The Future (75 page)
Authors: Al Gore
140
highest inequality of incomes and the highest poverty rate
James Gustave Speth, “America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part I,”
Orion
, March/April 2012.
141
lowest “material well-being”
Ibid.
142
highest child poverty rate
Ibid.
143
highest infant mortality rate
Ibid.
144
biggest prison population and the highest homicide rate
Ibid.
145
largest percentage of its citizens unable to afford health care
Ibid.
146
“should be monitored in the same way that textbooks”
Powell, “The Powell Memo.”
147
“opportunity for supporters of the American system”
Ibid.
148
“vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good”
James Madison,
Federalist
No. 10, “The Same Subject Continued: The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection,” November 23, 1787,
http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_10.html
.
149
“unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts”
Ibid.
150
“the various and unequal distribution of property”
Ibid.
151
property, and income in the United States is now larger
Timothy Noah, “Introducing the Great Divergence,”
Slate
, September 3, 2010.
152
who are relatively more tolerant and others who are relatively less tolerant
Jonathan Haidt, “Born This Way? Nature, Nurture, Narratives, and the Making of Our Political Personalities,”
Reason
, May 2012.
153
value liberty and fairness but think about them differently
Ibid.
154
differences are reinforced by social feedback loops
Ibid.; Sasha Issenberg, “Born This Way: The New Weird Science of Hardwired Political Identity,”
New York
, April 16, 2012.
155
what language would most trigger feelings of outrage
Frank Luntz,
Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear
(New York: Hyperion, 2006), p. 165.
156
strategy known as “starve the beast”
Bruce Bartlett, “ ‘Starve the Beast’: Origins and Development of a Budgetary Metaphor,”
Independent Review
, Summer 2007.
157
U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio will be 70 percent in 2013
Congressional Budget Office, “The 2012 Long-Term Budget Outlook,”
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/06-05-Long-Term_Budget_Outlook.pdf
.
158
exceeds GDP if money the government owes to itself is added to the debt
Agence France-Presse, “US Borrowing Tops 100% of GDP: Treasury,” August 3, 2011; Matt Phillips, “The U.S. Debt Load: Big and Cheap,”
Wall Street Journal
, July 25, 2012.
159
no perceptible effect on the demand for U.S. bonds
Tim Mullaney, “A Year After Downgrade, S&P’s View on Washington Unchanged,”
USA Today
, August 7, 2012.
160
add approximately $1 trillion to interest payments over the next decade
Jeanne Sahadi, “Washington’s $5 Trillion Interest Bill,” CNN Money, March 12, 2012,
http://money.cnn.com/2012/03/05/news/economy/national-debt-interest/index.htm
.
161
“the diffusion of power away from government”
Joseph S. Nye, “Cyber War and Peace,” Project Syndicate, April 10, 2012,
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/cyber-war-and-peace
.
162
not even close to the fiscal conditions that would have reduced the risk
David Marsh, “The Euro’s Lost Promise,”
New York Times
, March 17, 2010; Sven Boll, “New Documents Shine Light on Euro Birth Defects,”
Der Spiegel
, May 8, 2012.
163
for the two decades since reunification—at an estimated cost of $2.17 trillion
Katrin Bennhold, “What History Can Explain About the Greek Crisis,”
New York Times
, May 21, 2012.
164
plant varieties that were especially suitable for cultivation
Jared Diamond, “What Makes Countries Rich or Poor?,”
New York Review of Books
, June 7, 2012.
165
Fertile Crescent (and in nearby Crete)
Ibid.
166
several other areas of the world, including Mexico, the Andes, and Hawaii
Ibid.
167
shared form of national languages stimulated
Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities
, new ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), pp. 39–48.
168
difficulty communicating with speakers of other forms
Ibid.
169
further strengthened national identities
Ibid.
170
while often neglecting to include narratives
Ibid.
171
China and Korea have regularly become sources of tension in Northeast Asia
“Japan Textbook Angers Chinese, Korean Press,” BBC News, April 6, 2005,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4416593.stm
.
