TRENDS: 2080 A Critical Date
Introduction
While the future can never be known until it arrives, to ignore the trends that lead up to the present and that might likely predict what the future holds, is a short-sighted and potentially dangerous attitude. At the same time, it is just as wise to regard the predictions as, just predictions, not a reality for the future. Indeed, knowing the current trends and assessing a most probable future allows one to decide if that potential future is one that you yourself would be happy to see happen. If that is not a future you would like to see, then it is up to you to decide if you want to intervene and try to change that future to a better future, or if your choice is something else.
The purpose of writing this is to use trends to make a reasonable prediction about the future and what it might look like. The trends I quote here are derived from a number of sources, including my own meta analysis of the science of climate change, the interpretation of the costs associated with effecting a net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050, and the social costs of climate damage using the DICE and Epstein-Zin models. I am indebted to the work of the principals behind the website Our World in Data and to a number of informal authors on social media.
The future world that the trend analysis suggests is not a future I would like to see happen, and I have not proposed a mechanism to “fix” the trends. The leaders of the world, as portrayed by their actions, are short-sighted and interested in Power, Status, and Wealth, the order of priority of each depends on what level of governance the leader is in. They display characteristics of psychopathic narcissism and are unlikely to be dissuaded from the current path by appealing to their logic in the face of the threats suggested by the trend analysis.
Instead, my proposed course of action (to be explored in a future document) would be to work on survival at a lower level of governance — primarily at the community and city levels, avoiding the national, international, and corporate or investment leadership. The world population will decline beginning about 2080 and not recover for an extended period of time. The lead up to this decline is already underway in the more developed countries. This will destabilize the economic structure of the world and allow new financial and economic concepts to hold sway; hopefully the replacements will be sustainable, caring, and sharing.
In the meantime, the world is essentially governed by a mercantile empire with fossil fuels and large retail corporations directing the activities and policies of the political and investment industry leaders.
Mercantile Governance
The top priorities of the heads of the global mercantile empire (fossil fuels — wealth, power, status) impose similar top priorities on their political puppets but in a different order: power, status, wealth. To maintain the integrity of the fossil fuel mercantile empire it is necessary to prevent the fossil fuel nations from asserting their nationality as a means to limit access to the fossil fuels. In the past, this has been done, especially by the US through political and military interventions with excuses ranging from protecting democracy to fear of weapons of mass destruction.
The Ukraine war is a very recent example of the intent by the fossil fuel leaders to sacrifice Ukraine in favour of weakening Russia’s military strength. Taiwan is a similar probable event, but in this case to have a distant fight weaken China’s burgeoning military power. Sacrificing Taiwan and part of Australia (bases of operations to “protect” Taiwan) is undoubtedly part of the “plan.”
Migrants are a new issue, but only because they are numerous. In the past, a few refugees or migrants fleeing oppression was handled fairly well. However today, the extent of the migrant movement is stressing (mostly conceptually) many nations. Those nations are increasingly hardening their borders so that the refugees and poor migrants are rejected and die, or are deported to their original oppressive existence where they often are killed. Recently in North America, President Biden hardened the southern border and convinced Prime Minister Trudeau to harden the informal (“illegal”) crossings and repel the immigrants. The problem for Biden is that with a leaky Canadian border, there remains an incentive for migrants to cross the southern US border in hopes of making it to Canada, which in the past was a welcoming location — no more. That will further discourage and kill migrants in Mexico at the border crossings. This seems to be a trend around the world.
To further diminish the capacity of the public to assert influence over the fossil fuel industry, governments around the world have targeted scientists who speak out, protesters, and activists who have all been, and continue to be, subject to arrest and torture by increasingly militarized police forces around the world. In fact, many protesters are now criminalized for peaceful protests. In addition, the 50 year campaign by the fossil fuel industry to malign, falsely discredit and use disinformation propaganda as part of the advertisements has all been condoned by governments. It is unlikely this cabal of wealth, power, and status will be undone and replaced any time soon. If that does happen, it will be by revolt, not persuasion.
Given the economic instability that is on the horizon with the declining and migrating populations, the impending loss of the US dollar as the global standard, war-like local skirmishes (Ukraine, Taiwan) intended to weaken competitive countries without frontal confrontation, resource competition and declining biodiversity, the current arrangement of “sovereign nations” is unlikely to endure.
The most obvious alliances — already underway are:
North Atlantic Treaty Organization expanded.
Russo-Sino-Asia Alliance
Middle East (until it runs out of fossil fuels)
Oceania (including Australia) that will be under dispute for some time
South America and Africa subsumed into a resource-base single unit operated as a commons.
Competition will continue to be a major force in the struggle for global dominance in the mercantile empires. Once the Taiwan and Ukraine wars are “settled,” the next attempt to further weaken the US may be a feint into Alaska across the Bering Strait. Alaska is poorly defended, and in a warming world, it would be fairly easy to establish a ground base using submarines to drop off troops and equipment. To defend this part of North America would require a very heavy investment because of its isolated position. That would be a large investment from the USA and Canada, with little to show for the effort.
Fossil fuels are a mainstay of the Middle East. Replacement income is not going to be easy for the Middle East. Nether Russia nor China and Asia are at ease with Muslim doctrine, so it is possible the Middle East would finally join Europe.
Assuming the plans of the fossil fuel companies run true to end fossil fuel use by 2100, the world will be considerably warmer with the result that a large proportion of the remaining population in China and Asia will migrate north into the previously aligned border countries to Russia. Similarly, the USA alliance with Canada will probably grow to the extent that the border is no longer an impediment to migration northward from the USA.
Finally, it is not beyond the realm of possible that the entire North American empire might crumble in competition with, or isolation from, the Eastern mercantile empire. That would likely leave Europe vulnerable to an economic takeover by the eastern alliance, and ultimately a global empire under the governance of the European/Asian continent. North America would thus be isolated and forced to become independent at a much lower lifestyle than it now enjoys.
Had North America continued to increase its manufacturing, research, and development, as well as its innovative capacity, rather than having shopped it out to Russia and China, the outcome of history could have been quite different. That has left North America lacking in manufacturing, research and development and innovative capacity.
Is there time to reverse the roles of North America vs the East? President Biden is now calling for a “Made in America” regimen. This might seem a wise move, but the legacy of having discarded US development to the east is going to be hard to overcome, especially if the US dollar is no longer the global standard.
From the perspective of governing the mercantile empire (not necessarily individual nations), the emphasis on power is important and must be imposed on all nations of the world. If the US hold on the fossil fuel mercantile empire fails, an alliance in the east will likely form quickly around fossil fuels, with the Middle East in a brokering position. The West (North America, Europe and possibly Oceania including Australia), could form a second sub-global mercantile empire. In both cases (a continued single mercantile empire under US dominance, or a split empire), Africa and South America will likely be held in subservient positions to continue to act as sources of fossil fuels and other mineral resources.
