Ice Age Heat Wave

“When our rivers run dry and our crops cease to grow.

When our summers grow longer, and winters won’t snow.”

Rise Against, "Collapse (Post-America)"

We’ve slapped many labels on the impacts of industrial civilization on the global ecosystem. Climate change. Anthropogenic global warming. Human induced climate change. Climate destabilization. All accurate, all semantic. For all the snark about how Earth’s climate always changes and the human impacts won’t matter in the long run, Rise Against pointed out problem #1 with climate change when they wrote ‘our crops cease to grow’. If you don’t care one bit about rising sea levels flooding the homes of millions, or the mass extinction that very well could follow a few degreeS rise in global temperatures over the coming centuries, take a moment to think about where your next meal will come from. More on that later. 

As with the post about resource depletion last week, I'm not going to rehash the supposed controversy about the underlying science of climate change. People with PhD’s, doing decades of research in the field, have done the hard work, and we should listen to what they have to say. This isn’t to say I dogmatically accept whatever the climate scientists have to say. As I will go over in a bit, there’s a leak one area where the observed outcomes appear to be playing out differently from how the climate models said they would. That said, I don’t accept what PR firms paid millions by fossil fuel companies have to say about the underlying causes or impacts of climate change.

I'm sure those PR firms are honest actors...

    If you're interested in reading specific US projections, the National Climate Assessment is a good place to start. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. "I don't trust the government." Okay. Fine. Your tax dollars still paid for the NCA, so you might as well look at what you bought. 

    If you're not at least superficially familiar with the topic, let me bring you up to speed. Since about 1850, human beings have been burning fossil fuels at rates that have dumped more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the biosphere can absorb. Due to the chemical properties of one carbon bonded to two oxygens, that carbon dioxide is a potent heat trapping gas. Technically, the carbon and the oxygen are double-bonded, which means the molecule traps energy better than the other gases in our atmosphere except methane. We've known this since the late 19th century. Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius identified CO2 as the principal heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, though he did say, in 1896, that calculating how fast temperatures would rise wasn’t feasible at that time. Since then, we’ve done a lot of work documenting the rise in CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and we’ve observed a 1.5 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures over pre-industrial levels. 

I am very much aware of that in the 1970s, some climate scientist thought we might be headed into another Ice Age. Since then the Earth has only gotten hotter, and the carbon dioxide levels have only gone up. So while the climates consensus was not 100% settled in the seventies, at this point there's no doubt, from a scientific point of view; human activity drives the observed rise in both CO2 levels and global temperatures.

In a less than shocking turn of events, it turns out one of these magazine covers is fake...
There was scientific debate about global cooling vs warming, so the kept records, made
observations, tested hypothesizes, and came to the conclusion that cooling wasn't the problem.
With science. Hooray. The system worked.

Importantly for the topic of the next hundred years, the question is not whether the climate is changing, but to what degree. And yes that was a intentional pun. Dad jokes aside, the observed rise in temperatures are right in line with literally dozens of different models. It's almost like the science is sound. Anyway, it begs the question: What if the impacts of climate change are not reserved for the distant future?

I feel like I need to clarify a semantic point; when I say severe impacts, I’m referring to the 1 in 1000 years floods that seem to be happening every decade now, or the 1 in 1000 year droughts, or the fact that the two biggest reservoirs on the Colorado River are at only 33% capacity (and that's not normal), or the fact that Greenland is seeing rain rainfall later every year. These last two specific instances are just a smattering of the warning lights the climate is displaying for us on the metaphorical dashboard. And for the last year, average temperatures around the globe have been 1.5 degree hotter than pre-industrial temps, with no respite. This suggests that we’ve hit a new normal.

Twenty years of less rain and snow looks like this....

I acknowledge the caveat that ‘in recorded history’ is a very limited period of time, going reliably back only to the late 1800s. Past temperature records are difficult to compile in no small part, due to a lack of thermometers and dedicated climate scientists back then. Proxy methods used to make educated guesses about the temperature of the climate are adequate, but they are not completely precise. Unlike open heart surgery, where precision is, I’m told, very important, ‘close enough’ works for the educated guessing about past temperatures. The fact that we’ve pushed our climate to high temperatures not seen since the end of the last ice age, should not console anyone.

