Energy Decline and the Growth of Destitution

[GliderGuider]

I've just posted the second part of my unfolding series of articles on what I think the future is going to look like and why.

The first part was a global energy scenario developed over the last few months. That article is here: World Energy to 2050.

The new article looks at the impacts of energy decline on national economies. I link the calculated GDP changes with national demographic projections to look at the effect on per capita GDP out to 2050. The latest article is here: Energy Decline and the Growth of Destitution.

Current statistics from The World Bank indicate that over a billion people today live on a single dollar a day - half of the population I listed above as comprising the poor of 2006. The growth in that population, coupled with the drop in per capita GDP, implies that well over twice that number will be desperately poor in 2050 - perhaps as many as 3 billion in 2050. According to the same source, about half the world's population today lives on less than $2 a day. If the scenario developed in this article is close to being true, that number could double by 2050. That demographic and economic earthquake could leave 6 billion people - almost the size of today's entire global population - trying to survive on such a pittance.

Paul Chefurka