I first heard the term continentalization at a small gathering in a secluded hotel in the countryside outside of Paris. It was in late May 2008. CEOs of the leading postal companies, representing much of the logistics traffic of the global economy, were settled in for a soul-searching talk about the future of the global economy.
A sense of uncertainty hung in the air. The attendees were very worried. In the business community, a rule of thumb is that a drop in shipments is a warning sign of storm clouds on the economic horizon. Global transport was grinding to a halt—something these CEOs had never seen in their lifetime. Purchasing power was plummeting around the world and factory inventories were piling up in the warehouses, yards, and ports. It looked like the entire economic engine of the global economy was shutting down.
I was at the meeting, convened by the International Post Corporation, the umbrella association of the world’s postal companies, to give an address on the European Parliament’s new long-term economic vision and game plan.
During my presentation, I explained that just as information likes to “run free” on the Internet, distributed renewable energy likes to run uninhibited across national borders. When millions of people generate their own energy on or around their homes, factories, and offices, sharing their energy from neighborhood to neighborhood and region to region, everyone becomes a node in a borderless green electricity network that scales laterally across entire continents. I noted that the First and Second Industrial Revolution energies and communications media gave rise to national markets and nation-state governments. The Third Industrial Revolution energies, communications media, and infrastructure, by contrast, spread out to the edge of contiguous landmasses. In the green-powered Third Industrial Revolution, continents become the new playing field for economic life, and continental political unions, like the European Union, become the new governing model.
Immediately after my talk, Peter Bakker, the CEO of TNT (the former Dutch postal company that was privatized and is among the leading logistics companies in the world), took the floor. To my surprise, he turned to the group and said, “Globalization is dying.” In his opinion, the dramatic rise of the price of oil on the world market makes it increasingly problematic to send freight by air across the oceans, and government pressure to tax CO2 emissions would only add to logistics costs. The economic current, he said, is shifting from globalization to continentalization. He argued that growth in commerce and trade is going to become increasingly drawn to continental markets. The logistics business, he said, is already redirecting much of its focus to a continental world.
If Bakker is right, the partial repositioning of commerce and trade from globalization to continentalization, coupled with the Wi-Fi–like spread of a TIR logistics infrastructure across continental landmasses, will likely speed the formation of continental economies and political unions.
The attendees at the meeting agreed to endorse the European Union’s plan to implement a Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure. But as they voted, I couldn’t help but notice the silence in the room as we each sank into our own thoughts about what might lie ahead.
Although I had been talking for some years about how Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure favors continental markets, continental political unions, and transcontinental connectivity, the profound spatial implications didn’t really register until just recently. I was on a night flight coming into Dakar in June of 2009. Looking out the window, I could see the twinkling lights coming from the infamous Island of Gorée, one of several collection points in Senegal for the transatlantic African slave trade. Dakar is the furthest western point of continental Africa, and as a result, became an embarkation point for transporting slaves to the Americas.
A few days later I was having lunch on the beach with Moustapha Ndiaye, a personal advisor to President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, about the possibility of his country pioneering a Third Industrial Revolution economic development plan that might serve as a model for the rest of West Africa. Every time I looked up from our conversation, I couldn’t help but see the Island of Gorée immediately off the beach—a constant reminder of the gruesome toll that slavery and colonialism exacted on the African continent and its people.
At one point the conversation turned to the unique features of the West African coastline and I mentioned, in passing, how interesting it was that the curvature of the African coast fits almost identically with South America’s eastern coastline, like two parts of a jigsaw puzzle.
Scientists have long suspected that at one time early on in the Earth’s history, the two continents might have been a single landmass, and that a geological process, over time, could have separated them. In the 1960s, geologists were abuzz about new theories of tectonic plate shifts and continental drift. A consensus was emerging among scientists that as late as two hundred million years ago, in the Mesozoic era, the continents were connected in one extended landmass—what geologists called Pangaea. Scientists believe that a shift in the Earth’s tectonic plates caused Pangaea to break up into the continents that currently exist. Now, for the first time, there is some talk of rejoining the continents again in a single global landmass, marking a return to Pangaea. Let me explain.
TIR infrastructure is just beginning to spread across continents in tandem with the creation of nascent continental markets and continental governing unions. The European Union is the first continental economy and political union to begin transitioning into a Third Industrial Revolution. Continental unions have recently been formed in Asia (the ASEAN Union), Africa (the African Union), and South America (the Union of South American Nations). In North America, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a precursor to a continental union. While localities, regions, and national governments will not disappear in the coming century—they will actually be strengthened—continental unions provide an overarching political jurisdiction for regulating integrated continental markets. The new continental unions, in turn, are beginning to make plans to physically connect their landmasses, to create a seamless geographic space for conducting global commerce in the twenty-first century. In effect, continentalization is fostering a return to a single global continent—a second Pangaea, this time engineered by human hands.
The European Union has recently entered into a partnership with the African Union to begin laying the infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution, which will eventually join the two continents. For example, plans are being developed for a multibillion dollar project, called Desertec, which will bring energy generated from solar and wind technologies from the Sahara desert, via interconnector cables, to Europe—providing more than 15 percent of the European Union’s total energy needs by 2050.1
At the same time, Spain and Morocco have been in discussions about building a transport tunnel below the Strait of Gibraltar that will link Europe and Africa. Like the Channel Tunnel that connects the United Kingdom to Europe, the new tunnel would carry passengers and freight between Europe and Africa, bringing the two continents together in a single logistics grid.
Discussions are also underway between Russia and the United States to construct a sixty-four-mile tunnel under the Bering Strait, linking Siberia and Alaska, for an estimated cost of between $10 and $12 billion. The tunnel will feature a high-speed rail system to link Eurasia and the Americas for commerce, trade, and tourism, creating a connected, land-based logistics network that stretches three quarters of the way around the world—from London to New York.2 The tunnel will serve a dual purpose, allowing both continents to share electricity harnessed from the vast amount of renewable energy in Siberia and Alaska.
Laying down underwater high-voltage cables to exchange green electricity between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas is easier, from an engineering standpoint, than constructing deep-ocean tunnels and, for that reason, will likely come to pass in the near future. Tunnel connections will take longer, with policy analysts projecting more than twenty years to complete.
For those who find the possibility of connecting the continents hard to believe, recall the widespread skepticism when the ideas of the Suez and Panama canals were first bandied about. Although the technical and engineering challenges, not to mention the costs involved, cast doubt on their feasibility, the commercial advantages were just too great to ignore. We found ways to build both canals in record time.