Speaking of the end of the last ice age, about 11,500 years ago, the fact that the planet is as hot today as it was then shouldn't be a problem, right? Right? Well, not exactly.If you're interested in a deeper read about how heating after the last Ice Age influenced the rise of agriculture, I recommend The Long Summer by Brian Fagan. As you probably know, Agriculture emerged around the same time as the end of the Ice Age with wheat and barley cultivation, between the Tigers and Euphrates rivers in the Middle East, rice cultivation in southern China, and maize (corn) cultivation began about 3,500 years after that, around 8,000 years ago. While there’s quite a bit of academic debate about the how and why of the domestication of tasty plants but people, this process took hundreds of years in the case of wheat, and likely two thousand years for corn. And all this took place during a period of relative climatic stability.  

    This will matter a great deal going forward. To pick just one example, the NIH found that as global temperatures rise by 1, 2, and 3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, wheat crop yields will decrease by 8%, 18% and 28% respectively, based on a study of wheat cultivars in South Africa. So simplify the research, when the temperature rises above 30 Celsius for more than 24 hours, it puts stress on the plants, which drives down yields. At night, most agricultural cultivars need temperatures to drop below 75 to grow.

Of course this is not true for tropical cultivars, but for cereals like corn, wheat and  barley it is true. It's also worth noting that potatoes were originally cultivated high in the Andes mountain where they were more likely to encounter frost during the growth cycle then they were 90° day. Also thank you to the people of the southern Andes for cultivating tomatoes and potatoes they're both delicious. Why does this matter? It matters a great deal when you consider that the average human needs an average of about 2000 calories a day to survive, and most crops do not deliver the caloric content of cereal grains and potatoes.

As the hot weather of the tropics moves north into temperate zones, cereal and potato cultivation will have to move north. The lone exception is rice, which is calorie-dense but not particularly nutritious, unless it has been artificially enriched. On the other hand, one could theoretically live off potatoes alone for quite a while. Obviously, people don't live on a single crop. Human beings have always supplemented their diets with fruits vegetables, by products from animals, and yes, the animals themselves. For the purposes of our future scenario, we need to acknowledge that where people can maintain settled agriculture will have to change. 

        Adding to the pressure of agricultural regions moving north as the climate warms, there's a second problem with humanity’s food supply. Not only are we highly dependent on a few staples cereal crops for the majority of our calories, but amongst those crops we are highly dependent on a few strains of said crops. The risk of depending on just a few varieties seems obvious, but if it isn’t, let’s take a detour to Ireland in the middle of the 19th century.

Introduced to Ireland as early as 1590, the potato had acclimated to the Emerald Isle by 1750. As cultivation began spreading out of Munster to the rest of the Island, Irish farmers grew roughly 120 different varieties. By 1800, many farmers ate potatoes twice a day, with that number moving to three meals a day by 1840. This didn’t have to become a fatal weakness in the Irish agricultural system, but the root (heh) problem, was that Irish farmers depended on just four varieties. The 1840s were an exceptionally cool and wet decade in the northern hemisphere. The potato blight, which first struck Ireland in September 1845, is largely attributed to this temporary shift in weather. The blight attacked two of the four potato varieties, wiping out between one third and one half of the potatoes in Ireland. Without going into too much tragic detail, the crop failures of the late 1840s, combined with borderline genocidal policies set in London (wheat could've been shipped across the Irish Sea to alleviate the famine but it wasn’t) likely resulted in the deaths of 1 million people, or 15% of the population. Another 1.3 million fortunate ones, if you can call them that, boarded ships and depart Ireland, mostly bound for the United States. All this loss from a population of about 8 million. 

It is definitely NOT supposed to look like that.
Call a doctor.

Could such a scenario happen again today? Unfortunately, I think the answer is yes. According to the UN, corn, just four agricultural crops: corn, wheat, rice and soy, provide 60% of calories consumed by people around the world. Corn alone provides about 20% of the world’s calories.  Similar to the Irish of the 1800s, the world relies on a very few specific cultivars of corn, making the crop especially susceptible to some kind of climate-driven event. Even if the crop failure alone does’t wipe out a majority of the world’s calories, most people don’t starve to death. More often, opportunistic diseases kill before the body shuts down from a lack of calories.

