The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change

607 Pages·2013·3.48 MB·English

by  Al Gore

Copyright © 2013 by Albert Gore, Jr.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
Random House and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gore, Albert.
The future : six drivers of global change / by Al Gore.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-67964430-9
1. Social change. 2. Economic history—21st century. 3. Technological innovations. 4. Global environmental
change. 5. Globalization. I. Title.
HM831.G685 2013
303.4—dc23 2012039890
www.atrandom.com
Cover design: Base Art Co.
v3.1
For a larger version of the following image, click here.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
1
EARTH INC.
2
THE GLOBAL MIND
3
POWER IN THE BALANCE
4
OUTGROWTH
5
THE REINVENTION OF LIFE AND DEATH
6
THE EDGE
CONCLUSION
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
For a larger version of the following image, click here.
INTRODUCTION
L IKE MANY FULFILLING JOURNEYS, THIS BOOK BEGAN NOT WITH ANSWERS but
with a question. Eight years ago, when I was on the road, someone asked
me: “What are the drivers of global change?” I listed several of the usual
suspects and left it at that. Yet the next morning, on the long plane flight
home, the question kept pulling me back, demanding that I answer it
more precisely and accurately—not by relying on preconceived dogma
but by letting the emerging evidence about an emerging world take me
where it would. The question, it turned out, had a future of its own. I
started an outline on my computer and spent several hours listing
headings and subheadings, then changing their rank order and relative
magnitude, moving them from one category to another and filling in
more and more details after each rereading.
As I spent the ensuing years raising awareness about climate change
and pursuing a business career, I continued to revisit, revise, and
sharpen the outline until finally, two years ago, I concluded that it
would not leave me alone until I dug in and tried to thoroughly answer
the question that had turned into something of an obsession.
What emerged was this book, a book about the six most important
drivers of global change, how they are converging and interacting with
one another, where they are taking us, and how we as human beings—
and as a global civilization—can best affect the way these changes
unfold. In order to reclaim control of our destiny and shape the future,
we must think freshly and clearly about the crucial choices that confront
us as a result of:
• The emergence of a deeply interconnected global economy that
increasingly operates as a fully integrated holistic entity with a
completely new and different relationship to capital flows, labor,
consumer markets, and national governments than in the past;
• The emergence of a planet-wide electronic communications grid
connecting the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and
linking them to rapidly expanding volumes of data, to a fast
growing web of sensors being embedded ubiquitously throughout
the world, and to increasingly intelligent devices, robots, and
thinking machines, the smartest of which already exceed the
capabilities of humans in performing a growing list of discrete
mental tasks and may soon surpass us in manifestations of
intelligence we have always assumed would remain the unique
province of our species;
• The emergence of a completely new balance of political, economic,
and military power in the world that is radically different from the
equilibrium that characterized the second half of the twentieth
century, during which the United States of America provided global
leadership and stability—shifting influence and initiative from West
to East, from wealthy countries to rapidly emerging centers of
power throughout the world, from nation-states to private actors,
and from political systems to markets;
• The emergence of rapid unsustainable growth—in population; cities;
resource consumption; depletion of topsoil, freshwater supplies, and
living species; pollution flows; and economic output that is
measured and guided by an absurd and distorted set of universally
accepted metrics that blinds us to the destructive consequences of
the self-deceiving choices we are routinely making;
• The emergence of a revolutionary new set of powerful biological,
biochemical, genetic, and materials science technologies that are
enabling us to reconstitute the molecular design of all solid matter,
reweave the fabric of life itself, alter the physical form, traits,
characteristics, and properties of plants, animals, and people, seize
active control over evolution, cross the ancient lines dividing
species, and invent entirely new ones never imagined in nature; and
• The emergence of a radically new relationship between the
aggregate power of human civilization and the Earth’s ecological
systems, including especially the most vulnerable—the atmosphere
and climate balance upon which the continued flourishing of
humankind depends—and the beginning of a massive global
transformation of our energy, industrial, agricultural, and
construction technologies in order to reestablish a healthy and
balanced relationship between human civilization and the future.
This book is data-driven and is based on deep research and reporting—
not speculation, alarmism, naïve optimism, or blue-sky conjecture. It
represents the culmination of a multiyear effort to investigate, decipher,
and present the best available evidence and what the world’s leading
experts tell us about the future we are now in the process of creating.
There is a clear consensus that the future now emerging will be
extremely different from anything we have ever known in the past. It is
a difference not of degree but of kind. There is no prior period of change
that remotely resembles what humanity is about to experience. We have
gone through revolutionary periods of change before, but none as
powerful or as pregnant with the fraternal twins—peril and opportunity
—as the ones that are beginning to unfold. Nor have we ever
experienced so many revolutionary changes unfolding simultaneously
and converging with one another.
This is not a book primarily about the climate crisis, though the
climate crisis is one of the six emergent changes that are quickly
reshaping our world, and its interaction with the other five drivers of
change has revealed to me new ways to understand it. Nor is it primarily
about the degradation of democracy in the United States and the
dysfunctionality of governance in the world community—though I
continue to believe that these leadership crises must be resolved in order
for humankind to reclaim control of our destiny. Indeed all six of these
emergent revolutionary changes are threatening to overtake us at a
moment in history when there is a dangerous vacuum of global
leadership.
Neither is this a manifesto intended to lay the groundwork for some
future political campaign. I have run for political office often enough in
the past. The joke I often use to deflect questions about whether I have
finally surrendered any intention to do so again is actually as close to
the truth as any words I can summon in describing my attitude toward
politics: I am a recovering politician and the chances of a relapse have