Global Energy Scenarios
Scenario 2. Environmental Backlash

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The other scenario drafts available for your comments are:
- Scenario 1: "The Skeptic" (a Business as Usual Scenario)
- Scenario 3: "Technology Pushes Off the Limits to Growth"
- Scenario 4: "Political Turmoil" (exploring potential implications of political instability)

Invitation

On behalf of the Millennium Project of the American Council for the United Nations University, we have the honor to invite you to participate in the third phase of an international study to construct alternative global energy scenarios to the year 2020.

During the first phase, the Millennium Project's staff produced an annotated bibliography of global energy scenarios and related reports. This was used to design a Delphi questionnaire that collected judgments and some 3,000 comments from about 150 participants on potential developments that might affect the future of the global energy situation. These results were used to construct draft scenarios. Your views are invited to make these working draft scenarios more plausible and useful. They are for your review only and not for circulation, as they are rough working drafts. This is the working draft of the second scenario for your review. It explores potential futures resulting from environmental backlashes from nature and the environmental movement -- the next two scenarios will probe the effects of new technology and political instability; the first was a business as usual scenario.

The Millennium Project is a global participatory system that collects, synthesizes, and feeds back judgments on an ongoing basis about prospects for the human condition. Its annual State of the Future, Futures Research Methodology, and other special reports are used by decision-makers and educators around the world to add focus to important issues and clarify choices.

The results of all three phases of this international study will be published in the 2006 State of the Future. Complimentary copies will be sent to those who respond to this questionnaire. No attributions will be made, but respondents will be listed as participants.

Please submit your views on Scenario 2: "Environmental Backlash" by March 25, 2006 by answering this online form, or by downloading the Word version and then e-mail it back to Elizabeth Florescu acunu@igc.org with a copy to jglenn@igc.org and tedjgordon@worldnet.att.net.

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Instructions: Please add your comments in the blank spaces provided and at the end of the working draft of this scenario.

Scenario 2. Environmental Backlash
The catastrophic nuclear accident in 2008 that polluted the Indian Ocean with radioactive waste galvanized the brewing environmental movement with a new dynamic force around the world. Pro-environment politicians were elected and the G8 hammered out an agreement to create and implement the Global-Local Energy-Environment Marshall Plan (GLEEM Plan) with an Apollo-like mandate to fix the energy situation and reduce climate change.

Figure 1: Maps of Nuclear Power Reactors: INDIA
Source: INSC, http://www.insc.anl.gov/pwrmaps/map/india.php
(Purple reactor labels show specific reactor locations; some reacor labels may not represent the exact geographic location.)

The environmental backlash had been gathering momentum for years – both from nature and from the environmentalists. From the 1970s onward, forecasts of global warming and its impacts have proved to understate what actually occurred. In the last ten years, major areas of tundra have melted, releasing huge amounts of methane, a gas 22 times more dangerous for global warming than CO2. Nature’s backlash was felt most directly via increasing natural disasters, new diseases, falling crop yields, and social unrest among millions of environmental refugees from dying rivers and lakes. Many fishing industries around the world are gone. The water tables have fallen dramatically in India and China over the last 20 years, leaving dry wells for hundreds of miles in many locations, forcing millions to flee to already congested cities where tensions explode into riots. Increasing demand for meat accelerated the industrialization of livestock production with its massive concentrations of animals and their wastes, which led to the Pig Flu pandemic of 2010 killing over 25 million people. Less dramatic but also quite devastating is the slow-motion march of desertification in Asia, Africa, North and South America, and the Middle East. Other backlashes from nature included


The environmentalists’ backlash cut a broad swath across the array of industrial powers. There were strategic lawsuits, high-profile public confrontations, protocols to environmental treaties that used biosensors and satellite data for better detection of environmental crimes, tougher national regulations (mostly in Europe), inflammatory Internet blogs, and violent attacks on the key offices of fossil fuel industries. Although the horrific 2008 disaster caused the environmental movement and public attention to cross a fundamental threshold: environmental viability for life support was no longer assured - the world’s dependence on fossil fuels continues.

Increasing damage from hurricanes such as those that hit New Orleans in 2005 and Houston in 2007, and drying water sources in India and China added to the intensity of the environmentalists’ outrage at the inaction on climate change. Prior to the Indian Ocean nuclear catastrophe, political and corporate leaders gave emotional speeches full of beautiful rhetoric about sustainable development but they acted with little urgency; they congratulated themselves over agreements that were trivial compared to the enormity of the situation and the task to be achieved. This caused a gathering potential firestorm of resentment and anger in the environmental movement that just needed a spark to spread worldwide.
It is ironic that the spark was a nuclear accident – rather than the emerging climate changes – that lead to environmentalists’ greater focus against the global fossil fuel industries. Since the growth in nuclear energy was essentially stopped by the environmental movement by the mid-1970s, and the 2008 catastrophe killed all future plans to build new nuclear power plants, the fossil fuel industry became their next logical target. Their mission was to change the world’s energy sources to non-nuclear, non-fossil fuels for base-load electricity and transportation power. Self-organized groups set out to destroy any obstacle blocking this change.

