Six maps that will make you rethink the world
Six maps that will make you rethink the world
New maps for the U.S. - and the world
www.washingtonpost.com
The map tells us that the world economy is much more structured according to the gravity of these 40 or 50 megacities than the world’s 200 sovereign nations. In almost all countries, cities have all the economic mass and most of the population, and people are moving to cities by the hundreds of millions.>
We need to rethink the political and functional geography in the United States. It’s kind of ridiculous that we use 200-year-old logic to govern the economics and functional reality of day-to-day life in our country. Of course, we do it for votes - having 50 states is great if you’re running around in a primary. But it doesn’t help you make America a more viable or competitive economy.
One of the titles I’ve given the map is ‘Think geology, not nationality.’ America is now suddenly the largest oil producer in the world. The American energy revolution is the most significant geopolitical event since the end of the Cold War, and it’s a major shift in the world’s tug of war. Ten years ago, we were all talking about how the United States and China were going to fight resource wars for Middle Eastern oil and minerals in Africa. Now, thanks to this incredible seismic revolution, we’re selling oil to China instead.
This is a map by the New Scientist, a very respected British journal. They made this forecast of where global food production would be relocated to if the world rises four degrees Celsius above the 1990 baseline, which of course the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses. Where today the world’s largest food producers are the United States, Brazil, China, India, Australia and so forth, it could be that 30 years from now or less, the world’s largest food producers are Canada and Russia.
They play a very significant role in geopolitics. The world has four significant maritime choke points, three of which are geopolitically sensitive - the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca. We have feared for 100 years that there could be an act of terrorism or war that would block one of these choke points and disrupt global trade and energy flows.But Arctic shipping is a faster and better system. Tragic as climate change is, it opens up these new passageways to Europe, to North America, into the Hudson Bay. So the way into the heart of North America may eventually be these Arctic shipping routes.