We are very fortunate to have a back seat in Germany.
She was here as a visiting research scholar who years 2005.
Yes, I was very, very early on in the iteration of this program when it's been ongoing, Houston and others, as the other has been engaged in,
not only having been a serving officer of Fleet our own,
but also has been engaged in trying to make sense of how strategies have worked out or not worked in the last two decades.
A moment ago it appeared on movie screen. Actually, it was biography.
I can't get through all of the list of the appointments he's had in the Sea of
Service because it reads like a sort of you're left with this the raconteur movie,
right? He's not the only one. I think both of you get to the end of the list,
but it would be worth pointing out that in the context of what discussing here his role as strategy director in embassy in Afghanistan.
We were we just briefly got right to I people who would have known completion of Afghanistan his
observation of the third in order to make this conversation today that we hear about today.
I'm not going to I didn't actually vote.
You live in Cornwall. Justice might not work, so I'm delighted that you're doing that.
This is a new departure in many ways, things that weren't certainly for us.
But we are delighted that you've come to talk to us again after all these years
and that you come out enriched with experiences to bring to our attention.
Thanks very much. I'll get my presentation running soon.
It's just. It's just. Just take your time. Here we go.
It's good for you to stay on. Great, important first slide, as you can see.
Thank you for the invitation. Great to be back here in Oxford.
I'm a bit down from approach from the weather.
You expect that comments made lots of wonder whether I actually come and say, oh no, I don't like it as you flew.
But probably not because my background is very.
I started off as a scientist. I read Mass Motion on the Reef.
My first script went up to join the Navy. They wanted me to be a hydrographer.
I didn't want to do that. My venture into that flight.
They released me after flying and a little bit of ship grinding at Cambridge that year at Cambridge.
And my big subject there was international economics. I studied that latterly.
I did some time in Afghanistan because the only thing that I was there to observe in Afghanistan and was report on that.
I also eventually left the service, did a couple of things that went into energy.
And I now work in marine renewable energy, but I'm being generous to my company.
I should say that I'm here in a private capacity and nothing that I'd say will will should be attributed to the company.
They've asked me to say that. So it's really very much my own private thinking and work that I've done.
The work started really, and here is the title.
The work started, I suppose, thinking about strategy.
I've worked with Houston for a bit here in 2005 2006, and was thinking about how we made strategy out of working in the policy department,
in the Ministry of Defence and had a strong view that we didn't do very well.
I found that latterly when I worked for the Chief of Defence Staff as his principal staff officer and again came to that same conclusion.
I ended up after that appointment in Afghanistan and I remember well walking or getting out in that campaign away from Helmand,
which was where the British forces were, and instead getting around the campaign to essentially central moments for me was going out to Iraq and
going to Bagram to the divisional headquarters for the Army office a month junior or a couple at least.
Iraq was amusing because I was a Commodore. That got very confusing.
And Cheryl Coles, who was the ambassador, started to call me Brigadier General.
So I arrived at the Brigadier General was therefore in that sort of capacity.
I thought, this is amusing.
Until the divisional commander in Iraq got out his maps and it suddenly occurred to me that he thought I really was a brigadier general.
So we spent some time talking about the dispositions.
Fortunately, I I'd just read Rommel's book and infantry tactics, and I was able to give sage advice.
And I'm pleased to say that Harold is still not in the hands of Taliban. But more importantly, that I talked to the J5 were the planners in Herat.
It was a Spanish and Italian brigade.
It was clear to the planners in background, which is an American division and second level,
and to both of those sets of people, I asked the same question and the question was, what's the strategy?
What are you working to? And from both of the sets of young majors, who were the planners?
I got the same response and response was to look down at their feet and go home to me.
And then when I eventually I to persuade them that that's actually the same question.
The same response came up with no strategy, General.
We didn't go on and say that we were what we were five or six years into the campaign with no strategy going yet.
And that really what led me to start to write more. I came home and read the book.
I was quite pleased with myself when I had written it. Actually, it was quite a good book.
There is now a very, very serious flaw I used to denote by saying the best book written by a senior military officer,
British military officer for the last 70 years in that troop isn't there anymore.
But that in itself tells the story, which is I don't think we have been thinking about strategy,
but there was not a point of my presentation, which my presentation is that I can now see having written it in 2011.