Environmentalists have endorsed nonviolent civil disobedience since the early 20th century protests at the Hoover Dam in the United States, but even before the Indian Ocean catastrophe, increasing numbers had begun to talk about more serious sabotage of the fossil fuel industry, because people were not taking global warming seriously enough. Even during the 1990s, there had been attacks on oil company facilities that had been largely kept out of the press, for fear of copycat attacks. These and subsequent scattered attacks on oil companies, automobile manufacturers, and large car dealerships were unable to make much impact on fossil fuel consumption. The potential targets were too numerous and diverse – should they hit drillers, refineries, pipelines, tankers, storage tanks, truckers, gas stations, car manufacturers, consumers, corporate headquarters, what? However, the daily reports of new impacts from the radioactive material seeping into the Indian Ocean got so many people enraged that coordinating attacks and setting priorities for targets became irrelevant. Activist groups self-organized in the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America. They chose the most convenient target at hand that would make national and international news and used cell phone cameras to get dramatic images on Internet blogs that fed the media.
The new environmental movement took many forms. “Green Smart” emerged as a loose network of architects and engineers that became a force in urban planning and alternative communities around the world and made inroads in rural agriculture. “Save Gaia” radicals hit oil pipelines in the Middle East and the United States that disrupted supply by 5% for a month and carried out a series of cyber attacks on oil and car companies’ financial systems. In the middle were “moderate radicals” and university students who marched on the United Nations, parliaments, newsrooms, and corporate headquarters of leading energy companies around the world. The Save Gaia bombers were protesting the way the world was run, the way the wealthy spent their money, and the superficial values spread by the media throughout the world that kept people pursuing irrelevant consumption, while the life support systems of nature were simultaneously being destroyed. These radicals wanted to take the profit motive out of environmental destruction by targeting and causing economic damage to fossil-fuel-related businesses. They spread rumors via the Internet to affect stock prices and get employees of conscience to resign. Save Gaia had many political and economic sympathizers – those opposing globalization, free trade, cartels, imperialism, and the status quo in general – who saw the movement working to their advantage.
On the legal front, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace achieved a precedent-setting victory in the ExxonMobil lawsuit on global warming – like the previous judgments against the tobacco industry – the ExxonMibil verdict shocked the business world. That was the key event that let the fossil fuel industry know that the rules of the game had changed forever.

ExxonMobil was convicted of causing up to 4% of the economic losses due to global warming and had to pay this amount to the Global R&D Fund established by the G8’s GLEEM Plan for alternative energy systems. It nearly bankrupted the company, but they diversified, negotiated payment terms, and may well survive. Nevertheless, business executives in other major oil and automobile companies scrambled to create crash programs to drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and fit into the Plan. This paved the way for the post-Kyoto international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1970 levels. Environmentalists were brought in to work with company engineers to redesign their businesses, incorporating diversification into alternative energy sources, “green agribusiness,” seawater agriculture, massive tropical forest growth programs for carbon credits, and


How the backlash changed business as usual
The environmental backlash helped make brainpower, determination, altruism, and honesty more fashionable in the energy industry than the previous mindless corporate loyalty and short-term bottom-line thinking. Luxury businesses worked with Green Smart and other environmental groups to make top-quality products that were energy-efficient, environmentally friendly, and educationally significant. Even advertising agencies, movie producers, and rock video choreographers began to use more images and concepts that reinforced the honor of environmental stewardship.

Increasing oil prices created recessions and depressions around the world. Countries that decided to cut oil dependency avoided much of these economic problems. Sweden moved from being 77% dependent on oil for its energy in 1970 to 32% in 2005, and zero by 2020. Iceland hopes by 2050 to power all its cars and boats with hydrogen made from electricity drawn mostly from its geothermal resources. Brazil powered 80% of its transport fleet with ethanol derived mainly from sugar cane by 2011, and is now essentially totally free of oil requirements for transportation. Sugarcane is the best cultivated plant for capturing CO2.
The Eminent Scientists Group appointed by the UN Secretary General created the definitions of terms, standards, and measurements that proved necessary for effective political and economic polices. These common measures helped the establishment and implementation of environmental tax incentives, product labels (e.g., energy per unit), and international sanctions on violators of a series of UN treaties related to sustainable development. Improved bio-chemical sensors and their prevalence due in part to counterterrorism efforts have re-enforced the use of these scientifically determined definitions and measures. Offenders were more easily spotted and exposed to the press, which helped generate the political will for enforcement. With these changes in policy and technology, and an increasingly informed global market, businesses competed to show their “environmental correctness.”
The Green Smart label has become the most sought product endorsement due to its strict environmental standards and public relations plan that lists the best to the worst companies and countries in the world. Companies had little choice but to be rated by these standards.[1] Highly energy-efficient companies with excellent environmental impact audits received some tax advantages and attracted more investments and international market access than those that did not get favorable reports. They were also nearly immune from health, safety, and environmental lawsuits, which attracted even more investors into their stocks.

