2050

An interesting article on 2050 and why there is some cause for..., well I won't say optimism, I'll say, "a break from the relentless pessimism I usually associate with where I think we'll actually end up".

Thursday, officials released a five-volume coda to the UN's Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, an ambitious four-year attempt to explore the relationship between the environment and human development. Summary reports of the findings as they affected four international environmental treaties were released last year. These new volumes represent the detailed information that underpins the earlier reports.

I peeked at an advanced copy of this I got from a meeting in September. It's pretty good. I was a little dissappointed to find some of my Looking Backwards events had already been thought through.

By 2050, it estimates that the highly global approach - with liberal trade policies, and concerted efforts to reduce poverty, improve education and public health, yet respond reactively to environmental issues - could yield the lowest population growth and the highest economic growth. But the environmental scorecard would be mixed.

In a fragmented world that focuses largely on security and regional markets and takes a reactive approach to ecological problems, economic growth rates are the lowest and the population is the highest of the four pathways.

Two other paths, which place a greater emphasis on technology and a proactive approach to the environment, yield population growth rates somewhere in the middle, and economic growth rates that may be slow at first, but accelerate with time.


Of course, in 2050, some folks will be living in their asteroid harems, guarded by a benign super-intelligence and propelled there by magic (or at least physics that does require the use of calculus to understand). Why not trash the planet now? It's not like we'll have to live here or anything.