The Suez Canal, which cut across Egypt to connect the Mediterranean Sea and Red Sea, opened up an artificial water route between Europe and Asia without having to navigate all the way around the Horn of Africa. The 101-mile canal was begun in 1859 and completed just ten years later. Over 1.5 million people were employed over the course of the project and thousands lost their lives in the undertaking.3
The Panama Canal, first begun by the French in the 1880s and abandoned shortly thereafter, was picked up and completed by the United States. The canal cut across Central America, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, thereby eliminating the long journey around the Strait of Magellan at the southern tip of South America. The American Panama Canal was begun in 1904 and completed just ten years later, at a cost of 5,609 human lives.4
While the engineering challenges involved in connecting the world’s great continental landmasses are equally daunting, the commercial opportunities are enormous. Although far from certain, it’s quite possible that the continents of the world will reconnect in a Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure well before mid-century, paving the way for a return to Pangaea.
Just as the Internet connected the human race in a single distributed and collaborative virtual space, the Third Industrial Revolution connects the human race in a parallel Pangaean political space. What will this political space look like? Because the TIR infrastructure, which is the centerpiece of continental markets and continental governance, scales laterally and is distributed, collaborative, and networked, continental and global governance is likely to be as well. The idea of a centralized world government might have been a logical fit for the Second Industrial Revolution, whose infrastructure scaled vertically and whose organization was hierarchal and centralized, but it is bizarrely out of place and out of sync in a world where the energy/communication infrastructure is nodal, interdependent, and flat. Networked communication, energy, and commerce spread across the planet invariably gives rise to network governance at both the continental and global levels. The engineering of an interconnected, intercontinental living space creates a new spatial orientation. In an increasingly integrated global society, people begin to see themselves as part of an indivisible planetary organism.
Medieval scholars could not have imagined the concept of a nation—a secular governing authority that ruled by the consent of the citizenry rather than by holy mandate. Today, the European Union notwithstanding, most people in the world would have a difficult time imagining being a citizen of a continental union and feeling like they were part of an extended political family that stretched from ocean edge to ocean edge. The thought of each continent being governed by a political union would seem odd. Yet, barring some unforeseen circumstances, this is likely where society is headed. It is strange to hear policy analysts and journalists speculate about all the various new political power realignments—G20, G8, G2, BRIC—but never mention a more fundamental political realignment beginning to take place all over the world in the form of continental governance.
The Third Industrial Revolution not only brings with it a new generation of political leaders who think in a manner that is distributed and collaborative, but also new governing institutions that are likewise distributed and collaborative. The European Union is the first continental union. It was born in the aftermath of two devastating world wars and was conceived with the idea that traditional geopolitics, in which each sovereign state competed both in the marketplace and on the battleground to achieve its self-interests, needed to give way, at least in part, to a new continental politics in which nations collaborated with each other to advance their collective security and economic interests. While national self-interest didn’t disappear with the creation of the European Union, each generation of Europeans has become increasingly comfortable identifying itself, at times, as Europeans.
The European Union initially came together around the sharing of energy. The European Coal and Steel Community Pact (ECSC) in 1951 was the brainchild of Jean Monnet, who is regarded by most Europeans as the father of the European Union. Monnet argued that the long-standing economic rivalry between Germany and France might best be attenuated by merging their coal resources and steel production, especially along the long-disputed industrial corridor that bordered the Ruhr and Saar rivers. The ECSC Treaty of Paris was signed by France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg. In 1957, the six member countries signed the Treaty of Rome, expanding the idea of cooperation to include the creation of the European Economic Community. The countries also entered into a separate agreement to create the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), a cooperative venture to develop nuclear power across their regions.
Today, the European Union encompasses twenty-seven member states with a total population of five hundred million citizens in an area that extends from the Irish Sea to Russia.
Now, as the EU enters its second half century, energy again has become central to the next stage of continental development. While the European Union is potentially the largest internal commercial market in the world, with its five hundred million consumers, and an additional five hundred million consumers in its associated partnership regions stretching into the Mediterranean and North Africa, it has not yet created an integrated single market.
The Third Industrial Revolution makes possible the establishment of a distributed continental energy and communication infrastructure that will create a seamless economic space, so that the billion plus people in the EU region can engage in commerce and trade with efficiency and ease, and with a low carbon dioxide footprint, allowing Europe to become the largest integrated single market by 2050. This is the critical unfinished business of the European Union.
Asian, African, and South American nations are beginning to follow the European Union’s lead by forming their own continental unions with the same goal in mind—creating a single integrated market. And like the European Union, they are bringing distributed Internet communication media together with distributed renewable energy to create an infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution economy—one that can host a fully integrated power grid, telecommunications network, and transport system for continent-wide commerce and trade. A distributed and collaborative energy/communication infrastructure that crosses entire continents will spur the maturation of continental forms of governance.
The process is already well under way in Asia, where ten Southeast Asian nations—Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei Darussalam, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—have created the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN. Three other countries—China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea—have affiliated with ASEAN to form ASEAN Plus Three, or APT.
ASEAN was established back in 1967 to facilitate “economic growth, social progress and cultural development in the region through joint endeavors.”5 It wasn’t until 2003, however, that the member states agreed to create an ASEAN community, patterned along lines similar to the European Union. In 2007, the member states met on Cebu Island in the Philippines and took a giant step forward by signing the Cebu Declaration on the Acceleration of the Establishment of an ASEAN community by 2015. The ASEAN community is made up of three pillars: the ASEAN Political-Security Community, ASEAN Economic Community, and ASEAN Social-Cultural Community.6
An ASEAN charter entered into force in 2008, committing the member countries to operate within a common legal framework and create formal organs to facilitate the building of a cohesive continental community.7
At the Cebu Philippines East Asian Summit in 2007, the ASEAN member states signed a second accord, a Declaration on East Asian Energy Security, that would serve as a basis for the creation of a continental energy infrastructure and lay the foundation for a TIR economy across the Asian land space. The energy agreement was also signed by ASEAN’s regional partners, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of India, both of whom are on the Southeast Asian continent, and the Pacific nations of Japan, the Republic of Korea, Australia, and New Zealand.
The signatories acknowledged “the limited global reserve of fossil energy, the unstable world prices of fuel oil, the worsening problems of the environment and health, and the urgent need to address global warming and climate change.”8 Given these constraints, the question looming for the ASEAN nations is how to continue growing their economies at a brisk speed without compromising the environment or contributing to global warming. To fuel their economic growth, they will need clean energy on a grand scale, which will require a collective commitment to bring renewables online quickly across the continent and the Pacific Rim.