 Some companies that used environmentally sound production practices created their own green labels to gain a competitive advantage. "Green" producers and consumers united in political movements that changed waste-subsidizing government policies. Utilities began charging for the real costs of water, nuclear energy, etc. Buying clubs and consumer unions encouraged consumers to purchase from companies that used more environmentally friendly industrial processes. The merger of many educational activities of the environmental movements and human rights groups in collaboration with many leading multinational corporations and the global inter-religious discourses helped to establish reasonably clean air and water, and healthy soil on the political agenda as a human basic right rather than just a factor in economic cost/benefit analysis. Environmental stewardship has increasingly been added as a moral responsibility in the preaching of religions. It became almost unthinkable to propose an environmentally dangerous project.
The successes of George Soros with the development of the transition economies, Ted Turner with the United Nations, and Bill Gates with the international health programs, laid the foundation for many wealthy individuals to support the GLEEM Plan. For example,


Smaller investors also had a way to participate financially in the environmental backlash by investing in international funds such as the Green Brick (composed of the top ten rated Green Smart Companies in each of the following countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Korea), and GreenMap (composed of the most promising companies regardless of location that are producing the technologies within the GLEEM road map).
The GLEEM Plan had twelve elements:

  • Establishment of the World Energy Organization (WEO) as a unique transinstitution of self-selected governments, corporations (both for profit and not-for profit), national academies of sciences, and international organizations (such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and what became INSOLSAT –International Solar Satellite Consortium based on the INTELSAT model).

  • A long-term R&D Energy Fund administered by the WEO to provide a global focus for business, government, university, and individual efforts to invest into energy and sustainable development projects that were scientifically sound, not already being pursued, too distant to attract venture capital, and that would not receive funds by individual governments if only acting alone.

  • Establishment of a World Energy Prize for proven technology ready for massive investment for international proliferation.

  • A trust fund, administered by IAEA, to finance the dismantling of dangerous plants (Chernobyl-type) and the management of nuclear waste.

  • Creation of a Meta Internet to make the world’s energy-environment knowledge more easily available, including implementation status and road maps, for transparent access to the current status and future prospects of the global energy-environment nexus. It also included nearly real-time information from the many centers that analyze risks, benefits, and time-to-impact of various energy and environmental projects in a standard user-friendly format the non-scientists can understand – including politicians.

  • Harmonization of environmental treaties leading to a common set of government polities and incentives to save energy and produce it more safely.

  • Designation of the WTO to enforce environmental and energy standards in trade as set by the United Nations Eminent Scientists Group.

  • The International Court of Environmental Arbitration and Conciliation created as a complement to the WTO and the ICC to strengthen enforcement of international agreements – with reliance on bio-nano-sensors and satellite networks

  • A world education program by UNESCO in cooperation with WEO, UNEP, and the UN University to support the production of music videos, computer games, and additions to school curricula to help assure that adults of the future would know how to be stewards of their world.

  • Global Partnership for Development to promote a series of partnerships among high- and low-income peoples, corporations and civil society groups to improve energy applications and economic development.

  • Expansion of the U.S. Peace Corps, British Voluntary Service Overseas, UN Volunteers, and various forms of tele-volunteers to help support energy-environmental local initiatives in developing countries

Please add other elements:

The GLEEM Plan’s R&D helped further novel technologies that served as non-fossil, non-nuclear fuels or significantly improved the efficiency of their use. The key funding categories were: energy for transportation in developing countries; universal access to electricity; carbon capture, separation, storage, and reuse; and reducing the gap between R&D and commercialization. New projects included portable sources, energy storage systems, decommissioning of nuclear power plants, and nuclear waste management. WEO also helped to implement policies—such as the elimination of energy subsidies and tax incentives that perpetuated the status quo and stifled development of alternative sources.

