Hardin Tibbs
Chief Executive, Synthesys Strategic Consulting Ltd(A copy of Hardin Tibbs' powerpoint presentation is available in PDF format here (718k).
The Future Global Context: Storm Warning or Reason for Hope?
Introduction
There may be a case for issuing a global storm warning. We are acutely aware of the recent terrorism in New York, but there are a lot of other things that are being temporarily obscured by the events of the last month that we also need to think about. If there is a global storm coming up, New Zealand stands in a rather interesting position. I noticed a small item on the front page of yesterday’s local newspaper about a surge in the number of Americans who are thinking of applying to come and live here. And in the United Kingdom recently, New Zealand was voted the safest place in the world. That is a very interesting position to be in because it allows you to take the excellent conditions here as a starting point for initiatives that might not be available to some of the countries in the northern hemisphere.
There are a lot of dots to be connected when trying to understand what might happen on the world stage. I’ll be talking about a lot of the dots in quick succession and I’ll sketch in some of the ways they might be connected, but I’ll leave the full ramifications to you in your deliberations later on today. I’ll talk about a variety of things that might happen taking into account the large-scale issues. I’m taking a scenario planning or a scenario thinking approach, carefully trying to avoid making predictions, which is sometimes difficult. The idea of scenarios is to make simulations of possible futures rather than predictions, thinking about what you will do if such and such happens, rather than arguing about whether it will actually happen. The idea is to expand the horizons of thinking and take into account more factors than you might have thought about before. The emphasis is on testing strategies. I’ll look one to several decades ahead as well as look back an equal length of time.
Future Thinking
In the last 50 years there were some extremely significant changes. All of these things – rapidly accelerating science and technology, including weapons of mass destruction, rapid further acceleration of population growth after 1950, a huge expansion of global communications and travel – haven’t quite removed the tyranny of distance, but they have gone a long way towards that. The result is many more people, who have much greater freedom to communicate and travel, and who are interacting far more. The number of private business firms in the world is vastly greater than it was in 1950, and they have far more powerful technology at their disposal. It’s not surprising that we’re living in interesting times.
Where does it go next? Do we simply see more of the same, or could there be major discontinuities? There is a great deal of discussion in the media about the shape of the future, but it is generally talked about as if the overall context will simply be more growth, more expansion, more of all those things that we saw during the last half century. However, it is just as likely that there will be major discontinuities on several of those fronts.
It does seem that we will have much more technology. We may have either a deceleration of population growth or even, possibly, less people in the world. We’ll certainly be managing the impact of industry and trade in new ways, particularly with respect to their social and ecological impact. That in turn will be both driven by and give rise to completely new ways of thinking about social organisation, including economic structure, political concepts and national order.
Technological Change
In many ways technological change is the underlying driver of change in a whole range of other areas. We have had an onslaught or tsunami of technology since 1950. The rate of growth is not simply an acceleration, it is an acceleration of an acceleration. It is advancing very rapidly indeed and moving into areas that used to be purely the province of science fiction.
I used to read a lot of science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, and when I look at the things that are happening today it often feels as if those stories are coming true. Vernor Vinge, a science fiction writer, talks about a coming ‘technological singularity’. He envisages a situation in the relatively near future when the advance in technology accelerates to the point where the technology is creating itself and computers are designing their own successors. At this point, he says, we lose the ability to understand the technology we’ve unleashed – it moves beyond the human capacity for comprehension. The technology starts to accelerate away from us. This is the sort of scenario in which we download ourselves to silicon and that type of thing. I have some reservations about that possibility because it raises the whole question of what human nature is. But certainly there are people seriously speculating along these lines, suggesting that this might happen. As our technological power increases it raises a whole series of questions like this. Ethical, social, and environmental issues are coming to the fore.
The advances in technology are rapid but they are also uneven across its entire front. We’re very well aware of the advance in information technology. Biotechnology is coming along rapidly, advances in materials technologies are in the pipeline, and there are a whole series of interesting possibilities around energy. Energy is a primary element because without an adequate supply of energy, none of the other things can be done. Information is expanding very rapidly but whether it is improving knowledge, let alone wisdom, is another thing. It is certainly having a very broad impact on the economy and it is driving change in many areas. Privacy is under threat, for example.