The “annoying” and somewhat inconvenient global warming heralded by scientists as a true threat to humanity is, so far, still well below the top mercantile priorities of Power, Wealth, and Status. It is in this context that the world is now attempting to deal with climate change caused by the very people who wield all the power. For the foreseeable future, the power brokers are not concerned abut climate change.
The oil companies are flagrantly irresponsible, even criminally dishonest in the way they handled the knowledge their scientists provided them for setting the infrastructure up so that “we the people” have little to no choice on what to use for heating and transport. If we are rich enough, we can use geothermal heating and electric cars. If we are diligent and have some land, we could grow our own veggies and not use oil-based fertilizers or pesticides. If we are truly dedicated, we could probably figure out ways to avoid most plastic wrapping — but that is really tough. Most people really do not have those options so it is not hypocritical, it is being trapped by a gang of miscreants.
From 1972 to the present the oil companies have absolutely known what they are doing. From 1982 and especially 1988 when Jim Hansen spoke to Congress, the US politicians have absolutely known what the real situation is and have done nothing but make fancy speeches, while continuing to add more permissions to the extraction of fossil fuels. Scientists have been warning governments since we set up the UN conventions on climate, biodiversity, and desertification in 1990. Scientists do not have the authority to make decisions. Politicians have that authority. “We the people” rely on their honesty to protect us. We the people have been betrayed by almost every government on Earth.
In general, world governments have cast the people to the side in preference to the domination of the almighty dollar in the form of the lobbies (should I say bribes) to Kow-Tow to the fossil fuel and retail empires. Now the governments allow the industries to kill millions of people per year and to endanger the very society the fossil fuel industry helped build by allowing their greed to shorten their long-term vision even for their wealth in favour of power and status for the short -term benefits. Even today as the US west coast is battered by wild snow storms and atmospheric rivers blended in amongst wildfires and drought, the governments approve huge expansions into potential oil fields.
Politesse has just not worked. Protests and speaking out have been criminalized. Scientists who speak out are sued and harassed as well as receiving death threats. The information gap approach is a disaster. Deniers, greenwashing, paltering, sealioning, flat out lying, and making up fake data, all backed by $millions from oil companies are treated far more by the press than the serious material. Witness the latest synthesis report from the IPCC. Yes, it got some mentions, but has it made a whit of difference — NO.
Where do we go from here? I am really frustrated by the psychopathology of our leaders, but my search of the literature defines the human history as exactly what we are going through today. The conflicting philosophical positions of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke remind us that this same debate is well documented back into the 1600s. We appear not to have learned anything much. In today’s situation, the nature of the consequences is far greater for humanity than for the fall of the Genghis Kahn, Ottoman, or British empires. In this case, we have altered the natural systems of our ecological environment.
Our leaders’ current courses of action can be fatal for all humanity.
NEXUS
Climate change (2080 to 2100)
· Temperature: 3.2C by 2100
· Sea Level: 0.4m and 2.6m increase by 2100
· Cost to Fix: $30 trillion by 2050. Social cost $1.2 billion to $2.4 quadrillions.
World Population (2052 to 2100)
· Global Population: Carrying capacity 3 to 5 billion people.
· Peak population: 9 to 11 billion by 2080 and 2100.
· Age Distribution: Warped — older increasing, younger decreasing.
· Death Rates: The average age of death is increasing.
· Fertility Rate: Decline from 5 to 2.3 children per woman.
· Fertility Rate Correlates: Fertility rate decline is closely aligned to:
Increasing education,
access to family planning tools, and
independent wealth of the woman
falling need for children to work
the population of the world is now under the control of the women, not the men.
Agriculture and Biodiversity (2080 to 2100)
· Rural vs Urban: Rural populations 3 billion, urban 5 billion. Trend towards urban.
· Agricultural Land Use: 50% of the useable land area. Arable land is not a limiting factor.
· Biodiversity Decline: 70% of animal populations lost since 1970. A million species are at risk of extinction. Loss of pollinators represent a near existential risk to humans.
· Fresh Water Availability: The amount of fresh water used per year has peaked.
Economics (Immediate to 2080)
· Gross Domestic Productivity (GDP): The GDP per capita is rising fastest in the rich countries, producing increasing inequity.
· Gender inequality: Gender gap is narrowing.
· Human Rights: Nordic countries: equality is very high. Dictatorships: human rights non-existent.
· US Mercantile Empire: The United States entrenched mercantile empire depends on military intervention and predatory lending through the IMF and World Bank.
· Rising Banking Instability of the US investments: Huge unrealized losses in investment securities are a substantial risk.
· China vs USA: The US outsourced labour and manufacturing crippling its own manufacturing and labour force. China built a powerful manufacturing capacity and raised the standard of living. China and US neck and neck on GDP.
· Decoupling the US dollar: Russia and China alliance will decouple from US dollar. China loan system is not profit oriented so advantageous for other countries. A decoupling will destabilize international banking systems.
DETAILS
Climate Change:
We began to emit carbon dioxide (CO2) in earnest about 1750 when the industrial revolution began to use fossil fuels in large amounts. Since then, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has followed the rate of emissions from fossil fuels almost exactly.
Fossil fuels made possible most of the major advances in technology that has defined the most recent civilizations in the world today. The emissions of CO2 carried with them an unintended consequence of warming the world. If this trend continues, it will make much of the world uninhabitable by humans. Fossil fuel use also carries with it a very large economic cost in terms of pollution, human lives cut short (7 to 10 million per year), and forgiven externalities in regards to preventing or cleaning up environmental damage.
The world governments have set up agencies, held global meetings, and made many rhetorical statements about the need and intention to bring climate change under control and limit the rise to 1.5C increase since the early 1990s. So far none of these meetings, none of the warnings from scientists, and none of the many actions and sacrifices by activists have changed the trajectory of using fossil fuels through to about 2100. Projecting the use forward to, but ending the use of fossil fuels by 2100 would raise the annual emissions from the current 14 billion tonnes (GT) annually to a maximum of about 21 GT by 2070, after which the use would drop to zero by 2100, to be replaced by other energy sources.
Assuming that is an accurate picture of what the most likely scenario is for the world, the amount of CO2 in the air would rise significantly above what we have today, and would likely reach about 740ppm CO2. Assuming the replacement sources of energy do not emit CO2, the atmospheric CO2 would begin to drop. The rate at which the CO2 would naturally be withdrawn from the air is not known for certain, but we do know what the most optimistic, probable and extremes are likely to be. The most optimistic rate would be about 80% removed within 200 years. About 370ppm CO2 would remain after 200 years and the rate of absorption from then on would be extremely slow and require about 10,000 years to get back to 280ppm. A more probable rate is about 73% removed naturally within 500 years. In that case, the CO2 would only fall to about 400ppm by the 2600s. The most extreme likely is about 65% removed after a 2000-year decline. In that case, unless we remove the CO2 artificially, the level would be well above 570ppm until the next millennium.