But there was so much that I was missing at a much higher and deeper level.
And that really is the subject of today's presentation structured in a in this way,
I'm going to talk about the conventional geopolitical narrative as I think of it, what's going on, how we tend to explain it.
Those of us who are working on strategy,
what I'm then going to give you an alternative structural logic to show you that I think something much deeper is going on,
much more profound, much more crime is going on.
Then I would say to a little bit about so what the consequences and I'm going to try and distinguish between problems,
which are things that we can solve and predicaments which are things that we can't solve but just have to navigate.
So it's not off.
I'll come straight into this, which is conventional geopolitical narratives, but this has been a Jenkins for those of you who don't know him.
He, like me, believes strongly that we don't do you very well in this country.
And he sort of puts it in his he puts one of the problems in terms of how things have not gone
well in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and a lack of strategy and lack of strategic thinking.
He's right. But at the superficial level, I think it's fair to say that actually these endeavours that we've engaged in not been successful.
I can see little sign of them being successful.
The question about why there was a different story, and that's something that we could talk at length about.
This is my view. I use the medical metaphor and I use the medical metaphor.
We tried to conduct open heart surgery on other countries, and we've tried to re-engineer them in many ways in our own images or similar images.
It's has been costly. It's been costly in treasure.
Huge amounts of money spent by the Americans, for example. It's been costly in blood.
And I think ultimately it doesn't work. I've yet to actually look at one of these interventions and find out that it really worked.
If you want my opinion, when we look back in the middle of the 21st century at these times,
I think they will look at engagements in these places akin to how we look back at the Victorians proselytising,
a form of Western values and Western thinking through the use of military force and development aid with little consequence of success.
I don't think our politicians are much interested in much more.
We saw David Cameron try it out in Libya. A mistake, in my view.
I wrote about this for the Defence Committee and we saw them try it out in Libya and think we got away with that.
The British and the French by the skin of our teeth. It didn't turn out as we expected.
Furthermore, it seemed clear to me and I wrote about this at the time that the Libyan intervention would have implications elsewhere.
I felt it might lead to uprisings elsewhere such as Syria.
I also thought it would skew our relationship with the Chinese and the Russians.
And so it has. I felt that because we were going in there on a agenda or with an objective, which was to do with protecting people.
Whereas actually the real agenda, as was the case in Iraq, was actually regime change.
We were intent on regime change, and that's what we did.
I think, though, that there's been enough of this actually for our politicians to be much, much more much more cautious about what we're doing.
So I do believe that this age of neoliberal intervention is drawing to a close.
I also think, though, that there are other things going on. And I think one of the things that we cannot stop thinking about is energy.
I'm going to talk quite a lot about energy today because I think it's going to define the next 30 or 40 years.
And I'll explain why. That's a map in the Middle East.
You can see those green in the black areas where the key oil fields are.
The Ghajar field here is the Supergiant amongst all the oil fields and Saudi Arabia produces about between nine and 10% of the world's oil.
It's a huge it's a huge oil from Iran to Iraq.
This is the really the centre when it comes to world energy.
And it's worth bearing in mind that in world energy, 84% of world energy is a result of fossil fuels,
of which the bulk of that well, the biggest proportion of that is actually from oil.
So oil is major. So we cannot no matter how much I might like us not to intervene in these places,
we cannot take our eye off the ball in places like this, nor can we take off the ball in places like the Gulf.
We've seen some of the consequences of this. We saw it in Paris, what I would call consequential, terrible.
I think some people will take different views on this.
I think that one of the mistakes that we've made and this is something Rob and I talked about a little bit over lunch,
was we had not understood the proper political context.
I think the context within which we are operating is a context which goes back to the seventh millennium.
And I see it from two axes, I imagine an axis and where to the right and the left is Shia and Sunni.
An up and down is conservative and modernisers.
And you can pretty much place most of the Middle East in that sort of sense, and it helps you think about it.
I think we completely misunderstood that context in Iraq and we've completely misunderstood its inverse, which is Syria.
And without understanding these contacts, I increasingly take the view that we should not engage in these places unless we really have to.
And that is, to use the magical phrase, we should first do no harm before thinking about what we're doing.
It's not the big story, but it's drawing people's attention into what is the big story, I think.
I think the big story happens that sort of three levels.
