Project 2048: Imagining a Sustainable Future
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Project 2048 imagines what the world may look like in 2048 given current trends in key resources like energy, water, food, and population growth. It outlines how humanity has historically relied on wood, then coal, oil, and other finite resources for survival. Peak oil and other limits to these resources could drastically impact systems like transportation, production, and agriculture. Alternative resources and more sustainable models will be needed to support a growing population under conditions of greater scarcity, changing climate, and other global challenges over the coming decades.
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Project 2048: Imagining a Sustainable Future
- 1. Project 2048 Imagining What It Might Be
- 2. A Brief History Of The Human Race As We Know It
- 3. Water Consumption Coal | Wood Growth Oil, oil, oil | Money Sand Iron | Energy & Land/Space Transport Phosphorus | Rare Metals Food
- 4. Energy Its all oil! Transportation, Production, Agriculture Cheap, Plentiful! Peak Oil/Coal? Costs : ERoEI Other Costs There will be less
- 5. Water <1% usable freshwater, mostly underground The Indus Valley: Primary producer: the water cycle 12 yr drought Surface Water : polluted Deeper, historical, water: exploited
- 6. POPULATION 1.8 to 7bn to? Cause/Effect? Agriculture Oil Population Limits Critical vs Growth Needs
- 7. Shock? Sep 2000, The United Kingdom Cuba 1991 onwards Not just about oil. Energy. Food. Water. Air! The economic context and affordability. What, or Who? The Hunger Games! What are “Essentials”? What is knowledge? Education? Health/care. Urban spaces. Co-operation. Competition. Micro Energy. Leisure. Travel. Free Time. The Arts. The Internet? Population? What Will Change?
- 8. The Cuban Change Story Spain India : A Long History Hope Its a loan gone bad Science vs Technology Innovation sans consequences Industrial Era Constructs Responsibility Connecting the Dots
Hinweis der Redaktion
- I am Sameer. I run a small chain of locally aware, locally built and served vacation properties. I have 2 children - 11 and 7 years of age. I was a techie till about 3 years ago, and chased the usual dreams. Our generation in many ways was at the right place, at the right time, and we achieved way more than we had dreamt of. And then the world around changed - not always for the better - and the questions started popping up in my head. To cut a long story short, recently, I've been imagining 2048 - when my kids will be 47 and 43, and the world as we know it will cease to exist. So what will it be like? And what can we do to be ready for that world...?
- Lets start with how we got here. Of course we all know we were hunter gatherers for a long long time. Women included. Then, about 10000 years ago, we discovered this lovely, edible, starchy grass near Turkey and figured out we could settle down and grow lots of it in one place. That was the first startup on the planet. Of course, soon we had plenty of it, and different places were soon growing plenty of different things, so we could go trade it with others. Of course, that meant it had to be carried some distance and needed transport, and some form of energy/fuel. And we had to try and trade. All of this got too complicated pretty quickly and a fairly smart monetary system soon got invented, eventually becoming the world's most valuable commodity produced by guys running what some call a Ponzi scheme. And given its Ponziness, it needed more and more trade, and ROI, and perpetual Growth!! And that of course needs you and I to consume more and more and more....
- So here's a recap already - Food->Energy&Transport->A monetary system that needs to support these transactions->And in turn needs growth for its own perpetuity->Which needs consumption in the real world. Consumption of all sorts of things - oil, coal, water, wood, sand, land, trace elements, ores, everything. At a continuously increasing pace that needs a significant growth in transactions of goods and services derived from this to continue to make sense.
- And all this was accelerated massively when we found oil! Think of it. Nearly ALL of our energy, most of our transportation, production, is possible only because of this. Even agriculture depends largely on fossil fuel based fertilizers. Oil derived cheap and plentiful energy let us scale everything rapidly, massively. It significantly increased the total quantum of work done on the planet completely overwhelming human and animal effort that preceded it. We're so totally dependent on it that imagining a life without oil becomes very very challenging. Its accelerated innovation, effort and scaled output and production way beyond what we could have ever done otherwise. And its finite - the product of a specific age in the planet's life helped it form and it will disappear more or less completely before the century is out. We're exploiting it to derive more and more of everything - the critical, the frivolous and the amazing - and its already just about viable to extract oil for its energy. You might've heard of Peak Oil - i.e. the point of peak production of oil beyond which it might last just a few decades. The decline starts after 2020 best case, and by some fairly accurate-so-far model estimates, we run out of oil by 2070. Even at best it will be prohibitively expensive, given the continually lower ERoEI. Any which way you might cut it, we will eventually have less affordable energy at our disposal than we do now.