Biology
Biology is also coming along very strongly behind information technology, riding on its coat tails. Bioinformatics is an industry that is expanding extremely quickly because the sequencing of genomes that is happening couldn’t take place without the simultaneous advance in information technology. A typical genetics laboratory is sequencing 20 million base pairs a day and all that information has to be stored somewhere. The computer industry is selling the biotech companies the equipment to capture and store it. The amount of data is extremely large, and people talk about the size of genomes using the same terminology that is used for computer memory storage.
The impacts on the real world include the sudden advent and then equally prompt retreat or partial retreat of genetically modified crops. Developments occurring in the laboratory can very rapidly have large effects in the world. We can now surf the internet and download genomes, and the internet is the principal means of exchange for this information. I literally downloaded from the web this gene map of the first organism to have its genome fully sequenced.
If you look at this from the brave new world of science it looks very exciting. However, consumers tend to have values that are potentially in conflict with the products of biotechnology in that they prefer things that are natural. They want products that are ecological, pure, chemical-free, green, healthy, and so on. Of course the concept of ‘natural’ gets slippery when you start to look at it closely, but the overall message is clear.
People are apprehensive about messing around with the design of nature. Reports from ‘citizen juries’ and similar consumer review processes show that people are particularly nervous about alterations in the human food chain. They’re much more enthusiastic about possible therapies because that potentially affects just the one individual with the medical condition. Modifying the food chain does carry a higher risk and this is something people seem to highlight instinctively.
It seems that some biotechnology strategies, particularly in the area of agricultural products, have been shaped by chemical companies using traditional chemical industry thinking rather than by ‘biological’ or whole-systems thinking. We are in the very early stages of the strategic thinking in this new field and some caution is needed. This is a technology that raises a number of very significant ethical issues. We know that we can modify the genotype and change the phenotype. We can change the genes and modify the physical appearance of the organism, and that is the province of science. But when it comes to the question of what we should do with this ability, we need to move beyond the realm of science. We need to recognise another perspective: that life has its own agenda, its own purposes and intent that must be respected. The strategy for biotechnology needs to take these considerations into account and cannot afford to be purely reductionist.
Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is a bit further off, but the trend lines for the development of this technology show that it will be appearing in a significant form by the end of this decade. This emerging technology is driven largely by computer industry investment in R&D for microchip fabrication. The idea of nanotechnology is that we will be able to manipulate atoms as if they were Lego bricks and build things atom by atom. This will allow us to make things at the atomic level of size and precision. For example, an object such as this cylindrical bearing would weigh as little as a rather large molecule but would be an engineering component. This kind of potential is emerging in laboratories around the world, particularly in the United States and Japan.
The implications of nanotechnology are very significant because we could then make machines to perform the same functions we currently enjoy, but that use vastly less energy, that are vastly smaller, and require vastly less material to make, and so forth. There is work going on at places like MIT in the United States on what they call ‘sheet architecture’ for nanotechnology. For instance, you might have a thin transparent film that looks like a film of plastic that you stick on your window. It contains at the nanoscale, at the near atomic scale, a vast array of heat pumps that will push heat in and out of the room through the glass, either acting as room heating or cooling devices. So instead of having a large box on your windowsill to do the air-conditioning you just have a sheet of what looks like transparent plastic. And the tiny air pressure difference from the wash of air swirling behind people when they walk past may actually be enough to power up devices like this.
Here is another example of the sort of thing that we have in front of us. At the very small size-scale, but not yet anywhere near close to nanotechnology – just imagine reducing this a few thousand times to get the nanotechnology equivalent – Berkeley University are designing entire computers. This is a self-contained surveillance device about one or two millimetres across. At Berkeley they’ve had these things running for several hours at a time. The immediate objective is to make them just small enough so that they’re below the limit of resolution of the human eye and they float in the air like dust particles.
These devices have some form of sensor on board, plus a solar panel and a battery and a transmitter so that they can be used for surveillance. If we were meeting in this room in 10 years’ time the room might need to have virus-level air filters to make sure that there were none of these things floating in the air. And at the entrance you might need some sort of biological scanner, like the scanners airports have, to see if you’d actually breathed any of these things into your lungs on your way to the conference. There might of course also be other similar things in your bloodstream monitoring your vital signs and announcing your identity.