The story of tragedy we talked about had what we did in Afghanistan, what we're doing in Syria.
That's the superficial level. There's a deeper level in which there's this millennial conflict that I've been talking about.
But the real deep level is the one that I want to draw your attention to alternative structural logics.
I'm going to talk a little bit first about the environment. Are there any climate scientists here?
Well, that includes me as well. I mean, I do have a degree in oceanography, but it's a long time ago and I can't remember much it.
Climate change is happening. No doubt it's happening amongst those of us who are scientists and who work in this technological area.
Anthropogenic climate change has the same scientific validity as Newtonian physics or Darwinian evolution.
So amongst the scientists it's a non-issue. It's not politically, I'm afraid, and that's the sadness.
I happen to think also that it's not the big issue. For reason banal explain.
You can see that that we see the reductions in the Arctic ice floes.
This is methane which is being given off as a result of climate heating up.
There hita is another slide which for me actually sort of really highlights one key issue,
which is the speed with which that's changing this for the non climate scientists
here or is it just here is an event called the Pegasi is in trouble maximum.
It's the most violent event on the recent climate record.
And during that period the temperature rose six degrees in 20,000 years.
It's a spike and a big spike. And the most violent event went up there, stayed up then then came down later.
At the moment, we're predicting 1.5 degrees to 150 years.
So you can see the different rates that 1.5 years, that 1.5 degrees C is actually happening, six degrees in 2000 years versus 1.5 degrees.
And and in 150 years, I'm quite friendly.
And he was helpful writing my book with James Lovelock, the great climate scientist who wrote a lot about this.
He's 94 now, but is sharp as a whisker.
And he takes the view, which seems to make sense to me, that we cannot trust the models because actually what we're trying to model is so complicated.
And he says that our understanding of the climate is about the same as our understanding of the human body at around about the 1750s.
So I think we have to be cautious about those models. I cannot speak as a as a as a rather out of date mathematician, but that makes sense to me.
But I don't think it's a big issue. Let me come on to what I think are the two big issues.
First is economics. Are there any economists who. I'm not only a Keynesian economist.
For those of you who are, I think some of this will come as a shock.
Debt is a big issue. We are more indebted at the moment in global terms than we have ever been through history.
I think British interest rates as their lowest for the poor, for recorded history, certainly for the last 50 years.
And this debt is a major, major issue. This is a famous book amongst economists.
It's called This Time is Different.
And what it essentially says is that actually, when you come into these sorts of situations and then time and again,
when indebted countries get to where they are and have economic problems,
actually they construct a narrative which says that actually this time is different.
So whether it's in 2001, the bubble that occurred there or 2007 there,
always a narrative which takes you to explain to you that actually we're not going to have a problem this time.
We are more indebted, much more than we were at the start of the 2007 2008 crisis.
And there are not much more protections, despite the fact that governments have been looking at banks and how they might do that.
This is a massive problem because it's actually slowing down the world economy.
It's a burden and it's difficult to see how we'll get out of it. Growth, growth.
And this is really where we're starting to get to the nub of it. Growth is something we all talk about, isn't it?
Something our politicians talk about it. They talk about the need to get back to sustainable growth.
And sustainable growth is an oxymoron. As a mathematician,
you cannot keep growing if you grow up to seven and every 5 to 6 years it doubles and that's exponential and sooner or later it tops out.
So growth cannot keep going mathematically, and it certainly can't be physically on one point the planet, but current global growth levels.
But what you can start seeing this growth just starting to peak a little bit and that's just a hint about where I'm going with this.
Has anybody bonds by any chance read this book called Limits to Growth?
It's a fascinating book, is written in the 1970s during the Club of Rome time.
And what they did there were systems analyst, two meadows, a husband and wife.
And I think a Swedish was was the first. I'm looking for advice, Rob.
He's sort of nodding his head.
So it's a fascinating book because what it basically says is that we approach and will approach in this 21st century a time when growth stops.
I believe that we've arrived at it and I'm going to explain why. It was in the 1970s.
It was prepared. It was really looked at in 2010.
And what a lot of its predictions are still coming true.
And indeed it's most recently looked at by the Melbourne Sustainable Institute and almost all of the graphs which are in it.
I'll show one of them to show that all of its predictions are coming true.
