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The Next Real Revolution

• "The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil."
  
  Sheikh Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabia's oil minister in the 1970s.
  
  

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  The world has seen a Tool Making Revolution, followed by an Agricultural Revolution, followed by an Industrial Revolution. These were real revolutions, making mere political revolutions like Russia's Bolshevik, America's Thatcher-Reagan, and Iran's Khomeini revolutions pale to relative insignificance.
  
  The next real revolution will be built on at least eight basic foundations. Each of these eight qualifies as a "megatrend," each big trend makes an interesting story in its own right, and each has attracted a host of specialists who focus on one of them to the relative exclusion of others.
  
  But their revolutionary power to shape nature and civilization lies in the fact that they are all unfolding at once.
  
  1- THE END OF CHEAP ENERGY
  2- THE END OF A HOSPITABLE CLIMATE
  3- THE INCREASINGLY TOXIC PLANET
  4- THE END OF THE HUMAN POPULATION BOOM
  5- CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH
  6- AMERICA AS SELF-ENDANGERED SUPERPOWER
  7- CRIMELORDS GAINING CLOUT
  8- FUNDAMENTALISM FIRMS ITS GRIP
  
  1- THE END OF CHEAP ENERGY
  As Sheikh Yamani says in the quote in the top of this page, the Oil Age is dying, and he may as well have added that the era of natural gas will not be far behind. In each case, the easy to find - and therefore cheap -- deposits were found long ago, and we have been burning them up at increasingly rapid rates.
  
  The problem is not that the world will "run out" of oil or natural gas. No matter how desperately we drill the world today, we will simply end up leaving the costliest goo in the ground. But the most compelling thing about this simple change in human history is that it is part of a pack, one of eight major changes capable of shaking the world.
  
  2- THE END OF A HOSPITABLE CLIMATE
  The change of climate (brought on by burning cheap fuels) will be the most lingering momento of the dying Oil Age. And the switch to coal threatens to lift the new climate to extremely dangerous proportions that will last all through the 21st Century - and well beyond it. Scientists have calculated that, even if we had stopped burning ALL fossil fuels yesterday, the atmosphere and oceans are already set up to keep on warming for at least another one to "a few" centuries into the future.
  
  However powerful they may be, the pairing of fossil fuel consumption and a new climate only begins to set the scene for the next big change for human society and natural systems.
  
  3- AN INCREASINGLY TOXIC PLANET
  Here, we have another old story growing worse. And part of that story is that toxics can travel far from their sources. For example, when scientists discovered lead in the ice of Greenland, they traced it to the factories of ancient Greece.
  
  The process of polluting the planet has never ended. As a result, the planet's total mass of living tissue, including human flesh and bone, may now be the planet's biggest toxic waste dump. Nowadays, according to the Pesticides Action Network, the stereotypical American Thanksgiving dinner is poisoned material, carrying 38 pollutants into the bodies of people who sit down for an annual family rite.
  
  Some pollutants now building up in human bodies can perform de facto abortions when the fetus is a boy. Other pollutants are clearly implicated in cancers. Fish, one of the most valuable foods on the planet, now carry dangerous concentrations of some of the scariest pollutants on the planet.
  
  The end of cheap energy, the end of the hospitable climate people have known for thousands of years, and the rise of toxic content in living tissue combine to make a formidable force.
  
  4- THE END OF THE HUMAN POPULATION BOOM
  Already, demographers are revisiting their calculations for our population's future. Just a few years ago, the demographers were estimating that the number of people on the planet would jump from 6 billion to twelve billion. Lately, they've made what may have been the first adjustment in many to come -- now they think that we'll get to the nine billion mark instead of twelve billion.
  
  The big question in human demographics is probably not whether we'll hit 9 billion and stall there, but instead a question of just how far and how fast we'll fall. Stanford University's Paul Ehrlich and Gretchen Daly guess that 2 billion people would be about the optimal number. That would horrify anyone who sees it as a huge loss of consumers/customers. But each of those 2 billion will be about 3 times richer than 6 billion if we look at their increased per-capita wealth in the likes of water and wood, soil and foods.
  