One might ask if this is a good thing or a bad thing. The answer is partially contained in the examination of what temperatures these conditions might create. In the continued use of fossil fuels to 2100, the temperature rise is likely to be to between 3C and 3.5C by 2100. This temperature rise is well above the recommended maximum limit of between 1.5C and 2C. In the most optimistic case, the world would stay above the 2C mark for at least 100 years and reach the safest level at 1.5C increase above preindustrial times by 2250. In the more probable case, the decline would not be noticeable until after the year 2400, leaving the world exposed to a temperature rise of about 3.5C for a long time. In the extreme case, the temperature would continue to rise — familiar human society would be unlikely to withstand that temperature regime. If that were to happen, either we would live in highly technologically advanced environments or be restricted to the extreme poles.
But there is a problem. We know that the CO2 levels will be high enough to ensure significant temperature increase. So, what happens after the year 2400 if people do not artificially remove the CO2 from the air? Well, that is not likely to be a good thing. Even the optimistic level starts to increase temperature after the period of decline and rises to just over 3C by the year 3000 and then declines very slowly from there for about 10,000 years. The same is true for both the probable and extreme, with the probable maximum being about 4.3C and the extreme change being potentially as high as 8.0C, a temperature that would most likely end humans as a species unless a massive amount of technology could be mounted before then — or to remove the CO2 from the air much faster than nature can do it.
Yes, for sure, all that is a long way off, but if we want our species to last into the distant future, we want to be careful about the conditions we leave for our descendants.
Speaking of which, there are all those people who live near the oceans — about a billion people so far, and more to come. With the increase in temperature, it is a certainty that the ocean will expand because of getting warmer, and the land-based ice will start to melt and flow into the ocean, making the ocean even bigger. When the ocean gets bigger, that means the actual shorelines get covered with water. In the past couple of hundred years, as the temperature warmed up slowly, the sea level also came up a little — about 20cms. The warmer the ocean gets, the faster it will rise because of both expanding and because much more land-based ice will be melting into the ocean from the huge amounts of ice at both the south and the north poles.
Now comes the tricky part. We do know how much ice there is and how much it can raise the ocean levels. What we do not know for sure is how fast this will happen under the assumption of the use of fossil fuels up to 2100. The estimates range from about 0.4m to about 2m for 2100, with a proviso that if one of the major ice sheets lets go, it could be as much as 5m by 2100. To simplify the story, while recognizing there is this much variability in the prediction at 2100, I estimate the sea level will rise to about 1.3m by 2100. From that point on, the sea level depends on the temperature increase, which in turn depends on the CO2 increase, which in turn depends on the amount of fossil fuels we burn. We are assuming in this history, that the fossil fuel use continues to 2100. Under those conditions, the sea level will only decline slowly in the most optimistic scenario. In both the most probable and extreme situations, the sea level is likely to continue to rise, not fall; a serious risk.
If we extend the time-frame to the same 5,000 years as we did in looking at temperature change, and again assuming only natural absorption of CO2, the sea level over a very long period of time will continue to rise in all cases. The least rise after some 5,000 years is likely to be on the order of 10m, while the most probable is 14m and the extreme case could be as much as 18m. What would south Florida and the Gulf coast look like with a 10m sea level rise? Here is a map from Climate Central interpreting the result at 30 feet (a little less than 10m).
The wild thing about all this is that it really does not need to happen. We absolutely know what the source of CO2 is. We know that it is a greenhouse gas and that the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere is directly connected to the rising temperature, and we know how that happens. That all means we know that the use of energy sources other than fossil fuels and that do not emit carbon dioxide, will essentially stop the rise of CO2 and begin the decline of CO2 because of natural absorption. This is doubly good because it will eliminate all the pollution, health problems and 7–10 million unnecessary deaths per year due to the use of fossil fuels.
Yes, the transition needs to take place over time so that the energy demands are met and no one suffers. A period of transition of about 30 years would be safe. A quick calculation using a number of assumptions illustrates the potential costs involved. First, the cost of building new energy facilities whether they are nuclear, solar, or wind, is expensive. If we choose a mix of all three, the capital cost of building is roughly $5,350 per KW. The average revenue on a wholesale basis generated from these is about $0.06/Kwh. Let’s allow the industry building these to make a 10% profit from the sale of their electricity, once it is installed. We could force the new industry to completely pay for itself from the revenue generated by selling the electricity. However, we also know from the studies by a number of authors including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that the fossil fuel industry benefits through subsidies, tax write-offs, and especially forgiven externalities such as cleanups and pollution prevention, to the tune of $6 trillion per year (yes, trillion with a “t”). So, we could take $1 trillion of that savings and eliminate global poverty, and then allow the industry to claim the other $5 trillion based on their delivering carbon-free energy. If they did deliver carbon free energy by 2050, then the revenue to industry, both with savings and without savings would look like this.
Examining the chart, you can readily see that to undertake the global project to shift from fossil fuels to carbon free without getting any of the savings, would be a huge expense. Mind you, they have been getting a free ride of $6 trillion per year for years. However, if they were given the proportion of $5trillion that they spend on the transition, it could be done essentially for free, and after that the world would benefit by a $5 trillion surplus, some of which could be added to the bottom line of the industry if they kept us in a good position for clean energy. This is just to build the necessary infrastructure to generate the energy demand. Other costs will also be necessary. The total cost of the transition could be twice as much.
Is it worth the effort, you might legitimately ask? A number of studies have attacked that problem from an economic standpoint. To a certain extent, these economic studies also rely on examining the impact on the human condition as well as the economic cost of not incurring any human-related damage. The damage the studies assess are all expressed in economic damages. The value of human misery and death is considered to be zero in economic terms.