The scientific energy measurements and standards defined by the UN Eminent Scientists Group were used to set energy pricing policies to reflect the external and environmental impacts of energy production and use. Governments, in partnership with environmental scientists and the private sector, created carbon taxes (US$50/tonne)[2] and fees for the most environmentally damaging activities. All stages of the production process were included (extraction, production, distribution and consumption). A portion of the revenues subsidized R&D for more environmentally sound technologies and provided incentives for use of such technologies, goods, and equipment. Governments allocated some of the income to be administered internationally by the WEO long-term R&D Energy Fund.

As the cost of adding carbon capture and storage sank below the carbon trading fees, the use of CO2 sequestration accelerated around the world. Nearly all countries have consumption standards for vehicles (new and old) and some have had to ration energy and water usage. Many parts of China and India still do so today, which is the key limiting factor to their rates of economic growth.

Carbon trading has been practiced by the majority of the top 50 emitting countries since 2010; funds from this activity are used both for local environment-energy projects and for the Global R&D fund.
With assistance from UNEP, the World Bank, and the UN regional economic commissions, most governments today have a system of national accounts that includes the economic impacts of the depletion of natural resources. The Sustainable Development Index is now used to help countries set national priorities. Most corporations of any size have used the ISO 14001 Environmental Management System (EMS) to create their own EMS to continually improve their environmental profile.
These policy changes, plus the continuing technological breakthroughs and some cultural changes, have begun to have some impact on the energy-environment nexus. For example, energy efficiency of the economy has continued to improve.[3]

Figure 2: Global Energy Efficiency

What happened next?
“If it ain’t fit – retrofit!”
 Government incentives helped stimulate retrofits in such green technologies as photovoltaic roofing tiles and walls for buildings, better use of natural light for heating as well as saving electricity, more efficient windows, and liquid crystal display lighting (solid state lighting that puts the right photon, at the right place, at the right time, in the right color, with the desired intensity) that is ten times more efficient than conventional lighting. Even shading over parking garages in India and China is being replaced by photovoltaic nanotech sheeting to produce extra income for parking lot owners. Cars and trucks have been retrofitted for different fuels. Rooftops from Egypt to Ecuador are getting solar panels. However, one of the biggest retrofits that helped alter the energy situation was


Wherever feasible, nanotubes have replaced transmission wire in much of the world to conduct electricity more efficiently. This has had the same effect as producing a new source of energy without greenhouse gasses or nuclear waste.
Many cars built since 2015 remove CO2 from exhaust gases by chemical absorption with solvents, and thriving businesses retrofit previously built cars with this carbon capture equipment.
Energy storage was dramatically improved by replacing old batteries with those using a range of nanotube applications.[4] These new "nanobatteries" plus the three-dimensional computer chips with nanotubes have drastically cut the computer drain on the electric grids that just 15 years ago accounted for nearly 20% of electric usage in high tech areas of the world.

 Transportation
 Genetically engineered synthetic life that can create hydrogen and biofuels like ethanol have been developed by Craig Venter, who also created the system that speeded completion of the sequencing of the human genome.[5] This marked the historic transition from reading genetic code to writing genetic code. Genetic codes were specifically written from data banks of genetic information that produced life forms that now create hydrogen and ethanol in the presence of sunlight in a manner similar to how plants produce oxygen. Bio-hydrogen factories are beginning to produce large enough volumes to begin to be a source of reliable fuel for transportation. Although scaling up has been difficult, this approach could one day be a major source of hydrogen.
In response to the G8’s GLEEM Plan, the major oil companies and automobile industry leaders met with environmental leaders and scientists to work out a road map to dramatically cut carbon emissions. This included bio-hydrogen, electric cars, biofuels, and many ways to improve efficiencies. However, even several years before the Plan, BP[6] led the oil industry to the attempt to stabilize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (at the turn of the millennium cars and trucks used to account for about 33% of CO2 emissions). Some in the oil industries tried to find ways for the fossil fuel industries and consumers to reduce the amount of annual emissions from all sources by seven billion tonnes (from what it would otherwise have been by 2020), while continuing economic growth. Others did not take this seriously since it would mean building 4,900 nuclear plans around the world to replace a sufficient number of fossil-fuel-burning power plants, or by increasing the use of solar power by an impossibly large amount. Still, three years later, when the nuclear accident took the nuclear solution off the table, the oil industries realized that fundamental changes were necessary.
In this search for fundamental change, some transportation and energy companies followed Brazil’s leadership and led the fight for governments to pass regulations mandating flexible fuel vehicles that could use gasoline, ethanol, methanol, or mixtures of these fuels. As early as 2005, over 30% of Brazil’s gasoline demand was met by ethanol, while ethanol provided only 2% in the United States. This open standard for fuel competition provided the final incentives to make the less costly fuels more widely available.
When it was realized that less than 6% of the U.S. land mass could produce enough biomass to supply that country with its oil and natural gas needs, it became a national security issue in the U.S. Congress, which passed the biomass energy bill. Granted, there was not the accompanying reliable water necessary to produce all that biomass, but the bill spurred the R&D that helped the world make enough fundamental changes that today 19% of all new cars today use biofuels.