172
Google Translate
Franz Och, Google Official Blog, “Breaking Down the Language Barrier—Six Years In,” April 26, 2012,
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/breaking-down-language-barriersix-years.html
.
173
more documents, articles, and books in one day
Ibid.
174
Seventy-five percent of the web pages translated
Personal correspondence with Franz Och, Google.
175
Chinese language users of the Internet
Matt Silverman, “China: The World’s Largest Online Population,” Mashable, April 10, 2012,
http://mashable.com/2012/04/10/china-largest-online-population/
; David Teegham, “Chinese to Be Most Popular Language on the Internet,”
Discovery News
, January 2, 2011,
http://news.discovery.com/tech/chinese-to-be-most-popular-language-on-internet.html
.
176
once vested in its national government
U.S. Department of State, “Background Note: Belgium,” March 22, 2012,
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2874.htm
.
177
an “assembly of men”
Thomas Hobbes, “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity and Misery,”
The Leviathan
, 1651; ibid., “Of the Rights of Sovereign by Institution.”
178
1,500 years ago between the Western and Eastern Roman empires
“Bosnia and Hercegovina,” Lonely Planet, 2008,
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/shop_pickandmix/previews/mediterranean-europe-8-bosnia-hercegovina-preview.pdf
.
179
went to the disputed territory of Kosovo
Barney Petrovic, “Serbia Recalls an Epic Defeat,”
Guardian
, June 29, 1989.
180
launched genocidal violence against both Bosnians and Croats
Ibid.
181
20 percent of all land in the world, putting 150 million people
“The United States Becomes a World Power,” Digital History,
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook_print.cfm?smtid=2&psid=3158
; Saul David, “Slavery and the ‘Scramble for Africa,’ ” BBC, February 17, 2011,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/abolition/scramble_for_africa_article_01.shtml
.
182
nineteen of the forty-three known terrorist groups
Lieutenant Colonel David A. Haupt, U.S. Air Force, “Narco-Terrorism: An Increasing Threat to U.S. National Security,” Joint Forces Staff College, Joint Advanced Warfighting School, 2009.
183
larger than the national economies of 163 of the world’s 184 nations
Ibid.
184
Hundreds of thousands died unnecessarily, $3 trillion was wasted
Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes,
The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict
(New York: Norton, 2008).
185
amount of television watched and the decline of support for fundamentalism
Mansoor Moaddel and Stuart A. Karabenick, “Religious Fundamentalism among Young Muslims in Egypt and Saudi Arabia,”
Social Forces
86, no. 4 (June 2008).
186
popularity of its movies and television programs
Thomas Seibert, “Turkey Has a Star Role in More Than Just TV Drama,”
National
, February 8, 2012.
187
decline in the number of people killed in wars
Joshua S. Goldstein,
Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide
(New York: Dutton/Penguin, 2011), pp. 5–6.
188
decline in the number of wars in every category
Ibid.
189
“by arbitration under International Law”
Bulletin of the Pan-American Union
38, nos. 244–49 (1914), p. 79.
190
in spite of U.S. superiority in conventional and nuclear weaponry
Richard Clarke, “China’s Cyberassault on America,”
Wall Street Journal
, June 15, 2011.
191
more than on any other program besides Social Security
John Mueller, “Think Again: Nuclear Weapons,”
Foreign Policy
no. 177 (January/February 2010); Peter Passell, “The Flimsy Accounting in Nuclear Weapons Decisions,”
New York Times
, July 9, 1998.
192
President Barack Obama reversed U.S. policy four years ago
“A Treaty on Conventional Arms,” editorial,
New York Times
, July 9, 2012.
193
some of which end up being trafficked in black markets
C. J. Chivers, “Small Arms, Big Problems,”
Foreign Affairs
90, no. 1 (January/February 2011): 110–21; Richard F. Grimmett, Congressional Research Service,
“Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 2003–2010,” September 22, 2011,
http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/174196.pdf
.
