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The Environmental Macroeconomics Of Predicting The Future There was a time when predicting the future was best left to charlatans and religious leaders. Few legitimate academics, if any, were willing to bet their careers on some pie-eyed prognostications on what might be happening globally in, say, 2050. Unfortunately, guessing what might happen fifty years from now is easier than ever, with more and more respected literati lining up to take a shot at it. Why? Well, the world of economic theory has made predicting the future child’s play if you know the rules. Take, for instance, the world’s energy consumption. Were you aware that the world consumed some 13.5 terawatts of energy from all sources in 2002. BTW, a terawatt equals one trillion watts. That could power a lot of electric cars. The United States was by far the greatest consumer of that power. MIT professor Daniel Nocera calculated that if the world’s population is 9 billion people in 2050, and they consumed electricity like Americans do today, the world would need to produce 102 TWs of power, a staggering amount that could not be supplied with current technologies. (Read the story here) Economics suggests that in a supply and demand world people and governments will respond to this growth in one way. They will produce more energy. So how will they do it? Given the trend towards more and more energy use as the former third world continues its move to first world standards, possible scenarios get filtered out as being either unsustainable or ridiculous. The truth of 2050 is binary. Either we will have figured out how to produce adequate amounts of power in sustainable ways or we will live in a world that is apocalyptic—at best. The future’s big hope? Solar energy.  www.corporateknightsforum.com