Leaving our food supply in a precarious position, let's move on to the second base necessity in life: shelter. How will climate change make shelter less available to people? Setting aside dramatic events like hurricanes or floods driven by a more active water cycle, according to the UN, something like half the world's population lives within 50 miles of the coast. This average is slightly lower, at 40%, here in North America. Why does this matter? 

Better estimates put the rate of ice sheet loss from Greenland 20% higher than previously thought. In the fifty years before 2022, Greenland lost about 107 gigatons of ice annually. In 2022, that number nearly doubled, to 198 Gt. Just so we are clear, this is a net loss, and came from glaciers on land. And this was in the context of a climate which was still fluctuating below the 1.5 degree threshold noted earlier. I’m going to make my first bold claim; the the Greenland ice sheet will go into terminal collapse circa 2040. This means that, no matter what mitigation efforts we make, oceans around the world are on their way to 6 m of sea level rise. While this process will take several hundred years, even a 15% loss over the next 100 years would result in a full meter of sea level rise.

1 m of sea level rise would effect about 13 million people in the USA alone, and impact between 20-30% of existing shorelines. This will happen at the same time that the energy and economic base of the country will be contracting, making adaptation and recolcration even more expensive that is would be today. And this estimate doesn’t even include low-lying costal cities in poorer countries which will have an even harder time adapting, cities like Havana and Port-au-Prince.

Notice any patterns?

The third main impact of climate change on North America will be both acidification, mostly on the southern Great Plains, and intensified desertification in the border region of the USA and Mexico. This includes the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, and the United States of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, southern Utah and Colorado, and most if not all of California. If warming trends play out as expected, along with economic decline and mass migration, in one hundred years, I doubt the region will host any large population centers. Sure, people will live on the coast, or in high desert refuges up in the mountains, but this region will not be home to the approximately 80 million people that live there today. If the Pacific monsoons hold and rain continues to fall in the higher elevations of the Rocky Mountains, it is possible that the upper Rio Grande valley and northern Utah will continue to support settled agriculture. This trend will also play out in the higher elevations of Chihuahua and Sonora, as long as the Pacific monsoon rains fall every winter, but that's an open question.

6 meters, 18 feet, sea level rise.

1 meter, 3 feet, sea level rise.

If ice sheet melt, crop failures and desertification are the three negative impacts of climate change, I suppose we should acknowledge the less bad impacts. As climate belts move north, people in the Great Lakes region, and the northern portion of the Atlantic seaboard will have to grow used to climatic norms that would belong along the gulf coast today. At some point in the medium term future, likely beyond the hundred year scope of this exercise, places like Erie, Pennsylvania or Madison, Wisconsin will grow palm trees, sugarcane and dates. It also means that western Canada will transform from a place where 90% of the population lives within 50 miles of the US-Canada border, into a vast grassland habitable by pastoralist and, eventually settled agriculturalists. Eastern Canada will probably experience a climate that looks something like the American south today. They'll have a long, hot probably humid summers, but will still experience killing frosts between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox.

    I don't know how far north agriculture will be viable in the medium, term meaning between 100 to 1,000 from now. An extended growing season and heavier rainfall will lend itself to settled agriculture, The limiting factor the further north you go will be viable soils, which take a long time to build, at a minimum hundreds of years. Soils can be depleted quite rapidly by agricultural techniques unsuitable to the climate, but I would guess in a thousand years, human agriculture will extend as far north as the arctic circle, and maybe further.

So there you have it; the North American climate will be generally hotter, with some regions drying out, others getting wetter. As agriculture belts move north and up, this will trigger movements of people, as keeping one’s belly full will outweigh attachments to place and even culture. But before we can send wave of migrants in motion, next week we will look at the broader ecological impacts of human misuse of the natural world. Welcome to the empty continent.

Coming to a coastline near you...