The Nordhaus DICE Model uses a common neoclassical Ramsey growth model in which he integrated a damage function, an abatement function and equations to relate GDP growth to the increase in CO2 levels as well as the impact of that increased CO2 on the average global temperature. The intention is to create a dynamic integrated model of climate change (DICE) in which a single world producer-consumer makes choices between current consumption, investing in productive capital, and reducing emissions to slow climate change. The resulting answer is a tax on the use of carbon and is dubbed the “social cost of carbon” even though it essentially measures CO2 as the variable. The tax is levied as a charge per ton of carbon used. It applies to anything in the marketplace that uses carbon from fossil fuels, such as diesel, gasoline, furnace oil, plastics, and synthetic fertilizers. The method is to judge the cost at a date in the future — usually 2100 of the damage caused by climate change, and then mathematically relate that to the emissions causing the climate change damage. Suppose for example the damage caused was about $600 per ton of carbon (actually CO2), then that is assessed as “net present day value.” Net present day value assumes that the cost to clean up the mess in 2100 will be more than if it were to be avoided today, simply because of inflation. The rate of inflation is then applied as a factor to reduce the $600 to a value that would be reasonable today to clean up the mess. The lower the discount rate, the higher the social cost in today’s dollars. At 1% discount rate, the current social cost would be about $180/ton of carbon used. The normal rate applied in DICE is 3% which results in a social cost of about $50/ton, and that is where the tax comes from. The chart below illustrates a number of different rates and one assumption of $1200 at 2100, not $600, and discounted at 5% to yield a low social cost of about $30. https://www.nber.org/reporter/2017number3/integrated-assessment-models-climate-change
The penalty these discounted rates apply is that unless they are applied and used correctly to alleviate the future damage, the actual damage accumulates. For each year delayed, the cost increases according to the actual damage, not an arbitrarily assigned discounted rate. One cannot repair an extinct species, so there is no discount rate if bees become extinct, and agriculture thereby mostly fails, reducing human survival to hunting and gathering. Few of us modern city dwellers would survive in that mode.
The DICE model is actually very conservative in its assessment of damage potential. The Epstein-Zin (EZ) preferences added to the DICE model allows for low probability, high risk events and for uncertainties over “tipping” or threshold events, where the change is not reversible in anything relevant to human society. These include loss of ice sheets or major wildfires or extended droughts. The result is that the accumulated social costs rise much faster in the DICE models with the Epstein-Zin (EZ) preferences added in. The implication is that there is a much greater urgency to deal with climate change than the standard DICE models suggest.
For example, with the EZ preferences in the DICE model, the accumulated cost of climate change damages exceeds the increasing global GDP by about the year 2025.
In very little time, because of the exponential nature of the accumulation, the accumulated social cost of carbon is totally out of reach. That means that if we allow this to proceed beyond a certain point, there is irreversible damage that human economics will never correct. Allowing the fossil fuel companies to continue to use the carbon-rich fuels through to 2100 would result in accumulated damages of something on the order of $8 quadrillion — a number that is so huge it is barely possible to conceive of it on a conceptual level let alone on a practical level.
The consequences on a human level of these kinds of damages are essentially close to if not existential in nature — that is civil society and possibly the existence of humanity is threatened under these conditions.
In nature, one often finds that the statistics of population dynamics reveal a dangerous future, even when all seems to be just fine. A population of organisms introduced to a new environment where they have few predators and lots of resources, reproduces rapidly and the population grows exponentially at first. If the population increases to the point where the amount of resource use exceeds the capacity of the resource to renew itself as fast as it is used. That point where “use = renewal” is called the carrying capacity. Because there are still more resources to be found, just not easily, the population continues to grow until it finally reaches the point where there literally is too little to go around for all the organisms that are alive. That is called overshoot. Because the organisms continued to over-use the resource, the base carrying capacity has been damaged. Usually, the population is reduced to a much lower level than the carrying capacity was when they first reached it. If the resource is not too damaged, the population recovers to some extent and wobbles around the final carrying capacity of the environment. If the resource base is too damaged, the species goes extinct in that area. If they are unique to that region, then the species is gone forever.
Now, just for fun, substitute the first words of the above paragraph to read: “In human society…” Next substitute the words “human” or “humans” for the words “organism” or “organisms,” and you will understand the predicament we humans may be in. Are we really in trouble? Let’s examine some data.
First, the population curve of humans compares almost exactly to a standard animal mortality curve introduced to a new environment with few predators and lots of resources. In this case, humans discovering how to do agriculture, then figuring out how to build new technology and how to burn fossil fuels to deliver energy basically anywhere and find and extract or harvest huge reservoirs of resources from all over the world.
The human population for two hundred thousand years remained quite low — less than a few million, sometimes even lower. Then about 10,000 years ago, humans learned how to domesticate plants and animals to begin agriculture and leave hunting and gathering behind. The population grew faster. Then in the 1700s, with the industrial revolution and with the use of fossil fuels, a superb source of energy, the population began to really explode exponentially. Then, in the late 1960s the growth rate finally slowed and the curve bent indicating the carrying capacity of the world for humans at that time using that amount of resource per year. Since then, the population has continued to grow, but at a slowing rate. We are now in overshoot.
This means we will see the peak population in the near future. Can we predict when that will be, and how many people we will be? The United Nations offers a prediction of 11 billion people by 2100. To test their prediction, I derived the equation they used and looked backwards in time to see how well it fit the past. My finding is that the UN model does not fit the past. Instead, I used the actual observations and created a predictive equation that suggests the population of humans will peak at 9 billion, not 11 billion, and that it will do so by a little before 2060. Examining the observed rate of change in human population, we can see the same date and carrying capacity in both graphs.
As a further test, I examined the UN prediction for China. The UN predicted a peak for China in 2030 at about 1.43 billion people. By using the same method as with the world prediction, I calculated that the peak would be reached earlier: about 2018, and that by 2021, there would be the beginning of a decline. In retrospect, this turned out to be more accurate than the UN predictions, but not 100% accurate. To be practical, it is likely that the best estimate would be between the equations that I have used for different countries and those that the UN uses.
Just how much in overshoot are we? It depends on the country and the lifestyle. The two worst offenders are Qatar and Luxembourg. If we all lived like that country, the world would be in ecological debt by early February for the year. For countries like Canada, the United States and the UAE, we would have used up all the world’s replaceable resource base for that year by mid March.
The country best able to handle the world’s resources if we all lived like the average person in that country, is Jamaica.
One of the implications of declining or growing populations is the changing demographics that follow. In countries where the population is growing relatively rapidly, such as in the least developed countries, there are very few older people and the majority are below 25 years of age.
By contrast in developed countries where the population is peaking or falling, the bulk of the population is between 25 and 64 years old with a large population of people over 65 years of age. The relatively small number of children portends a falling population as the older members pass away and there will be insufficient young people to offset their loss.
The UN has predicted what will happen in the future to the distribution of age groups. The prediction is that the population of people under 25 years of age will decline, and the population of everyone over 25 years of age will increase. This trend, if accurate will make the older people more vulnerable, the mid-range ages increasingly responsible for looking after the older and younger generations.
Fertility rate is based on the number of children a woman could bear if she lived to the end of her reproductive age at the current reproductive rate for each age. Over time, the global average fertility rate of women has been on the decline from about 5 children per woman in the 1950s and 60s to the current rate of about 2.3 children per woman.