So let me just leave economists aside for once. I'd actually put that doubt in your mind that we can continue to grow and turn instead to energy.
I think energy is the big issue, and I'll explain why.
It looks to me that growth is incompatible with energy prices at $140 a barrel and perhaps even as low as $75 a barrel.
And so we've now got a massive, massive issue in energy. We watch and I watch energy like a hawk because it's my job at and what I'm
showing you there is what we're seeking to but demand over there as predicted.
And this is how we're seeking to supply this demand. We're seeking to supply it with as yet undiscovered oilfields.
A lot of you will no doubt have read in the press and perhaps been drawn in by the arguments about fracking.
Do not be. The fracking thing is a short lived thing.
The American fracking the American fracking industry will probably peak if it's not already peaked, which it may have done.
It will peak by 2020. It's worth bearing in mind that each of those fracking fails actually meets its maximum consumption at about six months,
and within 24 months it's down to 10% of its consumption. With 30 months, they've usually stopped.
So it will not be a it will not be a panacea, I guarantee you that.
Furthermore, it does not produce usually oil, usually produce condensates,
which are oil substitutes, and do not have all the things that we need in oil.
That very good evidence suggests that oil has indeed peaked and peaks around about 2010,
which I mean, crude oil did come across the Hubbert's curve, Hubbert's curve.
Hubbert was a oil geologist professor who wrote in the 1950s, and he used a quite simple mathematics to map out.
He saw what he thought was happening in terms of world discoveries and produced this red curve.
It's called a logistics curve for those of you who are mathematicians.
And what it basically shows that when you've got a resource which is like oil or like coal.
More like natural gas, but its exploitation follows a predictable curve.
This is the curve that this is the theoretical curve in rate and the actual curve that American oil production followed is that curve.
And you can see he predicted in around about 1956 with one year he was one year out,
I think actually when American oil would would peak and was one year out.
The little bit of a spike just here, which is fracking coming in, but fracking will not last.
As I've said, it's cutting back massively now. So he's just about spot on.
This is a terribly important curve in trying to understand the future.
Terribly important. Not coming back to it to other issues.
Here is something called energy return on energy investors. Very easy to get drawn into prices on oil.
How much does it cost? $75 a barrel. What's exportable?
This is much, much more interesting. It's the energy return. Energy invested.
How many barrels of oil do I get for every barrel of oil that I invest in Saudi Arabia?
NORTH Well, it's something like 1 to 100. This work is all been done in New York State University by a brilliant professor called Charles Hall,
U.S. environmental biologist or an ecologist, actually.
But it's very, very interesting work. So for Saudi Arabian oil, for every one barrel of oil you invest, you get about 100 back, 200 and Garfield.
But what you can see, if you look at these little things, they're coming down and they're coming down over time.
So we're now down to about four for a new field, a new conventional field.
It's about 12 barrels to one for fracking. It may be as low as 3.5 to 1.
That tells us a message, because when you get to 1 to 1, it's a waste of time.
It doesn't matter how technically technologically exportable it is.
If you're using more energy to get it out than you get in return, it's an it's a sink, not a source.
And what that curve is telling you is that actually we're on the other side of that bigger curve.
It means that actually energy and particularly fossil fuels or oil in particular is getting more expensive to extract.
That will not stop. We have seen no big new oil fields, so no big new cheap oil fields.
And it doesn't really sort of matter in terms of the price as well.
What matters is that actually if we can't, we use more energy, how much it costs.
We use more energy to extract the oil than we get in return.
There's very good evidence to suggest that ethanol and the use of biodiesel is actually uses more energy than it returns.
Not quite as bad as the the situation in Japan not so long ago where actually they managed to put some wind turbines up in completely the wrong place.
And we're so embarrassed about it. And they're actually powered for that power by electricity to make it look as if they're working.
I'm right. This is the limits to growth.
But will I mention the reason I bring this up is to just put in to that this diagram.
I won't bother you that this is what's called system analysis,
and essentially it uses a one dimensional mathematical model to come up with a one dimensional look at the world.
And one thing I want to draw attention to is this. This is industrial output.
Industrial output is growth. Growth as well. And where do we see the peak of this assistance now as we see the peak at around about 2015, 2017?
And if I was to show you the mobile analysis, which I haven't got, it shows the dots just running up here.