When biotechnology meets that kind of technology all sorts of other interesting things become possible. There are laboratory experiments combining information technology and biotechnology in attempts to enhance intelligence. Scientists are putting chips into the brains of unfortunate animals to see if brain functions can be replaced with appropriately coded chips. They are able to watch the thought processes in a rat’s brain as it negotiates a maze. They can see the difference between the older rats and the younger rats, as the older rats have trouble remembering where they are in the maze. All this can be read using an implanted chip. The people doing this work suggest that quite soon we’ll be able to use the brain as a read, write, erase medium rather like a computer storage disk. This has interesting implications for education as well as for less savoury activities.
New directions in physics
There are even more exotic things in the pipeline. These speculations may be slightly tongue in cheek but the point they make is important. Although these may not be the specific things that happen, we should expect breakthroughs at least as surprising as this, given the accelerating advance of technology.
There is a point of view in theoretical physics that really there isn’t any such thing as mass. What you have is electric charge and energy interacting together at the atomic level to create the illusion of mass. If that is true it should be possible to manipulate things like gravity and inertia and so on. This has some very interesting implications, not least for transportation technology.
Keen readers of New Scientist may remember an item from 1996 in which a Russian scientist, Podkletnov, working in Finland, claimed to have accidentally discovered a gravity shielding effect in an experimental rig that he was playing with. It consisted of a spinning superconducting ceramic ring, and he discovered that anything placed over it lost two percent of its weight. NASA are experimenting with this because maybe if you stack enough of these up you would get lift off, and if you can make them a little more efficient you don’t have to have quite such a big stack.
Meanwhile, the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke has publicly stated that there is a radical energy revolution in prospect and that cold fusion, the much maligned cold fusion, is alive and well out there. He says that people in various laboratories around the world are getting good results with it. And there is the even more exotic zero point energy in which energy is drawn direct from the quantum vacuum. According to Newtonian physics the vacuum is by definition empty. According to quantum physics it is full of things that don’t last for very long: virtual particles that appear and disappear very rapidly, but while they’re there you can snatch some energy from them. It sounds too good to be true, but theoretically there is some basis for thinking that this is viable.
It gets even more exotic. Imagine a vehicle with the gravity shielding device on board plus Alcubierre’s proposal for a warp drive. Miguel Alcubierre is a relativity theorist who was challenged in the early 1990s to determine whether under general relativity it is theoretically possible to go faster than the speed of light. You probably are aware that this is not supposed to be possible. This is one of the central tenets of twentieth century science – you do not go faster than the speed of light. But now it turns out that theoretically you can. It looks a lot like the Star Trek warp drive, because what you do is enclose your spaceship in a ‘bubble’ of space that remains normal in the relativistic sense, so that the spacecraft experiences no mass increase or time dilation at lightspeed. You warp the space at the front and back edge of this region, to create the bubble, contracting space ahead and expanding it behind, and then the bubble plus spaceship can be moved through space faster than light. An early critic said you’d need all the energy in the known universe to do this. A later rebuttal suggested that you could use far less energy by adopting a Dr Who-style approach, creating a special bubble that was very small on the outside but large enough on the inside to have the spacecraft in it, and move that.
The growth of transportation technology shows there have been successive waves of new transportation technology about every 50 years since the Industrial Revolution. It is very tempting to speculate that there might be something else on the horizon because according to this pattern it looks as if the growth of air transportation will be decelerating soon, maybe by 2010. Of course, if the terrorists have their way it will be decelerating a lot more sharply and a lot sooner than that. This idea is not a forecast, only a scenario, but perhaps there is indeed something waiting in the laboratory that would be significantly better. To follow the rule of thumb for replacement technology it would have to be about 10 times better or more advantageous than the technology it replaces.
Global Challenge
But there are concerns as well as opportunities. Technology is giving rise to a lot of stresses and strains in the global system. It is all good fun at one level but what is it doing out there in the real world? Is technology compatible with a globally viable ecosystem? Plenty of people in the world don’t have access to fresh water, so the market rhetoric that the market will deliver technology everywhere it is needed doesn’t seem to be working in all areas.
The proponents of globalisation say that globalisation is increasing inequity only in those places where it hasn’t been seriously attempted. That of course is rhetoric. But we do need to address serious questions more broadly than from within the framework of any given set of theories. In particular I would like to expand the approach beyond the framework of economic thinking, just to see if there are any other things in the real world that we might need to think about. There is that old joke that an economist is someone who doesn’t pick up a $20 bill lying on the ground because if it was real somebody else would have already picked it up. I’m not trying to knock economics here, but I do want to propose a broad field of appreciation in thinking about these things.