- Let's take another critical resource. Water. Less than a percentage is usable freshwater, and most of it underground. So far we've depended on the water cycle - which is very fickle, and unevenly distributed. Not all of us can afford to use it in large quantities everywhere. Surface water - the lakes, rivers, ponds, are shrinking all the time and whatever's left has been polluted so much over the last few decades that we cannot just use it without a significant effort in cleaning it up. Underground water is historical - it takes upto a few hundred years or more for water to find its way into the really deep aquifers. And a few years to suck it out, given our oil derived efficiency. A myth about a 12 yr drought might provide clues about why the Indus Valley crumbled and people moved to other river systems. We might see it again as the Ganges becomes rain fed from being snow fed in as little as 30 years, with little rain to feed it! They migrated, but where will the folks from the Gangetic plains move to next if that goes dry? The long and short of this is that, like most other resources, we've collectively been using way too much water - for food, industry, construction - and leaving it in a form that cannot be naturally recycled easily. We're killing surface water, and stressing groundwater. We just need to need lesser, and learn how to make do with what's available.
- And so it is with all other resources. Metals, minerals, trace elements, sand - we're using more and more of everything at an alarming pace. Various resources industry depends on have availability estimates of 4 years in a few cases to a 100 at best, for most. Never before have we exploited these many resources - all at this rate - so there are few fallbacks. What's causing this? Population? We were sub 2 billion for a long long time - even after settling down and growing food. Around the time available energy increased, our population graph just took off. 5 billion in less than a 100 years!! Is that a cause of our starting to hit resource constraints? Or an effect of the fact that we stumbled upon a lot more energy than ever before that let us use these resources to this extent? More people need more food need more transportation more things more this that and everything - more energy and more oil. Our innovation and efficiencies notwithstanding, the double whammy of increased numbers and increased needs super-accelerates resource exploitation way beyond our imaginations. And now there's whole new populations aspiring to become "developed" - in other words consumers of massively more energy, oil, resources. Will the population grow forever? Probably not. Some say we'll get to 9bn, and then start declining in numbers. The land and the whole planet has a finite carrying capacity, and despite our ingenuity, we must bow to the laws of nature. The other question is about the quality at which this population is supported. That opens up many questions about the idea of growth, what's critical for us, and looking hard at the idea of "needs".
- So lets run through how things might change if we find energy way beyond our means. Or just not there. - Shock? Of course we'll see a few of these, but the frog in slowly boiling water does get used to the rising temperature. And this will be short lived. The denial phase is likely to be longer - as happened in the UK. Cuba faced a shock when the Soviet Union disbanded and their oil supplies stopped completely. But recovered well. More on that in a minute. - It'll hit life as we know it. Not just air conditioning and electricity - food supplies will not be smooth, nor will water. Air though will improve really quickly :) - How will we react socially? Well, those who have the means - money or power - to corner resources will try their damndest for a while. Democracy may not do too well. The battle will be between whats important, or who is. The Hunger Games that my son's been reading is a good parallel to not just this reality, but a lot that happens in the current world already! - "Essentials" will again be decided based upon the outcome of the social structure that emerges. For many here, for instance, a good reliable internet connection would fall into that category right now. But is it? - Our idea of knowledge and education was formed through the industrial era, with specialization being the focus. As we need to reorganize, live with more human powered energy and in local communities, we'll learn to pick up a wide variety of skills again. Healthcare will not necessarily be about specialists in a centralized hospital, but will have to be found within the community again. - Urban spaces will shrink, and grow food, manage water, but retain their progressive ethos. We are unlikely to give up on a lot of philosophy, progressive thought and ideas we've benefited from. - Leisure. Contrary to what seems apparent, we might have way more, and quality leisure time! Co-operation with the community will actually spark more of the arts. - Will we give up on the internet - the large collective brain we've come to love and depend on? Will we not do our damndest to keep it alive for its most amazing quality - staying connected with the world? - Population. This will shrink for sure. Perhaps even voluntarily. Maybe through starvation, or an epidemic.
- There's this video about How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. We can almost be thankful it happened, because Cuba reacted much better than many of us might imagine we will. They re-organized society to more local, more entrepreneurial, more co-operative. Land usage rights took prominence over ownership. They did NOT give up on knowledge and education - and indeed produce way many more doctors, and many more professionals there work with and understand energy, sustainability without battling nature. 85% of Cuba's agriculture is organic, and the country is way healthier than it was in its earlier oil dependent avataar! Spain is going through an economic crisis, and money, not oil, is the scarce commodity. Farming has become a preferred, respectable profession, and they've innovated with Time Banks where ppl can trade effort and skills! India's historically worked with a huge humility around nature. Despite those wonderful innovations and technology you keep hearing about, sustainability was built into the fabric of society - even today many a ragi farmer will NOT irrigate their crop if the rain fails, because its meant to be rain irrigated! We have the belief systems, flexibility and knowhow and tools to make it work in a changed reality. Finally, it's our responsibility to start thinking, acting, preparing now. For a few generations, we've collectively acted with careless abandon and in a sense, borrowed from the future a little too heavily. We've used the technology bits from science that helped us exploit more from the planet, without thinking at all about what science also helps us understand about natural limits, constraints and the cause-effect relationships in the systems we play with. We have innovated without checks and balances or even trying to understand the consequences of the extent and scale of our innovation. We have en-masse adopted industrial era constructs about scale, economics, efficiencies, externalization of costs, without trying to see the big picture. We are the most educated population in history, we have the most powerful tools ever. We have to start connecting these dots now, and try being a little more prepared, a little less shocked about what 2048 might bring.