A Glimpse of a Better Future Could Get Us Out From Under the Cloud (Part 2)
The future can look better—more interesting and more promising—when we put ourselves in it, and look back at how far we’ve come.
Americans, in particular, are finding it harder to do this today. We’re a bit future-challenged these day, and it strikes us at our core. A daily avalanche of bad news clouds not only our present outlook but also our longer-term perspective.
Looking back at our country's history, stretches that are as bleak as the past 20 years have been fairly uncommon. Even if you were dirt-poor, you could imagine being rich one day. Even if you landed here yesterday, you could see yourself and your new family enjoying the American Dream as long as you put your head down and pushed. Not so much anymore.
In the recent We Don't Have to Be Productive All the Time, I quoted Derek Thompson of The Atlantic, because he managed to summarize our traditional belief “in what’s coming” quite nicely:
“[M]odern civilization is a shrine to the future. The shift goes back to the agricultural revolution, which subjected humans to farming cycles that separated planting and harvest by many months, and continued with the rise of finance. But a fixation on the future by now goes far beyond crop cycles and long-term loans. It is at the heart of our concept of education and corporate development, which presumes that young students and workers will gladly spend decades honing skills that they will be well compensated for only years later. The least controversial values in America today—the importance of grit, the hope for progress, the dream of social mobility—assume that the future is always changing and that our inclination is always to wish for better.”
That kind of optimism seems harder to find and even harder to hold onto today. It’s just as easy (and maybe easier) to imagine a future for ourselves and our children that’s not much better at all.
Since we’re a society built around generating wealth, some of our pessimism as a people may come from the fact that much of our nation's wealth is locked into a couple of expensive priorities today. As I discussed here in last week’s Part One post, fully one-half of our “discretionary spending” in the U.S. is dedicated to national defense each year. As citizens, we don’t feel “much safer” as a result. But the sense of futility goes even deeper. Over the past 20 years, upwards of two trillion taxpayer dollars have been spent in support of a military-industrial-complex that’s tasked with keeping us safe, but these vast sums have largely been spent without accountability or consequences. It’s like we’ve given some self-perpetuating monster a blank check. On the other hand, I also think that the debacle at Kabul Airport a few weeks ago took a picture of our defense machine's tragic incompetence that may prove to be as indelible as those images of Derek Chauvin's knee on George Floyd’s neck.
That wake-up call could change, is already changing, the political discussion about where we’re investing our wealth—wealth that is no longer increasing as rapidly as it did from World War II to the early 1970s. Like everyone balancing a checkbook in harder times, “guns vs. butter” choices are already being made, and it’s easier to imagine more of them—and their future impacts—from a vantage point in the future. In the climate change debate, we hear a lot about what may or may not happen by 2050. Well, what might responsible decisions made today look like from a vantage point 30 years out (when our kids will be our age and our grandchildren are in their prime)? And even more importantly, how might this perspective embolden our decision-making today between, say, a blank check for “security” as opposed to more accountable approaches, especially if those decisions will also liberate some of the funding that can finance a cleaner, more sustainable and promising way of life?
We need some futurists to help us to imagine those kinds of impacts, and even get excited about them.
Penciling in the Future
Some of our greatest science fiction writers of yesteryear, like H.G Wells or Jules Verne, envisioned compelling futures by sifting through the innovations of the day and extending them (and their impacts) out 50 or 100 years.
Instead of the dystopian futures their successors tend to conjure today, the end of the 19th Century seemed to hold optimism and pessimism in better balance. While you could find causes for despair in the gathering storms of nationalism and ideology (that culminated in World War I and the Russian Revolution) there was also tremendous excitement after a century-long run of astonishing invention (with all of the newest toys—from telephones to electric lights and modern plumbing—on gaudy display at the World’s Fairs in places like Chicago and Philadelphia).
Today, with the newest technology toys being twisted to nefarious purposes in what seems like "no time" (like the mass surveillance and exploitation of social media), our love affairs with innovative tools tend to cool with the first reports about their "harmful impacts." It's also likely that our wariness about innovation today has something to do with our being more afraid than hopeful, less hungry and resilient than we probably were “as a people” a hundred years ago.
So I was surprised by how easily a view from 2050 by “sober science types” could dispel some of that moroseness and get me thinking about ways to spend more of our dollars on an innovation-driven future that is more hopeful than fear-driven. In other words, it's exciting to consider spending somewhat less to "defend" what we have, while at the same time, paying somewhat more to improve (fairly dramatically) upon it.
