Yet the ecological consequences of a warming climate have greater fallout to our society. Their impact on trade, security, economy, public health and mass-migration all have worldwide implications.[63] The global food supply, however, remains perhaps the most imperiled. As water (and oil)[64] are vital to producing and transporting food, their scarcity alone would substantially disrupt our ability to feed our growing world. Climate change makes that task inexorably harder, and substantially more expensive.
Between 2006 and 2008, world average food prices rose 107% for soybeans, 136% for wheat and 217% for rice.[65] A 2010 study by the International Food Policy Research Institute estimated that the price of corn, wheat and rice will rise by at least 60% by 2050.[66] A 2012 report by Oxfam – one of the largest humanitarian charities in the world – estimates that by year 2030, food prices will rise 107% for rice, 120% for wheat and 177% for corn compared to their baseline price in 2010.[67] Oxfam’s report stated further that:
We must also contend with the fact that precious little of our situation is aided by the realpolitik of our time. The United States has been at war for the past eighteen years as conflicts continue and self-perpetuate over much of the globe. Faith in the promise of globalization and global institutions has retreated in many of the western cultures that gave them life. With more than 65 million people displaced around the world currently, millions of refugees are arriving in other nations as unwelcome aliens.[69] The storms brewing on our near horizon don’t present mitigating effects to this dynamic, they’re potent accelerants. Humanity has never before seen what happens when several hundred million people migrate in desperation – and these circumstances stand to impact billions of lives. If current trends continue, few doubts remain that our future may bear such witness.
By themselves, any one of these problems are calamitous – be it ecological collapse, unsustainable resource extraction, climate change, or the accompanying risks to the global food supply and mass migration that comes with all of the above. Yet none of them exist in vacuums. Their arrival is in unison, and they are manifesting today – and worsening – with combined effect.[70] Even a casual observation could see how their results risk spawning humanitarian crises and breakdowns in social order that could fundamentally compromise the global economy and the state of global security.
As we saw in early 2020, COVID-19, a novel respiratory virus, brought the world to its knees. Foreign and domestic supply chains were stretched so far past their breaking points that it became effectively impossible for developed nations to source even basic household items like bleach, hand sanitizer and toilet paper – let alone medical necessities such as masks, ventilators and hospital intubation equipment. Our social functions were pummeled to a standstill, and even first-rate healthcare systems were overwhelmed to the point of paralysis.
This was the result of a single infection with a relatively low fatality rate. When we consider what might happen if a billion people were to run out of food or water? Or if climate change were to displace hundreds of millions of people? Or if Earth’s ecology collapsed alongside its ability to support humanity’s existential foundations? It’s hard to overstate the danger any one of these events would present to our social order and our logistical capabilities to deftly respond to crises. Yet the simple math of our situation shows that the likelihood of each these results coming to pass – in unison – increases as long as current trends persist.
This reality exposes a fundamental truth of human nature and the actions of nations: of the motives that cause us to take up arms against one another, few, if any, are greater than resource scarcity and the economic damage caused as a result.[71] As individuals, people may fight over any number of reasons, be it religion, nationalism, identity or pride – but nations aren’t driven by causes so fickle.[72] Nations are driven by the resources that sustain their existential basis – the resources that power the vast unseen functions which enable a modern, interconnected society. And should they not manifest in either perception or reality, the uncompromising nature of desperation and need beats the drums of war to unleash the horror that follows. Most every conflict, occupation or atrocity on a large scale can be attributed to this fact.[73] The entirety of human history, even if varnished through a rose-colored sheen, provides a bitter testimony.
What might ultimately result from the combination of these circumstances is of course not yet known. Yet what remains known is that the darkest examples of human nature manifest in times of ecological, geopolitical or economic strife.[74] Further known is the possession of at least 15,000 nuclear weapons in the hands of nine countries – thousands of which can be launched in minutes.[75]
Some macabre trivia: a single Ohio-class United States Navy submarine is capable of raining thermonuclear warheads on as many as 288 targets within a range of 7,000 miles – each with 2,500% greater destructive power than the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.[76] The U.S. Navy has fourteen of such submarines. The Russians, Chinese, French, British, Indians and Israelis[77] each have their own, and that’s on top of the land-based missiles and aircraft that can be used to deliver thousands of nuclear munitions to any corner of the globe within an hour or less.[78]
There are fewer than 4,500 cities on the planet with more than 150,000 people.[79] Humanity possesses an equivalent of four nukes for each.[80]
It’s a hardened truism that society is intimately acquainted with prophecies of doom. It’s also true that people have been harking about things “going to hell in handbaskets” since we had words for either. Fear sells. That’s why the boy cries wolf – a lesson well-known to any politician, theologian or journalist worth their title. And when dark nights eventually turn to dawn and there remains no wolf to be seen, we become numb to future bells tolling its arrival.
Yet the quintessential point of the fable is that the wolf does one day arrive, to either be defeated or devoured by. That day is now.
The multitude of problems facing our future place the foundations of our civilization in existential peril. The continued survival of not only our way of life, but our very species and the planet we call home is incumbent on their solution. Our hands, in our time, are tasked with either developing that solution, or failing to. Failure in this context is not quantified by a loss of money, power, prestige or reputation. It’s quantified by the immolation of our civilization as we know it. The extinction of Earth’s natural beauty. And, ultimately, the ashes of what we love and hold dear. That is the stone-cold reality of our present state of affairs.
But The Next Giant Leap wasn’t written to bow to that reality. It was written to change it. And it starts with a story of technology.