As a baseline, it takes about 2.1 children per woman, on average, to maintain a level population above today’s death rates. But the main source of falling rates of population increase so far, at least, is not because of rapidly climbing death rates, instead it is because as the world has grown economically, the number of women who have been able to have access to education has given them access to the kind of information they can use in family planning and to gain independence through being employed.
The causes of deaths today — in advance of just getting old — are primarily from a combination of environmental and poor heath habits; mostly poor diet and lack of exercise. The poor diets and lack of exercise are a result of living in cities.
One of the most prominent causes of death is from air pollution, largely caused by burning fossil fuels, especially coal, and from improper cooking and heating indoors, often using wood or dung, as well as coal. A number of studies have attempted to more accurately assess the number of deaths per year from air pollution to . The range is from 3.5 million per year to 8.8 million deaths per year from air pollution with the most common answer in the range of 6.5 million to 8 million deaths from air pollution.
One of the obvious conclusions from these studies is that reducing fossil fuels will reduce the deaths from air pollution caused by fossil fuel burning.
In the distant past, from the early 1500s through to the modern era, there have been major changes in where people live. In the 1500s something like 98% of people lived in rural settings and were engaged in agricultural activities. With the use of fossil fuels as a source of energy to replace human or animal muscle power, the proportion of people in rural setting engaged in agriculture, forestry, and similar occupations, has fallen from nearly 98% to about 25%.
Rural populations in the 1960s was about 2 billion people, twice as many as lived in urban areas. The shift in distribution of people has been dynamic, but the increase in numbers of people living in rural locations slowed markedly in the late 1990s at about 3 billion people, whereas the rise in urban populations increased steadily from about 1 billion in 1960 to 5 billion in 2020.
With this growing population, it is essential that there is enough land to be able to supply the urban population from agriculture in rural settings. Furthermore, as the population grows in urban centers and fewer people per population are engaged in agriculture, the production must increase in efficiency or the land will not be sufficient to support the population. Several factors influence the demand. One is simply how much people eat. For example, if everyone in the world consumed as much food per person as the US did, the world could not support the population we now have. The world demand average currently only uses about 50% of the potentially useable land area. That is because many people in the less rich countries eat far less than the average American. It also means available land is not a limiting factor in the success of humans.
On the other hand, the efficiency of agriculture — especially on large factory-style farms using extensive artificial fertilizers, herbicides, GMO plants, and pesticides, has greatly increased resulting in a smaller amount of land to grow the same amount of crop.
As the consumption of fertilizer rises, the efficiency of the land use also rises. Once again, this demonstrates that arable land is not yet a limiting factor. It also demonstrates that the use of fossil fuels to produce fertilizers is not yet a limiting factor, although the rate of increasing use of fertilizer is slowing down, implying we are reaching a maximum efficient use of fertilizers.
And as noted, part of the success of modern agriculture depends on the use of pesticides, recently an array of specialized pesticides.
The types of pesticides range from toxins designed to kill plants to those designed to kill insects, and rodents.
The herbicides are also often twinned with genetically modified plants that can withstand the specific herbicide. This means the seeds can be planted and then as the weeds and crop grow up together, the herbicide can be applied when the weeds are most vulnerable to the toxin, but the GMO plants are resistant. With non-GMO wheat, the herbicides are applied after the wheat plant has died, but the seeds are still on the stalk. The weeds are killed reducing the amount of moisture and non-wheat plant material in the harvest. It is called a desiccant in this application, not an herbicide.
The purpose of modern agricultural processes is to grow a single crop on a field. Another way to put this is to recognize that agriculture is a means to destroy the biodiversity of an area with the express purpose of turning the area into a mono-culture that can be harvested. Sometimes this is for food for humans, sometimes as food for domestic cattle, and sometimes to create a forest plantation.
Because of very large proportion of the Earth’s land surface that has been turned over to agriculture, the actual biodiversity of the land has been significantly and deleteriously affected by agriculture and forestry.
The loss of biodiversity is not uniform over all regions. But on a world scale and using the Living Planet Index (the average decline in monitored wildlife populations), the loss has been on the order of 70% reduction (30% remaining) since 1970. This can bring many of the world’s species to the brink of extinction.
This does not mean every species is in decline. Some are increasing in numbers. Here is a useful breakdown of the types of organisms for which we have data.
This does not mean there is a balance of any kind, it simply means that on the whole the biodiversity is declining rapidly, but it does not affect all species equally. A quick glance at the figures on mammals suggests a nearly equal balance. But this is deceiving. The actual loss of mammals since the rapid increase in human population has been very dramatic with a loss from ancient times by about 85%. If these trends continue, the loss of biodiversity as an aggregate will be more than 50%. That would be a major extinction event on a geological scale.
This does not mean that the situation must remain as it is. The largest percent of agricultural land use is for animal pasturing. By shifting away from heavy use of pastured cattle and pigs for meat, and instead shift to a more vegetarian diet, much of the agricultural land could be returned to wild status, allowing the wild forms to increase again.
But for humans, the key factor to use as an indicator of risk, is not just the number, but instead, what species are considered keystone species in our survival as the animals we are — after all we do need to eat, and plants are at the base of all food chains. For most crop plants and in fact most terrestrial plants, the most important animals are the pollinators such as butterflies and bees. If the pollinators were to disappear, agriculture would be severely affected, even though some crops, such as the cereal crops, are self pollinated, and not pollinated by insects. Nonetheless a loss of pollinators would be a true disaster unless the world prepared for the loss well in advance by shifting food preferences in anticipation of the loss of pollinators.
While that may feel somewhat comforting for agriculture, the implications are far broader and debilitating. Some 88% of plants are angiosperms, and of those 90% require insect pollination. So, while the agricultural crops could be restricted to a few cereals, about 85% of all the plants in the world would die as there would be no viable seeds from almost all living plants. Should all the leafy plants disappear, a huge backlash in extinctions of animals would quickly follow, including most likely the fall of human society that depends on a healthy ecosystem.
Examining the fishery industry is quite disturbing as it applies to human food gathering. There are still some stocks of fish that can be managed sustainably, although the proportion is declining and the effort required to capture fish economically is increasing. One especially bad example of managing what was a very important fish stock in the ocean is the northern Atlantic codfish. This fish was literally the staple of the east coast of North America for generations starting in the 1500s. The catch grew as the human population grew and demand for the fish became economically more important. By the mid 1950s, the catch was about 300,000 tons per year. Fishermen were then subsidized and allowed to use new fishing gear about that time, and the catch skyrocketed to a peak in 1968. That catch crippled the breeding population of cod. By 1998, 30 years later, the catch was essentially limited to local fishermen. The commercial industry had died. The cod fishery off eastern Canada has not yet recovered.