The parties therefore agreed to “reduce dependence on conventional fuels . . . increase the capacity and reduce the costs of renewable and alternative energy sources through innovative financing schemes” and “ensure availability of a stable energy supply through investments in regional energy infrastructure such as the ASEAN power grid.”9
The last provision of the Cebu Declaration—the creation of the ASEAN power grid—is pivotal to the transition into a Third Industrial Revolution continental economy and the solidification of an ASEAN continental governing space. ASEAN, whose moniker is “ten nations, one community,” has laid out a comprehensive long-term energy plan for the continent and launched its initial five-year agenda, which it calls the ASEAN Plan of Action for Energy Cooperation (APAEC) 2010–2015. The centerpiece of the plan is the ASEAN power grid—a “flagship program” that was inaugurated in 2004 by the ASEAN heads of state. The goal is “a totally integrated Southeast Asian power grid.”11
Establishing a common electricity power grid across the Southeast Asian continent provides the nervous system for the creation of a single, integrated market and a continental political union. Currently, there are four interconnection power grid projects underway and eleven more in the planning stage, with an estimated cost of $5.9 billion.12
ASEAN clearly understands the importance of transitioning to renewable energies, and the critical role that an interconnected continental power grid will play in creating an ASEAN community. ASEAN states, in unequivocal terms, that it “views the need for ASEAN countries to move beyond independent energy policies and planning[,] to . . . inter-dependent, inter-country, and outward looking policies for greater economic integration.”13 The speed at which ASEAN countries create an integrated, single market and continental political union will ultimately hinge on how fast they can build out a green smart grid to connect the region.
Although the ASEAN community is quickly moving from vision to political reality, there are a number of open questions that could undermine its efforts to create a continental union. The first is the imposing presence of China. With 1.3 billion people and an economy that has already eclipsed Japan as the engine of Asia, China is the great unknown in the Asian arena.14 Will it remain on the sideline as an associated partner region, especially if ASEAN becomes a single political community? A political union of 605 million Southeast Asians, while only half the population of China, would still be a force to reckon with. If Japan, the Republic of Korea, Australia, and the Philippines were to shift from partner status to formal members of the ASEAN community, that would bring on board additional economic clout and almost three hundred million more people to boot, making the union a strong counterplayer to China in the region.
If India, the world’s other fast-growing Asian giant, with nearly 1.2 billion people, were to become a full-fledged member of the ASEAN community, it, too, might overwhelm the rest of the member states and dominate the political game.
The reason the European Union has been able to succeed in its efforts to create a single, continental political space is that no single government can completely dictate the terms of political engagement. While Germany is the economic engine and the most powerful single player in the union, its power doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the pack.
The EU community stops at the doorstep of Russia. That’s not to say that Russia couldn’t justifiably claim that it is part of Europe as much as it is part of Asia, and that it ought to be included in the European Union. Up to now, however, it has enjoyed only a special partnership status, and few observers think that’s likely to change in the foreseeable future.
I broached the subject of membership in the European Union at dinner once with Mikhail Gorbachev. He said that his country was just too big to fit into the EU room, and that instead Russia would likely enjoy an ever-closer partnership with the union, even to the point of being connected in an integrated continental electricity, communication, and transport grid—in effect, becoming part of a single market but not a single political space.
The same may happen in Asia with respect to China and India. The centralized command and control infrastructure of the Chinese government makes it less likely than India to engage in the kind of distributed and collaborative relationships that are the defining characteristic of continental union politics. India, on the other hand, with its far more decentralized and democratic power structure, might fare better in forging closer partnership ties, and even possible membership, in the ASEAN Union. All of this is purely speculative at this point in time. A younger generation coming of age in China is far more comfortable with a distributed and collaborative approach to economic, political, and social organization, and could quickly change the dynamics of the game, with consequences that are difficult to predict at this early stage of continentalization.
A final point ought to be raised, which is relevant to the creation of continental unions on every continent—that is, the increasing power exercised by localities and regions that are no longer as constrained by national boundaries.
This shift in political power was unanticipated when the European Union was first getting off the ground. The only real debate at the time was whether the European community would be more of a common market or a centralized federal state. The British favored the former, hoping to maintain their national sovereignty while enjoying the commercial advantages of becoming part of a larger integrated market. The French were disposed to a more centralized architecture, which they hoped they could direct or at least influence, without too much loss of national sovereignty. In the end, the European Union developed along altogether different lines, ultimately becoming far more than a common market and far less than a centralized federal state. What the EU experience shows is that when nation-states come together to create a common political community with integrated markets and open borders, commercial and political relations tend to flatten and extend across previous national boundaries, creating a new power configuration that is more nodal and distributed than centralized and top-down. EU governance more resembles a network of nation-states, regions, and municipalities, in which no single force determines the direction of the union, forcing all of the political players to engage in collaborative efforts to reach consensus on common goals.
The creation of a continental market and continental governance with open borders also allows regions to bypass their national governments and create their own commercial relationship with other regions, sometimes contiguous to but just across national boundaries, and other times far removed in geography from their home country. Contiguous cross-border EU regions are increasingly involved in commercial partnerships of all kinds and often enjoy closer commercial ties with each other than each region has with its own national government or more distant countrymen.
The Third Industrial Revolution communication/energy paradigm, because of its lateral orientation, flourishes in borderless open spaces. What this means is that as the ASEAN Union becomes more of a reality, open borders will allow contiguous regions to interconnect and jointly build out the five-pillar infrastructure of the TIR, much like Wi-Fi communications spread from neighborhood to neighborhood and quickly developed into vast, interconnected webs that span contiguous landmasses.
If China and India, both of whom have signed the Cebu Energy Declaration, would open their borders, thereby allowing neighboring regions to connect and build out shared TIR infrastructure, the spreading network could whittle away at the sovereign power each government previously enjoyed over the generation of energy and distribution of electricity within their borders. This would fundamentally alter the political configuration of power, much as it is doing on the European continent.
China and India may find they have no choice but to become part of a continental union if they want to remain relevant in the world economy of the twenty-first century. At present, both countries are moving quickly to develop the various TIR technologies. China, in particular, is within striking distance of taking over the commanding lead that the European Union has long enjoyed in the development and marketing of some of its key technological components. But China has siloed each of the technological pillars as if they were stand-alone items. So while it is fast becoming the leader in renewable energy technology and beginning to construct zero-emission and positive-power buildings, developing hydrogen and other storage technologies, creating smart power grids, and producing electric and fuel cell vehicles, it does not yet fully understand the social impact these advances will have when connected in a single, interactive system. Together, they require a flat, open, and shared continental political space to develop, scale, and fully optimize their economic potential. Ironically, China may end up developing the very software and hardware components that take down its present form of top-down governance. And that is what truly qualifies as “a contradiction,” to use a favorite Marxist phrase.