Now, what you can also see here is that actually coming down the other side.
And I want you just to start to think about the idea of a massive reduction in global GDP,
a reduction in millennial proportions, perhaps 23% for the next 15 years, which is what I'm predicting.
When I saw that, it really made me think a lot,
but I wasn't totally convinced because you can't actually it's quite difficult to actually work out to relate that to actual property GDP.
But it really set me thinking and it sent me thinking about what was really going on in the world.
So let me just leave that. It's the first bit of analysis, but it's not the final part of the jigsaw.
And let me come to really what I think is more interesting part of the jigsaw. This is Hubbert's Curve again, but it's used with CO2 emissions.
So what we're now looking at, and if you think of CO2 emissions, what do they represent?
They represent the burning of coal, oil and gas.
So the three big fossil fuels and what you're seeing here is that this burning is following, again, a similar curve.
Now, if you're a climate climate scientist here, they would show you a thing which shows that CO2 is going up.
So we see more and more and they get very, very, very worried about how much how much fossil fuels are being burned.
I'm less worried. I'm less worried because I think the fossil fuel burning throughout the world will follow this curve.
That's a good thing for the climate.
It's a disastrous thing for the economies is disastrous because actually we are talking about reducing GDP over time.
And I'll connect this in a second. Reducing GDP over time, following pretty much the curve that we've thrown that limits the growth way.
I'll just connect those two in a slightly more sophisticated way. This is the one bit of maths.
It's not that difficult maths, but it's not that difficult maths because I'm not very good at math.
It's not that difficult. But I just wanted to get this is the original part of this presentation,
the original thinking and what I'm doing in this is I'm just connecting about five things.
This is the basis of a paper that sort of half drafted.
It's for the Royal Society. It's not a theory, it's more a hypothesis.
But I want you to run run you through it because it really matters in terms of understanding the structure of our future.
What's the purpose of the GDP? What I'm saying is GDP here is equivalent to GDP, which is the gross domestic domestic energy production.
So I'm trying to make a link between how much we produce as human societies and how much energy we use.
There is a very close link between these two things. People tend to assume that that economics production is a function of two things.
My economist colleague would probably say usually people talk about the fact the production of capital and labour well is the third critical one.
And it's energy. Energy is critical. It's a critical factor.
Production is so much all around us, we don't even really think about it that much.
But it is a critical part of production, in my view, much more important than Labour.
So I think that we can actually start to look at GDP, how much we produce and the energy we consume and produced.
You can think of one as a property for the other.
I also know that if I look at my energy supply across the world, you may think it's all buried there, but it's not.
Actually, 84% of the world's energy is both transport and stationary.
Energy is fossil fuels. It's a mix between gas, between coal and between oil.
But 84% is fossil fuels. Anybody talks to me and says which which of those is the most important?
It doesn't really matter. I think the key thing, the key message that I've arrived at is that we're going to need them all.
Nuclear makes up a relatively small proportion. Hydro and renewables make up the rest and still a pretty small proportion.
And one thing I can tell you about nuclear and hydro working in the business, we will not grow these at the levels that we need to.
It doesn't matter how hard we go in renewables, we'd love to do it. We'd love a bit more money to do this as well as many investors out there.
But we'd love to do it, but we will never be able to grow them at the speed we need to to actually replace fossil fuels if they start to burn down.
So I'm going to make the assumption that actually that because 84% of the world's fossil fuel,
well, world's energy is fossil fuels that actually I'm going to call 100%.
So roughly speaking, I'm going to say that the way that the energy in the future will match will be according to that curve.
So the energy supplies that we all have to do the work in the future will follow the habits.
So if I that's what I'm essentially take is I'm ignoring nuclear, I'm ignoring renewables.
I'm assuming that they won't grow that quickly and certainly not quickly.
And therefore, I'm making as a simplifying assumption the idea that actually fossil fuels.
Will be our primary energy source and that actually it will start to decline as a primary energy source following that curve.
What's the best proxy for fossil fuels? In terms it could be kilowatt hours like burn.
It could be all those barrels of oil that I burn. It could be whatever fuel, so on.
I could actually have a look at a very complicated mathematical equations and try to solve those.
But a much simpler way is to relate it simply to CO2.
They all put CO2 in the atmosphere.
And that's why that curve that I showed you originally is CO2.
