Another Strategist: Thomas P.M. Barnett

He's got the right drivers, not so sure on conclusions.

I noticed the keyword “demographics” in post by Thomas P.M. Barnett and the article it led to, Reject The Future, Retreat Into The Past, was a nice dissection of generations and politics here in the U.S. Basically everyone over fifty sees climate change, global demographics, U.S. demographics … and wants to go back to what they had before they spent forty years voting against their own best interests.

I’m watching this video of Barnett being interviewed by people from Salve (sal-VAY) Regina’s Pell Center about globalization and I have a LOT of problems with this. If you start at 11:00 you can hear a theory about resettling “tens to hundreds of millions of people” into the new arable land that is appearing as climate zones move north about twenty five kilometers a year.

Several of the world’s breadbasket regions exist because their soil is glacial till. If you move north in the U.S. that plains dirt gives way to taiga. Boreal forest isn’t going to magically become rich farmland because the climate zones are shifting. Any reality based assessment on wheat futures and climate change predicts dire decline.

TPMB has had an illustrious career in the field but much of this is just a nonstarter for me. At 12:30 the Indians will move north due to climate change? The pressure to move is already there, but there’s a small matter of this thing called the Himalayas.

One unspoken thing in Barnett’s view is that globalization is a given, he assumes that the arc of development we’ve been on the last two hundred plus years will continue despite the environmental catastrophe our overpopulation has caused.

I would very much like to migrate to the world of Barnett’s assumptions, some parallel Earth where things are gonna be OK. But Zeihan’s calculus on the U.S. abandoning its globalization duty of policing freedom of the seas seems a much better match to the day to day news. I hope I’m wrong here, because I deeply regret the world I’m leaving for my offspring, but I’m going to stay grounded in facts.