Don't make too much of these predictions. They might be wrong. I didn't do any serious research.
1. The solar revolution has finally begun in earnest. Over the next 10 years, it will grow by leaps and bounds, taking over coal, natural gas and eventually petroleum (and even shale gas and oil) as the leader in energy. It will represent a booming industry that we can scarcely imagine even today. I'm not not really going out on a limb here, I'm only making some inferences from articles like this and this and this etc. I'm more optimistic than BP, though. I figure that if the cost of solar really achieves grid parity by 2015 as predicted in the first article, then Katie bar the door. Wind energy will also continue to grow. The U.S. has the potential to harness 14.5 million gigawatts of wind energy each year, although currently it produces only 43,461 gigawatts. Wind and solar energy grew by 30-40% in 2010, and world wind and solar grew by 35% in 2011. Chinese companies have quickly become the low-cost supplier and is crushing all competition, and as a result, 2011 has been brutal to U.S. solar and wind power producers. Thanks to Chinese pricing, solar is already cheaper than diesel, and has already gone mainstream in India, where some large companies are "jettisoning diesel in favor of solar panels".
2. In the next 10 years, we will see some bubbles that will pop:
a) The U.S. dollar will implode sometime after Europe gets their house in order, and our political power and prestige in the world will take a huge hit. I don't know whether this will happen in one day or over a period of years. It might follow an earlier implosion of derivatives worldwide.
b) The soaring cost of higher education (especially state-funded public institutions) will peak and implode as more people opt for less expensive Internet classes. A crisis will ensue as professors lose their jobs or opt for working in internet-based teaching companies. This crisis will be further exacerbated by the lack of jobs for college-educated people.
c) The price of farmland will eventually peak as a result of speculation and high commodity prices, and then when prices drop, farmers will be going belly up all over the place...except those farmers who are getting payments for wind generators...they will be buying up their bankrupt neighbors.
d) Health care practitioner salaries, malpractice costs, unnecessary procedure costs, drug costs, insurance and government oversight costs, technology costs and unhealthy diet costs will continue to skyrocket. A larger and larger percentage of people will lose their company health care benefits. Medicare will collapse, and we'll then either leave the poor and destitute to die, or we will adopt socialized medicine, similar to the European countries. In the meantime, there will be lots of political turmoil.
e) China will attempt to buy up our best technology companies, in the same way they are currently buying Japanese companies. This will create a political furor, but we may not be able to keep it from happening any more than Japan is able to keep it from happening right now.
3. Facebook's stock will droop once it goes public. Apple will also become less popular as Google Android sales rise and Microsoft & Nokia also make a comeback. Cd's and even DVDs will fade out of use. Land line phones will disappear. Kmart, Sears and Radio Shack will close their doors.
4. Cyber warfare will preempt our ability to consciously declare (or not declare) war. It will be continuous and have no end. It will no longer just affect the army, but it will affect us, the citizens. We won't necessarily even know who to strike back at. Drones and miniature robots of all sorts will render the conventional part of armies, air forces and navies much less useful, and they will also have more of an affect on the citizenry and will also be harder for countries to respond to. Miniature drones will also be used more by law enforcement as well as by criminals.
5. a) Putin will finish installing himself as dictator, or else he will be kicked out amid burgeoning protests. He wants to fix Russia's problems, but he has totally gutted every aspect of Russia's democracy in order to gain the power that he thinks he needs. Russia is at his mercy. We'll have to hope he's a "nice" dictator.
b) China might attempt to influence a coup in which Kim Jong Un of North Korea will be replaced by one of his brothers--but probably not. (Actually, there is so little available information on North Korea that I would be foolish to make any prediction.)
c) Iran, already a brutal, corrupt police state, a giant mullah-sanctioned house of prostitution, and an opium den in which an astonishing 5% of the adult population is addicted, has the same problems of unemployment and lack of opportunity faced by the young in other Muslim countries that have revolted. It's schizophrenic religious/democratic government has been co-opted by an alliance between the hard-line, dictatorial president Ahmadinejad and his clerical allies. I predict that another attempt at a democratic revolt by the young may occur within the next few years. It's also possible that a death of one or more of the geriatric ruling clerics will result in another power struggle. Incidentally, I believe the whole nuclear standoff is at least partly Ahmadinejad's scheme to rally the country around him and allow him to crush dissent. In any case, Russia and China will make sure the sanctions on Iran have limited effectiveness--and in doing so, may actually be doing the world a favor. Pressing Ahmadinejad in a corner and having him start a war would not be helpful.