Human population dynamics and the flow of materials
If we are going to look into the future it is useful to do so in terms of large-scale factors that we know about going a long way back into the past. There are two factors that enable us to look at the very big picture in this way. One of them is human population dynamics. Projections by the United Nations show global population growth smoothly slowing and levelling out, but there is a nasty alternative scenario. In ecological population dynamics there are two broad population behaviours. On the one hand there is the ‘S curve’ behaviour, in which the species begins to saturate the carrying capacity of its environment, and it moderates its growth, which slows down and levels out. Alternatively, there is the ‘J curve’ behaviour, in which the species does not have that capability, and the population growth punches up above the carrying capacity and then drops rather dramatically until it falls back to a level from which it can regrow. As to which one of these will turn out to be the human species behaviour, we don’t yet have the answer.
The other large-scale factor is the flow of materials through the entire industrial economy. This is growing very rapidly. Whereas the population is currently growing with a doubling time of 40 years – in 40 years’ time population will be twice what it is today if today’s growth rate is maintained – the consumption of materials is doubling twice as fast as that. It is doubling every 20 years. Pollution tracks this consumption growth very closely because pollution is the materials flow getting dumped into the environment at the end of its economic life. For example, the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere has doubled twice since 1950.
We can see from this that the industrial economy is growing very fast, but we also need to ask how big it is relative to the natural global system. If it is still small compared to the global system, then even with rapid growth we still have plenty of time before it becomes a problem. But if it is already large compared to the global system, then the rapid growth is much more of an issue.
There are a number of ways of gauging how big the industrial system is compared to the biosphere. For example, we can look at the release of toxic heavy metals into the environment compared to the natural background rates of release of these elements. And what we see is that the amount being released by the human economy is many times greater than the natural release into nature, from the weathering of rock and so on. This is important because the biosphere has only evolved to absorb a certain level of these metals, and they are highly toxic, which is why they are of interest. So here we see that the size of industry is already significantly bigger than the biosphere.
There are other measures of this. In 1986 a team at Stanford University attempted to measure how much of the natural global productivity was being taken by the human economy. And what they found was that we were taking 40 percent of the NPP, the ‘net photosynthetic product’ of the terrestrial biosphere. This means that almost half of the net growth of biomass in any one year was being taken by the human economy. And if this amount is growing in line with the growth of total materials consumption, it is growing very fast and will double in 20 years. The surface of the earth however, which provides the background for this rapid growth, is obviously not getting any bigger. (Although you may be amused to hear that there is at least one fringe theory out there that actually says it is.) So in this case, the scale of human activity is already half the size of the biosphere, and is rapidly overtaking it.
Exponential growth like this is very bad news for the kinds of public decision-making processes that we tend to have in Western style democracies. Here is a riddle for French schoolchildren that illustrates the point. Suppose you have a pond, and on this pond there is a water lily growing, and it is doubling in size every day (it is growing exponentially). At this rate of growth it will completely fill the pond after 30 days. Now suppose that you decide not to do anything about this until the pond is half full. When will that be? When you first hear this question, there is a tendency to think that the pond will be half full halfway through the month. But that is not correct, because every day the lily doubles in size, and in fact the pond is not half full until the 29th day – and on the last day it doubles in size once more and covers the pond.
This means that if there is an exponential problem and you decide to wait until it reaches a reasonable size before you act, you’re not going have very much time left to do something about it. You can see from this example that until about the twentieth day the problem is so small it is not even visible. This is very significant in terms of decision-making response time. If the global flow of materials is growing exponentially, then by the time we see some real impact it may be too late to do anything about it. If you scale the 40 percent of NPP in 1986 to the pond example, making the assumption of a 20 year doubling time, you see that we’re now at approximately 11 o’clock in the morning of the last day.
We live in interesting times. As Professor Wilson at Harvard has said: ‘One planet, one experiment.’ No back-up, no control. This might be all right if ecosystems showed progressive (linear) degradation, because at least this would give us some warning – although you’d still have the boiled frog syndrome to contend with. But many ecosystems don’t respond like that, they absorb significant environmental impacts with no sign of degradation and then suddenly collapse without warning.