194
warned the United States about the “military industrial complex”
Sam Roberts, “In Archive, New Light on Evolution of Eisenhower Speech,”
New York Times
, December 11, 2010.
195
all of the military weapons sold to countries around the world originate in the United States
Grimmett, “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 2003–2010.”
196
countries with the potential to build nuclear bombs
Polly M. Holdorf, “Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2010,
http://csis.org/files/publication/110916_Holdorf.pdf
.
197
could over time result in the ability to project intercontinental power
Graham Allison, “Nuclear Disorder,”
Foreign Affairs
89, no. 1 (January/February 2010): 74–85.
198
many believe it is capable of selling nuclear weapons components
William J. Broad, James Glanz, and David E. Sanger, “Iran Fortifies Its Arsenal with the Aid of North Korea,”
New York Times
, November 29, 2010.
199
“correlation between high levels of development and stable democracy”
Francis Fukuyama, “The Future of History: Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class?,”
Foreign Affairs
91, no. 1 (January/February 2012).
200
will reach almost five billion people by 2030
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System,
Global Trends 2030—Citizens in an Interconnected and Polycentric World
,
http://www.iss.europa.eu/uploads/media/ESPAS_report_01.pdf
.
201
“economic and social rights and, increasingly, environmental issues”
Ibid.
1
“the personal distribution of income” or “a variety of costs that must be recognized”
Simon Kuznets,
National Income 1929–1932
, Report to the U.S. Senate, 73rd Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1934), pp. 5–6.
2
three billion people in just the next seventeen years
Homi Kharas, OECD Development Center, “The Emerging Middle Class in Developing Countries,” January 2010,
www.oecd.org/dataoecd/54/62/44798225.pdf
.
3
standards that are more common in the wealthiest nations
Ibid.
4
exceeding the rate of growth in the number of people in the world
Jeremy Grantham, “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever,”
GMO Quarterly Letter
, April 2011.
5
“furnished by the arts and manufactures to be debarred the use of them”
“Letter from Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 15 March 1784,” Library of Virginia,
http://www.lva.virginia.gov/lib-edu/education/psd/nation/gwtj.htm
.
6
general public’s happiness or sense of well-being
Institute for Studies in Happiness, Economy and Society, interview with Lester Brown, November 7, 2011,
http://ishesorg/en/interview/itv02_01html
.
7
increases in consumption do not enhance a sense of well-being
Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, September 7, 2010,
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/27/1011492107.abstract
.
8
a dangerous “planetary scale ‘tipping point’ ”
Anthony Barnosky et al., “Approaching a State Shift in Earth’s Biosphere,”
Nature
, June 7, 2012.
9
“It’s either got to be deflated gently, or it’s going to burst”
Justin Gillis, “Are We Nearing a Planetary Boundary?,”
New York Times
, Green blog, June 6, 2012,
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/are-we-nearing-a-planetary-boundary/
.
10
high levels in 2008 and again in 2011
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, “FAO Initiative on Soaring Food Prices,”
http://www.fao.org/isfp/en/
; Annie Lowrey, “Experts Issue a Warning as Food Prices Shoot Up,”
New York Times
, September 4, 2012.
11
political upheavals struck several countries
Jack Farchy and Gregory Meyer, “World Braced for New Food Crisis,”
Financial Times
, July 19, 2012; Evan Fraser and Andrew Rimas, “The Psychology of Food Riots,”
Foreign Affairs
, January 30, 2011.
12
northern China, India, and the Western United States
Li Jiao, “Water Shortages Loom as Northern China’s Aquifers Are Sucked Dry,”
Science
, June 18, 2010; “Groundwater Depletion Rate Accelerating Worldwide,”
ScienceDaily
, September 23, 2010,
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100923142503.htm
.
13
countries where 50 percent of the world’s people live
Lester Brown, Earth Policy Institute,
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization
(New York: Norton, 2008),
http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/book_files/pb3book.pdf
.