The View From the Golden Mesa

    Humanity stands on a high vantage point, looking back over the past, at empires that rose and fell. We tell ourselves that the industrial world is unique, untethered from the constrains of the past. But if we turn and look to the future, we see cloud and shadow. We step forward and the ground beneath our feet undulates. The gold dust that spreads out around us bounces into the air with each step forward. Then the realization hits; what we mistook for solid ground is just a thick, black goo. The endless expanse of oil-fueled wealth does, in fact, have an edge. We stand atop a golden mesa, and beyond the edge lies a steep cliff.

Imagine the pitch meeting, "Yeah, it's gonna smell 
awful, and you won't want to go to the beach,
but it's gonna make you rich, fellas! Well,
it will make the local nobility rich..."

    While humans have know about and used petroleum oils for thousands of years, Russian engineer Vasily Semyonov drilled the first modern well near Baku, in 1846. In North America, the first commercial wells went into operation in Canada and the US in 1858 and 1859 respectively. It took a bit more than a century for oil to become the largest source of energy, in the USA by 1950, and globally in 1964. Since then, it has only grown in importance as a natural resource. Some 95% of all transport fuels are oil based: gasoline, diesel, marine fuels, and aviation fuel. Oil makes up 33% of global primary energy supplies. Add on to that the dizzying array of plastic products made from oil, and it seems reasonable tot say that no other single resource contributes more to the continued viability of the industrial age. And this primacy of oil as an industrial resource, makes the question of how much longer it will remain available for human use, important to the future trajectory of North America as an industrial economy. 

    Before continuing, I do want to address two issue: one semantic, and the other farcical. Liquid petroleum is a nonrenewable resource. This simply means it is a resource used by human beings that does not naturally replenish itself on a timeline meaningful to human beings. In the broad sense in terms of geologic time, yes, fossil fuel will probably replenish themselves via Earth’s carbon cycle. Eventually, today’s plant life and animal life will die and return to the Earth. Some small fraction of it will be trapped, compressed and heated over time into fossil fuels. How long will that take, you may ask. Well, consider that the Permian basic in West Texas, one of the most productive layers of petroleum-bearing rock in North America, formed between 485-320 years ago. The oil-bearing rock of the the relatively young field of Gehwar in Saudi Arabia, is about 160 million years old. 

Abiotic Oil Theory: wish fulfillment for people
 who's mother didn't tell them 'no' as kids.. 

    Semantics aside, I suppose this is the point where I need to address the abiotic oil theory. This theory as been around for decades, and holds that somewhere deep within the mantle, kindly Mother Earth produces new petroleum from mysterious processes. Processes which stand completely at odds with our understanding of the chemistry of hydrocarbons. Because of the tremendous pressures within the mantle and under the Earth’s crust, this a-biotic oil then seeps up to the surface to pool conveniently in cap rocks, where it waits patiently for us to use. This theory has been debunked over and over and over again, by people for understand the geology and chemistry better than I do. Even if this theory were true, which, again, it isn’t, it doesn't really matter because the rate of depletion of mature fields suggests that the Earth doesn’t replenish the abiotic oil supply at a rate sufficient to match human consumption.

    Now that we’ve gotten the minor quibbles out of the way, we should get to the core of the issue; what will the future hold for world oil production, and what does that imply for the future of North America? To assess the situation, I will focus on United States oil production, as it is three times higher than Canada, and Mexico's production has been in decline for almost a decade. With the US data, I'd like to direct your attention to the details, rather than the big, top-line numbers. And as we all know, the devil is always in the details. Much like Mephistopheles, this devil offers us a few more decades of oil, but at a very real, economic cost. And like the two horned Prince of Darkness, this devil has two horns, rate of depletion and energy returns. So let us get acquainted with the fracking devil, shall we?

    Setting aside local environmental impacts and the longer-term impacts of more CO2 in the atmosphere, both the US and Canada increased petroleum production from sources that historically have been considered unconventional. While the technology underlying both ‘tight’ oil production and oil sands processing goes back decades, until the 2000s, both sources weren’t economically viable. Until roughly 2005, the low cost of production of conventional crude oil kept global prices below $30 per barrel. But starting in 2005, global crude oil production stalled, and prices tarted to rise. Anyone reading this who bought gas in around 2008 surely remembers the high prices at the pump. Global price peaked that year at $147 per barrel. What most may not remember is that in the wake of the 2008-09 recession, global prices crashed, then rose again. By 2011, global crude prices were back around $100 per barrel. These higher prices made fracking for tight oil and digging up and processing oil sands economically viable.