Biofuel production used to rely on fossil energy to convert biological sugars to transportation fuels. Even with the use of fossil energy to make the biofuels, their greenhouse gas emissions were 20-50% lower compared to petroleum fuels. Fossil fuels are now replaced with nanotech solar strips of photovoltaics layered for catching photons of the most efficient wavelengths. This, plus the use of cellulosic ethanol production techniques, now allows biofuels to be considered “greenhouse gas neutral” because the amount of CO2 plants take from the atmosphere when growing is roughly equal to what they give back when burned as fuel.

Biodiesel fuel production got an early boost when the EU mandated that 5.7% of its diesel fuel be biodiesel by 2010. Biofuel production has now replaced 10% of petroleum usage.[7] This should increase if the terraforming of the Earth’s coastlines by seawater agriculture continues. Biofuels have become a new form of wealth for previously impoverished rural areas of the world. For example, biofuels from sugar cane helped the Haitian economic recovery, and seawater agriculture helped reduce poverty along the coast of East Africa and Somalia.
Although this prevents further damage, it does not solve the problem of global warming. Additional ways had to be found to sequester the excessive global warming gases. Green Smart engineers have been testing nanotechnology applications to exhaust systems to reduce CO2 emissions. The use of nanotech on the surface of buildings to strip carbon from the air is a source for future molecular manufacturing applications. The massive tree plantings have helped, but they have only reduced the growth rate of carbon in the atmosphere without turning it around. However, the uses of advanced composites, ceramics, nanotubes, plastics, and lightweight-steel have more than doubled the efficiency of cars and trucks, which has reduced emissions proportionally.[8]
The promise of the hydrogen economy is still just a promise but is an attractive future possibility. There are many alternative production methods and applications for hydrogen, and more than 7% of all new cars are powered by hydrogen today; nevertheless, it has not become the dominant fuel yet. Many would not buy hydrogen cars before sufficient numbers of local gas stations carried hydrogen, and few hydrogen producers and car manufactures would take the risk of investing in distribution systems and new car designs that might not sell.

The global R&D fund in the GLEEM Plan might have more substantially funded the development of hydrogen by reducing the investment risks, but a new problem was discovered. To achieve a 50% reduction in oil used for transportation (in the United States, for example, in 20 years by using hydrogen fuel cell cars), half the new cars sold within five years would have to be running on hydrogen. Since that seemed unlikely, the hydrogen enthusiasm began to wane, not to mention that the hydrogen production might have to come from water electrolysis using electricity generated by many new nuclear power plants that the environmentalists would protest. Nevertheless, some dedicated truck fleets used a combined system of hydrogen with ammonia.
The use of metal hydrides which store hydrogen at densities approaching liquid hydrogen is being developed. Just a little increase in temperature releases the hydrogen. The depleted block of metal hydrides could be replaced at gas stations with a new "charge", just like a battery. However, the process is still very new and it is not yet clear if it will succeed. A magnesium alloy with a modified nanostructure was shown to store enough hydrogen to allow a vehicle to drive 500 km back in 2010, but commercialization has been slow because