In 2002, the heads of state of the fifty-four nations on the African continent, with a combined population of more than 1 billion people, launched the African Union (AU) with the goal of accelerating “the political and socio-economic integration of the continent.”15 The mechanics of getting the AU off the ground were bogged down in bureaucratic delays until 2008, when the African Union and the European Union entered into the Africa-Europe Energy Partnership (AEEP). The aim of the partnership is to promote the development of renewable energy and create an electricity master plan for Africa, connecting its one billion people in an integrated grid that will crisscross the continent.
Africa has the least developed electricity infrastructure of any continent in the world. Seven out of every ten people in Sub-Saharan Africa have no access to electricity, while many others have only spotty and irregular access.16 The fact that much of Africa is without even a Second Industrial Revolution infrastructure may turn out to be an asset. Some policy analysts argue that Africa could “leapfrog” into a Third Industrial Revolution without having to address the thorny issue of how to manage the expense and ease the pain of transitioning out of a dying Second Industrial Revolution infrastructure. With this in mind, the European Union earmarked €376 million to seventy-seven projects, mostly to promote renewable energy sources and grid extension, with an additional €588 million pledged to future projects not yet on the drawing board.
The EU/AU energy partnership set two specific short-term targets: first, to bring modern and sustainable energy services to at least an additional hundred million Africans; second, to greatly increase the use of renewable energy on the African continent by building 10,000 megawatts of new hydropower facilities, 5,000 megawatts of wind power, and expanding other renewable energy by 500 megawatts.17 Like ASEAN, there is a growing realization that a distributed and collaborative renewable energy regime will invariably be accompanied by the formation of a networked, continental governing space.
Still, Africa faces a significant obstacle. Because the Second Industrial Revolution did not take hold across much of Sub-Saharan Africa, there is a lack of professional and technical expertise and vocational skills to support the industries that would need to be developed to get the job done. That’s why the EU/AU partnership is as much about sharing knowledge and technical expertise as it is about capital expenditure and technology transfer. The idea is to create a close, collaborative partnership between the two continental unions that will allow Africa to grow their businesses and train a skilled work force that can build and manage a TIR infrastructure. The hope is that the joint energy initiatives to create a green electricity grid across the African continent will open up “significant new areas for industrial trade and business cooperation between Africa and Europe” and help establish a powerful intercontinental market.18
The EU/AU partnership has won praise from around the world. TIR advocates point out that unlike the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, which relied on elite fossil fuel energies found only in select places and required large military investments and geopolitical manipulation to secure, all of which favored the interests of the more powerful northern nations, renewable energies are found everywhere. They are particularly abundant, however, in the developing countries below the equator. Because renewable energy is widely distributed, a Third Industrial Revolution is just as likely to take off in the developing world as the developed world. Africa, in particular, has barely begun to exploit its renewable energy potential. Energy analysts say that solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass sources could more than supply the energy needs of every continent. The key is providing a favorable playing field, and that means financial aid, technology transfer, and training programs to assist developing nations, like the ones being advanced by the EU/AU partnership.
Already however, such efforts are raising eyebrows. Skeptics question whether these programs might constitute a new kind of “eco-colonialism.” They point to the controversial Desertec Industrial Initiative in the Sahara as a possible harbinger of this.19 A fierce debate is unfolding between those who advocate centralizing energy production for export versus those who champion generating electricity from locally available renewable energy and sharing it regionally across distributed smart grids. The debate is similar to the one in the United States over centralizing wind and solar production in the West and exporting electricity via super high-voltage power lines to the eastern states, versus those in other parts of the country who prefer to produce electricity locally from renewable energy sources and share it across a distributed, national smart grid.
Backers of the Desertec Industrial Initiative argue that “if you enable large-scale investments into power generation and power transmission in North Africa, then this will automatically lead to local industry, transfer of technology, and the transfer of knowledge.” Some African officials agree. Aboubakari Baba Moussa, director of infrastructure and energy of the African Union Commission, says the Desertec project is a win-win for both the European Union and for Africa. “In Africa, we don’t have a shortage of solar radiation, we don’t have a shortage of land. The Europeans don’t have the same resources.” Baba Moussa hopes that similar projects can be marshaled for the Kalahari Desert in South Africa and the Ogaden desert in East Africa. He asks critics to “imagine how many hundreds of thousands of jobs could be created and how much energy could be produced.”21
Others are far more guarded. They wonder whether the potential jobs will merely be for temporary, unskilled labor, with most of the skilled workforce brought in from Europe to build and maintain the facilities. The late Hermann Scheer, the chairman of the World Council for Renewable Energy and a member of the German Parliament, argued that transporting solar energy over vast distances is inefficient and a waste of money, and that Africa should be focusing its efforts on local generation of renewable energies instead. Greenpeace comes down in the middle on the debate. Sven Teske, Greenpeace’s international renewable energy director, supports Desertec, but with the qualification that it should be developed alongside local renewable energy generation initiatives across the continent.22
The struggle over centralized versus distributed generation of renewable energy is intensifying around the world. For my part, while I don’t oppose some centralized applications of solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass power, they are likely to make up a small portion of the renewable energy generated to power a Third Industrial Revolution economy. The reality is that renewable energies are, by nature, universally distributed, and the new, distributed communication technologies make it possible to harness and store these energies locally and distribute them across intelligent utility networks that span entire continents. The potential to produce more distributed power more efficiently and more cheaply far exceeds the conventional centralized approach to harnessing these energy sources.
Lateral power is already beginning to transform the developing world. Electricity is now coming to remote areas in Africa, which never before had access to a centralized power grid. Not surprisingly, the introduction of cell phones has helped precipitate the development of a nascent TIR infrastructure.
Virtually overnight, millions of Africa’s rural households have scraped together enough money—from selling an animal or surplus crops—to purchase a cell phone. The phones are used as much for carrying on commercial activity as for personal communications. In rural areas, far removed from urban banking facilities, people are increasingly relying on cell phones to facilitate small money transfers. The problem is that without access to electricity, cell phone users often have to travel on foot to get to a town with electricity in order to recharge their phones.
Elisabeth Rosenthal, writing in the New York Times, recounts the story of a rural woman living in Kenya who had to walk two miles once a week to get a motorcycle taxi and drive for three more hours to a town to recharge her cell phone battery for a 30 cent fee. Recently, her family sold some farm animals to buy an $80 solar power system. A single solar panel now affixed on the tin roof of her hut provides enough electricity to not only charge the cell phone but also power four overhead electric lights.23 Although the statistics are still spotty, it appears that families across Africa are installing solar panels and analysts predict a quick scale-up as millions of others follow suit into the Third Industrial Revolution. What’s going on in Africa heralds a historic transformation as households leapfrog from the pre-electricity era directly into the TIR age.