Welcome to Mordor. No, wait, that's Alberta!

    Currently, a fracking  well costs between $46 and $58 per barrel, though can cost upwards of $90 per barrel, just to drill and pump out of the ground. And that price doesn’t include the cost of shipping and refining these barrels of tight oil. Tar sands run a broader range of costs, but mostly vary between $48 and $84 per barrel. Over 2023, the West Texas Intermediate price, which is the benchmark in the North American market, averaged $77 for a barrel of oil, compared with the Brent crude price of $83 per barrel.

    These trends imply two things: one - that higher prices are the new normal, to support North American oil production from unconventional sources, and that the lower priced conventional crude oil production cannot keep prices down through more drilling. 

        And who is that? Well, buried in the US Energy Information Agency projections which assume growing oil production over the next 20 years is a bit of an admission; conventional production has remained roughly flat from 5 million barrels per day in 2008 to 4.6 million barrels per day in  2023, so in a certain sense, we’ve already seen the future. This last point cannot be overstated, as it cast a whole lot of lamplight over the dim outlines of the future. North American oil production will, more and more, come from more expensive, dirtier sources of petroleum. The EIA estimates that fracked tight oil and shale gas, accounts for 64% and 70% of US production respectively.

Ignore the colorful bits and take a second look at the gray area.

    One might argue that the higher costs, both economic and environmental, are worth is to keep the petroleum party going. But before you consider fracking a solution to North America’s oil production problem, it’s worth considering that fracked wells experience much steeper rates of decline after the first few years of production. So where conventional wells can remain productive, albeit at very low levels, for decades, fracked wells typically experience decline rates of 50-75% over their first year in production, leaving them with negligible rates of production within a 60 months. While it wouldn’t be technically true to say these wells run dry within a decade, the typically have to be shut down or re-fracked, just to maintain production. This means that drillers must work fast and faster to maintain the same rates of production from any given field. In other words, fracked wells producing tight oil, won’t put an end to long term production decline. The tar sands face a similar problem, one a slightly longer timeline. Here's a good examination of that issue.

    But wait, there’s more! The problem isn’t just about the economics of tight oil and the swiftly approaching decline of oil production. Another, sneakier problem lurks in the background of all this: net energy. The light sweet crude that used to build industrial civilization and support the 8 billion or so people that live in it, was incredibly easy to get out of the ground. In most cases in the late 19th century all it took to dig in oil well was a team of mules a whole lot of iron piping and a drill bit. In most cases you didn't have to dig too deep and once you got there, the oil came to you. That first well drilled by Semyonov outside Baku, was a whopping 21 meters deep. In fact even as late as the 1920s, a lot of the oil that came out of the ground was so light and so sweet that you could literally scoop it with a bucket pour it directly into a car's gas tank and drive off. Nowadays I'm pretty sure that you couldn't perform that feat using the oil from any well in the world, even Saudi Arabia and Russia. 

Mules - keeping costs down for thousands of years.

    But the problem isn't just with refining. The energy return on energy invested in the 19th century was possibly as high as 300 to 1. Even as late as the 1920s, the energy return on energy invested was still a phenomenally good 100 to 1. By the 1950s, that ratio dropped to 75 to 1. I've read that by 1970 the ratio was down to about 50 to one which is still a really good investment but it's nowhere near what it started out at. The problem is that as improved techniques made technically difficult wells viable, more and more specialized equipment and more and more specialized people had to be brought in to produce the same amount of oil. Today, the EROEI ratio globally hovers somewhere between 20 to 1 and 4 to 1. This is of course a difficult number to qualify, especially because you're talking about investments that compound over time, but the trend is clear and the trend is down. Why does this matter going forward? 

Windmills, like mules, have a 
place in the future...

