1948. A Choice of Futures

Fans of speculative fiction will be familiar with the concept of alternative futures, where a change in the past creates a different present to the one we know.  In 1948 George Kennan wrote a paper, then classified Top Secret,which looked at the world of the time and mapped out the dangers and options for what was then the newly established 'Empire of the USA'.

Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American adviser, diplomat, political scientist and historian.  He served as deputy head of the U.S. mission in Moscow until April 1946. And between April 1947 and December 1948,  Kennan was an advisor to George C Marshall, Secretary of State. Kennan is regarded as the architect of the Marshal plan, the post war financial support that countries in Europe received in the post war period. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan

At the time the USA was at the top of its game, with a supercharged industry and the sole possessor of the nuclear weapons that had cost it plenty to produce but would be, until 1949, be its sole privilege. As Kennan writes, the USA had 50% of the world's wealth and 6.5% of the world's population. Thus, the USA was in a position to buy the sort of future that it wanted. And, having just brought the latest war in europe to a close,  it had a special interest there.

The Marshall plan, which would cost the USA some $13 billion, was fundamental to the rebuilding of post-war europe. The USA was very concerned about the possibility of the spread of communism at the end of the second world war. In Germany, Italy and elsewhere communism had growing support. To have won the war but ultimately lost europe to communism would be failure and people like Kennan felt that european industry, particularly German industry, needed to be quickly rebuilt unless communism was to spread across into western Europe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

Kennan's  PPS23 memo, 

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Memo_PPS23_by_George_Kennan 

contains some insights into how the USA looked at the rest of the world in 1948. Modern day eurosceptics may find it interesting to see how an American thinker looked towards a federated Europe, with active participation by Britain.

"Some form of political, military and economic union in Western Europe will be necessary if the free nations of Europe are to hold their own against the people of the east united under Moscow rule.

It is questionable whether this union could be strong enough to serve its designed purpose unless it had the participation and support of Great Britain.… Britain could be encouraged to proceed vigorously with her plans for participation in a European union," 

Well, we know how that turned out. But alternate possibilities are also conjectured by Kennan.

"If we were to take Britain into our own U.S.-Canadian orbit, according to some formula of “Union now”, this would probably solve Britain's long term economic problem and create a natural political entity of great strength. But this would tend to cut Britain off from the close political association she is seeking with continental nations and might therefore have the ultimate effect of rendering the continental nations more vulnerable to Russian pressure'

The Union Now reference, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Now is a pre-war proposal by an American journalist, Clarence Streit, who "proposed a Union that, along the lines of American federalism, brought together the democracies of Europe, North America and former parts of the British Empire, under a single government with the power to grant citizenship and wage war; its membership would expand as more nations joined the democratic camp." (Those former parts of the British Empire being the white parts.) 

This future then, would be a uniion, with a common currency, freedom to work anywhere, and no trade tariffs between the sovereign states. It's a kind of super EU which includes  North America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand as well. Although, as George Orwell pointed out in an essay Not Counting Niggers, the whites would retain the privilege and the black population of the British and French empires would continue to be exploited.

In 1948 there were fears, shared by the Soviet Union, that a united Germany would present a future danger. Kennan again, "If there is no real European federation and if Germany is restored as a strong and independent country, we must expect another attempt at German domination." Other options in Kennan's paper are, the possibility of a federal Europe where Germany is broken up into much smaller pieces. Perhaps along the lines of the occupation zones of the time. With the Federal Europe to include this weakened, partioned Germany.

In the end, of course, a partitioned Germany with the western part as a cornerstone of the EU is what we got. Later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a Germany united with many of its former components restored and with a large part of Europe united in a common currency.

The Marshall plan, which came with strings attached, played a big part in shaping present day Europe. But it's not all turned out according to Kennan's futures. He didn't predict the demise of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent admission of so many of the eastern, former communist block, states to the EU. (the law of unintended consequences/beware of what you wish for) And that Union Now idea melted away. Paving the way for a much larger EU, eventually including more parts of eastern europe.