Following the Hubbert's curve, we then assume that it therefore follows that I can use CO2 as a proxy for energy use.
I can use energy use as a proxy for GDP, and it therefore follows that our GDP, I think, will follow the same curve, the habits curve.
So in other words, what I'm saying is that not only does that represent CO2 emissions and how much we use energy,
I also think it represents our future GDP.
Now, if I look at that future where we are about 2010, 20 with the amount here, you look at that reduction to we get to 2020,
that means a global reduction in GDP of around about 7 to 8% in the next five years.
And a further I think the figure is about 16% in the ten years after that, that that is a global reduction in GDP approaching 25%.
That sort of figure, it's rough and ready in the next 15 years at a time when the the world's population continues to grow.
So not only is GDP going down well, reducing to think about it another way, but also the population is increasing.
So GDP per capita is going down even more quickly. And I think this is the issue.
I think this is the structure of our future. It's a future in which there is much less wealth out there,
in which countries are having to cope with a quite different structural future than they're used to.
We, all of us in this room, I've spent my life on this side of the curve.
All of us in this room have spent our lives on this side of the curve. We've fought wars, are using lots of energy.
We've used huge amounts of energy around the world to do whole loads of things.
One of the things we've used huge amounts of energy to do is to extract energy.
I've talked a little bit about fracking, but I can tell you the oil and gas offshore market,
which makes up 30% of the oil and gas produced in the world, is in carnage at the moment, and things are cutting back like nothing I've ever seen.
It's incredibly shocking for us what fortune? I mean, renewables, but it's carnage.
So this sooner or later will show up and reduce production.
There may be a slight glut of world gas, but it will not last.
We're absolutely certain about working in the energy industry. And let's just take those two.
And this really was the final bit of it for me.
I looked at that graph, that graph, and I thought, goodness me, that is not a very mathematical observation,
but it's an observation that's important in a way that very different logics and very different sciences that they arrive at the same conclusion.
They arrive at the conclusion that their growth is over. I'm absolutely certain of it.
And as I start to see the world in a different way, I see the things that are happening around me in a completely different way.
I see things like the Arab Spring. What started the Arab Spring off?
It was a it was the Tunisian who was struggling to feed his family, set himself on fire.
My brother, who's a brilliant Arabist, was talking to an Egyptian about 2 to 3 years ago.
He said, What's the problem in Egypt? And I'm not an Arabic speaker.
But his Egyptian friend said he used the Arabic phrase, But people are hungry.
The people are hungry. Migration is not, to my mind.
What we're seeing a political issue. It's an economic issue. And I think it's just the start.
So anybody who thinks this migration thing's going away, if I'm right on this, I think again, it's just the start.
What will happen? I use the term predicaments and problems because actually I think this is a predicament and I can't see a solution,
which means that the only issue is how we navigate it, how we navigate as human societies.
I'm early in my thinking here and it'd be great subjects for questions,
but I'm starting to think about what sorts of things will happen as a result of this end of growth.
The start of contraction, I call it contraction, the great economic contraction, which is possibly starting and what that will mean.
Bear in mind that all our Western systems, the banking systems, the pension systems are based on the idea of growth and the need for growth.
And at the moment, we are not growing,
despite the fact that we've had over six years of quantitative easing and interest rates are low, as they've been for generations.
Despite that fiscal stimulus, we're not growing. I think we'll see debt defaults.
I think we'll see currency collapses. Indeed, it's happening.
Venezuela is in the middle of hyperinflation and I don't think Venezuela will be the last place to have it.
I think we'll also see banking system failures. Banking systems are designed for growth.
That's how debt gets repay. The debt can't get repaid. We're likely to see banking system failures in terms of politics, increasing volatility.
I think we're seeing it already. We can see it in Europe. I think we'll see the rise of the left and the right again.
I think we're seeing that already. And I think actually there'll be a general slow recognition of what's going on.
I don't think it'll come the lights will come on straight away, but there'll be a slow recognition that neoliberalism is over.
When I said to you that, I felt that people will look back on us in the Victorian as Victorians were in the 21st century,
proselytising a neoliberal system through war and through development aid.
There was a third want to add to that, and it's the business system and our economics.
