09-04 Conflict or Challenge

Nothing impacted my thinking about the future more than the Syrian refugee crisis and Germany’s decision to admit massive numbers.
Migration is going to be the source of a great deal of conflict when global warming makes so many parts of the world uninhabitable.
I loved the cartoon which demonstrates the pressure on Europe linked to the threat of mass migration from both Syria and North Africa.
Conflict is taking many new forms. It is now more than nuclear proliferation. Today, we have the Russian hacking of the US election which provides a powerful window into the future. They call it cyber warfare, where nation states attack another nation’s computers and networks.
But things that we can eventually deal with are not what worry me. I believe we will deal with issues like nuclear proliferation and cyber warfare.
It is things that won’t change like global warming and the mass migration that it will cause that really has me thinking. My belief, and I hope I am right, is that the enormity of the climate threat will overwhelm traditional conflicts.
Thoughtful people in the US and Canada refer to climate change as a national security issue. It is certainly bigger than the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Korean conflict, the Sunni-Shia conflict and so on. It is what I would call an overwhelming global challenge.
Over the last few years, I have developed the view that climate change is real and that all the efforts to deal with it will not be enough.
At some point, however, the world will understand this. And the world will refocus its attention. Just like they do in wartime.
Although I have spent thirty years of my life in the world of public policy and politics, I still have the basic instincts of an engineer. And climate change makes me think more about the technological challenge ahead than the threat of political conflict.
How about the two major hurricanes of 2017 and what they have done to the US economy. This kind of thing will drive both technology and politics in the US.
Climate experts predict that about one in seven people in the world will be impacted by global warming. Talk about the future of political discourse and the kind of leadership that will have to emerge.
But are all nations and societies losers? Not necessarily. Some us are lucky and some of us are smart enough to make change work.
I am intrigued by the opening of the north by warmer weather, and the massive development of new resources in Russia and Canada that lies ahead. And what about nations like Canada that have the capacity to substantially increase their population?
And I am also intrigued by the competitiveness of technologies like wind and solar energy. There should be no shortage of jobs during the decades ahead of us when most societies are fighting climate change. Peace-time jobs rather than war-time jobs.
We are approaching a time when a public challenge like climate change becomes everyone’s personal challenge. That again is like wartime.
That’s the way I see it anyways.