Today's European Union has a larger economy than the USA, see table. The union has succeeded beyond all expectations. wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP

	GDP (millions of US$)
	World	62,911,253
	European Union	16,242,256
	United States	14,526,550
	China, People's Republic of	5,878,257

The eurosceptics in Britain will, no doubt, continue to predict the imminent demise of the EU, and many will long for that special relationship between Britain and the USA. Interesting that it could have gone that way  if different choices had been made, back in 1948.  

Think Tanks

Recently I've been writing about propaganda and the way vested interests use it to influence the media. Chomsky refers to, a Bought Priesthood, the technocrats, columnists, pundits, university professors, intellectuals and business lobbyists  who benefit from the political status quo and use their position to defend and support it.
These, according to the Chomsky propaganda model, provide the media with large amounts of ready-to-print material to support the needs of special interest groups. So who are the people providing this material? 


I've previously mentioned: Global_Climate_Coalition This now defunct lobby group took financial support from BP, Esso, Ford and General Motors. Although this group eventually folded, as the evidence for Global Warming increased, the denier propaganda  that they disseminated in their heyday is still being repeated today. 
One group that is still very much in business is Policy Exchange. This organisation describes itself as an " independent, non-partisan educational charity".  A look at the testimonials dotted around the Policy Exchange website will give you some idea of how non-partisan they are. Even Boris Johnston recognises that they represent the interests of the centre right:

They produce, apparently 'a torrent of ... media scoops', I think Boris probably means press releases than can be reprinted by the media at no cost. The print media, worldwide, are all having huge financial problems. No one has come up with a financial model that allows them to make a profit in the face of so much free, online competition. Therefore, anything that can reduce their costs, by allowing them to fill the pages with zero effort, is hard to refuse.
The kind of article that gets sourced from the material produced by Policy Exchange is thus dailymail/Green-taxes-treble-2020-costing-taxpayers-16bn-year     
This article opens with "Taxes to pay for contentious climate change policies are set to treble over the next decade, soaring to more than £16billion a year." 


Another think tank is the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Today they picked up on the BBC interview with Steven Hawking, where Hawking repeated his warning that climate change, or nuclear war could mean the end of the human race. GWPF came up with an item, Scientist criticise Hawkings doomsday hype, quoting another BBC interview.

scientists-criticise-hawkings-doomsday-hype
So who are these scientists? One was Dr Benny Peiser, from Liverpool John Moores University, UK, who was, apparently, highly critical of the reported remarks. The second was Sir Arthur C. Clarke!   
Now it turns out that Dr Peiser actually runs the Global Warming Policy Foundation, so no surprises there. More improbable was the snippet from Sir Arthur C Clarke who was quoted as saying,  "I am surprised Professor Hawking didn't mention the danger of an asteroid impact which is inevitable sooner or later. Admittedly, this is most unlikely to wipe out the human race, but it could send us back to the Stone Age."
Well ACC was a great SF writer and asteroid impact on Earth was one of his plot devices. Quoting him on this can hardly be considered criticism of Steven Hawking, but somehow GWPF makes it seem so. BTW, Global Warming Policy Foundation have to go back to a news item from the year 2001 to find the quote from Clarke. (Unsurprisingly, as Sir Arthur died in 2008)

Policy Exchange and the Global Warming Policy Foundation are both registered charities. Last year Policy Exchange turned over £2 million yet it enjoys the tax advantages of a charity. Global Warming Policy Foundation is rather smaller, it has 3 employees and turns over a mere £500,000 a year. 
The thing about charities is, they are supposed to be non-political. UK based organisations such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth can not be considered charities in the UK because of their political positions. Given this, it seems nothing short of astonishing that the likes of Policy Exchange and Global Warming Policy Foundation, which are little more than a neocon propaganda units, should have the status as a charity.


"Think Tanks. . . phoney institutes where ideologue-propagandists pose as academics ... into which money gushes like blood from opened arteries to support meaningless advertising's suffocation of genuine debate". (John Chuckman)

Engineering Consent

Edward Bernays is most famous for introducing the concept of manipulating public opinion for profit. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays dreamt up a number of breathtaking techniques that have changed the way opinions are formed, and ideas sold, using the mass media.

