A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (15 page)

To flee these horrors, over the next twenty years, many will move to other southern hemisphere countries in search of pleasanter climates, wider spaces, and cities either more secure or closer to the northern hemisphere.

Masses of Chinese will move into Siberia. Vladivostok is already in large measure a city economically, humanly, and culturally Chinese. Similarly, more than half the population of Khabarovsk, a Russian city on the banks of the Amur River, originally came there from the other side. While China’s Heilongjiang province on the Siberian frontier boasts as many inhabitants as Argentina in a territory as small as Sweden’s, 70 percent of Russia’s territory is fast losing people and its extremely fertile agricultural lands are being abandoned. Chinese are very much in demand to repopulate them. In the Urals, the officials of Sverdlovsk have just invited
Chinese peasants to cultivate 250,000 acres of abandoned land. This flow will increase with the increasing incidence of Russo-Chinese marriages; a considerable mass of Chinese will invade Russia little by little. By 2025, there will be fifteen million foreigners working in Russia, or 20 percent of Russia’s working population. Slavs will begin to see a revival of the age-old threat of Mongol invasions.

At the same time — around 2020 — other mass movements will flow from central to southern Africa or to northern Africa; from Indonesia to Malaysia, from Malaysia to Thailand; from Bangladesh to the Gulf States; from Iraq to Turkey; from Guatemala to Mexico.

For many immigrants, these moves will simply be a way of approaching the countries of the North. Ever more numerous masses will hurl themselves at the gates of the West. They already number hundreds of thousands every month; that figure will increase to millions, then tens of millions. And not only from the most disadvantaged: all the elites of the South will leave for the North. Their major points of passage will be the Russian-Polish, Iberian-Moroccan, Turkish-Greek, Turkish-Bulgarian, Italian-Libyan, and Mexican-American borders.

The United States will continue to be the country most sought after by emigrants. In 2008, 1.6 million foreigners settled there. Only 600,000 did so legally. Twelve million people, or a third of all immigrants in America, entered illegally. Half of them come from Mexico, and a third from Central America. A growing number of people will try their luck in a lottery that decides the allocation of 50,000 American visas (there are already eight million candidates, 1.5 million of them
from the Middle East). In twenty years, the Hispanic and African-American populations will almost constitute a majority in the United States. Their elites and those from Asia will reinforce American power. If present tendencies continue, the American population will rise from 281 million in 2000 to 357 million in 2025, and this demographic inflow will by itself explain the continuation of growth in the core of the ninth form.

After being lands of emigration, the countries of southern Europe will also become host countries. They will recover dynamism, growth, and the means to finance their retirements. Other European countries, such as France, will attempt to refuse these immigrants from Eastern Europe and from Africa, but will realize that a population inflow, well controlled and integrated, is the condition of their own survival. Great Britain will also become a major host country, especially for citizens of Central European countries. The latter will in their turn welcome Ukrainian workers, themselves replaced by Russians, themselves replaced by vast Chinese populations. In all, the inflow of immigrant workers into developed countries will make it easier to finance retirements but will weigh heavily on the salaries of the middle classes.

Moreover, more and more people will leave one country of the North for another: there will soon be more than ten million of them switching countries every year. Some of them will do it for professional reasons and will amply reinforce, as in the past, their lands of origin, for which they will continue to serve as economic, financial, industrial, and cultural ambassadors. Others, more and more numerous, will choose to leave
simply because they no longer want to depend on a country whose tax system, legislation, and even culture they reject. And also to disappear completely, to live another life. The world will thus be increasingly filled with people who have become anonymous of their own free will; it will be like a carnival where everyone — ultimate freedom! — will have chosen a new identity for himself.

Finally, tens of millions of retirees will go to live — whether part-time or for good — in countries with kinder climates and a lower cost of living, particularly North Africa. Whole cities will be built for these newcomers, attracting hospitals, doctors, architects, and lawyers, who will make the move with their clients. This will last as long as native populations accept these new residents.

In all, twenty-five years from now, about fifty million people will exile themselves each year. Nearly one billion people will live elsewhere than in their native countries or in their parents’ native countries.

Until now, the mercantile order has always managed — just in time — to come up with what is needed to replace raw materials growing scarce, sometimes at the price of military operations and the displacement of the core.

This is how the world successively overcame the disappearance of farmlands in Flanders, of charcoal in England, of whale oil in the Atlantic, of coal throughout Europe. The invasion of cities by horse droppings, feared by everyone in the late nineteenth century, never
materialized. For the last century, the environment has even been considerably improved in countries of the core and the “middle.” London’s air, unbreathable in the nineteenth century, is much purer today, like that of all the industrial centers of the wealthy countries. Similarly, lack of energy (regularly foretold for over a century) is a fear that is daily receding. Yet since the start of the eighteenth century, consumption of raw materials has multiplied by thirty. Over just the past forty years, consumption of mineral resources has tripled, and since we began using petroleum 900 billion barrels have been burned.

Before 2035, the virtual doubling of urban populations will be accompanied by a doubling of the demand for raw materials. While it is certain that one day every one of them will become rare, and that on several occasions there will be a temporary lack of certain resources, they will all be available at the end of the twenty-first century; and the most precious of them, silver and gold, will still be available for at least two centuries. Moreover, we are beginning a massive recycling of industrial waste, thus recovering an important share of raw materials: 40 percent of aluminum production comes from recycled waste. And finally, when we really confront scarcity, we will hunt for iron, titanium, and other minerals in the oceans or on the moon.

For energy, however, the data are even more disquieting. At current rates of consumption growth, reserves stand at only 230 years for coal, sixty-four for gas, forty years for confirmed petroleum. But we must also take into account Venezuela’s heavy petroleum and
Canada’s bituminous sands. Those bituminous shales alone could represent as much energy potential as all of Saudi Arabia’s petroleum, even though their extraction would be an ecological disaster calling for heavy use of energy. Extraction of petroleum from bituminous strata will again call for heavy spending (in the form of coal) and quantities of energy higher than the quantities recovered in the form of petroleum.

