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…