New West Network

The Pillars of the Next Real Revolution

By Lance Olsen, New West Unfiltered 8-12-07

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"The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age willend long before the world runs out of oil."

Sheikh Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabia's oil minister in the 1970s.
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The Pillars of the Next Real Revolution
By Lance Olsen

The world has seen a Stone Age, followed by a Bronze Age, followed by an Iron Age. The world has also seen a Tool Making Revolution, followed by an Agricultural Revolution, followed by an Industrial Revolution. These were the world’s real revolutions, making petty political revolutions like the Reagan and Khomeini revolutions pale to relative insignificance.

The next real revolution will be built on at least 8 basic pillars. Each pillar makes an interesting story in its own right, and volumes have been devoted to them as separate trends, but their real revolutionary power lies the fact that they are all unfolding at once.

I will do each of them a disservice by trimming them down to a few sentences, but the 8 basic pillars of the next real revolution are:

1- THE END OF THE OIL AGE
2- THE END OF THE HOSPITABLE CLIMATE
3- THE END OF THE HUMAN POPULATION BOOM
4- A NARROWED CIRCULATION OF MONEY
5 - A SUDDENLY ENDANGERED SUPERPOWER
6- THE SCARY ARE BECOMING POWERFUL
7- THE RISE OF HARD-CORE FUNDAMENTALISM
8- AN INCREASINGLY TOXIC PLANET


1- THE END OF THE OIL AGE
Cheap oil has been a pillar of rich nations’ economy. But the Oil Age is dying -- the cheap and easy stuff is gone, or about to be gone, and we will end up leaving the costliest goo in the ground. Something new will follow the dying Oil Age but, no matter how desperately we drill the world today, the costliest oil will remain sequester underground, turned useless by the simple fact that it isn't worth the costs of drilling.

2- THE END OF THE HOSPITABLE CLIMATE
Along with the end of the Oil Age, we are seeing the beginning of new and less hospitable climate. This change of climate (brought on by the past hundred years' binge of burning cheap fuels) will be the most lingering momento of the Oil Age -- scientists have calculated that, even if we had stopped burning (all) fossil fuels yesterday, the atmosphere and oceans are already set up to keep on warming for at least another hundred years into the future, and plausibly for several centuries.

3- THE END OF THE HUMAN POPULATION BOOM
Already, demographers are revisiting their calculations for our population's future. Just a few years ago, the demographers were estimating that the number of people on the planet would jump from 6 billion to twelve billion. Lately, they've made what may have been the first adjustment in many to come -- now they think that we'll get to the nine billion mark instead of twelve billion.

The big question in demographics -- and in many others -- is whether we'll hit 9 billion and stall there, or fall back to 6 billion and possibly fewer. Stanford University's Paul Ehrlich and Gretchen Daly guess that 2 billion people would be about the optimal number. Those 2 billion would be about 3 times richer than 6
billion if we only look at their increased per-capita wealth in the likes of water and wood, soil and food.

Changes of oil, climate, and population add up to a big story of interacting trends. Because cheap oil has translated to lots of cheap food, a lot of us have noticed that it was oil that boosted our population boom. And that a human-friendly climate played a major part of its own. For us, it is not a question of whether the human population can keep growing, or hit a peak and stall, but instead a question of just how far we'll fall.

Some of us will fall faster than others, and partly because of another major force of change. All across the planet, economic strategies have been diverting money into fewer and fewer hands.


4 - A NARROWED CIRCULATION OF MONEY

The division of haves and have-nots is not new on this earth. But the past quarter century’s accelerating concentration of wealth is raising eyebrows galore as it stirs social tension. And may yet threaten the global economy.

George Soros says the global financial system is like a circulatory system, with a heart pumping money out to the peripheries, then taking it back from the peripheries to circulate it again. But he warns that, at some point, trouble out at the peripheries (a slashed wrist, for example) can pose serious threats to the heart. Should the circulation of money to the economic peripheries be imperiled, it would be happening at the same time as the end of cheap oil, the beginning of a new climate, and the likely shrinkage of the human population.

5 - A SUDDENLY ENDANGERED SUPERPOWER

The United States had no sooner become the planet's sole surviving superpower than some fanatics flew planes into the twin symbols of its increasing economic clout. All over the world, in cities of Iran and France, Russia and others, millions poured into the streets in shared shock. Magazines printed photos of thousands in the streets of Moscow and Tehran, carrying candles, murmuring slogans of solidarity with the slain. A leading Paris newspaper, Le Monde, ran a headline saying "We are all Americans now."

But then the US swelled its chest and declared an endless war, one financed by borrowing from abroad, making the mighty nation dependent on the savings of people in other nations at the precise moment when other nations were wondering if the Americans had gone mad.

The end of the Oil Age, the beginning of a new climate, an increasingly vulnerable human population divided along lines of wealth, and a superpower turned wobbly each create opportunity for ruthless entities who will strive to thrive in times of crisis.

6- THE SCARY ARE GAINING POWER AND WEALTH
American University's Louise Shelley has testified before the US Congress that "... transnational organized crime will be one of the major problems facing policy makers in the 21st century. It will be a defining issue of the 21st century as the Cold War was for the 20th century and Colonialism was for the 19th."

In his final State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton said that global crimelords will be working in alliances with terrorists, creating a combined threat to the security of the United States. Intelligence agencies have warned that at least some nations are already at danger of being virtually owned and operated by what Washington Post columnist David Ignatius once called "the scariest
people on earth." Dr. Shelley told Congress that, already, the 1980s had shown that even major nations such as Italy and Japan could come close to being taken over by organized crime.

7- THE RISE OF HARD-CORE FUNDAMENTALISM
Whether we look at the Middle East or Middle America, hard-core fundamentalists are digging in, taking firm positions, staking out their claims on everything from women’s bodies to the contents of books. Whether Islamic or Christian, they believe they have God on their side, and that they must wage war on the others they see as evil. The partisans of fundamentalist fervor have been around for a very long time, but have expanded their power base in recent years.

8- AN INCREASINGLY TOXIC PLANET
Here, we have another old story grown worse. For example, scientists discovered lead in the ice of Greenland. Wondering where it came from, they
traced it to the factories of ancient Greece. In the following centuries, many another factory feeding goods to millions and millions more people also sent dangerous materials into the same atmospheric circulatory system that circulated lead to Greenland.

Nowadays, according to the Pesticides Action Network, the stereotypical American Thanksgiving dinner is poisoned material, carrying 38 pollutants into the bodies of people who sit down for an annual family rite. Some pollutants now building up in human bodies can perform de facto abortions when the fetus is a boy. Others are clearly implicated in cancers. Fish, one of the most valuable foods on the planet, carry pollutants that are among the most dangerous on the planet.

Summary:
The above 8 changes aren't operating in a vacuum. Each one is a biggy, but the real story is that they are all unfolding within the same period of history, and that their combined and interacting impact will linger well into the unavoidably revolutionary 21 Century.