As these wild capture fisheries were slowing down and the wild stock reaching their maximum sustainable yields, the demand for fish continued to rise. The answer was to twin the fisheries with aquaculture — farmed fish. Farming fish comes with a host of typical problems in husbandry, but so far, the farmed fisheries are continuing to increase.
Because of the continuing and increasing effort expended in direct harvest of wild fish and other aquatic animals, the stocks are increasingly failing and the harvest is peaking. On the land we finished this process and have essentially wiped out all harvestable wild land animals.
The IUCN Red list is a compilation of species that are known to be at risk of extinction. There are many species that have insufficient data to be able to make this assessment on all species. Thus, these numbers will be significant underestimates. In fact, the total estimated to be at risk approaches a million species. Nonetheless this breakdown indicates the types of organisms most at risk in terms of numbers. Fish top the list because of harvest pressure. Amphibians are next because of their sensitivity to pollution. Insects next because of the widespread use of pesticides specifically aimed at insects.
Water can be a limiting resource for people and agriculture. People need clean water for drinking and sanitation, agriculture needs a constant supply to nourish the crops. As the agricultural demand for water increases, it approaches the capacity of the environment around it to replenish fast enough to meet the demand. The distribution of stressed water resources is very varied. In some locations, water is plentiful and remains so up until today. In other areas, water shortage has been a fact for decades, or even centuries. Deserts stand out but areas that have been productive are also falling behind in some areas.
Overall, the amount of freshwater use rose slowly until just after the second world war, when it the rate of withdrawal increased markedly. The last few years, the use of water appears to have peaked. That is likely close to the upper limit of global withdrawal given the distribution of people. If that distribution changes in response to water shortage, and people are able to move to areas where water remains available, then the amount used may increase. However, that seems unlikely to happen immediately.
In fact, almost more than agricultural needs, is the need for clean drinking water. That is very unevenly distributed, almost more by wealth standards than by location.
When energy was the limiting resource, new technology increased the wealth briefly, but ultimately just increased the number of people, so it was a zero-sum situation in which the wealth ultimately remained constant. Released from energy as a limiting resource (no longer relying on the personal or animal muscle power), the individual wealth and general prosperity rises with new technology. That release from energy as a limiting factor began with the use of fossil fuels and innovations to make it an extremely versatile source of energy. When and if a new limiting resource arises, the wealth and number of people will respond to that new limiting factor. Unless a new technology arises to release people from the new limiting factor, the wealth and prosperity will return to a zero-sum game. What would be the indicator of a new limiting factor, and what might the early indicators be?
Already we have begun to see the rate of increase of people begin to fall, and in some countries, the actual number of people has begun to fall. To what has this been attributed? Before the advent of cheap and plentiful energy, the fertility rate was high because children were the source of new muscle power. Because death rates in children under 5 years of age were also high, the fertility rate was even higher than it might have been. It is an axiom of modern neoclassical economics that we need babies to grow up and become workers. As we saw earlier, the proportion of workers is falling while the proportion of older people is increasing.
But there is something different about this proportion in modern society. The people over 65 years of age are mostly unemployed, whereas in the past people worked until they died. One of the most obvious correlates of declining fertility is the increase in women’s individual wealth and access to education as well as giving them the tools to control when and how many children they have, essentially taking the population rate of increase or decrease out of the hands of the men.
From an individual and a couple’s perspective, the choice to have children or not, is increasingly the woman’s perspective on the advantages of having fewer babies to allow her the chance to be more independent, especially as the income does not directly rely on the addition to the family to support the couple even into their old age. The continuing exception is in the poorest countries that have the richest resources that are being extracted by wealthy countries for export and use abroad. Children are a valuable labour force in these countries. But in wealthy countries, there is no need for child labour. Nonetheless, it seems children are easily exploited so still are in the labour force.
GDP in rich countries grew much more rapidly than GDP grew in all other countries. Amongst all the others, GDP rate of increase was still directly linked to the income levels. The lower the income, the slower the GDP rose.
In Nordic countries, the birth rate fell from the late 1700s to modern day in an almost inverse relationship to the rising GDP.
In Asia, the birth rates rose to a peak between 1940 and 1960. Then the birth rates fell steadily to the present day.
In Europe the birth rates peaked in the late 1800s, then fell steadily through the following years to about 2010. Two very important exceptions; birth rates plummeted in the first world war and fell rapidly in the second world war, but not as much as in the first world war. East Germany experienced a huge spike in births after the uprising in East Germany in 1953, following food-aid from the USA, but then birth rates resumed normal rates and declined to 2010. In almost all the European countries, birth rates have leveled off between 2010 and 2022.
In the New World, birth rates continued to climb from the late 1800s through to just before the second world war. The second world war severely depressed the birth rate, and after it recovered, the rates have continued to fall, although more slowly than in the Old World. There is not the apparent levelling off since 2010 in the New World.
Birth rate is largely controlled by women once they have been educated and given at least some access to family planning. The education of women and their growing predominance in the labour force is also directly correlated to the decreasing wage gap and hence the increasing income independence of women.
Human rights for children, women, and minority groups have long been an issue around the world, with very unequal rights ranging from virtual equality for small communities to the gross inequality of slavery. Part of that inequality has been lessened by increasing wealth distribution, but that is not a uniform change everywhere in the world. In the Nordic countries, the equality is very high, and in countries like North Korea where a dictator reigns, the human rights are just about non-existent.
Closely allied to human rights in the sense of equality, is the access of all social groups to the same social benefits as the other groups in that country enjoy. That includes such things as welfare, health care, education, and other aspects of the social system paid for by public spending. Many countries in the Middle East, where women in particular are excluded from most social services including even basic education. In Africa, and South America the indigenous groups are largely excluded from the benefits routinely afforded the dominant culture.
Meanwhile in the broader financial world, globalization began to ramp up in the mid-1800s and peaked first by the 1920s. The runup to the second world war and until it ended put a severe restraint on global travel and hence the exports of merchandise fell rapidly until 1945. Recovery through the 1950s and 1960s was slow, but picked up rapidly in the 1970s, and has now peaked and fallen slightly. As all this was going on, the banking and financial systems of the world were solidifying around the US dollar. This gave the United States a method and strategy to entrench the mercantile empire into the hands of the US by dismantling old colonial spheres of influence, particularly the British empire, simultaneously preventing the remilitarization of Europe, and clearing the way for US exports. The tools to accomplish this were the establishment of the IMF and World Bank. These powerful lending organizations essentially had veto power over the world banking system.
