; (d) a global economic depression, as living beyond
our means catches up to us -- the US and its main suppliers, China and
Canada, and suburbs in urban agglomerations worldwide, will be the
hardest hit; (e) a crash in stock markets and in Western housing
prices, followed by a flood of money from third-world corporations and
their richest citizens to buy up Western property at fire-sale prices,
and then a prohibition on ownership of property by non-residents.
- By 2045, in the face of this economic tumult, we'll have a New New Deal.
The untrammeled 'free' market economy, 'free' trade, globalization and
corporatism will have been completely discredited, and people will be
working together at both a community and a national and international
level to rebuild the economy. Unfortunately, short-term expediency will
again dominate thinking at the expense of sustainability, so while 2045
may be a banner year for human cooperation and collaboration, it will
be just one more horrific year for the environment. Conventional wisdom
will be that we just won't have the luxury to worry about our planet's
health when human health and well-being are in such precarious
condition.
- In 2045 the global footprint, the amount of resources used
by humans as a percent of the planet's ability to regenerate them, will
be about the same as it had been a decade earlier, about 300% (today it
is 120%). The burning of coal and wood will have been the greatest
contributors to the increase, along with population growth, which will
defy optimistic predictions and track the UN's 'upper-middle' forecast
track, reaching 9 billion by 2045 with a projection of 12 billion by
2085.
- Famine will have hit in several areas of Asia, Africa and
Latin America, but the total death toll of 200 million since 2010 will
not have significantly affected total population. New epidemic diseases
will have become the newest fear, with new annual outbreaks becoming
the norm, and 10-20 million dying each year, but again, not enough to
significantly offset the immigrantion-driven overall population
increase. Part of the New New Deal will be the prohibition of using
land for animal feed or grazing, and scientists will have already come
up with vegetable-based proteins to substitute for animal proteins, so
the people will have become vegans without even really being aware of
it -- they will still call the vegetable-based protein foods they buy
'meat' and 'eggs' and 'cheese' and they will still look and feel and
taste the same. Because of health scandals and financial non-viability,
fish 'farming' will also have ceased and animal proteins will have
replaced this food sector as well.
- The loss of almost all Earth's forests, much of it for the
burning of wood for fuel, will have accelerated global warming and made
weather enormously unpredictable. It will also have led to the
desertification of most of Earth's former rainforest areas, and the
complete inability of vast areas of the planet to support any
agriculture whatsoever (since there will be insufficient oil to waste
on soil fertilizer). A large proportion of agriculture will have moved
indoors by 2045.
- The first great fresh-water shortages will have hit by
2045, following three consecutive very hot years, and fresh water will
be rationed. Use of fresh water for non-essential purposes like
watering lawns will be a criminal offense. But although the rationing
will hit some industries especially hard, just as the New New Deal was
starting to work, the shortage will not be life-threatening.
- The big corporations of 2005 will mostly still be around in
2045, but mostly by default: Their stranglehold on the economy will
have stifled innovation and entrepreneurship through most of the
intervening 40 years, until they too fell victim to the Great
Depression of the 2030s. The period from 2035-2045 saw the big
corporations lay off most of their already depleted staff, and cease
most operations, but sit on their accumulated wealth. Entrepreneurs
followed the example of early 21st century Argentina, seizing and
occupying the idle facilities of these big corporations and running
them as co-ops, as part of a huge entrepreneurial decade-long boom
driven by economic desperation, modest 'subsistence' expectations, and
great collaboration and ingenuity of people with no other way to make a
living. The fight over 'squatter's rights' to idle corporate assets
still rages in the courts.
- Nuclear weapons were first deployed in 2015 in a war
between India and Pakistan, which then exploded into a regional war
encompassing the Mideast and seeing the limited use of new nuclear
weapons by the US to protect its strategic political and economic
interests there. Since that time they have been used again by the US in
wars in Venezuela, Libya, Congo and Indonesia, all ostensibly for
peace-keeping purposes.
- The United Nations continues to meet in its new
headquarters in Brussels, but since the US withdrew in 2010, its power
and authority has been greatly diminished.
- Terrorists from 35 different countries have made attacks on
other countries, in addition to the never-ending cycles of civil war
that continue to plague most of the third world. Terrorists attempted
to use nuclear weapons on several occasions, but only once (in
Indonesia) successfully. International terrorist organizations now
prefer to use biological weapons, which require much less money and no
state sanction to develop, and which have successfully been used in
attacks on dozens of countries. There is a never-ending 'arms race'
between new bioweapons used by extremists and the development of
vaccines and anti-toxins and inoculation of people in the wealthy
nations in response to, or anticipation of, each new development. Ten
times as many Westerners die from effects of the vaccines and
anti-toxins as die from the weapons themselves, but neither number is
yet large and it it considered an inevitable cost of the war on
terrorism.
This prediction may sound dire, but it's not all that different from
what the world went through in the 1930s and 1940s, and humanity is
essentially the same species now we are then. I'm also not predicting
anything radically different from what the world has already seen, in
one form or another -- no unprecedented crash, no global plague, no end
of civilization or of the world as we know it. That could come later in
the century, but not by 2045. Contrast this world in 2045 versus 2005,
and compare the degree of difference between 2005 and 1965, and I think
you'll see the changes are comparable, consistent and, sadly,
recurrent. What I'm predicting is not inconsistent with the predictions
in The Fourth Turning, a well-researched but annoying 1997 book that tells us we're destined (or doomed) to repeat the cycles of history at an ever-increasing scale of magnitude.
In 2045 I will be, if I'm still alive, 93 years old. My grand-daughters
will be about the age I am today. I can picture them now, lamenting, on
whatever takes the place of blogs by then, the malaise of our society,
its short-sightedness and preoccupation with immediate crises, our
inability to learn the lessons of the past. They will be pleased about
the growing awareness of the need to, and willingness to, conserve, and
about the re-birth of entrepreneurship and innovation in the search for
answers to the pressing economic and social problems of the day.
They will probably still have big mortgages, and the threat of
foreclosure will hang over them, as it will everyone else, but that
will be just one more of the daily stresses they have learned to
endure, to adapt to, as we have in our time. They will live more for
the moment, in their 50s, than I do today in mine. But as the clock
ticks on, as the overpopulation and despoiling and exhaustion of the
planet continues at an unceasing and inexorable, but almost
imperceptibly slow pace, will they still cling to hope that the next
generation will be able to solve the problems they leave unaddressed?
Will they even notice that the fate of all life on Earth has probably
already passed The Tipping Point? Should we expect them to be any
different from us?
The intriguing graphic above is from a Rutgers University study
asking whether 9/11 or The End of Oil could be the catalyst for the predicted 'Fourth Turning'. The
graphic is available in a legible wall-sized version on the site.
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