42 | COMMENT
One hundred years from now….. From Where I’m Sitting – Howard Knott – howard@fleet.ie
On the evening of 3 April this year, in most houses throughout Ireland, pens were poised over the Census of Population of Ireland form, and, in particular, over page 23. This was where the opportunity was provided for respondents to write their piece for the time capsule that would not be opened for 100 years. Looking ahead to doing this one a few months back you could not help imagining what the world of 2122 might be like and speculating about future generations enjoying fit and healthy lives in eternal sunshine. However, when we did come to writing it, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was becoming ever nastier and more cynical, not only for the population there, but also for many more millions of people all over the world who were facing hunger as economies buckled under the inflationary pressure. We can but hope for the conclusion of the invasion and the restoration of peace in Ukraine, enabling, hopefully, the millions of women and children who have moved to safety elsewhere in Europe to return home, and allowing some normality would return to theirs and our lives so we can dream again about a wonderful world for our descendants. FLEETTRANSPORT | MAY - JUNE 22
One thing, though, that Spring 2022 will have taught us is that this will not happen without significant effort. It’s not just a question of keeping a lid on those worst animal instincts that find their expression in political activities that enable some groups to dominate others, it’s the even more basic need to restore the world’s climate to a level of safety; armed conflict must be way up there in the list of global warming activities. In a recent “Fleet Transport” piece we talked about East Coast of Ireland Port Development plans for the next twenty to thirty years, as Dublin Port and indeed Dublin Bay run out of space. Figuring that out isn’t easy, so trying to look one hundred years ahead would seem to be extremely difficult. Less so though when I recall a conversation with the Port Director at Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), who spoke about what facilities they plan to have in place in fifty years’ time as being a part of their short-term planning, whereas one hundred years could be seen as the medium term. In 2122 it’s likely, assuming that the present climate change has been arrested and reversed, global population increase will still be a major concern both in terms of accommodation and, even more concerning, nutrition. Will the meat and dairy businesses become extinct to be displaced by a food industry based on vegetation? Will timber forests in areas of
temperate and warmer climate regions be displaced with forests of fruit bearing trees? Will deep-sea fishing be displaced by inshore fish farms providing food with a lot less carbon production? All of that might read somewhat like a political manifesto and very straightforward, but of course it is anything but straightforward. If one of the main planks of the climate change plans currently being developed is to reduce fossil fuel production and consumption to a minimal level then, that could give rise to serious problems; where will the fertiliser needed to grow all those crops come from? Without meat and dairy production there would be no slurry and bio-methane sources to feed the land and the transport industry. More important, perhaps, there would be no feedstock for the huge volumes of plastics needed to replace all the timber that would not be harvested. It’s all a bit mad, perhaps nothing so drastic would happen and the present evolution of power for heat, light, production, and mobility will continue through ever more efficient hydrogen production and usage. Perhaps the twentieth century lengthening of supply chains will be reversed as 3D and 4D technology takes over manufacturing, and the 400-metre-long container carriers will become a distant memory.