The IMF and the World Bank became the tools to create a global financial framework that concentrated economic power in US. Spinoff development banks as well as the direct work of the IMF and World Bank meant the US became the world’s credit agency. Furthermore, this made the US dollar into the global currency reserve. At the same time the US was spending large amounts of money in military efforts to suppress the rise of nations, which resulted in large debt loads. At the time, the US dollar was tied to gold, so the gold began to return to Europe. In 1971, the US withdrew form the gold standard. This put the US firmly in charge of the world mercantile empire. Today the hold is less firm because of the huge unrealized losses in investment securities.
In fact, the very recent (March 2023) instability in bank solvencies is a symptom of this investment debt load.
Because the US was dominant in the trade system, credit was on US terms so that the other currencies fell in relation to the US dollar. dominance allowed them to dictate the terms with their creditors. As the world’s reserve currency, the US could run large budget and trade deficits to spend on militarily defending its hold on foreign resources. In addition, foreign labour became cheaper than US labour, so labour was also exported — meaning capital was not invested in US infrastructure or manufacturing.
US investors then began to borrow huge sums, through the IMF and World Bank which they used to bailout the sinking economies of other countries in return for extracting access to the foreign national resources or corporations. The resulting flow of rich resources to the US and away from the foreign countries means the economic system within the US has shifted away from manufacturing, to financial investments, in what were publicly-owned foreign corporations, real estate, and stock market speculation at huge profits.
China was a favoured very large source of cheap labour. China’s reaction was very clever strategically. China opened the doors to western capital (no longer being invested in the US). But China did not turn to capitalism or democracy, instead entrenching the communist party and its base ideology. The spectacular rate of growth of wealth in China over the last 40+ years built a powerful manufacturing base and lifted millions out of poverty into the middle class. The US, by contrast, reduced their manufacturing and labour capacity and reduced their economic dominance.
A further consequence of this error in strategy by the US is that the US dollar is now faltering as the global standard. The old Sino-Soviet alliance is now re-establishing itself as Xi Jinping visits Vladimir Putin in Russia as I write this statement.
Could China and Russia create a successfully competitive dollar standard to the US dollar? China is now a major lending country — on a par with the combined IMF and World Bank. One of the reasons why even the US borrows extensively from China is that intergovernmental loans from China are not structured to make a huge profit; instead, the loans are seen as a way to build capital in China. Loans can be renegotiated and are even written off if it is to the advantage of the country. Lenders now have a true choice between the aggressive capitalistic loans from the US or the more strategic loans from China.
The evidence for this difference is in the way China invests in Africa and other nations where resources are to be found. They allow the countries to build their own self-sufficiency rather than a subservience to the US. And they can do so in their own currencies, rather than being forced to use the US dollar. The standard of living and the labour costs in China are close to the US. This is reflected in the move by the current president of the US to try to make the US more independent of foreign manufacturing (offshoring labour is no longer so lucrative for the US manufacturers).
The US is meanwhile is using the Ukraine war to further destabilize Russia’s economy. Is it possible that the US is now poking China over Taiwan to provoke a war to destabilize China? To do that the US must assume China will not expand its war beyond Taiwan, but will expend a large proportion of its military on the Taiwan war, leaving US dominant again. A good assumption? The Chinese defensive system is huge compared to any invading forces the US could muster because the US would have to bring troops in ships and by air to China.
Putting this into the context of the dominance of the US dollar, implies that unless the US finds a new strategy, China and a potential Sino-Russia alliance will topple the US dominance. President Trump’s use of tariffs against China, further damaged the US dominance, and China has used this to its advantage in decoupling from the US dollar. When and if the decoupling really takes place globally is not certain, of course, but if and when it happens, it will likely be quick. It is also likely to be tied firmly to any attempt the US makes to intervene militarily between Taiwan and China. Xi Jinping’s intention is to take over Taiwan without military force, but by economic strength.
Finally, such a decoupling would mean that the US ability to loan and acquire resources, would be fundamentally broken with financial instability following in the US until the debts are paid.
SUMMARY
Climate change
Temperature: The global increase in temperature with the current plans of the fossil fuel companies would bring the global increase to about 3.2C by 2100, the date by which the current fossil fuel companies expect to stop using fossil fuels. The most optimistic natural decline in temperature would keep the world above a global temperature anomaly of 2C (the highest “safe” level) for at least 200 years.
Sea Level: The most likely sea level rise by 2100 would be between 0.4m and 2.6m.
Cost to Fix: The $6 trillion annual combined subsidy, tax relief, and forgiven externalities could largely offset the cost of installation of a combination of nuclear power, renewables and energy storage. The social cost estimates of the damage by 2100 range from hundreds of millions to quadrillions of dollars (DICE and Epstein-Zin models respectively). It makes no sense to stick with fossil fuels until 2100 — it is best to end their use by 2050 at the latest.
World Population
Trends in Global Population: World population has been increasing exponentially since the use of agriculture as a means to feed people. The rate increased immediately following the use of fossil fuels as a source of energy. The inflection point indicating the carrying capacity at the then resource base, was in 1998 and was about 5.2 billion people. The projected maximum populations from two estimates range from 9 to 11 billion people at the year 2080 and 2100 respectively.
Age Distribution: There is a marked increase in older generations (who no longer are working to support the family) and a relative decline in both the young and in the working age population indicating increasing difficulty to support the non-working population.
Fertility Rate: The global average fertility rate of women has been on the decline from about 5 children per woman in the 1950s and 60s to the current rate of about 2.3 children per woman.
Fertility Rate Correlates: Fertility rate decline is closely aligned to a combination of increasing education, access to family planning tools, and independent wealth of the woman. Fertility rate is also correlated to with a falling need for children to work in the fields. This means the population of the world is now under the control of the women, not the men as in the past, because while sexual activity is not changed much, the ability of women to control pregnancy has markedly increased.
Death Rates: The average age of death is increasing, and the death rate of children before the age of 5 years has dropped rapidly. One of the reasons for high fertility rates is high infant mortality. In developed countries the primary early death is caused by poor eating and exercise as well as air pollution from fossil fuels. However, the controlling factor for population decline today is not death rates, instead it is the declining number of children born to a woman.
Agriculture and Biodiversity
Rural vs Urban: Rural populations in the 1960s was about 2 billion people, twice as many as lived in urban areas. The increase in rural locations slowed markedly in the late 1990s at about 3 billion people, whereas the rise in urban populations increased steadily from about 1 billion in 1960 to 5 billion in 2020. This reflects a shift away from agriculture as land use becomes more efficient.
Agricultural Efficiency and Land Use: if everyone in the world consumed as much food per person as the US did, the world could not support the present population. The world demand average currently only uses about 50% of the potentially useable land area. Thus, most people eat far less than Americans and it also means arable land for now, is no longer a limiting factor in the success of humans. Part of the reason for increased efficiency is the use of pesticides ranging from toxins designed to kill plants, to those designed to kill insects, and rodents.
Biodiversity Decline: Primarily as a result of agriculture and forestry, the world’s biodiversity and the population of wild animals and plants is declining rapidly. Much of the decline is loss of habitat and pollution. Huge land use devoted to domestic cattle and pets is a major contributor that could be reversed if the favoured foodstuff did not emphasize meat. Wild harvesting on the land has long since ceased as the wild harvest potential declined to near zero. In the ocean wild harvest is still a major industry although most fish stocks are now at capacity use or overexploited. Aquaculture, just as terrestrial agriculture is now overtaking wild harvest in the ocean. Overall, nearly a million species are at risk of extinction.
Biodiversity and Humans: The risk imposed by loss of biodiversity is in two parts. Our ecological environment is necessary for our collective survival. Several specific types of organisms are especially important. Pollinators are responsible for most of the food crops (except for cereals). But pollinators are also responsible for the reproduction of almost all flowers and leafy plants. Imagine a world without those.
Fresh Water Availability: Overall, the amount of freshwater use rose slowly until just after the second world war, when the rate of withdrawal increased markedly. The last few years, the use of water appears to have peaked and is likely close to the upper limit of global withdrawal. If people are able to move to areas where water remains available, then the amount used may increase. However, that seems unlikely to happen immediately.
Economics
Gross Domestic Productivity (GDP): The GDP in all countries has been rising in all countries. The GDP per capita is rising fastest in the rich countries, and much slower in all other countries. GDP rises more rapidly as the wealth of the country increases.
Gender inequality: As the population declines and the percentage of women working in salaried positions has increased, and the gender gap between men and women also declined. While there is still a substantial gap, nonetheless, women now have the potential, and in many countries are exercising that potential, to either not get married or not to have babies until much later in life.
Human rights for children, women, and minority groups have long been an issue around the world, with very unequal rights ranging from virtual equality for small communities to the gross inequality of slavery. Part of that inequality has been lessened by increasing wealth distribution, but that is not a uniform change everywhere in the world. In the Nordic countries, the equality is very high, and in countries like North Korea where a dictator reigns, the human rights are just about non-existent.
US Dollar the Global Standard: The banking and financial systems of the world solidified around the US dollar in the 1970s. The United States entrenched the mercantile empire into the hands of the US by dismantling old colonial spheres of influence, particularly the British empire, simultaneously preventing the remilitarization of Europe, and clearing the way for US exports. The tools to accomplish this were the military, and the establishment of the IMF and World Bank. These powerful lending organizations essentially had veto power over the world banking system.
Rising Banking Instability of the US investments: Today the hold is less firm because of the huge unrealized losses in investment securities. In fact, the very recent (March 2023) instability in bank solvencies is a symptom of this investment debt load.
China vs USA: The US outsourced labour and manufacturing largely to China thus crippling its own manufacturing and labour force. China used this as a means to build a powerful manufacturing capacity and raised the standard of living in China many fold. China now has a GDP nearly equal to the US but has a better industrial sector. China is no longer a cheap labour source for the US, but the US has relied on cheap labour. This creates a problem in the US as it tries to bring manufacturing home from China — it will be very difficult to succeed. US is now attempting to weaken China as it has other countries by provoking a local war between China and Taiwan.
Decoupling the US dollar as the International Standard: The east is rebuilding the alliance between Russia, China, and India. Both countries have strong internal manufacturing capacity, whereas the US does not. The use of the US dollar as international trade system will not be needed if China and Russia agree to use local currencies. China loan system is not profit oriented as the US loan structure, so is advantageous for other countries. This decoupling will force USA away from huge debt loads and will require more balanced budgeting. Together this indicates a destabilizing of the international banking systems.
CONCLUSIONS
1. Land availability is no longer a limiting resource
2. Water is nearing a limiting resource
3. Energy is now effectively a limiting resource because the current source of energy (fossil fuels) is a threat to civil society over the next few decades.
4. Neither energy nor land use need to be limiting resources if the effort to solve climate change is implemented.
5. Human rights remain a significant problem in many parts of the world.
6. Men no longer control population rates of increase or decrease. Women are now in control and are using that control to limit the population of humans on the planet. This will be a benefit because the decline in population will be by lowered fertility rate not increased death rates.
7. Depopulation and decoupling of the US dollar as a global standard will destabilize the existing economic mechanisms of the current US-based mercantile empire.
8. Local and digital currencies will become international currencies, potentially restabilizing a Sino-Russian mercantile empire.
9. Aggressive and predatory capitalist systems around the world will begin to crumble.
TIME FRAMES (Immediate to 2100)
1. Climate change will reach a socially destabilizing level of damage by 2080 if fossil fuels continue to be used through to 2100.
2. Population will likely peak about 2080 at 9 billion people and decline thereafter. Women are now in charge of population control by virtue of their growing knowledge and wealth independence. Having children is very much a choice as to timing and number. Having any children is now factored into the women’s career choices.
3. Agriculture and forestry have probably peaked in efficiency and require massive injections of fertilizer and pesticide to maintain the efficiency. Food is a limiting factor in some countries because of distribution problems, not because of global capacity. Nonetheless, the potential for massive starvation is quite possible by 2080.
4. Biodiversity is strongly adversely affected by both forestry and agriculture. Loss of critical species or groups of species can pass thresholds of biological resilience and result in rapid loss of key species. If that happened to pollinators for example, human death and misery would be extensive. Reversing the loss of pollinators in anything relevant to human well-being would not be possible, despite some crops and plants able to self fertilize or grow by cloning. Climate change will add to the rate of biodiversity loss and could be critical by 2100 or earlier.
5. Water use appears to have peaked indicating it is close to being a global limiting resource.
6. Human rights are likely to be a destabilizing issue in many of the worst offending countries because of the communication innovations that the cell phone has made possible. Awareness is definitely spreading.
7. Economic instability is now the norm in the world. The looming decoupling of the US dollar as the global standard has been underway ever since the US decoupled from gold in 1971. The mercantile empire the US became is therefore now in serious danger of collapse. China and Russia could well become the dominant competitor and have the advantage of being better equipped for manufacturing and labour. A Sino-Russia alliance would mean local and digital currencies could be used for international exchange. Any further escalation of local wars will further weaken the relationship of global trades, just as it did in the second world war, and that is likely within the next two decades — that is before 2045.
8. Mercantile Empire currently governed by the fossil fuel leaders and held in check by the US dollar as the global currency standard, could be split into two: East vs West with separate currencies and economic systems. A showdown (trigger point) is likely within the next decade by 2033.