And I think actually that I tend to look now on business schools in a strange way,
but I look at them in the same way that people look on the madrassas and look at them as exporting a idea of Western profits and capitalism,
which is based on lots of energy.
People don't realise it, but it is. And that actually I think that idea will come to its it's close.
So there are three things that we've been proselytising not to the societal.
I think we're going to see mass migration. I just think that's the start.
It was obvious. I wrote a paper on this about 15 years ago because it was obvious that the population of North Africa was growing more commercial GDP.
So, you know, people are getting poorer, so they're going to migrate. Well, I think this is going to get worse.
I think I think we'll see the blaming of the other. I think we'll see reversion to localism.
Internationally, though, it's all going to be a bit variegated because a lot will depend on where you live and what sort of society you live in.
I tend to think the poor societies will will probably do as well as any because actually they're poor.
And what we're talking about is the return to poorness. So I think my wife is from Zimbabwe.
We've watched that we were in Africa recently and you can see the poor societies, which they do seem to have the poor in some ways,
but what actually they get by they used to getting by because actually they had much less to get by with.
I think that what we will see, though, and this is very general,
I think we will see the middle income countries are where we'll see the first major problems.
And if you just think about what's happening in the world, Brazil is having significant troubled.
So in South Africa, Venezuela is in serious trouble. So I think that's where we'll see.
It will come from the from the periphery towards the core. The core being the G7 nations, the G20 nations of the G20.
In the G7 nations. A lot will depend on how you do and how you do with energy.
If you're a major energy importer like Japan, you would seriously struggle.
I think those nations, which have a high degree of energy security, will actually probably do better, but none will do hugely well.
The energy use matters a lot. If you look at Canada and Australia and the US, their per capita and use is twice as high as the EU nations.
So I think they'll struggle. It's very interesting when you look at EU and what's going wrong in the EU.
One of the most interesting factors when you look at the PIGS nations Portugal,
Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, they are the highest energy importers in the EU.
There are other issues, but they're the highest energy importers. And again, I think that's a factor in their struggle.
And I think actually it's the energy. Reporters who will struggle. What does this mean for the current of future military operations?
Your guess is probably as good as mine, actually, but I think we're going to see different things.
I don't think will we might see high intensity war. I don't know. But I think we'll see a need, increased need for military edge the civil power.
We're seeing it already in the Mediterranean. You will see the need to patrol already.
That's conduct disaster relief. Notice that none of this has to do with climate.
I'm not saying that climate is an issue. This is to do with economics.
Energy, resource security will matter. The protection of resources, sea lines of communication, the ability to protect those.
I think there will be conflicts, but I think we'll sort of see them. And I think actually we will not want to engage with them.
We would need to engage in one or two places in the world. And the obvious one is the Gulf.
The second obvious one is probably the Suez, but actually the Gulf is the most important one.
Border controls the rise of the lead to control borders.
I think we'll also see failures in some of the great multinational experiments, starting with the EU.
I don't think it'll be a question of the UK getting out.
I think it will be a question of the EU struggling to cope with this massive migration challenge which can only get worse.
I think we'll see. The counterterrorism, I suspect, will continue, but it will be sort of different actually,
because in a way it will be it will be overtaken by these bigger, epochal events.
Will we see Will? I honestly don't know. The problem with war is it's extremely energy intensive.
You know, I think it takes 400 to get one. One barrel of oil into Afghanistan, took about 400 barrels.
It was an extraordinary number, actually, to actually make that work.
So I don't know, is this a picture in which I sound pessimistic?
You know, in the funny way, in the long term, I'm actually quite optimistic.
I sort of think, well, this is sort of got to come.
And I'm not sure as I look around the world and watch this, driving around at high speed all over the place,
actually, where we're already going and what it's all about.
So I think actually one way or another, actually, I think we could well find that the world,
which will be a slower world and a smaller world will perhaps in the long term be better.
But that right on the other side of that graph will be complex.
And I think it's the thing that will define the next 30 to 40 years, certainly the rest of my life and possibly the rest of all of our lives.
Please challenge me. Please challenge the science. It's the first time I've presented it like this again.
I don't want to be apocalyptic because I feel strongly that actually it's important for us to understand
this because I believe that this is a predicament for us to navigate and not a problem for us to solve.
Thank you very, very much indeed. Of women already depressed by the weather in this country now people should probably be saying that.