Electric cars are more acceptable now that nanomaterial batteries improved the weight-storage ratio. They account for 15.4 % of all cars sold in 2020. As a result, China’s long-term strategy to be the world’s leader in electric cars has paid off and China now sells over a million cars per year. They now account for over 50% of all new electric cars sold in the world. Granted, the majority of them are sold within China, but their success has gone a long way to change world opinion about their earlier air and water polluting practices.
Hybrids are still the most popular, with 31.7% of all new cars sold in 2020. Their owners can now plug them in at night to get the previously unused power in the electric grids to recharge their cars. Hence, electric plug-in hybrid cars with flexible fuels acquired the “Green Smart” image along with the Chinese electric cars. Pure electric cars were made exempt from road taxes, congestion charges, and other similar state fees. Some cities like Paris, São Paulo, Tokyo, and Mexico City have been offering free parking for electric cars for several years now, while most major cities have significant areas that are closed to private vehicle traffic.
The use of natural gas in cars has not grown significantly because these cars do not address the issue of CO2 production in a manner that is significantly better than gasoline-powered cars and, like oil, natural gas would also run out one day.
New uses of nanotubes, ceramics, and plastics reduced the weight of cars and trucks, which in turn reduced the amount of carbon emissions per mile traveled. Fuel cell cars with methanol in the tank, electric cars, and advanced Stirling engines are expected to reduce this even further.
Gasoline vehicles still account for 26.5% of all those sold around the world in 2020. Although some expected the power of OPEC to become nearly hegemonic as non-OPEC countries passed their peak oil production in 2010, Canada has become an energy powerhouse. When the United States finally realized that the Canadian oil sands could actually replace Middle Eastern oil, investments poured into western Canada, like the California gold rush. There was no political risk and no exploration costs, since Alberta was covered in the black muck. Worried by the Save Gaia attacks, the oil managers had a series of high-profile meetings with moderate environmentalists to make less damaging extraction and production plans. When the political risks subsided in Venezuela, it too received major investments into tar sands and heavy oil production around the Orinoco basin, estimated to hold 1.3 trillion barrels of oil equivalent, and became an important factor in world energy. Despite these new sources, gasoline was a dying fuel and the replacements all were seen to have finite lifetimes.
Electricity
 The need for new electric production has increased dramatically due to increasing population and wealth, increasing number of electric cars, new desalination plants, and the closing of nuclear power plants (over 300 of the 443 nuclear power plants and the 25 under construction around the world in 2005 have been decommissioned by 2020). Even with the 20.7% improvement in total energy efficiency over the past 15 years, the demand cannot be fully met. There are 1.2 billion people without reliable access to electricity today.
Coal and natural gas still produce the majority of our electricity today, but the alternatives in solar, wind, and biomass are catching up. The environmental movement has affected some fossil fuel demand, but not enough to be significant. The greatest growth the kilowatt-hours of electricity from solar between 2010-2010 was due to


Farmers around the world added extra income from wind energy, which had little negative effect on agricultural output. Nearly half of Denmark’s electricity comes from wind. Offshore wind supplies a growing proportion of the rest of Europe's electricity. Even the United States gets much of its electricity from the winds of North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas. Five years ago the construction of great ocean wind farms began in earnest; these farms are expected to account for at least 5% of world electric production by 2030. Some of this will be wirelessly transmitted via satellite to the electric grids around the world and some will produce hydrogen.
Meanwhile, the coal gasification with carbon sequestration and hydrogen production report released in early 2019 demonstrated that this option is now commercially viable. Unfortunately, it will take another twenty years – by 2040 – to build enough new plants and retrofit existing ones to have much effect on climate change.
Also coming into question is the growing world dependency on natural gas. Although its supply would last longer than oil, it too would be gone one day and its use also emits greenhouse gases. So some asked why not use the peak oil frenzy and climate change issues to try and fix the energy problems with truly long-term solutions. As a result further development of natural gas supplies seems short-term and additional investment has diminished recently.
As the world has moved to ubiquitous computing and communications, the need for local and portable energy has grown dramatically. Mini methanol-fueled fuel cells now power most wearable and portable electronic and photonic appliances. There are also fashionable nano-solar accessories added to clothing and bags.
On a larger scale and as the International Space Station neared completion, the consortium of countries that built the ISS plus China, Brazil, India, and Korea have begun to throw their weight behind space solar power.[9] When the environmental movement finally realized that space solar power had a better chance of success than any other approach to non-fossil, non-nuclear energy to supply the world’s needs indefinitely at costs comparable to or less than today’s electricity prices, many began to support the establishment of INSOLSAT. This triggered massive international funding for space solar power. The first commercial orbital solar electric satellite and receiving antenna on the earth feeding electricity to the terrestrial grids is expected to go on line by 2030. Income potential should be enormous and private industries want to participate with government investments. An agreement was reached. Today governments account for 50% of the investments in INSOLSAT, while the oil industries have 25%, automobile industries have 15%, electric utilities have 5%, and private investors have 5%.

At first, the concept of space solar electric power had no natural allies – initially the environmental movement opposed it, as being big science, centralized technology, and environmentally dangerous. Some governments and the nuclear industries saw it as a long-term competitor for providing base-load electricity without CO2 emissions and tried to co-opt environmentalists to oppose it. Ground solar and other alternative renewable energy players saw it as competition for R&D funds and associated it with Star Wars fantasy hightech. NASA saw it as cutting into their International Space Station priorities, arguing that they could get only one major project funded at a time. So when the ISS was essentially complete in 2011, NASA began to openly support it. Surprising support for the idea also came from the Sahelian African countries. They had little invested into nuclear energy plants and lobbied the World Energy Organization members to invest in wireless energy transmission from their desert solar photovoltaics to satellite relay systems. Tele-robotic assembly in earth orbit has begun; the initial test of a solar satellite in orbit is scheduled for next year. The design objective is for 90% efficiency in the wireless energy transmission from orbit to earth. Japan has announced that if the consortium breaks down, it is prepared to continue building orbital solar power satellites on its own for commercial operations by 2040, potentially making it a major suppler for electric grids around the world.
In the meantime, what is important to understand about electric production and transmission today in 2020 is