Some of that hopeful view came from a recent NPR storycalled “It’s 2050 and This Is How We Stopped Climate Change.” (The link also lets you hear journalist Dan Charles’ resonant voice recounting the story.) Like yesteryear’s best futurists, Charles found experts in technologies from batteries to smart cities and farming who take threads that are already being woven by innovators today and extrapolate them into quite possible (and attractive) realities 30 years from now. Then they look back and say, with a kind of practical satisfaction: “This is how we did it!” once we began to rearrange our priorities in the early 2020s.
2020 < > 2050?
Mass Electrification (Batteries Hold the Power). We already know that clean electricity from sources like wind, wave action or the sun is the foundation for a future that’s less dependent on carbon-based fossil fuels. A stumbling block has been the ability to store the power from those sources in batteries we can draw upon when the sun isn’t shining or wind blowing, or that can power transportation of goods and people (on air, water and land) efficiently.
According to the first tour guide in the story (Sila Kiliccote, an engineer who works near Apple’s Cupertino headquarters), the lowest hanging fruit today involves powering our cars. By 2025, she sees a massive shift beginning to cleaner, quieter and lower maintenance electric vehicles. And from 2050, it’s easier to see where the electricity for this transformation will be coming from. Solar and wind farms will cover 10 times more land than they do today, battery innovations (already underway in the 2020s) will be able to store more of that clean electricity for when it's needed, and we'll share this accumulated power over vast distances.
“Huge electrical transmission lines [will] share electricity between North and South America. Europe [will] be connected to vast solar installations in the Sahara desert, which means that sub-Sahara Africa also has access to cheap power.
“’It just changed Africa,’ Kilicote says. ‘It actually fuel[s] the economies of Africa.’”
Moreover, we won’t be storing electricity in batteries alone, a development that has revolutionized our ability to heat and cool buildings by 2050. Cities will increasingly use electricity to heat and chill massive water tanks that can regulate the temperature in buildings day or night. In addition, gas-burning furnaces will be replaced in existing homes and office building and no longer be installed in new construction, having been replaced by electric-powered heat pumps—a trend that had also begun to accelerate years earlier.
Bigger vehicles, like trucks and airplanes, get less of a boost from electric batteries in 2050. Long distance trucks are heavy and so are the arrays of batteries needed to power them, reducing their efficiency. Other futurists predict that the fix will be “electric highways” that trucks can plug into in the way that 2050’s faster passenger and container trains do on their tracks, or that the trucking industry of tomorrow may be powered by clean hydrogen fuels—another possibility that's being actively explored today.
On the other hand, battery size and weight will be prohibitive for air travel and it’s likely that planes will still be powered by fossil fuels in 2050. As a result, it will also be more expensive for travelers, with each ticket’s price now covering its share of the cost of offsetting the plane’s carbon emissions. It’s comforting to note that some of downside for air travelers will be reduced by the availability of faster and more economical passenger trains.
Sally Benson, who is the co-director of Stanford’s Energy Institute, says that technology advances can carry us to this version of the future with relative ease. The most serious impediment she sees is navigating “the social disruption” that comes with doing things differently. From the vantage point of this cleaner, healthier and more efficient 2050, she admits that:
"The transformations were so profound that it really needed to be a collective [societal] effort. Entire industries died — like oil exploration and gas furnace manufacturing. Others rose to take their place, as the country rebuilt its electrical systems. People didn't know what would happen and they were scared. The changes only moved ahead when people were convinced that they weren't getting ignored and left behind.”
And Benson might have added, these changes only happened once the people (or me and you) got to see how much cleaner, healthier and more efficient it would be, along with the new jobs these transformations would create along the way. In other words, influential people had a vision and then sold that vision of the future to the rest of us. It’s integral to the same political discussion that will determine whether we’ll spend more on some priorities and less on others in the years ahead.
The Urbanization of Everything. A city-centric view from the future has everything to do with the fact that over the past century, more people globally have been moving from the countryside and into cities almost everywhere. More and more people want to be in urban areas because they are the places where people and ideas collide with one another and new things start to happen in nearly every area of human endeavor. People know that the future comes to cities first.
The urbanized view from 2050 also comes, in part, in the wake of the smart cities movement that began in places like Toronto 35 years before. As Jennifer Keesmaat, that City’s former chief planner said to Dan Charles, key emphasis was placed on replacing car traffic with cheap, frequent mass transit (like street cars) and building life and work communities around these new, central corridors so that residents were a short distance from everything that they needed to do on a daily basis.
