This will be a war because the future profitability, or even survival, of many of the world's most powerful and wealthy corporations will be at risk, and because every nation has a potentially life-or-death stake in the contest. At the same time, the use of existing fuels like oil and coal, which spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is likely to plummet, thanks both to diminished supplies and rising concerns over the growing dangers of carbon emissions. And there is little way to predict how it will go at this stage in the game. Some of these systems (as well, undoubtedly, as others not yet on our radar screens) will survive the winnowing process. Why 30 years? Because that's how long it will take for experimental energy systems like hydrogen power, cellulosic ethanol, wave power, algae fuel, and advanced nuclear reactors to make it from the laboratory to full-scale industrial development. The losers will be cast aside and dismembered. The question will be: Which will dominate the world's energy supply in the second half of the twenty-first century? The winners will determine how - and how badly - we live, work, and play in those not-so-distant decades, and will profit enormously as a result. Over the coming decades, we will be embroiled at a global level in a succeed-or-perish contest among the major forms of energy, the corporations which supply them, and the countries that run on them.
It may not result in as much bloodshed as that of the 1600s, though bloodshed there will be, but it will prove no less momentous for the future of the planet. Think of us today as embarking on a new Thirty Years' War. Indeed, many historians believe that the modern international system of nation-states was crystallized in the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which finally ended the fighting. It was, in part, a struggle between an imperial system of governance and the emerging nation-state.
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But that's where we're headed and there's no turning back.įrom 1618 to 1648, Europe was engulfed in a series of intensely brutal conflicts known collectively as the Thirty Years' War. A 30-year war for energy preeminence? You wouldn't wish it even on a desperate planet.
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