Work smart – at home – from Mumbai to Mexico City
 Tele-work, work-at-home, and flexible time have finally become acceptable for many information and knowledge workers around the world, saving energy, increasing productivity, and allowing families to more easily raise their children. Although some expected problems of social disintegration, children got more attention from their parents and previously isolated neighbors had more time together. The initial successes of China’s sustainable communities and Finland’s Information Society Initiative for international development (which put small computer transceivers in the hands of millions of poor people around the world by 2012) helped trigger the World Bank-Linux-MIT-Google work smart economic development programs in many developing regions as well as richer megacities. This helped reduce the growing demand on urban public and private transportation systems, which are still choking with congestion even though the price of oil averaged US$123 per barrel during 2020.
The “return to the future” movement was in part caused by the intolerable urban congestion. Green Smart engineers and energy-environment NGOs worked with private and public land developers to create high tech environmentally sustainable communities in different settings around the world. These communities were designed for foot, bicycle, and electric vehicle transportation, reduced material consumerism, increased knowledge and esthetic consumerism, and included sylvan spaces throughout the built environment. Often these communities were built for fewer than 2,000 people.
Seawater Agriculture
 Proponents of biomass fuels had difficulty proving that there was enough sustainable water to provide reliable large-scale substitution for petroleum. Then they discovered the value of coastal deserts for seawater agriculture. After a series of meetings among the Food and Agricultural Organization, the International Food Policy Research Institute, NASA, and USAID, the World Summit on the Energy-Food Nexus was held in New Delhi, India, to secure agreements to initiate very large-scale seawater agriculture. Vast desert coastlines like those of Somalia were selected to become salty Gardens of Eden by growing salt-tolerant plants on beaches for biofuels, fertilizers, and food. Large-scale saltwater agriculture also had the effect of raising water tables and absorbing CO2.

The initial success of saltwater agriculture in the Persian-Arabian Gulf, China, and some of the coastal deserts in Baja California, have begun to “reclaim” or desalinate the land, allowing for new channels to be dug that now bring additional seawater further inland to deserts. Of the 10,000 natural halophyte plants, more than 100 have been used for food and/or biofuel factories. With genetic modifications, many more – such as rice, tomatoes, wheat, and maize – are now grown in salty conditions. This turned out to be very important since climate change reduced the yields of these crops in China and India.
Desert sunlight also produced electricity via nanotech plastic highly efficient photovoltaic strips to run the biofuel plants and support the emerging coastal desert communities.
In the desert interiors like the Sahara, ten-mile-long robotically managed closed-environment agricultural tubes, interspersed with nanotech photovoltaic strips are beginning to produce sufficient food for Africa and exports to Asia. Surplus energy from the strips is planned to be exported by microwave to Earth orbital relay satellites and on to electric grids on the ground.
Animal protein without Growing Animals
 The price of meat, eggs, and milk began to dramatically increase around 2012 as the amount of land and animal feed required to meet world demand for animal protein could not be met. Simultaneously, the increasing urban demand for meat led to dense concentrations of animal production, and mutating pathogens in their wastes were found to cause a number of new diseases among livestock and humans.