    Eventually we will reach a point where the energy invested in extraction of the resource is equal to the energy pulled from that resource. But before we get to a 1 to 1 breakeven point, we will probably pass a point where, even when the energy return is still positive, the energy return won't be enough to maintain everything else in the industrial economy which depends of fossil fuels. That's probably when the oil age will end. 

    And one might cheer the end of the oil age, until one recalls that roughly 31% of all energy used by human beings in the world today comes from liquid petroleum. 24% comes from natural gas in another 27% comes from coal. Those keeping track at home that means roughly 82% of the world’s energy production and consumption, comes from fossil fuels. The remainder is split between hydroelectric dams (7%), nuclear power plants (4.3%) and a tiny fraction, about 5.7% comes, from other renewables. Even the ‘renewable’ sources of electricity generation, wind, solar, hydroelectric and geothermal, are also produced using fossil fuels. To my knowledge, nowhere in the world uses a wind turbine or photovoltaic cells solar to produce more solar panels or wind turbines. Compounding this is the problem that industrial civilization built an entire economic model around perpetual growth. What happens when economic growth no longer materializes, because fossil fuel production is in decline, and renewable can't fill the gap?

    But again, the decline is not instantaneous, or even necessarily steep. The oil age began 180 years ago, so the implication for the future is that if we are at the end of the plateau and oil production is about to go into decline, we may have 150 to 180 years of oil “left.” The difference is this time, the about of oil produced for human use will go down, not up. And since oil is the basis of industrial economies, this implies both extended economic contraction, and eventually, contraction of the human population. 

    What will this contraction look like, and where will it end up? The global human population in 1846 was somewhere around one billion people. Industrial production was largely limited to the northwest Europe and the east coast of the United States. The population of the United States in according to the 1850 census US population was 23.1 million people. The vast majority, somewhere around 90%, lived outside of urban areas and overwhelmingly engaged in agriculture or some trade that directly supported agriculture. The estimated annual energy used per person in was 1/10 of what it is today.

... but they probably won't look like these.

    Two things: first, that the bedrock resource of industrial civilization will be more expensive going forward, and second, the fundamental, underlying problem hasn’t gone away: oil is a non-renewable resource that will not be with us forever. It's also worth remembering that when someone that tells you that we can have a future full of battery powered vehicles, lithium is not a renewable resource, or even particularly plentiful. Just like oil, coal and natural gas, it will also hit hit a peak of production and go into decline.

    But do you know what isn’t in decline? The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Next week we will take an overview of the flip side of burning all these fossil fuels - the man-made destabilization of the climate. That's right, we're going to go where Al Gore has gone before, and talk about anthropogenic climate change!

An Introduction to the Future

    Over the next couple months, I plan to outline what I think will happen to North America over the coming century. The impetus to create this series of posts comes from a novel I’ve been working on for the past few years. The story follows three siblings swept up in a struggle for power and family glory. It takes place 1,200 years in the future, amongst the city-states along the Arkansas River. But more on that later. 

A ship, powered by the wind? 
What will they think of next?
Subtle metaphors?

    In short, this is both an exercise in world building, as much as a prognostication about where the vast forces of history appear set to propel our continent. It also ties in with a non-fiction book I’ve co-authored with Dr Ryan Mattson. This book, Inequality by Design, written for a wide audience, shines a light on the economic forces driving wealth and income inequality in the United States. The book concludes by drawing on historical examples to sketch three scenarios of what may be in store for the USA over the coming decades. The publication date for Inequality by Design is set for Spring of 2025, by Upriver Press.

    First I'd like to outline the major forces that I feel will have the biggest impact on North Americas specifically, though these forces will impact everyone, everywhere, though maybe not all at once. The first force will be the peak and decline of non-renewable resource extraction, and its impact on the industrial economy.

There's a reason I chose a picture of the sun setting...

Next, I will outline the probable trajectory of anthropogenic (man-made) climate destabilization. Third, we will look at the impact of broader ecological damage done by industrial production. Fourth, we will examine the history of mass human migration, grafting past examples onto the modern world. Fifth, we will take a quick look at the implications of wealth and income inequality and the corrosive impact it will have on the political economy of North America. Finally, we will speculate on the big wild card: the politics of the USA, and how the simple twists of fate can cascade into epoch-defining historical forces.

    Once I finish outlining the six major factors, I will offer a broad overview of the constituent nations or regions of North America. I plan to break this up into at least five posts discussing the current affairs of Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Depending on how the research and writing goes this may just be combined down into one single post outlining vague measures such as size of economy, demographics and the current state of governance.

    With the scene set, we can move on to the meat of the project; outlining what I think will happen over the next century to the peoples of North America. I plan a series of 10 posts covering each decade from 2025 to 2125. Within each post, I will outline the ways in which the six factors will impact the continent. I will try to include a section outlining specific geographical regions of North America for each decade, though some decades will impact different regions more than others. 

    In case I somehow forget, I will reiterate several times that the scenario I'm constructing is the one that I think is most likely. One might think of it as the line of best fit. For instance, I will NOT include black swan events that could be so fundamentally game changing as to completely upend the scenario. This is partly to keep the series focused on what we know about the trends now, but also because black swan events are, by nature, unknowable before they happen.

The right amount of air pollution, but too many robots...

    What will this mean in practice? On the negative side of the ledger, It means no Rise of the Terminators. Nor do I assume we will end up trapped in the Matrix. As impressive a technical feet as current “AI” is, I think it's highly unlikely that sentient computers will get a hold of the nuclear codes and launch the world’s ICBM arsenals. That makes for entertaining science-fiction I don't think it's likely to ever become science fact.

    On the positive side of the ledger, unfortunately, I don’t think lab-grown food will replace old-fashioned rain-and-topsoil agriculture. As much as I would love replicators to end human hunger and free up vast tracts of farmland to return to nature, I don’t think that will happen either. And as I outline issues like resource depletion and climate instability, it should become clear why I don't think utopia or armageddon are around the corner. Unfortunately, I think it's very unlikely to near impossible that some combination of solar, nuclear, wind and hydroelectric energy will solve our energy crisis. 

Like fusion power, replicators are the technology of the future,
and probably always will be...

    It’s also worth pointing out the semantics involved; a crisis is often viewed as a problem, and a problem often has solutions. I'm not sure that the situation we find ourselves in right now fits that description. Instead we've backed ourselves into a corner where every factor we face exacerbates another. Besides calling it the normal cycle of history, I think it would be more appropriate to call the impending crisis of the 21st-century a set of predicaments. Predicaments often involve two bad choices rather that a good/bad dichotomy implied by a problem. For the most part, I think our situation involves a perpetual choice between the lesser of two evils. And it will be by no means clear, which of choice is actually less evil over the long-term. 

    To illustrate the nature of the situation, consider electricity generation. Setting aside storage issues, wind, solar and hydroelectric power provide only a fraction fo the content’s electricity generation capacity. To take one example, the USA Energy Information Agency estimates the USA could build 10 terawatt hours of wind electricity capacity. Last year, the USA consumed just shy of 4,000 terawatt hours of electricity. Even with aggressive conservation efforts and extensive build-out, renewable sources can provide, at best, about a third of current demand. Another source will have to satisfy the demand, but if we want to get to net-zero carbon emissions, the obvious choice to fill the gap would be nuclear power. Yes, nuclear power is (largely) carbon free, but produces long-term radioactive waste, and still depends on a fuel source which is fundamentally non-renewable. So what’s the lesser evil; less but cleaner electricity generation, or ample electric capacity with the same core problem as coal and natural gas?

Wind power: the technology of the past and the future!

    Depending on how this all goes, I may write a pair of posts covering a pessimistic scenario, and an optimistic one. As with this main series, both the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios will follow the line of best fit, they will just veer more towards one extreme or the other. I may slip in a black swan or two, just to spice things up.

    I look forward to this new project, and I hope that you, dear reader, will enjoy it as well. The topic and difficulties presented may seem upsetting or depressing, but I believe that only with a clear vision of the future, can we as individuals, families and communities, handle the predicaments to come. I welcome comments and feedback. If you think that I'm missing a factor, or have overlooked a local situation, please let me know. If this thought-experiment interests you, please join me on a brief tour of the future…