14
depressing crop yields in several important food-growing regions
John Vidal, “Soil Erosion Threatens to Leave Earth Hungry,”
Guardian
, December 14, 2010.
15
surged simultaneously in the last eleven years
Grantham, “Time to Wake Up.”
16
increases larger than those that accompanied either World War I or II
Ibid.
17
the danger that we may soon reach “peak everything”
Ibid.
18
have been at least three times faster than those in the industrial world
Ibid.
19
world’s iron ore, coal, pigs, steel, and lead—and roughly 40 percent
Ibid.; Scott Neuman, “World Starts to Worry as Chinese Economy Hiccups,” NPR News, December 2, 2011,
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/02/143048898/world-starts-to-worry-as-chinese-economy-hiccups
; presentation by Robert Zoellick, World Bank Spring Meetings 2012,
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/NEWS/Resources/RBZ-SM12-for-Print-FINAL.pdf
.
20
being produced each year are now made in China
Charles Riley, “Obama Hits China with Trade Complaint,” CNN Money, September 17, 2012,
http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/17/news/economy/obama-china-trade-autos/index.html
.
21
automobiles in China than in its home country
Alisa Priddle, “GM’s Big Plans for China Includes More Cadillac Models,”
USA Today
, April 25, 2012.
22
250 million to slightly over one billion in 2013
“One Billion Vehicles Now Cruise the Planet,”
Discovery News
, August 18, 2011,
http://news.discovery.com/autos/one-billion-cars-cruise-planet-110818.html
.
23
double again in the next thirty years
ExxonMobil, “The Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040,” 2012,
http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/files/news_pub_eo.pdf
.
24
“All of the net growth”
International Energy Agency, “World Energy Outlook,” 2011.
25
countries may be slowing, and in some cases may have peaked
See, for example, U.S. Energy Information Administration, press release, “EIA examines alternate scenarios for the future of U.S. energy,” June 25, 2012,
http://www.eia.gov/pressroom/releases/press361.cfm
, and “U.S. Energy-Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions, 2011,” August 14, 2012,
http://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/carbon/
.
26
world’s population of cars and trucks would be 5.5 billion
Justin Lahart, “What If the Rest of World Had as Many Cars as U.S.?,”
Wall Street Journal
blog, November 12, 2011,
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/11/12/number-of-the-week-what-if-rest-of-world-had-as-many-cars-as-u-s/
.
27
U.S. oil production may soon edge back slightly above the 1970 peak
Ronald D. White and Tiffany Hsu, “U.S. to Become World’s Largest Oil Producer by 2020, Report Says,”
Los Angeles Times
, November 13, 2012.
28
the Arab members of OPEC implemented the first oil embargo
U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “OPEC Oil Embargo, 1973–1974,” 2012,
http://history.state.gov/milestones/1969-1976/OPEC
.
29
China and other emerging markets portend further significant increases
International Energy Agency, Key World Energy Statistics, 2011,
http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/key_world_energy_stats-1.pdf
.
30
China’s coal imports have already increased
Kevin Jianjun Tu, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Policy Outlook, “Understanding China’s Rising Coal Imports,” February 2012.
31
and will double again by 2015
Rebekah Kebede and Michael Taylor, “China Coal Imports to Double in 2015, India Close Behind,” Reuters, May 30, 2011.
32
increase in both coal and oil consumption through the next two decades
International Energy Agency, “World Energy Outlook,” 2011.
33
to exploit the newly discovered abundance of deep shale gas
Chrystia Freeland, “The Coming Oil Boom,”
New York Times
, August 9, 2012.
34
At current levels of growth
International Energy Agency, “World Energy Outlook,” 2011.
35
seems to have peaked more than thirty years ago
Grantham, “Time to Wake Up.”
36
more expensive unconventional onshore sources
Ibid.
37
unforgiving and environmentally fragile Arctic Ocean
Guy Chazan, “Total Warns Against Oil Drilling in Arctic,”
Financial Times
, September 25, 2012.