As for gas, it seems more durably abundant, even if it will require heavy investment in transport accompanied by major geopolitical risks. Besides, in twenty years it will be possible to convert coal economically into petroleum products, which will again double the quantity of petroleum available. For another century, the availability of oil will thus be only a question of price.

The progressive transition to other energy sources will therefore be essential. Where management of radioactive wastes is politically accepted, nuclear energy will be used more and more. There will be progress on issues such as safety, acceptability, and competitiveness, and in thirty years this energy will supply 15 percent of the world’s primary energy needs. Solar and wind power will not be inexhaustible sources until the energy they produce can be stored. Biomass will be hard to develop on a grand scale except (which is very important) for powering private cars. The other sources of natural energy — geothermal, ocean swell, tidal — appear unable to respond to significant demand. Finally, thermonu-clear fusion, which could on its own represent an almost inexhaustible source, will certainly not be practicable before the end of the twenty-first century at best. Overall,
energy will be more and more costly, which will encourage consumers to economize by replacing physical movement with telecommunications.

Long before lack of energy really makes itself felt, other scarcities will have to be overcome, especially in farm and forest products. While we must double agricultural production before 2050 to feed the world’s population (which implies one billion more tons of cereals per year, or 50 percent more than in 2008), almost fifteen million acres disappear each year under the pressure of urban development. What is more, humanity has already consumed half the capacity of plants to photo-synthesize sunlight. Adequate agricultural development will therefore imply the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), whose harmlessness nothing and no one has so far guaranteed. And time is short: stocks are running out.

Forests will be rarer and rarer, devoured by the packaging and paper-making industries and by the expansion of agriculture and cities. The creation of farmland, which is more profitable than forest land, will also lead to mass deforestation. Since the eighteenth century, a part of the world equivalent to the whole surface of Europe has been stripped of its forests. In the last ten years of the twentieth century, half the forest reserves of the western region of Germany disappeared. The equivalent of five football fields is deforested every hour. Japan, the world’s leading importer of timber, is responsible for a third of this carnage. Furthermore, industrial gases, sulfur, and nitrogen oxides randomly destroy trees across the globe, in particular the fragile shade-loving trees of the “periphery.” And finally,
development of the immaterial economy will take a long time to reduce the demand for printing paper. At the present pace, there will be no more forests in twenty years except in countries where they are nurtured — that is (for the time being), only Europe and North America. This disappearance will be lethal to countless living species, even threatening the survival of humankind.

Greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by industrial production constitutes another threat. While production of fluorocarbons, which reduce the depth of the ozone layer surrounding the earth, now seems to be under control, twenty-thee million tons of carbon (produced by the combustion of carbon, petroleum, and gas) are annually released into the air — where they heat it. And other diverse gas emissions join in. It will get worse: China, whose carbon emissions in 2006 already exceeded those of the United States by almost 10 percent, plans to build the equivalent of a thousand-megawatt electric power station every month over the next thirty years, thus feeding greater and greater amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere. Unless we can imagine a colossal joint action between now and 2030, carbon gas emissions per capita will double.

The publication of the Global Carbon Project (GCP) in 2008 concerning the worldwide emission of carbon dioxide for the preceding year (2007) revealed that eight and a half billion tons of carbon were emitted from all sources, including the consequences of deforestation.

If the absolute value of these emissions is disturbing, the speed with which they are taking place is even more so. Since 2000, they have increased by an average
of 3.5 percent per year, four times faster than in the decade from 1990 to 2000, when the annual increase was just under 1 percent. Why? Because while the industrial countries have for all intents and purposes not diminished their emissions, the developing countries, especially China and India, have increased theirs far more than expected.

This is where the worst danger lies, for according to most experts the carbon gas thus emitted will lead to a considerable rise in the atmosphere’s temperature. While the average temperature of the earth’s surface has increased by only three-quarters of a degree in the last hundred years, the last decade has been the hottest in history. And doubtless this phenomenon is only beginning. Despite the extreme variability of climates, the most reliable simulations predict that the earth will warm by three degrees before 2050 and by 6.4 degrees before 2100. The
consequences are already there to be seen. The polar caps have begun to melt, at least in the North. The thawing speed of ice has risen by 250 percent from 2004 to 2008; the glaciers of Greenland, the second-leading source of freshwater, are rapidly shrinking. From 1990 to 2008, three million cubic kilometers of ice (out of the eight million that existed at the North Pole) have vanished; ocean levels are rising by two and a half millimeters per year and in 2050 will have risen by at least nineteen centimeters, perhaps even by fifty, and by some accounts by fifty-eight. The last time it has been so hot was in the middle of the Pliocene, three million years ago, when the ocean level stood at twenty-five meters higher than today.

Natural disasters will follow, with gigantic financial consequences. With the marked increase in temperature changes, very important alterations will take place in nature. Trees will grow faster and will be more fragile; there will be more oaks and fewer beeches; cicadas will be at home in Scandinavia, along with the praying mantis and Mediterranean butterflies. Plankton will migrate northward, followed by the fish that feed on them, causing the disappearance of the seabirds for which they were the staple diet. Much more serious: many more coastlines could become uninhabitable. Seven of the world’s biggest cities are ports, and a third of the world’s population lives on a coastline. Each year, the African desert expands across a surface equal to the area of Belgium. Soon two billion people will be living in regions threatened by desertification, 700 million of them in Africa. Fifteen million have already had to leave their villages, now uninhabitable. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), these eco-exiles will be ten times more numerous by 2050.