We will have a real problem when the more than four billion wake up to what the less than one billion are doing to the planet. The terrible worldwide political tensions that will ensue will make the cold war seem quite cosy by comparison. The bomb won't help us much then. We shall need the things we are most short of - open-minded humility and informed foresight.
There are three ways, in theory, in which the huge injustice of the global rich/poor gap might be remedied (and it will have to be remedied because the poor will rumble the rich and cannot be forever intimidated by superior force or fooled by religious propaganda about the next world being better if only you do what you're told in this one).
1) is by levelling up, 2) is by the rich going down to the average while the poor go up to it and the other, 3) is all go down to the current lowest level, if not lower still. The paper chap is right, 1) is not on. 3) is what will happen if we persist in thinking that 1) is on. So we are left with 2) - more or less.
The politics of the next few generations will consist of the promotion of 2) to prevent selfish but futile attempts at 1) resulting in 3). The political parties of the left, right and centre kinds will have to go and the greens will fade out too if they try to imitate those parties in the hope of short-term palatability. The greens won't win elections easily and, in any case, winning elections is not enough.
A very wide variety of people of the recent past, Henry Ford, Marx, Frederick Engels, H G Wells, the Webbs, have all shared the belief that the resources of the earth are unlimited and that, therefore, we all have a divine right to a high and rising standard of living. They disagreed about how to do it; Ford by creating and meeting demand, the Marxists by command, the Fabians by the super-optimistic belief that people would demand to be commanded for their own good once science had shown the way and the old gang brought to their senses.
For a century or so, economic growth has been a matter of almost devout reverence. Capitalism takes it for granted and when capitalism failed - as it did in many countries outside of western Europe, North America and one or two other places - revolutionary socialism made its pitch on the basis of being able to achieve it and outstrip capitalism. Where capitalism flagged in the 'democratic' countries, a vague sort of democratic socialism was attempted in order to do what capitalism was failing to do. All these isms were variants of a sort of cult, a divine right to a high and rising standard of living.
The various socialisms have failed to equal let alone outstrip capitalism and capitalism itself has all the future promise of a blind man running to the edge of a precipice. It is all in ruins, less visibly in the First World, more visibly in the Second and cruelly at the expence of the Third World in which eighty per cent of humanity subsists.
Growth in consumption of goods and services is destroying the life-support systems of the planet by plunder and pollution. Growth, roughly speaking, has to stop. This would be difficult enough if all the world's people were more or less equally, and tolerably, well off. Even if that were so, it would be hard to accept a standstill in our standard of living let alone a reduction.
But we are not all equally well off, or anything like it, and the fighting over limited resources that will be needed to level up the poor and level down the rich will make orderly politics very difficult.
Green disicipline has somehow got to well up from below. Global growth has to be zero or possibly negative with little bits of positive growth permitted only where absolutely necessary and self-supporting. But to try to impose green discipline from above would need a Party of Greenshirts beating up their opponents with compost grown clubs and giving them a going over with broken bottles made of recycled glass. The greens have a terrible political problem - how to be effective, and quickly, without copying failed totalitarianism and without copying the silly futilities of the 'growth and to hell with posterity' parties who base their appeal on 'everybody can be rich - but our way'.
How many people will there be in the twenty-second century and how 'well' will they be able to live? Two things are pretty clear; they will be fewer than we and a lot poorer than most of us decent sheltered middle class people care to imagine. Humanity will be lucky if it does not have to go through another millennium of cruel and shabby stagnation - like the 'dark ages', only worse.
This gloomy prospect need not actually happen but it will unless we consolidate rather than grow, share rather than compete and look after the future rather than next week. A pity nobody of the beard and sandals tendency ever said "thou shalt love posterity as thyself" or "blessed are they who make the earth fit to inherit".
It is no longer a matter of politics - in the sense of the pursuit of public power for the promotion of 'policies'. It is now a matter of changing basic attitudes and all the old factions of left, right, centre, religious, secular or whatever have got to change - and fast