By Constance Beutel

I HAD THE HONOR OF FILMING AL GORE LAST WEEK. He is on tour for his latest book, “The Future.”

As a futurist myself, I am most interested in how people are thinking, planning and preparing for the future. As ordinary people, we are constantly focused forward. Peter Schwartz, who has written widely on scenario planning, notes that our human physiology keeps us looking forward, as our eyes — unlike those of many animals and insects — are set looking straight ahead.

It takes effort to scan the horizon and be aware of what’s behind us. In teaching the scenario planning protocol to graduate and doctoral students, I like to remind students that activities like attending school, investing, applying for and later changing jobs, and buying insurance are all related to the future. I love the quote from Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Knowing about events that are emerging and thinking in advance about how to best respond to them is all about good planning. Rothschild did it when he sent observers with carrier pigeons to the battle of Waterloo; seeing that France was losing, he was able to move his capital out of France to England.

More recently, Shell Oil, through their scenario planning, anticipated what the fall of the Soviet Union would mean for oil prices and made plans accordingly. As I have written, they also have worked through scenarios to 2050 and have contingency plans to deal with what they anticipate to be the most likely outcomes.

Mr. Gore’s gift, in my opinion, is his ability to take difficult or abstract concepts and make them very concrete. In his latest book, he identifies six drivers of global change. I won’t go through them all, but here’s a sample of his ideas:

Ever-increasing economic globalization

Mr. Gore calls the globalization of the Earth’s economy “Earth Inc.,” which has a reality of its own that gives the global economy a new relationship to national governments and to labor, capital and natural resources. Jobs can be easily relocated; therefore, he argues, the ability to achieve higher wages is diminished. Robo-sourcing, advanced automation, is replacing jobs in a new way. Advanced technologies are replacing physical and cognitive functions, which is displacing whole categories of employment and making it harder for people to achieve decent wages. (I urge you to explore “Baxter,” a relatively affordable robot that can be set up and operational in an hour).

“Common sense” applications operating at the cognitive level are now available and allow one first-year lawyer to compile as much legal research as five hundred first-year lawyers, while achieving a higher percentage of accuracy.

Mr. Gore affirmed something I’ve thought for a long time, and that is there is more than enough work to be done, but the work that needs to be done is either not compensated or compensated poorly in today’s markets — e.g. child and elder care, medical R&D and maintenance and restoration of the natural environment. The question for us to solve is how to value and compensate for this work in the future.

Earth Inc. is now driving policy in all countries. The new technologies, such as 3D printing, are extremely exciting. Manufacturing is coming back to the U.S., but the intensity of employment normally associated with manufacturing is no longer possible because of robo-sourcing. China’s Foxconn, which manufactures Apple products, among others, announced that over the next three years it will deploy 3 million robots. Apple itself is “reshoring” computer manufacturing but will use advanced robotics.

Finally, with Earth Inc. in full swing, natural resources are being voraciously consumed.

Shifting balance of global political, economic, military power

China will surpass the U.S. as the largest economy in a few years and is already the largest trading nation in the world. Mr. Gore spoke passionately about democracy and capitalism having been “hacked.” In his early political experience, Mr. Gore would hold town hall meetings in Tennessee where people would stand up and express their concerns and hopes for government and he would take their hopes and needs to Washington.

However, he said, “Democracy does not work that way anymore.” Most of the campaign money raised today is spent in 30-second television ads. Party caucuses tell newly elected representatives the amount of money they have to raise every day until their re-election. That adds up to five to six hours every day spent off the Hill dialing for dollars. This behavior, he suggests, definitely affects how our representatives vote.

He went on to say that capitalism has also been hacked through quarterly earning targets, short-term incentives that drive businesses’ decisions rather than long-term, sustainable practices.

Growth

When Mr. Gore talked about growth, he brought up the important concept of externalities. Barry Posner and Peter Senge — and of course my hero, Buckminster Fuller — have each written and lectured about the need in business for a more accurate accounting. Mr. Gore said we currently have a flawed economic compass that is strictly focused on growth as the Holy Grail.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is not comprehensive enough to base growth on, as it leaves out “externalities” like pollution (a negative externality) or education, art and culture (positive externalities) that don’t show up on the economic ledger. The depreciation of natural resources and distribution of income is not visible in the design of our economic policies.

Since 2009 and the economic recovery, 93 percent of all additional national income in the U.S. has gone to the upper 1 percent of the population. The family of the founders of Wal-Mart, for example, are six individuals who now hold more wealth than the bottom 100 million Americans. These kinds of measurements are not included in GDP. We need a more accurate accounting to understand and manage our economy.

Climate crisis

He wouldn’t be Al Gore if he didn’t highlight the radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the Earth’s ecosystems as a driver of global change.

He noted that 2012 was the hottest year ever recorded in North America, and that 60 percent of the U.S. suffered deep drought. Last year saw increases in West Nile virus incidents, as well as $110 billion in climate-related disasters (after a mere $60 billion in 2011). After his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was released he was told by climate deniers that he was being demagogic and irresponsible in showing an animation of seawater splashing into the World Trade Center memorial site. “Well,” he said, “it happened in Super Storm Sandy.” He said the fact that not a single question in any of the presidential debates was about the climate crisis was “pathetic” and a commentary on our democratic discourse.

Among all that was said, here is what really stuck with me. We are pouring nearly 90 million tonnes of greenhouse gases — the equivalent of 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs — into our atmosphere every day, as if it were an open sewer. It should not pass without noting that our beloved Benicia contributes about 8,500 metric tonnes daily to that devastating total.

Connect the dots

Mr. Gore concluded by saying that we’ve got to connect the dots and be conscious of the risk to future generations. He urged us to become agents for positive change on behalf of the future.

Learn more

• Al Gore, “The Future”: www.algore.com/
• Baxter: Rethinkrobots.com

Constance Beutel is a member of Benicia’s Community Sustainability Commission. She is a university professor and videographer and holds a doctorate from the University of San Francisco.