Take as an example Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack mountains in the United States. From the late nineteenth century onwards it received a very a heavy loading of sulphur from acid rain from the burning of high sulphur coal in the Ohio River Valley. That stabilised in the 1920s at around 3.5 million tonnes a year. Right up until the 1940s this had no effect at all on the acidity of the lake. The lake was full of fish, the water was fine. But very shortly after that the lake water acidified extremely rapidly and the lake is now completely dead. The original graph showed the species of fish that died as the acidity increased. The nasty question in all of this is: will the global ecosystem show similar behaviour?
Might we be living in that pre-1940-type regime thinking everything is more or less all right out there when in fact the entire system may be teetering on the brink of collapse? What was happening in the lake example was that the ecosystem was showing degradation if you knew where to look. In fact the buffering capacity of the soil in the lake watershed was neutralising the acid rain. However, around the early 1940s that neutralising capacity was used up and the next domino was the lake water.
Is there any evidence that this sort of global non-linearity might be in process? Here is a graph downloaded from Shell’s website. It is based on deep ice cores from the Arctic and shows temperature and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere tracking each other up and down very closely over the last several hundred thousand years. Then after 1800 the level of carbon dioxide shoots off the scale, but the linked or expected degree of temperature change has yet to happen. And apart from gradual global warming we could be about to push the climate system into fibrillation, and there is some evidence that climate variability may be increasing and that is likely to mean larger storms. The insurance losses for major storms were much greater during the 1990s than in any previous period. They were several times up from the storm levels in the 1950s and 1960s, for example.
Resource depletion
The fear about resource depletion in the 1970s, which more recently we decided wasn’t really a concern, is actually back on the radar screen again. It is now thought that the peak of global oil production may occur between 2004 and 2008. Roughly speaking the way that a resource gets depleted, in any given oilfield or whatever, follows a normal or bell-shaped curve and the point of concern is not when the resource completely runs out, but when it reaches the peak level of extraction. After that point the actual amount of resource extracted begins to decline. When we reach that point for global oil production, we move into what would be a permanent global oil shortage. There are a few things that could offset that, but even if any one of those things started immediately it is unlikely that it would come onstream fast enough to offset this peak effect. We’re certainly looking at the beginnings of the end of oil and, of course, major disruption in the Middle East could bring us to that point much sooner.
This is where you might start thinking about how much oil New Zealand produces, how much it uses and whether you want to be in the open market, or whether you want to have contingency plans about keeping the country running should this happen. We’re not talking many decades into the future. We’re talking only a few years into the future. In the wake of the events since September 11, and trying to think the unthinkable, maybe it is actually worth asking these questions.
About three years ago, when this global oil shortage scenario began to emerge, I asked Shell’s scenario planning department in London for their view about a possible oil shortage in the near future. They said they had the largest oil reserves of any oil company in the world, and based on what they knew they alone had it was inconceivable that there would be a permanent oil shortage. Interestingly, when I asked them the same question again in the northern spring of this year they said their current calculations show that the peak of production will come in 2025. It seems to me that this change in their view in the last three years from dismissing the idea to putting a date on it, albeit a number a little further out than 2004 to 2008, is quite significant.
So those are the environmental issues. On the social front, exponential growth of global economic output is not producing a nicely equitable distribution around the world. If the world were a village of 100 people there would be 60 Asians, 12 Europeans, 15 from the western hemisphere (nine Latin Americans, five North Americans and one from Oceania) and 13 Africans. Eighty people would be non-white, 20 would earn 89% of the entire world’s wealth and 25 would live in substandard housing. Seventeen would be unable to read and 13 would suffer from malnutrition. This question of global inequity is a very important one to address if we’re going to manage this further doubling of population. It is hazardous enough already without doubling the scale of the problem.
Global Solutions
We come back to technology for various reasons when thinking about possible solutions. I’m not suggesting a technological fix, but I am saying that the role of technology will be very significant. You can see this from the so-called ‘IPAT’ equation by Paul Ehrlich, which is a classic in environmental studies. It basically says that the burden on the environment is a function of how many people you have in the world, how affluent they are, and what kind of technology they’re using in order to be affluent.
Suppose we want to achieve a reduction to one quarter of today’s environmental burden, at the same time as global population doubles and affluence increases by a factor of four. This allows for one more doubling of population and for many more people to be affluent in the interests of equity. To achieve that, the equation shows that the performance of technology has to improve enormously and the pollution loading from the technology has to drop to a tiny fraction of what it is today. You can’t reach that level of performance with the current approach of cleaning up pollution after it leaves the end of the pipe. That won’t get you there.