d) The U.S.'s relationship with Mexico will become more problematic, as the illegal immigrant dilemma is allowed to develop into a real crisis and strong emotions give way to possible riots and ethnic strife.
e) China will lead the world in new environmental technologies, electric cars, and many other technologies and will export products to the U.S. using these homegrown Chinese technologies. Prior to this, U.S. businesses will be starved out of China once the (illegal) transfer of existing technology is complete, via China's increased government subsidies for copycat products made by Chinese companies.
f) Iran is on a race against time, and only a strike by Israel will stop their efforts to build nuclear-tipped missiles--and Iran has vowed to fight back. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are quietly building their own nuclear program as a response to this threat. However, if there is a truly serious, near-term armagedden-type threat, it will likely come directly or indirectly from either Russia or Pakistan, which are both in political turmoil and have lots of serious nuclear weapons.
g) It would be easy to be pessimistic with respect to the financial markets, but I'm going to predict a good year in 2012. My reasoning will be that corporations (and even some countries) are sitting on piles of money waiting to be invested; not to mention all the inflationary government stimulus. Now that IS a bit like sticking my neck out!
11. After the next ten years, less than six percent of our cars will be battery powered.
1. The solar revolution has finally begun in earnest. Over the next 10 years, it will grow by leaps and bounds, taking over coal, natural gas and eventually petroleum (and even shale gas and oil) as the leader in energy. It will represent a booming industry that we can scarcely imagine even today. I'm not not really going out on a limb here, I'm only making some inferences from articles like this and this and this etc. I'm more optimistic than BP, though. I figure that if the cost of solar really achieves grid parity by 2015 as predicted in the first article, then Katie bar the door. Wind energy will also continue to grow. The U.S. has the potential to harness 14.5 million gigawatts of wind energy each year, although currently it produces only 43,461 gigawatts. Wind and solar energy grew by 30-40% in 2010, and world wind and solar grew by 35% in 2011. Chinese companies have quickly become the low-cost supplier and is crushing all competition, and as a result, 2011 has been brutal to U.S. solar and wind power producers. Thanks to Chinese pricing, solar is already cheaper than diesel, and has already gone mainstream in India, where some large companies are "jettisoning diesel in favor of solar panels".
2. In the next 10 years, we will see some bubbles that will pop:
a) The U.S. dollar will implode sometime after Europe gets their house in order, and our political power and prestige in the world will take a huge hit. I don't know whether this will happen in one day or over a period of years. It might follow an earlier implosion of derivatives worldwide.
b) The soaring cost of higher education (especially state-funded public institutions) will peak and implode as more people opt for less expensive Internet classes. A crisis will ensue as professors lose their jobs or opt for working in internet-based teaching companies. This crisis will be further exacerbated by the lack of jobs for college-educated people.
c) The price of farmland will eventually peak as a result of speculation and high commodity prices, and then when prices drop, farmers will be going belly up all over the place...except those farmers who are getting payments for wind generators...they will be buying up their bankrupt neighbors.
d) Health care practitioner salaries, malpractice costs, unnecessary procedure costs, drug costs, insurance and government oversight costs, technology costs and unhealthy diet costs will continue to skyrocket. A larger and larger percentage of people will lose their company health care benefits. Medicare will collapse, and we'll then either leave the poor and destitute to die, or we will adopt socialized medicine, similar to the European countries. In the meantime, there will be lots of political turmoil.
e) China will attempt to buy up our best technology companies, in the same way they are currently buying Japanese companies. This will create a political furor, but we may not be able to keep it from happening any more than Japan is able to keep it from happening right now.
3. Facebook's stock will droop once it goes public. Apple will also become less popular as Google Android sales rise and Microsoft & Nokia also make a comeback. Cd's and even DVDs will fade out of use. Land line phones will disappear. Kmart, Sears and Radio Shack will close their doors.