Besides solar, other green micro-generation energy technologies are quickly coming online, including small biogas chambers that make electricity and fuel from cow manure, tiny power plants that make electricity from rice husks and small hydroelectric dams that generate power from local streams. Still missing is a smart, distributed power grid that will allow stand-alone micro-generators to share electricity with others across entire regions. That is likely to come as millions of families begin generating their own electricity from on-site renewable energies. This process represents the democratization of energy in the world’s poorest communities.
The South American union is a latecomer to continentalization. Two earlier regional associations—the Andean Community of Nations, formed in 1969, made up of Bolivia, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru; and Mercosur, founded in 1991 and comprising Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina—were both designed to create a common free-trade area.
In May 2008, heads of state representing twelve South American nations agreed to join together and establish the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). The union, which absorbs the two existing customs unions, Mercosur and the Andean Community, and includes Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela, covers a region of 6,845,000 square miles, with a combined population of 388 million people and a gross domestic product of $4 trillion. The fledgling South American union will have a common defense. Its first secretary general, the former Argentine president, Néstor Kirchner, was appointed in 2010, but died shortly thereafter. The current secretary general is Maria Emma Mejia Vélez, the former Columbian foreign minister. The member nations have also agreed to establish a South American Parliament, issue a single passport, create a common currency, and move toward an integrated, single market by 2014.
The treaty creating the union puts energy at the top of the agenda, committing the member nations to a build-out of a continental infrastructure for sharing energy and electricity. The Energy Council of South America, established in April 2007 by the twelve heads of state, was made a formal part of UNASUR and given the responsibility for developing a South American Energy Strategy. The council has put a priority on developing the continent’s abundant renewable energy because “it plays an important role in the diversification of the primary energy matrix, energy security, the promotion of universal access to energy, and environmental preservation.”24
In practice, many South American countries have been slow to wean themselves off fossil fuels. Brazil, the continent’s economic powerhouse, is an exception. It generates 84 percent of its electricity from renewable hydroelectric power, and domestic ethanol makes up between 20 and 25 percent of every liter of petrol used in transport.25 The strong reliance on hydroelectric power and plant-based ethanol makes Brazil one of the most advanced renewable energy economies in the world.
Still, Brazil’s love affair with renewable energy could change. The discovery of vast oil reserves in deep waters off the coast in recent years has catapulted Brazil to the front lines of the world’s major oil producers—it now ranks number twelve—raising the question of whether its energy policies, both domestically and internationally, will continue to move in the direction of a Third Industrial Revolution, or backtrack into the older oil culture.26
An unknown in Brazil is the country’s future hydroelectric capacity. While water is a renewable resource, global warming is forcing a dramatic change in the planet’s hydrological cycle, triggering more violent floods and longer periods of drought. The Amazon, which is the principle source of hydroelectric power, is among the regions of the world already affected by climate change–induced drought. In 2001, the country experienced a record drought, significantly reducing its hydroelectric capacity. The result was that the country’s transmission grid experienced brownouts and blackouts throughout the year.
More serious droughts in the future could also diminish sugar cane yields and drive the price of ethanol higher. Brazil has an abundance of solar energy, however, which has yet to be harnessed and could pick up the slack.
Venezuela is another interesting anomaly. The country is awash in heavy oil, making it the ninth largest oil-exporting country. Hugo Chavez has used oil revenues strategically in the geopolitical arena to promote his ideological agenda, and on the domestic front to advance his unique brand of populist-socialism. With oil revenue accounting for about 30 percent of the country’s total GDP, one would think that Chavez would be the last to champion a shift to renewable energy and a Third Industrial Revolution.27 Yet, in a world where uncertainty has become the norm, political behavior and policy choices are often just as unpredictable.
It was September 17, 2006. My wife and I had just sat down for our ritual Sunday breakfast, with the New York Times spread out on the table. I flipped to the “Ideas and Trends” section, where an entire page was dedicated to Hugo Chavez’s favorite books. The spin on the article was to try and dig into the mercurial leader’s inner psyche and get a fix on the way he thinks. I scanned down the list of his all-time top reads: Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country?, Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Economics of Innocent Fraud, and Jeremy Rifkin’s The Hydrogen Economy. I did a double take. I’d never met Mr. Chavez nor even corresponded with him. I glanced over to the article itself to see if I could glean any information on why Chavez was so taken by my book—after all, it was all about the sunset of the oil era, the lifeblood of his Venezuelan economy. Chavez remarked in the article that Fidel Castro, the president of Cuba, had been pushing him to read the book, and he did. (I had never met Fidel Castro either.)
The press reported that in July of 2006, on a state visit to Iran, Chavez had made a speech warning his Iranian audience to prepare themselves for a very different energy future after oil. Chavez referenced The Hydrogen Economy and informed his audience that “the book is based on something which is no longer a hypothesis—it is a thesis . . . oil will run out one day.”28 Most old hands in the Middle East didn’t need an American citing global peak oil studies to tell them something they already knew in their very marrow. There is a saying in the Middle East that goes something like this: “My grandfather rode a camel, my father drove a car, I travel on a jet, and my grandchild will ride a camel.”
Not necessarily. The deserts of the Middle East and North Africa have more solar potential per square inch than any other region in the world—more energy potential, in fact, than all of the oil ever extracted from deep beneath its sand dunes. The United Arab Emirates, the fifth-largest oil producing power, is already preparing for a post-oil era. Abu Dhabi is investing billions of dollars in the construction of a new city rising from the desert. It’s called Masdar, a post-carbon city that will be run exclusively by the sun, wind, and other forms of renewable energy. It’s a Third Industrial Revolution urban space, the first of thousands of such cities that will be nodes in the distributed networks that will crisscross every continent. I visited Masdar in 2009 and watched as engineers and construction crews were putting up the first building. The structure was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The design, building material, and facade all looked like something out of a futuristic movie. It took my breath away.
So, what’s the takeaway from Chavez’s speech? Begin transitioning now into a Third Industrial Revolution economy—don’t delay until the oil spigot runs dry because then it will be too late.
I heard that very same message for the first time in the summer of 2002 from still another unexpected person—one of the world’s leading oil company CEOs. My wife and I were in Los Cabos, in Baja Mexico, for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit, the annual meeting of the heads of state of the Pacific region. I was sharing a plenary session panel with Raúl Muñoz Leos, the director general of Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil company. At the time, Mexico was the fifth largest oil-producing country in the world. I had just delivered my remarks on the coming of peak oil, urging government leaders to begin preparing for a transition into a post-carbon economy. I expected Mr. Muñoz Leos to politely disagree with me and give a more optimistic forecast. Instead, he told the assemblage that Pemex’s own internal studies showed that Mexico’s oil production would likely peak around 2010. The audience was stunned. One could hear a pin drop in the hall. A Mexican business leader rose from the floor and asked Muñoz Leos what this would mean for Mexico, given that Pemex’s oil revenue accounted for a significant portion of the country’s GDP and government revenue.