Even cleaning up what goes in at the beginning of the pipe doesn’t get you there, and you end up having to think about a systemic redesign of industry. The entire architecture of industry would have to be different. What exactly does that mean? One way of thinking about this is to realise that nature already runs a global-scale system for transporting and continuously processing materials. It’s called the biosphere. Nature manages to run it on ambient solar energy input and has kept it going for millions of years.
How does nature do it? There is a set of principles underlying the design of natural ecosystems and the entire biosphere. There is no reason in principle why we shouldn’t emulate them in the design of industry. The most important principle is that there is no such thing as waste at the level of the whole system. In nature, waste exists at the level of the species, but there is always another species to deal with it. But industry does produce waste at the level of the whole system. The starting point for a systemic redesign of industry is that what we have now is a linear materials processing system. We extract resources from the earth: the biosphere or the earth’s crust. We process them through the market domain and we throw away the residue. But we could change that to a cyclic pattern where materials flow indefinitely around the industrial system once they are brought into it. In the cyclic economy, material flows are decoupled from economic flows. There is a cyclic flow of materials that minimises the use of virgin materials, and the system’s energy use and entropy of the materials is kept as low as possible. Economic transactions can continue to grow but they require less embodied mass. This is a view that sees the industrial system as a dependent subsystem of the biosphere.
You could move to a large-scale cyclic economy if you took that approach. In principle this could be done using today’s technology. It would require political will and a lot of innovation but it doesn’t require any fundamentally new technology. Of course, having nanotechnology would make it a lot easier. On the other hand, having nanotechnology without this kind of environmental discipline would probably make environmental problems much worse.
An example of this thinking applied at the industrial facility level is the industrial ecosystem at Kalundborg in Denmark. This consists of a number of economically independent entities with an infrastructure for sharing what would otherwise be waste flows. One of them is a wallboard company making plasterboard that used to buy 30,000 tonnes of mined gypsum from Spain every year. But it doesn’t need to do that now because it is using industrial gypsum recovered from the flue gas at the power station. This sort of thing could be done on a much larger scale and in time you could do it across the entire global industrial system.
The value loop
Management textbooks like to talk about what they call the value chain. But in a cyclic economy, where materials move in a cyclic pattern, this would become the value loop. Materials are put in initially to fill the loop and are then continuously recycled. Energy input for materials reprocessing is kept as low as possible. There is no overall waste and the idea is to minimise the use of virgin materials via reprocessing and recycling. The value loop would give you a completely different approach to business management, product strategy and so on. It also presents a challenge for companies at the ends of the chain, such as mining companies, as they relocate themselves to the value loop. Instead of digging things out of the earth’s crust they would be extracting their raw material from the local urban industrial ecosystem. This requires a rethink, a different mindset. The biggest problem would be the significant cultural shift required.
Dupont is an early example of a company that is beginning to develop very serious product strategies based on this kind of approach. Dupont is about to unveil a high performance biopolymer. This will allow them to move from an oil-based feedstock pathway, to a recycling pathway that uses some biomass inputs, to a fully cyclic pathway once they’ve loaded up the industrial materials loop with the polymer.
Decarbonisation
One of the other things you would do as you changed the design of industry is decarbonisation – reducing the carbon intensity of energy. Every ton of carbon in fuel releases 3.66 tons of carbon dioxide. As economies have industrialised they’ve moved from high-carbon energy sources to low-carbon energy sources. This is why environmentalists propose that we might go the next step to pure hydrogen gas as an energy carrier, the ultimate zero-carbon fuel. That might be the energy system of the future.
Decarbonisation is just a special case of what is being called dematerialisation, reducing the materials requirement, the mass intensity, of industrial production. One of the implications of this is that we must be able to retrieve materials at the end of their useful life, and this will mean redesign. Car brakes are a good example. When you slam on the brakes at high speed on a highway the forward kinetic energy of the car is turned into heat that is dissipated from the brakes and the brake pads themselves are worn down into a fine powder. Anybody who has a car with alloy wheels will be well aware of this effect. As an individual item of technology this doesn’t seem very significant, but at the huge scale on which we’re doing this it does become significant. The largest source of copper pollution in San Francisco Bay is from car brake pads worn to dust and then washed into the bay when it rains. The alternative is the braking technology on the proposed high-efficiency ‘Hypercar’. The wheels are each driven by an electric motor that gets turned into a generator, a dynamo, when you brake. Then the energy of motion of the car is turned back into electricity that can be stored on board, and the release of heat and dust, the inefficiency and waste, is completely eliminated. And across the entire car fleet, this kind of design change can make an enormous difference.
