Too many greedy and deceitful decisions led to a world recession and demonstrated the international interdependence of economics and ethics.
(2009 State of the Future)

Sadly, the latent hope that politicians will eventually come to their senses cannot suffice as a political strategy.
(Mark Engler, writer and senior analyst with Foreign Policy Focus)

We've actually made some progress worldwide on such things as life expectancy, literacy, infant mortality, and GDP/capita, according to the Executive Summary of the most recent State of the Future report, which is part of the United Nations Millennium Project.

Yet, according to the report, some 6,700 pages long, half the world is “vulnerable” to social instability and violence. Of course the U.S. Department of Defense has also published its assessment on security threats to the U.S. because of possible global instability.

While we have had our worldwide successes, as the report clearly states, our shortcomings are glaring, specifically in the areas of global warming and CO2 emissions. This is going to impact on such things as food and energy prices and water supply.

At the same time, world population is growing 1.16% per year and we can expect to reach approximately 9.2 billion people by 2050. The connections seem to be unpleasantly clear while, at the same time, we have today a better “technological” understanding of how to address some of the problems.

Just a few days ago it was reported that the states with the highest home foreclosure rates were Nevada, Arizona, California, and I forget the fourth one, but at least three are in the American Southwest. I've found myself reading more about this part of the country, a region that could conceivably run out of water within the next 20 years ... or maybe it's only 15 years or as long as 30 years.

What might Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix look like? Would it become some sort of dystopian darkness with the flapping salon doors and the tumbleweed blowing down the deserted streets, like those abandoned mining towns we saw in the John Wayne westerns or the old Hoot Gibson flicks?

Certainly the poor and the elderly, with few options, would likely remain in the region and perhaps the area would return to something that resembled a natural state.

Would all those inexpensive charter flights from Kansas City and Des Moines visit the deserts and watch sunsets rather than gamble at the Mirage where “soft, sunlit days give way to torrid nights”? We can merely speculate at this point of course.

We are seeing some striking changes in the region right now: vanishing mountain snow packs will slowly reduce available water and depleted aquifers become simply depleted. Lake Powell and Lake Mead are the two largest reservoirs in the United States. It's now more than a few lone voices that think that by 2021 Mead and Powell will reach what is colorfully called dead pools, where water falls below the dam's lowest outlet.

Of course these possibilities may never occur. Have the bookmakers in Vegas given odds?

Quite by coincidence I was attending a conference in D.C. this past February, the same time as a huge march protesting the Capitol Hill coal-fired power plant was taking place.

This relic had been built around 1910. This is the plant that provides electricity and warmth to our visionary national legislators. The last I heard the plant is going to be converted to natural gas.

As Mark Engler has suggested, we may have to climb a lot more smokestacks in America and throughout the world to force some dramatic changes. We know it is a lot easier in both democratic and non-democratic states to assure the “people” that nothing needs to be changed nor sacrifices made nor power dispersed. It is of course the best of all possible worlds, don't we know.

We humans can rationalize our own “virtuous” behavior at the drop of a difficult decision, don't we know. The Chinese government a few days ago announced that carbon emissions can't keep going up. They plan on reducing CO2 emissions by 2050.

Thank goodness for their enlightenment. But in the meantime they will build at least one coal plant per week, don't we know. The government cannot afford to slow down its "economic growth." Try to imagine one billion angry people.

Bueno de Mesquita, the well known game theorist, claims there is really no national or state interest in the world, just leaders trying to stay in power. In the meantime a lot of smokestacks may have to be climbed, don't we now know.

A starting point and point-of-view on water in the American west: Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West, by James Lawrence Powell