Muñoz Leos’s response was circumspect. He said that he agreed with me that Mexico and the world needed to begin immediately planning for a new, renewable energy era. Mexico’s best course of action, he said, was to use a sizable portion of its existing oil revenue to lay down an infrastructure for a renewable energy economy. He reminded the group that Mexico enjoyed extensive renewable energy resources with year-round solar irradiation and wind across the entire coastline.
The next year, I was invited down to Mexico by the federal government’s Energy Ministry to discuss the prospect of Pemex transitioning into renewable energies and investing in the pillars that make up a TIR economy. To my knowledge, little came of the meeting. Muñoz Leos subsequently left Pemex. Still, every country, whether it is an importer or exporter of oil, would do well to heed his prescient remarks. Time is running out for the Second Industrial Revolution, as well as for laying down a Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure.
I’m reminded that America, once the leading oil power in the world, peaked in oil production in the early 1970s and, since that time, has increasingly had to rely on ever more expensive oil imports to maintain its own economy. Like Muñoz Leos at Pemex and President Chavez in Venezuela, US president Jimmy Carter tried to warn the American people that we needed to find alternatives to oil more than thirty years ago.
In 1979, during the dark days of the second oil crisis, when Iranian oil fields were all but shut down because of the disruption caused by the Iranian revolution, oil shortages resulted in long lines of cars queuing up for blocks at local filling stations in the United States like what happened in 1973 during the first oil crisis. Americans were angry and looking for a solution to a problem that seemed beyond their control. Sensing the mood of the country, President Carter delivered the most important speech of his presidency, although at the time it was not well-received and continues to be a source of derision among political pundits to this day.
The White House called the speech “The Crisis of Confidence,” while the popular press dubbed it the “Malaise Speech.” Reading it now, more than thirty years later, I am taken by how prophetic his address was. Carter realized that we were becoming more dependent on foreign oil and that the price of energy was likely only to increase in the decades ahead. He said that the oil crisis represented the culmination of a series of events that over twenty-five years had begun to erode the faith of the American people in a better tomorrow—the hallmark of the American dream. The assassination of President Kennedy, his brother, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.; the long, torturous Vietnam War that had divided America; the growing inflation and unemployment; and the decline in wages were chipping away at the American psyche, creating a “crisis of confidence.” The long lines at the fuel pumps and the increasing cost of gasoline and other oil-derived goods and services were exacerbating the crisis of confidence and turning America from a nation of hope into one of despair.
The president called on his fellow Americans to join him in a great crusade to claim our energy independence, put America back on track and restore our faith in the future: “Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite as a nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.”29
The president led by example, installing the first solar panels on the White House roof and a wood-burning stove in his living quarters. He set forth bold new initiatives to cut dependence on foreign oil in half by the end of the following decade, establish energy conservation, and develop alternative sources of fuel. He proposed legislation for a solar bank to help the United States “achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.” He asked Americans to turn down their thermostats and use carpools and public transport. He called for an energy board similar to the War Production Board of World War II to oversee a complete mobilization of the country, with the goal of winning the war of energy independence.30
When the price of oil on the world market began to fall, the American business community and the public lost interest in the great energy crusade. Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, removed the solar panels from the White House roof and scrapped the wood-burning stove in the living quarters. America went back to business as usual, buying even larger gas-guzzling vehicles, and using ever greater volumes of energy to support a wasteful, consumer-driven lifestyle.
Although Carter’s warnings faded from the public mind in the ensuing decade, vast changes in the global economy were laying the groundwork for the first tentative forays into North American continentalization and, once again, energy would come to play a critical role.
The recession of 1990–1991 turned the nation’s attention to restoring economic growth. In Washington, both Republicans and Democrats were championing globalization, the elimination of trade barriers, and deregulation of the market as the best route to grow the domestic economy and put Americans back to work. Eager to lead by example, George H. W. Bush successfully negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico. Although some political observers wondered whether this was meant to be a precursor to the foundation of a North American political union, President Bush made it crystal clear that it was not the intention of any of the three countries to form a political union like the European Union. Rather, their sights were strictly fixed on the creation of a commercial zone to advance the mutual economic interests of the respective countries.
Energy policy was a key consideration from the beginning of NAFTA, but the focus was on the conventional energies—coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium—and, for good reason, at least as far as the United States was concerned. Canada to the north is the sixth largest oil producer in the world, and Mexico to the south is now the seventh. Sandwiched between two of the world’s leading oil producers, the United States was understandably anxious to use NAFTA as an instrument to advance its energy security.
Few US citizens are even aware that Canada is the largest supplier of US oil and refined oil products, representing 21 percent of all US oil imports.31 Canada also has the second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia. In addition, Canada provides 90 percent of all US natural gas imports and represents 15 percent of US consumption. It also has the world’s largest high-grade uranium deposits and was the leading producer of uranium in 2008, with 20 percent of total global production. One-third of the uranium used in US nuclear plants is mined in Canada.32 Canada and the United States also share an integrated electricity grid, all of which makes our Northern neighbor indispensable to the economic well-being of the United States, and our most important trading partner.
A growing number of Canadians, however, question whether NAFTA makes their country a valued partner or a useful appendage to the United States. Many Canadians deeply oppose strengthening NAFTA, arguing that Canada is already being absorbed into the larger US economy and is losing its political sovereignty in the process. Canadians also worry that NAFTA will mean having to go along with the dominant American ideology, which is often at odds with Canada’s deeply held cultural and social values. They fear that the new “continentalism” is merely coded language for erasing the border along the forty-ninth parallel. In short, they suspect that NAFTA is a front for a twenty-first century, high-tech American colonialism designed to grab hold of Canada’s rich resources and remake its citizenry in the United States’ image.
Opponents of the “one container fits all” approach to continentalism also worry that Canada is becoming so dependent on exports to the United States (currently 73 percent of Canadian exports flow south) that the country may eventually be forced to accept whatever commercial and political terms the United States chooses to impose.33 This is why Canada’s NAFTA critics insist on trade, investment, and fiscal policies that encourage the growth of a more robust internal market and overseas trade, reforms to safeguard Canadian industries from US protectionism, and measures to redress the current trade imbalance between Canada and the United States.