Architecture of industry
The entire architecture of industry shifts when you replicate those sorts of system and design changes across the entire spectrum of industrial products and processes. And there are a whole series of other things in addition to retrieving materials at the end of their useful life. The overall analysis is global. Industry must form a system of flows that mesh with the natural planetary system. This suggests a new reading of Darwinism, or maybe this is what Darwin meant in the first place – that the survival of the fittest means the survival of what fits best, rather than what fights best.
Can technology solve our problems? I’ve stressed technology a lot, but if we mean by better technology that it is simply faster, stronger and more powerful, then no it isn’t enough. In fact it will add to our problems. Something else needs to change. What is that something else? Broadly speaking it is a new context, a new set of social values brought to bear on the design and deployment of technology, so that what we need to do is not simply to improve the technology but also to change the values that we’re using. Better technology must be used in a systemic way that consciously aims for optimal social and environmental outcomes.
The ‘cultural creatives’
Is there a new set of social values that could change the context for technology? As the global population dynamic moves into the deceleration phase, and we turn the top corner of the S curve, Jonas Salk has said that we will see an entirely new set of social values emerging in response. These sorts of values are appearing in the OECD countries, where in some cases fertility is already below replacement level. Some very interesting demographic data has been reported from the United States about a cross-cutting group dubbed the ‘Cultural Creatives’. These are an emergent group with very different values from either the ‘traditionalists’, representing about 25 percent of the population in OECD countries, or the mainstream ‘moderns’ who comprise about 50 percent. Cultural Creatives have a very different, holistic approach to life. They value authenticity, engaged action and ‘whole-process’ learning, idealism, globalism and ecology, the importance of women, altruism, self-actualisation and spirituality.
This group has grown from about five percent in the 1960s to its current 25 percent and represents a steadily growing leading edge. I don’t know if anybody has attempted a survey like this in New Zealand. It may well be that the Cultural Creatives are the group with whom to explore and position future innovations in government. They represent the sort of hybrid thinking that could resolve many of the contradictions inherent not only in the way we use technology but in the social tensions that exist out there.
Scenarios and Implications
It does look as if there will be some kind of crisis sooner or later if we don’t change the way we deploy technology and the social distribution of its benefits. According to the World Wildlife Fund we’re consuming renewable natural resources 30 percent faster than the global capacity to regenerate them, and it really makes you wonder how long we can keep going with that.
There are a couple of broad choices. Either society can begin voluntarily to move along a track that increases relative sustainability or it can wait and see what happens. If we take the wait and see approach then maybe when the crisis appears it makes us do what we weren’t able to do voluntarily before. It jolts us up to where we would have been on the voluntary track. On the other hand the crisis could put us all back in the Stone Age. What this amounts to is that ‘business as usual’ is no longer the scenario that leads to an optimistic outcome.
Business as Usual: Tensions
As a result, there are significant changes brewing under the reassuring surface of our ‘business as usual’ world. The ‘business as usual’ worldview is framed by and seen through a lens of neo-liberal economic thinking that reflects the rising importance of commerce and business. The social role and power of economics has been increasing steadily over the past 50 years. This is significantly different from earlier historical periods when non-economic and social factors had more prominent roles. Economic and scientific expert advice now dominate policy making.
The so-called ‘Washington Consensus’ expresses a lot of the business as usual thinking. The consensus is based on the redirection of public expenditure priorities towards fields offering economic returns and the potential to improve income distribution, such as primary health care, primary education and infrastructure. It emphasises fiscal discipline, financial liberation, a competitive exchange rate, trade liberalisation, privatisation, deregulation and secure property rights.
The anti-globalisation protestors have gone very quiet since September 11. But in many ways the so-called protest against globalisation is actually the beginning of what is probably a several years long, maybe a decade long, political struggle against the power of large corporations, against what is seen as the misuse of their power. Many NGOs themselves operate globally and, to make a subtle distinction between the two words, what they want is really a sustainable globalism rather than an unsustainable globalisation.
