Environmentalist Jonathon Porritt's antidote to enviro-gloom shows the way to a sustainable low-carbon future, in The World We Made: Alex McKay's story from 2050.
In the here and now, it seems like a bit of stretch but anything is plausible! I'll take a pass on the world famine prediction.
Can we change in just 37 years? The realisation of the speed with which we need to move dawns very soon. One big wake-up call is that there are so many climate shocks that insurance companies say there is no way we can insure a world with such problems. The years things go badly wrong force politicians to accelerate our use of low-carbon technology. When I talk to sceptics, my analogy is Pearl Harbor. Until Japan attacked the US, consumer goods piled out of factories. Within nine months, production was committed to war. Not one private car was built.
Are there other wake-up calls? Yes. We are living a lie if we think we can feed 9 billion by 2050 on business-as-usual production. So my second big wake-up call is a world famine in 2025, caused by many factors, including crop-attacking "black rust" virus in the Middle East, China and India.
What kind of changes help people get past these crises? A big change is that 90 per cent of energy in 2050 comes from renewable sources. We're going to have a Moore's law with solar power. That's been going on for the past 10 years. We only need another 10 years of costs reducing by 5 to 7 per cent a year, and efficiencies increasing by 2 to 3 per cent a year for solar power to compete with all energy sources.
How else will 2050 be different? One of the projections underlying the book I care passionately about is that the super-rich have largely disappeared. They see that it's not much good being super-rich as the rest of the world falls to pieces. They wake up to the fact that it would be much better to live in a world that worked, so they use quite large percentages of their wealth to make that happen.
Then there's China. There's a very real chance it will use existing knowledge to start showing how 1.3 billion people can live in a sustainable way.