While public attention has focused on the benefits and drawbacks of NAFTA, another type of continental political realignment has been quietly gaining momentum over the past twenty years and has the potential to redraw the North American political map. Former Canadian minister of external affairs, Lloyd Axworthy, notes that the 1990s saw the emergence of a spider’s web of regional, cross-border, intracontinental networks. In the United States, owing to its tradition of states’ rights, the states are mostly free to determine their own economic agreements. During the 1990s, the border states and Canadian provinces took significant steps to increase ties. In 1999, then–Ontario premier, Mike Harris, in a speech to American governors in neighboring states that border Canada, said “We really see you as very strong allies, more so than many parts of Canada, something far more significant than perhaps my national government understands.” Cross-border commercial relationships have been developing for decades.
The closer commercial ties, in turn, have been accompanied by ever-closer political ties. Regional associations of US governors and Canadian provincial premiers now exist from coast to coast to promote and integrate mutual commercial and environmental agendas. In fact, the political integration of Northeastern, upper-Midwest, and Pacific-coast states with Canadian provinces has, in many ways, begun to eclipse the traditional political links each has with political jurisdictions within their own countries.
The Conference of New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers (NEG/ECP), founded in 1973 has been steadily moving toward a regional, transnational approach. The NEG/ECP is made up of six states and five Canadian provinces: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. The governors and premiers meet annually to discuss matters of common interest. Between these summits, the NEG/ECP convenes meetings of state and provincial officials to implement policies, organize workshops, and to prepare studies and reports on issues of regional impact. The conference’s many accomplishments include “the expansion of economic ties among the states and provinces; the fostering of energy exchanges; the forceful advocacy of environmental issues and sustainable development; and the coordination of numerous policies and programs in such areas as transportation, forest management, tourism, small-scale agriculture, and fisheries.”34
Another transnational political region, similar in scope to the NEG/ECP, exists in the Pacific Northwest and is made up of British Columbia, Alberta, the Yukon Territory, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. Established in 1991, the mission of the Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER) is “to increase the economic well-being and quality of life for all citizens of the region.”35
At least as active as its eastern counterpart, the PNWER group is attempting to harmonize approaches in the fields of agriculture, environmental technology, forest production, government procurement, recycling, telecommunications, tourism, trade and finance, and transportation. PNWER subcommittees are looking to a regional energy strategy, focusing on best practices for sustainable development, as well as exploring methods for states and provinces to reduce soaring health-care costs, tighten border-security issues, expand foreign investment, and share information to upgrade workforce skills.
These transnational political groupings represent a new chapter in North American governance, with both Canadian provinces and US states bringing powerful assets to the partnership. Canada’s vast renewable energy reserves provide the kind of energy security that is essential to make transnational political regions semi-autonomous. Canada also sports a highly educated workforce and relatively low production costs. For example, American employers save on health-care costs by locating production facilities in Canada or by outsourcing to Canadian firms because workers in Canada are covered by national health-care insurance.
The border states, in turn, have some of the best universities and research facilities on the planet, giving the budding intracontinental partnership a leg up on other regions of the world in cutting-edge commercial development.
The creation of cross-border regional partnerships in North America are similar to those being formed between regions inside the European Union, and ones that are likely to form on every continent when nation-states begin to ease border restrictions on commerce and trade and form larger commercial trade zones, or even full-fledged continental political unions.
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, continentalization flattens national sovereignty and allows regions to hook up across national borders in wholly new ways that not only create new economic opportunity, but even breed new cultural and political identities. Here is a case in point. Perhaps no contest is more highly charged in terms of national loyalties than bids for the Olympic Games. When Vancouver made its bid for the 2010 Olympic Games, it was supported by every one of the states in the Pacific Northwest Economic Region, creating blowback in other parts of the United States.
It is not surprising that everywhere continentalization is evolving, regions are connecting with one another to create Third Industrial Revolution green infrastructure. Just as elite fossil fuel energies are always harnessed centrally and distributed from the top down, renewable energies are, for the most part, best harnessed locally and shared laterally across contiguous regions.
In the Pacific Northwest Economic Region, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) of California, the British Columbia Transmission Corporation (BCTC), and Avista Utility are jointly exploring the erection of a power line that will stretch one thousand miles from southeast British Columbia to Northern California, with the capacity to transport 3,000 megawatts of power from renewable energy harnessed locally and uploaded to the grid along the entire length of the transmission line. Much of the electricity will come from the abundance of wind, biomass, small hydro, and geothermal energy in British Columbia.
Thinking of the Pacific Northwest as a political space is not all that far-fetched. The fact is, the region shares a common history that predates national boundaries but remains alive in the minds of the people who live there. It is not unusual for people living in the Northwest part of North America to think of themselves as being part of Cascadia, a semi-fictional region that includes Alaska, the Yukon, British Columbia, Alberta, Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Idaho. The region is bounded by topography and shares a common past that includes shared ecosystems, the migration patterns of indigenous populations, and European settlement. Thomas Jefferson regarded the region west of the Louisiana Purchase as a potential separate country.
The idea of Cascadia has stuck in the minds of utopian visionaries and has been part of popular lore for as long as anyone cares to remember. If California were to be included—and many inhabitants of Northern California would no doubt consider themselves to be part of Cascadia—the region’s sixty million inhabitants would claim a GDP of $2 trillion and rival the size of the Chinese economy.
The Pacific Northwest Economic Region already encompasses much of the region of Cascadia, a fact not lost on regional party leaders. In 2007, the premier of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell, in discussing the enormous economic and social potential of the region, went as far as to say, “I think there is a very strong, natural pull of the region called Cascadia.”36 Because the region’s population is among the most environmentally sensitive in North America, Campbell argued that the cross-border political jurisdictions should join together to create a common carbon trading market to address climate change. That year, British Columbia and Manitoba joined with Governor Schwarzenegger of California and other states in signing the Western Climate Initiative to begin working together to implement a regional cap and trade program.
The Conference of New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers are working just as closely to unite their jurisdictions around a common plan to share regionally generated renewable energy in a distributed smart grid network. The governing bodies are quickly putting in place the various pillars of a regional TIR infrastructure and, when that’s completed, the region’s inhabitants will share far more than energy—they will be part of a regional biosphere connected by post-carbon businesses and workforces. Equally important, they will share a common quality of life in an extended community that bypasses national boundaries, creating their own de facto intracontinental union.