  Changes of oil, climate, toxicity, and the end of the human population boom add up to a very big story, and have already set the foundations for the next real revolution. But there's yet another force lined up to shape the 21st Century as the Century of Revolution.
  
  5 - CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH
  The division of haves and have-nots is not new on this earth. But the extent of it today is raising eyebrows galore as it stirs social tension across the globe. For example, George Soros says the global financial system is like a circulatory system, with a heart pumping money out to the peripheries and then taking it back from the peripheries to circulate it again. There are probably few better ways to summarize this thing we call "the economy."
  
  But Soros warns that, at some point, trouble out at the far peripheries (a slashed wrist, or a blood clot) can pose serious threats to the heart. As the circulation of money beyond limited spheres becomes entrenched, its effects are combining with the effects from the end of cheap oil, the beginning of a new climate, toxic occupation of living tissue, and the likely shrinkage of the human population.
  
  6 - AMERICA: THE SELF-ENDANGERED SUPERPOWER
  The United States had no sooner become the planet's sole surviving superpower than some fanatics flew planes into the twin symbols of its increasing economic clout. But Americans were not the only ones horrified by what had happened.
  
  All over the world, in cities of Iran and France, Russia and others, millions poured into the streets in shared shock. Magazines printed photos of thousands in the streets of Moscow and Tehran, carrying candles, murmuring slogans of solidarity with the slain. A leading Paris newspaper, Le Monde, ran a headline saying "We are all Americans now."
  
  But then the US swelled its chest and declared an endless war, one financed by borrowing from abroad, making the mighty nation dependent on the savings of people in other nations at the precise moment when other nations were wondering if the Americans had gone mad. As bad or worse, the world's good will toward America vanished with news that it had used torture, evaded treaties on chemical and light weapons, threw out treaties on testing of nuclear weapons, commenced snooping on its own citizens' emails and phone calls, prosecuted journalists, and ignored warnings from its generals, intelligence agents, and scientists.
  
  The end of the Oil Age, the beginning of a new climate, pervasive toxic contamination of living tissue, a vulnerable human population increasingly divided along lines of wealth, and a superpower turned wobbly each create opportunity for the ones most likely to thrive off of crisis.
  
  7- CRIMELORDS GAINING CLOUT
  American University's Louise Shelley has testified before the US Congress that "... transnational organized crime will be one of the major problems facing policy makers in the 21st century. It will be a defining issue of the 21st century as the Cold War was for the 20th century and Colonialism was for the 19th."
  
  Dr. Shelley told Congress that, already, the 1980s had shown that even major nations such as Italy and Japan could come close to being taken over by organized crime.
  
  "Timber mafias" from Malaysia to Pakistan already endanger the forests of the world. Black markets in light weapons spur bloody wars from Africa to the Balkans. And the market for buying and selling people is on a worldwide roll.
  
  In his final State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton said that global crimelords will be working in alliances with terrorists, creating a combined threat to the security of the United States.
  
  U.S. intelligence agencies have warned that at least some nations are already at danger of being virtually owned and operated by what Washington Post columnist David Ignatius once called "the scariest people on earth."
  
  8- FUNDAMENTALISM TAKING FIRMER GRIP
  Whether we look at the Middle East or Middle America, the planet's hard-core fundamentalists are digging in, taking firm positions, staking out their claims on everything from womens' bodies to the contents of books. Whether Islamic or Christian, they believe they have God on their side, and that they must wage war on those they see as evil.
  
  Some have mostly feared a re-ignited conflict between Christian and Muslim, possibly on a scale similar to ancient Crusades. However, the plausibly-bigger story today is that Muslims are killing Muslims, and that Christians have launched culture wars based on dread of sex and science, simultaneous with a death-wish based on a delusional vision of a fictional "Rapture" after death.
  
  SUMMARY:
  The above 8 changes aren't the only changes happening on this earth. But their combined impact will shape the 21 Century and, plausibly, at least a few centuries beyond the 21st.
  
  The response to this unavoidable new revolution matters hugely. John Kennedy took a look at around at a potentially dangerous world, and promptly initiated the Peace Corps. George W. Bush took a look at a potentially dangerous world, and promptly set loose a Torture Corps.
  
  Lance Olsen
  Project Director
  Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers