Time to Draw the Thread on the Map

In the previous part, I explored key drivers of change that will influence the way our modern access to goods and services operates. I followed a simple frame, looking at efficiency opportunities, resiliency concerns, and environmental degradation issues, including climate change. We first realized that our industrial setups still have massive opportunities for greater efficiency in their operations. This depends on energy and material intensities of production, labor and capital productivity, the optimization of supply chains and logistical costs, and finally, the way products reaching end of life are handled. We also came to terms with concerns about resources’ scarcity. Modeling resources demand to 2050 and beyond, we realized that — unlike what is commonly thought — the world is in general not close to running short on most resources, with the exception of certain metals such as copper, nickel, or lithium (and growing constraints on cobalt and zinc) if the world were to keep running things the way it has in the past. We however understood that, due to the unequal distribution of these resources across the planet, resource dependencies are likely to be heightened in the coming decades, with its impacts on geopolitical bargains and possible disruptions in supply. Fossil fuel dependencies on the Middle East and Eurasia have been known for decades, if not centuries. The dependency on precious resources from the Pacific, Africa, and Latin America, on the other hand, is on the verge of emerging as a new critical choke point in the global resources trade. We also discovered that trade dependencies in goods manufacturing materialized between affluent economies from the Western world and those from East Asia, with China playing a pivotal role in all these exchanges. Finally, we understood the essential role that our modern industry plays in overall pollution issues, including the mother of all problems, climate change. Industry is not only directly responsible for around 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally, but it is also — in how it consumes resources and designs our modern goods, shelter, and mobility infrastructure — at the center of all greenhouse gas emissions of our modern services and those associated with the energy we use to run them. An integrated approach showed that our need for food, shelter, and mobility each takes up 20 percent of global emissions, while our consumption of modern goods accounts for around 35 percent. And our modern industry acts as the underlying machinery that designs and delivers all these essential services. The same applies to pollution issues, with industry having a notable role in water (possibly responsible for up to 50 percent of overall pollution) and soil pollution (industrial waste is 18 times larger than solid municipal waste, and the lack of handling of products reaching end of life poses a serious environmental threat in many regions of the world)…