In an essay called Engineering Consent he wrote,  "entire populations, which are undisciplined or lacking in intellectual or definite moral principles, are vulnerable to unconscious influence and susceptible to want things that they do not need."


Bernay's first major triumph, in the field of advertising, was in the campaign to persuade women to smoke. At the time, the 1920's, there was a taboo against women smoking. Bernays cleverly associated women's smoking with the campaign for votes for women. Totally spuriously, he propagated  the idea women campaigning for the right to vote considered the cigarette the symbol of their cause, the Torch of Freedom.


Bernay paid women to smoke in public and took photographs of them. These were always attractive women, but carefully chosen not to look like models. The newspapers were supplied with these pictures along with explanatory copy which they could use free of charge. Interestingly, this led to genuine campaigners for women's votes picking up on the cigarette campaign and eventually endorsing it.

Since 1920, when Bernay's techniques were still called propaganda, opinion manipulation has gone from strength to strength. The Nazis excelled at such matters, so well in fact that they brought the word into disrepute and Bernays had to come up with a new term, Public Relations, to replace propaganda.


In earlier times advertising had been about announcing the latest products and their features. But now the owners of the big manufacturing companies, and the banks, wanted people to buy more than merely what they needed, they must now desire things. With Bernays help, through the manipulation of irrational desire,  the consumer was invented.


Paul Mazer, a Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s, said, "We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. ... Man's desires must overshadow his needs." Bernay's, with his Freudian connections, linked sex to marketing and soon American car ads showed couples enjoying almost orgasmic delight over their new car purchases.   


Eventually all political campaigns latched on to public relations and by 1997 Britain's Labour Party had fully embraced the marketing model to the extent that actual, fundemental policies, in particular Clause 4, were abandoned.


Because the two main parties in Britain have well entrenched support the New Labour campaign of 1997 concentrated first on identifying the 'swing' voters, those who might or might not  support Labour, depending on policies. 


Once typical swing voters were identified they were invited to join focus groups and what would please the focus group was then investigated. From this Labour's campaign was developed. 


This focus group strategy, (tell me what you want, what you really, really want) is now used to market everything from movies to cake mix. It doesn't just identify what the voters want, or rather what the focus group wants, it also changes the product. Nowadays movies are 'test screened' so that the producers can decide which of a variety of endings is most satisfactory. So too were New Labour policies test marketed, to see what would engender the most votes.  


Of course, some causes are not negotiable. Support for unpopular wars must still be 'sold' to the public. And certain agendas, pro-nuclear power, for example, are promoted by strong vested interests. The media is saturated with input from armies of special interest groups each promoting a particular cause.


Neom Chomsky, the linguistics expert and liberal has gone to lengths to identify how public opinion is manipulated, for both political and consumer marketing ends.  

Chomsky refers to the Bought Priesthood, the technocrats, columnists, pundits, university professors, intellectuals and business lobbyists  who benefit from the political status quo and use their position to defend and support it.

Chomsky argues that all mass media news comes ready filtered, for our consumption, via the Propaganda Model. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model#The_filters 

Filter 1, Ownership. 

The ownership of mainstream media is concentrated into a decreasing number of growth orientated, profit motivated clusters. The BBC cannot be excluded from this group, as in order to maintain funding they have to keep the government of the day on side. As Jon Pilger wrote, "The BBC began in 1922, just before the corporate press began in America.  In the same year the British establishment was under siege. The unions had called a general strike and the Tories were terrified that a revolution was on the way. The new BBC came to their rescue. In high secrecy, Lord Reith wrote anti-union speeches for the Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and broadcast them to the nation, while refusing to allow the labor leaders to put their side until the strike was over."


Filter 2, Advertising. 
Stories that conflict with a "buying mood", will tend to be excluded, along with information that presents a picture of the world that collides with advertisers' interests.


Filter 3, Sourcing. 
All news media have to maintain their sources, they have to keep in good favour with government spokespeople in order to maintain the flow of news.


