Jorgen Randers: what the future will be

Ugo at Cassandra's Legacy has a post on a talk by the pessimistic Jorgen Randers (of "Limits To Growth fame) in Rome in April - Jorgen Randers: what the future will be.

Presenting his book, "2052", Jorgen Randers starts with a bold statement: "I will not tell you what the future could be, but what the future will be". You would think that this shows quite a bit of hubris but, if you follow Randers' reasoning, you'll see that he has a point.

Randers is one of the authors of the famous "The Limits to Growth" report to the Club of Rome. Published in 1972, the book caused quite a stir and was widely misinterpreted as a prophecy of doom. It wasn't so and, in his talk, Randers summarizes what he and the others did. They didn't make any prophecy but, rather, they created a 'fan' of 12 different scenarios for the future of the world up to 2100. Some of these scenarios involved decline and collapse of the economy, some involved stabilization and prosperity. Whether one or the other set of scenarios would unfold depended on whether humankind made the right or the wrong choices in dealing with pollution, resource exploitation, and population growth.

One problem with the "The Limits to Growth" was that the authors never specified by what mechanisms humankind could develop the consensus necessary to make the right choices, which all involved some sacrifices in the short term. After 40 years of work, Randers has arrived to a conclusion: there are no such mechanisms. The right choices were not made and never will be.

Today, Randers says, there is no more a fan of good and bad scenarios: there is only one; and it is not pleasant. It can only be the decline of our society, constrained by overpopulation, declining resource availability, and widespread damage caused by pollution and climate change. The start of the decline may come earlier or later; collapse may be faster or slower, but the shape of the future is determined.

Randers maintains that there is a simple way to describe the reasons that are taking us to this unpleasant future: people always make the choice that involves the least costs in the short term. The problem is all there: as long as we always choose the easiest road, we have no control on where we are going.

Imagine you are lost in a forest. Would you think that always choosing the easiest path in front of you could take you home? But this is what we are doing: even though we should know that this is not the way to go where we would like to be. We are unwilling, for instance, to invest in renewable energy as long as fossil fuels are even slightly less expensive and we can neglect their external costs in the form of pollution and climate change. But this choice is based on short term consideration and it will cause us terrible long term damage.

Why are we unable to do better? Here, Randers proposes that "short-termism" is deeply ingrained in people's minds and is reflected in our democratic decisional system. He has been accused to be against democracy, but he maintains that he has nothing against democracy: the problem is that democracy is the result of human short-termism. He makes the example of an enlightened politician who decides to introduce a carbon tax. Soon, voters discover that the carbon tax is making gasoline and electricity more expensive. As a consequence, that politician won't be re-elected. It is simple and it happens all the time.

Of course, you might object that if the public were to be educated about climate change, then people would accept a carbon tax - actually they would clamor for it. Maybe; but Randers is skeptical. He says that he has spent decades of his life training generations of decision-makers in sustainability and ecosystem science. And he has seen those trained generations taking exactly the same wrong decisions that the previous, untrained, generations were taking.

Human nature is difficult to overcome. Randers recounts how he and his colleagues had been discussing about the size of a natural disaster that would wake the public to the reality of ecosystem destruction. Then Hurricane Katrina came and, later on, Sandy. Both where disasters as big as they can be. But they fell flat as wake up calls: the public didn't react. Today, three Americans out of eight still think that global warming is a hoax.

Randers has seen the enemy and the enemy is us.

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Randers: What does the world look like in 2052?

While I've always argued "The Limits To Growth" was totally misunderstood by most of those who pass comment on it, Jorgen Randers' latest book does seem to have gone more down the path of mildly gloomy prediction than mere scenario planning - Randers: What does the world look like in 2052?.

What will the world look like in 40 years time. In 2052, will we have enough food and water? Will there be too many people? Will our standard of living be higher. Will we have taken decisive action on climate change.

To briefly summarise Jorgen Randers, the renowned Norwegian futurist, the broad answers to those are yes, yes, maybe, no and no. But it’s the way he reaches those conclusions that makes his latest book 2052: A global forecast for the next forty years, so compelling.

Randers made his name as the co-author of the book “The Limits to Growth”, which underpinned the Club of Rome’s work on resource depletion and helped spawn the sustainability movement. Not that he thinks the book and his work had that much impact. “I spent 40 years working on sustainability and failed. The world today is a much less sustainable world,” he lamented during a visit to Australia this week.

Now 67, Randers runs the centre for climate strategy at the Norwegian Business School. And having outlined 12 scenarios for the world running from 1970 to 2100 in his first book, he now feels there is enough information to make more concrete forecasts.

It is not a picture he finds particularly attractive, but one he sees as inevitable because of mankind’s inability to look beyond short-term solutions and the obsession with growth. “I’m not saying what should happen, but this is the sad future that humanity is going to create for itself.”

Here are the base numbers for his predictions. Unlike others that predict a world population of 9 billion in 2050, he sees it peaking at 8 billion in 2040 and then declining, because he says the rich world will choose jobs over children, and the poorer urban families will choose fewer children.

He expects the world economy to grow much slower than most, because it will be harder to increase productivity at the same rate as has occurred in the last four decades. The low hanging fruit in the agricultural, manufacturing and office sectors have been picked. And he does not believe the poor countries will “take off”. He says that by 2050, the world economy will be no more than 2.5 times bigger than it is today, rather than four times bigger as many assume.

The US has a bleak outlook because their average disposable incomes will not grow, because they have already gone further than most in productivity and have a huge debt to China. And, Randers says, because the US is not capable of making simple decisions, it will also be not capable of making difficult decisions. He puts the current debate around climate change, or the lack of it, as an example.

“China is the real winner and they will be 5 times as rich in 40 year time,” Randers says. That’s because of China’s ability to make quick decisions that are in favour of the majority. The rest of the world, he suggests, remains poor,

Still, while the economy and the population will not grow as fast as some predict, and there will be no huge shortage of food, water or energy, it will still grow fast enough to trigger a climate crisis, because the short termism of the political class and business means that greenhouse emissions will not be addressed. He expects emissions will peak between 2030 and 2040, and will have only returned to 2010 levels by 2050 – pushing the world beyond the 2°C scenario and locking in disastrous climate reactions in the second half of the century.

“We will spend more money repairing the damage of climate change after it has occurred instead of spending up front avoiding the climate damage,” he says. “We know what to do. The only reason we do not do it is because it is slightly more expensive than doing nothing, so we don’t do it. It is very frustrating.”

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