A Global View: Emerging Technologies and Climate Change
August 1, 2007
The central theme of this blog has been the need for us to make future-minded choices – and to see the future as an arena for responsibility, as if it were another geographical area of our planet. That is of course how risk management has always framed the future, and how futurists, when they have been at their most useful, have helped set up scenarios to feed today’s decision-making process. But most people just don’t see it that way, and one can see why. They reason that either we have definite future knowledge (of the Old Mother Shipton and Nostradamus variety), or what will happen is so unclear that we wasting our time talking about it. Yet those have never been the alternatives.
As the pace of change has picked up, and governments – especially, and ironically, within the democracies – remain wedded to short-term thinking, the problem is getting worse by leaps and bounds. It is not simply a matter of technologies and their impact, though that factor grows exponentially in import and integrates with all others. The growing asymmetries that are helping make the world a more dangerous and unpredictable have not junked the need for forward thinking; they have just made it more necessary and, to be sure, more interesting. Of course, governments plan. Their often maligned civil servants, drawn at the higher levels from the brightest and best of their generation, do this all the time. I had the privilege last year of participating in just such a project, at the behest of the US Department of State and other agencies. But on the political level – among elected officials and the citizens who elect them – the situation can be dire. And unless there is buy-in from them, the efforts of the brightest and best will stay forever in their files.
It is hard enough to run a corporation accountable to the market through quarterly reporting. Think how hard it must be to run a country accountable to the daily news cycle. And, thanks to the new media, there barely is a news cycle any more. We are into the politics of 24/7. The notion of hundreds of leaders traipsing across Europe to spend months and years working on the Peace of Westphalia or the Treaty of Versailles reads today like a bizarre kind of science fiction, the history of another planet. (How will this nation state idea play on CNN?) Flux, unpredictability and asymmetry require studied future-mindedness, and yet are proportionately less likely to get it. Which fact itself becomes a looming element in the emerging asymmetric equation.
And this, of course, is the environment into which the climate change dynamic has been released. It has begun to evince the characteristics of the political matrix that has two settings, each alike antithetical to considered long-term policy development: panic and ignore. But there is a third setting: panic AND ignore. That is, panic and make speeches. Like the economic consequences of an ageing workforce and the specific issue (that we keep highlighting here) of the need to develop long-term technology policy, the inter-generational thinking (and trade-offs) involved are going to test our mettle as few things have. The easy answers that will play well on the 24-hour media – all the way from “nanotechnology will solve the problem so we don’t need to make hard choices” to “blame America because it is easy and makes us feel good” to “it’s all up to China and India so let’s sit on our hands” – are alike ways to slough off responsibility for our own futures.
Not that the answers are easy; answers rarely are. But once we get the questions right at least we have a chance.
