Barnett - 2007: the globalization urbanization tipping point
¦"Half World’s People to Live in Cities by 2007," by Irwin Arieff, Reuters, 15 February 2005, pulled off web (Yahoo news).
World goes majority urban in 2007. U.S. did it around 1920 and a generation later, we had an entirely new political landscape. Same will be true for world.
As I explore in the PNM Blueprint for Action, shrinking the Gap is one big exercise in successfully bringing the population from rural to urban, connecting these people to larger opportunities in the process. This urbanization process is a huge tipping point moment. We are on the verge of shrinking the Gap because the Gap is on the verge of so many things that we need to help these nations achieve, with security obviously being at the top of the list.
Right now about 75% of the Old Core lives in cities, but far less than half do in the Gap. Where are the biggest cities of the future? Most are New Core giant metropolises found in places like China, India, Brazil, Mexico. This is an obvious tipping point process.
Shrinking the Gap means growing “cores” all over the place, and they’re called successful cities that process all that ambition and connect it to something larger, and that something large is the global economy, or the only thing capable of taking advantage of all that potential comparative advantage.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett
Qatar's doing this just to thwart Tom Friedman!
¦"In Qatar, Oil Firms Make Huge Bet On Alternative Fuel: Supports Say New Diesel Is Cleaner, More Efficient; Untested on Large Scale," by Russell Gold, Wall Street Journal, 15 February 2005, p. A1.
Exxon, shut out of Saudi Arabia, is pouring billions into Qatar to create the world’s largest natural gas-to-liquid plant in the world. Big gamble? Yes. Getting the world to shift to this clear diesel is no mean trick, but not as hard as you might think. Work some huge rising vehicle markets like India and China and you capture a lot of the auto-making and truck-making players’ attention across the world. It’s not who has the most vehicles now, but who’s buying the most in the coming years.
But alas, none of this will really fit Tom Friedman’s dream of killing them (authoritarian regimes) softly with lowered oil prices, because the same (at least early) big sources of gas will hail from the same regions as the long-time big sources of oil. Yes, eventually, we’ll search the world over more intelligently on gas, but in the near- and mid-term it’ll all be what they call “associated gas,” or gas we’ve found when looking for oil (associated with oil).
Should we be depressed? No. The connectivity required on gas is a lot more than that required for oil: more technology, more industry, more pipelines, more long-term commitments and infrastructural change.
Don’t beggar these regimes; connect them. |
