Energy, Economic Growth, and Geopolitical Futures: Eight Long-Range Scenarios (The MIT Press) - Tapa dura

...the alternative worlds imagined by Hillebrand and Closson are useful starting points for a whole host of intriguing conceptual exercises, teaching and learning opportunities, strategic planning processes, and additional investigations into specific topics. This book clearly can be utilized as a valuable and engaging tool for both undergraduate and graduate students in a range of disciplinary fields, along with scholars and researchers working in interdisciplinary programs. If applied to its fullest potential, this book could also serve as a jumping-off point for other related scenario planning efforts. In the end, perhaps the book's most valuable impact could be in helping to expand a reader's thought processes, suggest new lines of inquiry, and stimulate new ways of approaching about the complex, vexing challenges facing the world today. -Futures

Eight varied scenarios, integrating a quantitative model and qualitative analysis, that examine the interplay of three key drivers over the next four decades. This book presents eight varied scenarios of possible global futures, emphasizing the interconnectedness of three drivers of change: energy prices, economic growth, and geopolitics. Other published global future scenarios focus on only one of these factors, viewing, for example, economic growth as unaffected by energy prices or energy prices in isolation from geopolitical conditions. In this book, Evan Hillebrand and Stacy Closson offer a new approach to scenario construction that acknowledges the codependence of these key drivers and integrates qualitative analysis with a quantitative model. The eight scenarios represent possible combinations of high or low energy prices, strong or weak economic growth, and global harmony or disharmony across three time periods: the 2010s, 2020 to 2040, and 2040 to 2050. The "Regional Mercantilism" scenario, for example, envisions high energy prices, weak economic growth, and global disharmony. To impose numerical consistency across scenarios, Hillebrand and Closson employ the International Futures (IFs) model developed by Barry Hughes. (Interested readers can download this interactive model to alter or build scenarios themselves.) Assessing the probability of each scenario, they conclude that increased U.S. energy supply and the sustainability of the Chinese growth miracle are the most significant drivers over the next forty years.