Continual global disease threats were killing consumer confidence and the livestock sector. Alternatives had to be found. Public and private investments in the Netherlands began the new meat revolution. The amount of energy, land, water, fodder, and time to produce meat via animals had been called one of the greatest environmental and energy wastes in civilization. Thanks to the Netherlands’ initiative, stem cells are now taken from the blood of umbilical cords of cows, goats, and pigs to grow muscle tissue without the need to grow the entire animal. This has substantially reduced the threats of disease and bioterrorism, as well as the requirements for land, water, and energy. Even some vegetarians see this as a moral alternative to the conventional animal factories.
Educated Consumers
 The race to educate the world about being Green Smart consumers began after the World Summit on Cognitive Development in 2010. Then, only about 1.5 billion people were connected to the Internet, compared to 3.5 billion today. Back in 2010, most institutions that had even a peripheral association with education began debating the most equitable and cost/effective ways to make everyone more knowledgeable, virtuous, intelligent, and Green Smart. Educational software was beginning to be imbedded into kitchens, people movers, jewelry, and anything that could hold a computer chip and nanotech transceiver. Now the interconnection of many separate programs into several global systems of education has created a cyberspace through which most people can receive the best education at their own pace, learning style, available time and even in their own language. Energy and environmental considerations in decision-making is a new focus of education, which in turn has significant impact on the number of energy-environmentally destructive purchases.
The Meta Internet is working smoothly, providing energy-environmental data that is married with an integrated global scholarly and scientific knowledge base that is far more user-friendly today. It has increased the speed of problem solving in all fields, by providing a logically structured framework into which existing and newly acquired knowledge is placed and assimilated for examination, discussion, and extension by scientists and scholars worldwide, and for a full range of educational applications and public access. Academic and business interests collaborated to create a sophisticated body of principles and techniques for knowledge visualization and the use of artificial intelligence to make it possible to rapidly navigate around in the cumulative knowledge of the world. The speed of feedback from inquiry to intelligent response is so fast today that curiosity is becoming a normal mental state for most adults, which in turn exposes energy-environmentally destructive purchases, to the now more educated consumer.
The promise of the information and knowledge economies to reduce the energy requirements for transportation is beginning to be felt around the world. The price of ICT interfaces has become so low by 2020 that many people in the poorer regions of the world are now given free connections as part of employment benefits, rights of citizenship, insurance policies, marketing programs, and credit systems. This accelerated the diffusion of access to the Meta Internet within poorer countries. UNICEF, the World Health Organization, UNESCO, and some international development agencies also helped with distribution in poor regions. Speech recognition and synthesis, which is integrated into nearly everything, made technology transfer far more successful than originally deemed possible by the UN Development Program’s Tele-volunteers, who did much to help the poorest regions understand and use the benefits from these new technologies. As a result, many remote villages in the poorest countries have cyberspace access for tele-education, tele-work, tele-medicine, tele-commerce, and tele-nearly-anything. This helped reduce the energy consumed per unit of GDP.
In the past we had universal declarations and local ignorance, but increasingly all these efforts have added up to a more educated public around the world.
Results by 2020 and foundations laid for the future beyond 2020
The sixth World Summit on Sustainable Development held in 2017 reviewed the status of implementation of the energy-environment Interlinkage Convention that harmonized the hundreds of environmentally related treaties. The International Court of Environmental Arbitration and Conciliation and WTO have given teeth to these agreements.
Technological breakthroughs, regulatory changes, and increased public awareness of the energy-environment linkages have changed the mix of energy usage. For example, hybrid cars now outsell gasoline-only cars, and biofuel and electric cars are catching up fast:
Table 1. Types of New Vehicles Sold in 2020

 

New vehicles Sold in 2020
Percentage of sales in 2020 [10]
Hybrid
31.7
Gasoline
26.5
Biofuels
19.0
Electricity
15.4
Hydrogen
9.5


The big promise of nanotechnology to decrease manufacturing unit costs, requiring a smaller volume of materials and energy usage, and hence, lowering the environmental impact and increasing productivity, is just now on the horizon.[11]

 In the meantime, over one-third of our transportation needs are still met by petroleum. The oil producers also continue to supply the needs of aviation, plastic, and pharmaceutical industries for the foreseeable future.
Unfortunately, the dynamics set in motion over the past will continue climate change for some years to come. Although great gains have been made in both energy efficiency and the production of energy via non-greenhouse producing system, humans still emit about 9 billion tonnes[12] of carbon per year. Granted, this is less than forecasted back in 2005, but it is still too much since the absorption capacity of carbon by oceans and forests is only about 3–3.5 billion tonnes per year. If we are to avoid the point of inflection for a serious runaway greenhouse effect, we still have to continue improving. Hopefully the new polices, technologies, and cultural patterns will make the impacts less traumatic that they might have been. As a result those who died as a result of the Indian Ocean nuclear catastrophe will not have died in vain.

What would make this scenario more plausible and useful?



Thank you very much for your participation.

Endnotes:

1. Some less well known rating systems are already in place: http://www.csrwire.com/article.cgi/5008.html
2. All US dollar references are in 2006 value, not forecasted to 2020 value)
3. This curve was derived using CurveExpert. The shape is "saturation growth rate"
Y= (year* a) / (b+year) Where a= 99.775118 and b= -1968.6818. The fit is excellent: r= .985
4. Draft paper by Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist, NASA Langley Research Center
5. http://www.syntheticgenomics.com/
6. http://www.bp.com/subsection.do?categoryId=4451&contentId=3072030
7. http://europe.eu.int/comm/energy/res/sectors/bioenergy_en.htm
8. http://www.oilendgame.com/ExecutiveSummary.html
9. Space Solar Power assessment http://robot.usc.edu/spacesolarpower/presentations.html
10. These numbers add up 102.1% instead of 100%, because the individual estimates were averaged from Round 1 participants of the Global Energy Delphi. http://www.acunu.org/millennium/energy-delphi.html Rather than fit them to 100% the results are simple reported with the 2.1% variance.
11. http://www.foresight.org/cms/press_center/128
12. All references to tonnes are in metric tons.

Study conducted by the ACUNU Millennium Project