4. Cyber warfare will preempt our ability to consciously declare (or not declare) war. It will be continuous and have no end. It will no longer just affect the army, but it will affect us, the citizens. We won't necessarily even know who to strike back at. Drones and miniature robots of all sorts will render the conventional part of armies, air forces and navies much less useful, and they will also have more of an affect on the citizenry and will also be harder for countries to respond to. Miniature drones will also be used more by law enforcement as well as by criminals.
5. a) Putin will finish installing himself as dictator, or else he will be kicked out amid burgeoning protests. He wants to fix Russia's problems, but he has totally gutted every aspect of Russia's democracy in order to gain the power that he thinks he needs. Russia is at his mercy. We'll have to hope he's a "nice" dictator.
b) China might attempt to influence a coup in which Kim Jong Un of North Korea will be replaced by one of his brothers--but probably not. (Actually, there is so little available information on North Korea that I would be foolish to make any prediction.)
c) Iran, already a brutal, corrupt police state, a giant mullah-sanctioned house of prostitution, and an opium den in which an astonishing 5% of the adult population is addicted, has the same problems of unemployment and lack of opportunity faced by the young in other Muslim countries that have revolted. It's schizophrenic religious/democratic government has been co-opted by an alliance between the hard-line, dictatorial president Ahmadinejad and his clerical allies. I predict that another attempt at a democratic revolt by the young may occur within the next few years. It's also possible that a death of one or more of the geriatric ruling clerics will result in another power struggle. Incidentally, I believe the whole nuclear standoff is at least partly Ahmadinejad's scheme to rally the country around him and allow him to crush dissent. In any case, Russia and China will make sure the sanctions on Iran have limited effectiveness--and in doing so, may actually be doing the world a favor. Pressing Ahmadinejad in a corner and having him start a war would not be helpful.
d) The U.S.'s relationship with Mexico will become more problematic, as the illegal immigrant dilemma is allowed to develop into a real crisis and strong emotions give way to possible riots and ethnic strife.
e) China will lead the world in new environmental technologies, electric cars, and many other technologies and will export products to the U.S. using these homegrown Chinese technologies. Prior to this, U.S. businesses will be starved out of China once the (illegal) transfer of existing technology is complete, via China's increased government subsidies for copycat products made by Chinese companies.
f) Iran is on a race against time, and only a strike by Israel will stop their efforts to build nuclear-tipped missiles--and Iran has vowed to fight back. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are quietly building their own nuclear program as a response to this threat. However, if there is a truly serious, near-term armagedden-type threat, it will likely come directly or indirectly from either Russia or Pakistan, which are both in political turmoil and have lots of serious nuclear weapons.
g) It would be easy to be pessimistic with respect to the financial markets, but I'm going to predict a good year in 2012. My reasoning will be that corporations (and even some countries) are sitting on piles of money waiting to be invested; not to mention all the inflationary government stimulus. Now that IS a bit like sticking my neck out!
Alternative and Possibly
Wild Predictions for the Next Few Years
Made 4-2012
1. Solar and wind energy will
slowly add to our electric grid, and within about 50 years, will supply about 20 percent of the electricity used in North America.
2. Over the next ten years, we will see approximately 20
percent inflation, with a return to higher interest rates.
3. One of the first signs that the health of our economy is improving will
be a sudden uptick in stock prices.
4. The national media will never publicly admit that there is
enough oil in the Canadian oil sands to provide North America with enough oil at
current consumption rates to last for the next 100 years, and the new oil
fields in North Dakota have at least twice that amount.
5. No matter which direction health care moves, it will become
more expensive and the weakest in our society will suffer the most in the next
ten years.
6. Our federal government will continue rapid growth over the
next ten years as needs increase for various forms of litigation.
7. Much of our future warfare will include both ways to get directly
at specific leaders, and to get information to the masses.
8. The North Korea political and economic situation will change
little over the next ten years.
9. Within the next five years, Israel and the United States
will carry out a joint mission to bomb Iran’s mountain bunker and will take out
a few jets and many missiles.
10. Within the next ten
years, real estate prices will skyrocket when current inventories dry up.
11. After the next ten years, less than six percent of our cars will be battery powered.
12. In the next ten years, there will be competition for
information data bases on individuals habits, preferences, genetics, and
finances, followed by copy write and litigation issues.
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