Similarlly, the city of Paris’s new mayor had been elected 30 years before on a platform to transform France’s leading city into a series of living and working communities where walking or biking replaced driving to school, office, doctor’s appointments, shopping, libraries, sporting and other entertainment venues, and these urban amenities were clustered around new and existing housing. (See my short profile of Mayor Anne Hidalgo in my April 11, 2021 post and my prior posts about smart cities initiatives in Toronto and elsewhere here, here and here).
Once cars are banished from urban streets (or driving your own car in central cities has became more expensive due to new tolls or taxes), the cities of 2050 encourage not only mass transit but also ride sharing on the car-friendly streets that remain. As urban and near-urban populations grow, single family homes are now housing several families and downtown apartments and townhouses are smaller, but at the same time, under-used highways, streets and parking garages have been “upgraded” into common spaces (like parks and even wildlife areas), effectively “outdoor living rooms” for more closely compacted residents.
In looking back from 2050, Daniel Hoornweg, a professor of energy systems at the University of Ontario’s Institute of Technology, also notes a continuous wave of experimentation in urban living that stretches back decades, citing as an example how the city of Curtiba in Brazil started dedicating certain roads for fast buses in 1991 and how “their kind of train system on wheels” spread across the world until it became a fixture of urban life across the globe by the middle of the 21st Century.
A Revolution in Livestock Farming. Last year, in the middle of the pandemic there was an outcry over hundreds of thousands of new acres of Amazon rain forest being cut down to support livestock grazing and farming. There seemed no end in sight, and similar amounts of forest destruction and soil depletion were rampant elsewhere, including in other parts of the Americas, Africa and Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia. Not only were vast amounts of carbon being released into the atmosphere when the trees were cut down but the forests' "lung capacity" to clean the air was also diminishing. That sorry state of affairs makes the changes to livestock farming and soil management that have been widely adopted by 2050 seem all the more remarkable.
Tim Searchinger at the World Resources Institute told NPR that in 2020, “grazing land [accounts for] about two-thirds of all agricultural land, and about a third of that came right out of clearing forests.” Beyond the enormous releases of CO2 from cutting down trees and tearing up forest soil was the damage from cattle (in particular) releasing ever more methane (a powerful greenhouse gas) as the global demand for meat keeps growing. In addition, there are more greenhouse gas emissions from other kinds of farming too, including plowing vast areas and using tons of fertilizer to boost productivity. As a result, livestock farming and traditional agriculture likely produced a quarter of all negative climate impacts in 2020. So what changed so dramatically in the succeeding 30 years?
By 2050, livestock and other farmers are planting different feedstocks to reduce the disasterous impacts on the soil and environment. For example, new grasses (which had been engineered and first introduced decades before), grow so fast and are so nutritious for livestock (without depleting the soil), that pastures a fraction of the size can now produce “more milk and more meat” than ever before. It’s no longer necessary for livestock farmers to move their herds over vast areas. Moreover, given these new grasses and other lab-developed food stocks, cattle are releasing less methane per pound of milk or meat produced. Over the next 30 years, farmers globally have learned to treat their pastures as well as their animals as “valuable crops” with encouragement from their local governments.
In 2050, while some of the Earth’s inhabitants are eating more "environmentally responsible" meat, others are simply eating less of it. Searchinger predicts that Americans will be eating half as much meat, per person, as they do today as alternatives to meat and dairy products proliferate from the creative test kitches of our food and flavor scientists. But these are personal rather than governmental policy choices.
Climate-friendly transformations involving the expanded use of electricity, new approaches to urbanization and more sustainable farming will require active government involvement to change practices that are widespread in the 2020s. Political bodies, including the citizens behind democratic governments, will need to decide whether planetary health and quality of life are at least as important as protecting ourselves from one another by making bottomless investments in our defense capabilities.
Considering the waste that was so evident at Kabul Airport a few weeks ago, of course I’m hoping that we will discipline America’s orgy of spending on its war machine and reconsider how big a one we actually need—particularly when we can see a 2050 that’s both attainable and worth investing in for ourselves, our children and our children’s children.
Maybe our confidence about this future (instead of our fears of it) will enable other countries across the globe to re-balance their defense and environmental priorities too. It could be a life-affirming way for America to regain the leadership role in world affairs that it seems to have lost over these past 20 years.
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Have a good week at work and outside of it. I'll see you next Sunday.
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