Companies will find that there is significant pressure growing against them over the next few years and it will probably get tangled up in the current anti-terrorist efforts. This pushback against social injustice is going to be a major feature of the next several years and it may well result in changes to corporation law world-wide. In short, the tide is turning against business. There is a public distrust of the business community. The pressure on companies is likely to grow. There is a growing international political movement to make corporations more democratically accountable. Already people are beginning to talk about reviving the corporate death penalty in the United States.
You could think in terms of three groupings – governments, business corporations and citizens (forming themselves into organisations such as NGOs to rival the clout of corporations) – either coming together or flying apart. The positive scenarios happen when the three come together cooperatively and the negative scenarios are where they’re pulling against each other and failing to cooperate. With the multiple combinations that result from that simple structure you can make an interesting set of scenarios that illuminate the broad range of geopolitical futures.
‘Third way’ politics
These tensions are driving changes in politics. So-called ‘Third Way’ politics is emerging. This new politics takes globalisation seriously and argues that the three key areas of power – government, the economy and the communities of civil society – all need to be constrained in the interests of social solidarity and social justice. Third Way politics proposes a new social contract: no rights without responsibilities. It seeks broad supply-side policy to reconcile economic growth with reform of the welfare state, which is reconstructed as the ‘social investment state’. Even if the Third Way is not in fact the future of politics, there is certainly a new kind of political culture emerging, in which some of the old left-right polarity is breaking down and people are looking to position in the centre in different ways than they were before.
Relationships
Social change is also driving political change, as illustrated by the rise of relationships. This is something new in sociological terms. In the past, when people got married, what kept them together was the social institution of marriage itself and the social pressure that went with it. But the idea of marriage as a social institution has steadily weakened, and now it’s not enough to hold people together. What has taken its place is the idea of relationships, a term that didn’t exist 30 years ago. The sociologist Anthony Giddens has described an emerging ‘democracy of the emotions’ as people focus on relationships. As people pay more attention to the quality of their relationships, democratic ideals are becoming important at the family and personal level. As a result people are beginning to demand a higher level of democratic performance in the public sphere. This implies steadily rising expectations for the quality of public political process.
A multiple bottom line
All of this is moving us beyond traditional money-based measures of accounting for businesses, and economic numbers for the performance of the economy as a whole. We are moving into a ‘multiple bottom line’ regime for the future: people, planet, and profits. This means we are sustaining and enhancing social capital and ecological capital, as well as ensuring economic viability. This makes perfect sense. Social and environmental externalities are becoming the limiting factors – not access to capital and labour, which were the constraints before –†so we shouldn’t be surprised to see them turned into performance criteria.
This multiple bottom line approach emerges on several fronts in parallel, not simply under the rubric of sustainability. You can think of people, planet and profits as three different kinds of capital. There are probably four or even five kinds of capital, because ‘people’ capital might be thought of as comprising both human and social capital, and technological capital and money capital could be treated separately. Thinking this way leads to a completely new systemic design for the sustainable economy of the future.
A new model for business
This leads to a completely different model for business. You go from the industrial growth model, which was suited to a phase of very rapid physical growth, into a mature phase in which the emphasis is not on rapid quantitative growth, but on qualitative development. When the growth levels out it does not imply an intellectual and cultural flatline. It is the physical growth aspect that decelerates – the number of people and the amount of mass flowing. A stable global civilisation emerges which is able to emphasise cultural development.
When you put all these things together you see a completely different set of characteristics for the nature of a business organisation that doesn’t go for growth. It is likely to be all about systems, managing complex systems in a stable manner and addressing environment and social factors as it does so. In the optimistic scenario, there is a historic deceleration, a deceleration of physical growth occurring. At the same time a new acceleration is beginning – a non-material acceleration with more information, more communications, more culture and a renaissance of spiritual awareness.
Conclusion
In short, the twenty-first century promises to be significantly different from the twentieth century. There are surprises in store on all the fronts I have been talking about and the challenge for public policy is how to weather the storm and get through to plain sailing on the other side of the little disturbances to come.
© Hardin Tibbs, 2001
Some of the ideas in this presentation form the content of a chapter contributed by Hardin Tibbs to a new book: Sustainability: The Corporate Challenge of the 21st Century. Edited by Dexter Dunphy, Jodie Benveniste, Andrew Griffiths and Philip Sutton. Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2000.
The set of PowerPoint slides (in PDF format - 718k) that accompanied this presentation, illustrate and expand on the information in Hardin Tibbs’ speech.