Governor John Baldacci of Maine captured the historic nature of the mission the jurisdictions have set out for themselves in a 2008 meeting of the governors and premiers. On the table was a proposal to construct a 345,000-volt transmission line from central to northern Maine that could connect with a transmission line that had recently been built from Point Lepreau in New Brunswick to the Maine border. The new high-voltage line would be able to accept the flow of electricity generated from locally harnessed renewable energy in Canada and send it across the New England power grid.37 Speaking in favor of the project, the governor told his Canadian and American peers that:
New England and Eastern Canada are uniquely positioned to take advantage of tremendous wind, hydro, biofuels, and tidal power to meet our electricity needs. But acting alone, none of us can truly reach our potential. . . . We must develop new transmission capacity that serves both generation projects in New England and improves the capacity to move renewable, green power from Canada into the United States.38
There is no doubt that a new intracontinental political realignment is going on, as regions begin to transition their economies into a Third Industrial Revolution, even if it’s not overtly acknowledged. Listen to what Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick had to say at the 2010 Conference of the New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers. He reminded the governors and premiers that “as the region that started the industrial revolution [on North America], the Northeast can also be the region that leads the world in a clean energy revolution.” The governor said that he was convinced that “by coming together to announce aggressive regional energy efficiency goals and ramping up renewable energy, we will grow clean energy jobs, enhance our energy security, and improve the air we breathe.”39
The “we” he referred to is a regional, transnational, and intracontinental political realignment. Washington was absent in his inspirational address, but not far from his mind. That was the very same day Governor Patrick and a group of eleven Mid-Atlantic New England governors sent the letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Congress, opposing the plan to create centralized wind and solar power parks in the West and send electricity via high-voltage lines to the East, saying it would “undermine” the potential to harness locally generated renewable energy on the East Coast and “stifle” the economic prospects of the region.
What these transnational regional alliances suggest is that if a continental union does come to North America, it’s not likely to be imposed by Washington; rather, it will grow out of the regional political realignment that accompanies a cross-border TIR infrastructure.
The intercontinental era will slowly transform international relations from geopolitics to biosphere politics. As previously mentioned, the biosphere envelope is the space that stretches from the ocean floor to outer space, within which living creatures and the Earth’s geochemical processes interact to sustain life on the planet.
The scientific community’s recent insights into the workings of the Earth’s biosphere amount to nothing less than a rediscovery of the planet we inhabit. From diverse fields—physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, geology, and meteorology—researchers are beginning to think of the biosphere as operating like a living organism whose various chemical flows and biological systems are continuously interacting with one another in a myriad of subtle feedback loops that allow life to flourish on this tiny oasis in the universe.
This change in how scientists view the Earth is as profound in its implications as the change in thinking in the modern era, when scientists up-ended the Abrahamic description of the Earth as a creation of God and replaced it with the notion that it was a remnant of the sun, thrown off into space, where it cooled over eons of time and became an inert reservoir of resources for the evolution of life. As life evolved—at least according to the popular misreading of Darwinian theory—a fierce competition for the Earth’s resources ensued, locking every species into a relentless battle to prevail and reproduce itself.
The Social Darwinist’s view of nature as a battleground, where every creature is fighting with each other to grab as much of the Earth’s resources as possible for itself and its progeny, has been taken up by nations and acted out on the grand stage of history in the form of geopolitics. Wars have been waged and political boundaries continually redrawn to secure access to elite fossil fuels—and other valuable resources—the energy lifeline of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions.
The new view unfolding in science, by contrast, sees the evolution of life and the evolution of the planet’s geochemistry as a co-creative process in which each adapts to the other, assuring the continuation of life within the Earth’s biosphere envelope. Ecologists argue that it is the synergistic and symbiotic relationships within and between species, as much as the competitive and aggressive drives, that help secure each organism’s survival.
The shift in energy regimes from elite fossil fuels to distributed renewable energies will redefine the very notion of international relations more along the lines of ecological thinking. Because the renewable energies of the Third Industrial Revolution are ample, found everywhere, and easily shared, but require collective stewardship of the Earth’s ecosystems, there is less likelihood of hostility and war over access, and greater likelihood of global cooperation. In the new era, survival is less about competition than cooperation, and less about the search for autonomy than the quest for embeddedness. If the Earth functions more like a living organism made up of layer upon layer of interdependent ecological relationships, then our very survival depends on mutually safeguarding the well-being of the global ecosystems of which we are all a part. This is the deep meaning of sustainable development, and the very essence of biosphere politics.
Biosphere politics facilitate a tectonic shift in the political landscape; we begin to enlarge our vision and think as global citizens in a shared biosphere. Global human rights networks, global health networks, global disaster relief networks, global germ plasm storage, global food banks, global information networks, global environmental networks, and global species protection networks, are a powerful sign of the historic shift from conventional geopolitics to fledgling biosphere politics.
As human populations begin to share green energies across continental ecosystems, engage in commerce and trade in integrated continental economies, and come to see themselves as citizens of continental political unions, the sense of being part of an extended human family is likely to foster a gradual shift in spatial orientation away from geopolitics and toward more inclusive biosphere politics. Learning to share a common biosphere is tautological with biosphere consciousness.
If it is difficult to imagine a change of this kind, think of how preposterous it must have been to a feudal lord, his knights in arms, and his indentured serfs to conjure the possibility of free wage earners selling their labor power in national markets, each a sovereign in his own right in the political sphere, all bound together by a set of agreed-upon rights and freedoms and a sense of national loyalty.
LIKE EVERY OTHER ECONOMIC REVOLUTION that preceded it, the Third Industrial Revolution is going to recast many of our most basic assumptions about the way the world works. While our governing institutions are morphing into new forms, so too are our academic disciplines.
It’s been nearly fifty years since I took my introductory class in classical economic theory at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. I have watched a transformation take place in the workings of the economy over the ensuing half century—most of which has never been integrated into the standard economics textbooks. The once-unquestioned value of unlimited economic growth has given way to the idea of sustainable economic development. The conventional, top-down, centralized approach to organizing economic activity that characterized the fossil fuel–based First and Second Industrial Revolutions, is being challenged by the new distributed and collaborative organizing models that go with a Third Industrial Revolution. The hallowed nature of property exchange in markets has been partially upended by shared access to commercial services in open-source networks. National markets and nation-state governance, once the spatial milieu for all economic activity, are giving way to continental markets and continental governments. The result is that much of economics, as it is taught today, is increasingly irrelevant in explaining the past, understanding the present, and forecasting the future.
Although the term paradigm shift has been grossly overused in recent years, I think it’s safe to say that when it comes to economic theory, the term is apt. Our children’s understanding of economic theory and the governing assumptions of economic practice will be as radically different from ours as the market theorists’ ideas are from the “just price” philosophy that governed late medieval commerce and trade.
The biochemist Joseph Henderson once remarked, “Science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science.” In other words, our intellectual abstractions are often little more than explanations of what we already experience in our technological applications. We might look back fifty years from now and say the same thing about the Third Industrial Revolution technologies and the new economic theory that is likely to accompany them.