R.K.: Who is going to eat our lunch? Who is going to eat China's lunch? Who?
L.W.: Well China is going to eat its own lunch. China has a tremendous problem with potable water right now. It has a tremendous problem with pollution that it doesn't seem to be able to do anything about. I mean, every summer I've been in Beijing it's been worse. People wear masks. Millions of people with masks on because of the pollution is so bad.
China has a problem environmentally, ecologically, has a problem resource-wise. Let's just look at one aspect of this. If the UN projections are right, and I have no reason to question them about population increase, by 2040, 2050 certainly, we're going to add another two to three billion people to this planet. That's going to require at present rate of resource consumption, six more planets in order to support them.
Well you say, we just won't consume at quite that rate. Well these people are coming into the middle class, predominantly in India and China. That's where the major population increase is going to occur that is going to be demanding middle class standards of living. Are we going to have enough plastic water bottles? Just think about it for a moment, what that means in terms of the Earth already beleaguered in its ability to support the human population that's already on it.
What the Earth is going to do when there's another two, three billion people? I'll tell you what the Earth is going to do-- all you have to do is study the geologic history of the Earth. The Earth casts things off when they become untenable to its sustainability and its productivity and its health. It's like a human being. There are too many people on my surface, I'm going to get rid of some of them. And that's what's going to happen. And it's going to happen through a number of mechanisms but the most threatening right now, to me is acidification of the oceans, sea rise in general, and the warming temperatures and the melting ice and the new ice age which is going to make it really untenable for human life.
We forget sometimes that the last millennium has been, look at the geologic record, which we can do fairly accurately now. Back a hundred thousand years, back even 4.5 billion years, but at least a hundred thousand years, you look at the geologic record and you can see that the last millennium has been extraordinarily conducive to human life. Extraordinarily so.
That's one reason why we put, since 1900 more people on the face of this Earth than were on it in the previous five millennia. So we have had a really good time. We, being human life. We're getting ready to go into a period where we're going to have a really bad time.
And not dealing with the challenges that that presents early on, and we're already behind the power curve, and by the way, I don't give a damn whether you believe humans are contributing to this change or not, it's irrelevant, the change is occurring.
I happen to believe humans are contributing and causing some of the accelerated effects and that we could find a way to probably attenuate some of these effects if we believed that and did something about it, but even if we don't believe that, it's going to happen. It's going to happen and we're going to have to deal with it.
I firmly believe right now there are people thinking in the oligarchy, whether it's the oligarchy in Moscow, or here in Washington, or in Beijing, there are people thinking seriously about how they are going to protect their wealth, their lives, and their family's lives when this begins to happen in such a serious way that blood in the streets becomes a metaphor for the day. The Royal Dutch Shell did a couple of scenarios a few years ago that they made partly public.
And Royal Dutch Shell by the way has one of the best strategic think tanks in the world embedded in its executive leadership and they call these alternative futures that they were forecasting, scramble and blueprint. As you might imagine, blueprint was where world leaders in the G-20, the G-8 whatever actually got together and made some meaningful changes to the way they did business and the way their business did business so that we attenuated and mitigated and adapted to some of these changes that are coming.
And we did it in a more or less programmed, process-oriented way that is reasonable and rational. That was called Blueprint. The other scenario was called Scramble, and in that, each nation more or less tried to save itself. There was very little cooperation, very little international attempt to meet challenges like climate change, environmental degradation and so forth, it was all every nation for itself.
And in this scramble Shell predicted there will be a lot of conflict. Conflict over dwindling resources like potable water, oil and gas and so forth, and conflict over arable land because there won't be a whole lot of it and guess which one Shell predicted would be the eventual outcome, the eventual alternative that would match more or less the future? Scramble.
R.K.: Yeah it figures.
L.W.: Even began to put together, I'm told, private security companies and money to pay those private security companies to protect its own oil, pipeline and so forth facilities around the world because it didn't believe governments would be capable of doing so. And here is one of the largest corporations in the world and it's telling you that the future is fraught with problems and it doesn't believe that the governments of the world are going to get together and deal with those problems.
R.K.: Well corporations have really become trans-national entities in their own right with resources bigger than most governments, so in a sense-
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