Filter 4 Flak. 
The US-based Global Climate Coalition (GCC) - comprising fossil fuel and automobile companies such as Exxon, Texaco and Ford is a typical flak machine. The GCC was started up by Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest public relations companies, to attack the credibility of climate scientists and 'scare stories' about global warming. 


Filter 5, originally, Anti-communism and fear. 
This filter speaks of the selecting of bogeymen, originally communists but lately any group who might be accused of possibly having a terrorist agenda. The recent Occupy (Wall Street) etc have already started to share this demonisation. As Chomsky puts it, "the way artificial fears are created with a dual purpose... partly to get rid of people you don't like but partly to frighten the rest. Because if people are frightened, they will accept authority."   


Watching a recent clip from Christopher Hitchens, he made the amusing observation that at 250 dollars a year a subscription to the Washington Post is way too much. As it's largely an organ of government propaganda it should be free to all taxpayers. (British readers can change that to the Daily Telegraph or the Guardian) 


As the Czech novelist Zdener Urbanek put it. "In dictatorships we are more fortunate that you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know its propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West, we've learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive."

Selling the Big Lie

Napoleon seems to have been amongst the first to acknowledge the power of the media. He said, "Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets." By the time he was developing his news management techniques newspapers had been around a couple of hundred years but by the early 1800s advances in printing techniques had made them much cheaper. That, and increased levels of literacy had lead to the increasing influence  of the press.


At the time of Hitler the first of the broadcast media was appearing. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, recognised that this would have a news-management power at least as important as the press. Goebbels commissioned the development of a cheap radio, the Volksempfänger, that was designed to be both cheap and only capable of receiving the short range German broadcasts.

These days Italy's ex PM Berlusconi has his own TV and radio stations which did not show the cheering crowds in Rome on the day he stepped down. 

And, just in case we might think that news management is just something that Johnnie Foreigner gets up to, keep in mind the pro nuclear power spin that was rolled out in the early hours of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. supply-and-demand 

It's no surprise that where there's money there's someone lobbying to get their story in the papers. This article, from the Guardian, discusses the Climate change denial industry. Largely funded by Exxon.  ethicalliving.g2

This is what Edward Bernays, called "engineering public consent." Edward_Bernays

In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."

The Czech novelist Zdener Urbanek said. "In dictatorships we are more fortunate that you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know its propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West, we've learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive."

John Pilger has  written much more on this subject, please read his excellent article.the-invisible-government


And why does this go on? Unsurprisingly this lobbying stuff is big business. A Washington firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and any politicians who might express sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street, and the other financial centres protests. upwithchrishayes


A free press, you must be joking. Who would call $850,000 free?

The Sound Barrier

There's an old British movie called The Sound Barrier. Filmed in the 1950's it purports to tell the tale of the first attempts to fly faster than sound. At the time it was assumed that airtravel, which was starting to become cheap enough for all to afford, would mean faster and faster speeds. But first there remained the special problem of the Sound Barrier. High speed flight at supersonic speeds seemed to introduce new control problems, or at least that's how the film puts it.

At the moment we have the UK, apparently poised on the brink of something called a double dip recession. The UK, which is not a member of the Euro currency, has the option of using the old money supply controls to manage the economy. When it comes to stoking up a boom the tool that may be used is increasing the money supply. The current euphemism is QE, Quantitative Easing. This, it is claimed, will kick-start the economy by encouraging growth and this, by making it easier to pay more for property. 

This seems to overlook a couple of things, the first being that the current demographic leaves a large part of the working population closing in on retirement age. The younger ones have doubts about their employment prospects and the scarcity of new jobs. 

Secondly, and this is where we get into Sound Barrier territory, is the fact that the old tried and tested device for encouraging growth was last seen to work properly in 2006 and, arguably, something important has changed since then.   

The change is Peak Oil, and this, for me, is where we have crossed into the supersonic region. These days growth no longer has access to an infinite fuel supply. In the old days, say the 1987 run up to the election, it was quite in order to fan the economy with cheap money, but the economies’ fuel was, and is, oil. At that time oil was cheap too, at that time, oil supply exceeded demand by a considerable margin.