38
more expensive oil than the world has enjoyed in the past
Jeff Rubin, “How High Oil Prices Will Permanently Cap Economic Growth,” Bloomberg View, September 23, 2012,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-23/how-high-oil-prices-will-permanently-cap-economic-growth.html
; Bryan Walsh, “There Will Be Oil—and That’s the Problem,”
Time
, March 29, 2012.
39
methane for 90 percent of their fertilizer costs
Maria Blanco, Agronomos Etsia Upm, “Supply of and Access to Key Nutrients NPK for Fertilizers for Feeding the World in 2050,” November 28, 2011,
http://eusoils.jrc.ec.europa.eu/projects/NPK/Documents/Madrid_NPK_supply_report_FINAL_Blanco.pdf
, p. 26.
40
“more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food”
Michael Pollan,
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
(New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 46.
41
spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food
Lester Brown,
Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity
(New York: Norton, 2012), ch. 1,
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-09-17/full-planet-empty-plates-new-geopolitics-food-scarcity-new-book-chapter
.
42
diminishes grain yields by 6 percent
Jims Vincent Capuno, “Soil Erosion: The Country’s Unseen Enemy,” Edge Davao, July 11, 2011,
http://www.edgedavao.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4801:soil-erosion-the-countrys-unseen-enemy&catid=51:on-the-cover&Itemid=83
; Lester Brown,
Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth
(New York: Norton, 2001), ch. 3,
http://www.earth-policy.org/books/eco/eech3_ss5
.
43
50 percent reduces many crop yields by 25 percent
Vidal, “Soil Erosion Threatens to Leave Earth Hungry.”
44
Increasing desertification of grasslands
Judith Schwartz, “Saving US Grasslands: A Bid to Turn Back the Clock on Desertification,”
Christian Science Monitor
, October 24, 2011.
45
45 percent more water
“No Easy Fix: Simply Using More of Everything to Produce More Food Will Not Work,”
Economist
, February 24, 2011.
46
from 3.5 percent annually three decades ago to a little over one percent
Grantham, “Time to Wake Up.”
47
three quarters of all plant genetic diversity may have already been lost
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, “Building on Gender, Agro-biodiversity and Local Knowledge,” 2004,
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/007/y5609e/y5609e00.pdf
.
48
“some form of export ban in an effort to increase domestic food security”
Toni Johnson, Council on Foreign Relations, “Food Price Volatility and Insecurity,” August 9, 2011,
http://www.cfr.org/food-security/food-price-volatility-insecurity/p16662
.
49
less frequent but larger downpours
Kevin Trenberth, “Changes in Precipitation with Climate Change,”
Climate Research
47 (2010): 123–38.
50
produce a 10 percent decline in crop yields
Wolfram Schlenker and Michael Roberts, “Nonlinear Temperature Effects Indicate Severe Damages to U.S. Crop Yields under Climate Change,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
106, no. 37 (October 2008): 15594–98.
51
increasing global preference for resource-intensive meat consumption
Johnson, “Food Price Volatility and Insecurity.”
52
food crops to crops suitable for biofuel
Ibid.
53
Conversion of cropland to urban and suburban sprawl
Lester Brown,
Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization
(New York: Norton, 2009),
http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/book_files/pb4book.pdf
.
54
with 67 percent of its people under the age of twenty-four
John Ishiyama et al., “Environmental Degradation and Genocide, 1958–2007,”
Ethnopolitics
11 (2012): 141–58.
55
“don’t succeed in solving them by our own actions”
Jared Diamond, “Malthus in Africa, Rwanda’s Genocide,” ch. 10 in
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
(New York: Viking, 2005).
56
run into a wall
“Groundwater Depletion Rate Accelerating Worldwide,”
ScienceDaily
, September 23, 2010,
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100923142503.htm
.
57
“when the balloon bursts, untold anarchy”
Fred Pearce, “Asian Farmers Sucking the Continent Dry,”
New Scientist
, August 2004.