This is no longer the case. Of course, officially, the jury is still out on Peak Oil, largely because the people with oil are pretty cagy about how much of it they have. Back when OPEC was being set up some members lied about how much they had because the size of the reserves represented position within OPEC. But there are reasons to believe that we have already past Peak Oil, or else are so close to it as makes no difference.

This means that any attempts to fan the market with cheap money will now be met with a new effect. As an economy tries to come out of recession and oil demand rises now the cost of oil goes up.  We know that whenever this has happened before, because of war related supply restrictions, this has triggered a recession. (see previous blogs.)

This suggests that any attempt to 'kick start' the economy will be stymied, quickly, by an abrupt increase in oil price, with its customary depressing effect on the economy.

So how to deal with this? In the Sound Barrier movie one of the ace test pilots discovers that he can recover control by reversing the controls. To pull out of a dive he must push, rather than pull, the control stick back. In real life supersonic flight is a bit more complex than that, but this is movie as metaphor, not real life. ( In reality, the Sound Barrier was conquered by engineers as they gradually understood more  about airflow in the supersonic region. )

Could the economy be fixed by a 'control reversal'? Instinctively, the citizens of the UK seem reluctant to buy into a new boom. They'd all sooner reduce their credit card debt and not extend their mortgages.

The civil aircraft industry didn’t persevere with supersonic flight. There just weren’t enough movie stars and millionaires to pay for it, hence no replacement for Concorde. Instead the industry chose to move people on mass, and put airtravel within reach of almost everyone. Which, along with mass car ownership and high energy cost agriculture, is why we are at Peak Oil now, and not twenty years from now. 

The only fix on the table is to reduce the demand for oil, while keeping the wheels of industry going. Which means just one thing, more and more investment in renewable energy. If demand for oil can be reduced, there’s a chance of avoiding another oil price boom and shutting growth down.

Long term, this is going to be ever more difficult as oil gets harder to find. We’ll need to much burn less of it, so we can use what is available to keep our energy intensive agricultural systems going. We have to leave sufficient ‘headroom’, between the supply and demand, so that we don’t choke off all growth with high energy prices. 

In the supersonic region the old rules no longer apply.

Supply and Demand

A friend of mine remarked recently that she was surprised that Britain, unlike Germany and Italy, was not making more of the nuclear catastrophe in Japan. A recent item in the Guardian gives some idea why. emails-nuclear-uk-government-fukushima

Here the Guardian reproduce some 80 emails between Government officials and the British nuclear industry. These show that within 2 days  of start of the Japanese disaster the government and industry had their heads together rehearsing their lines. The disaster started on March the 11th and by March the 13th, a Sunday, the British Government had prepared a,'Let's not rush to judgement' announcement. Well they certainly had. On the day the press release came out the Fukushima reactor building 3 exploded.


This was when Energy Secretary Chris Huhne mocked continental politicians, those excitable Germans, for their response to the crises. The stoic British kept to a press strategy that had been worked out the previous weekend. This warned that anti-nuclear types would probably compare the disaster to Chernobel. By the 12th April Japan itself had classified the Fukushima incident as being equivalent to Chernobel.   


The recent revelations regarding News International, the Murdoch news empire, reveal a level of complicity between the press and government.  As regards nuclear power the British Government had decided on its energy policy and it doesn't want to have to go changing it just because of public opinion. Murdoch promised his support to the British government, in return for support of his project to dominate British media. And, perhaps by coincidence, the government had no trouble getting its take on Fukushima into the papers.

Nuclear power is hideously expensive if the costs of incidents like  Fukushima are properly considered. No insurance company will supply cover for a nuclear power station. It is assumed that the government will carry that burden should it be needed. If nuclear power companies had to buy insurance cover on the free market running costs would be much higher. Governments, of course, don't like to remind taxpayers of this important fact, and the nuclear companies certainly don't brag about it. The UK government, in particular, seems to be being led around by the nose by the nuclear industry.

Peak Oil is another issue the British government just doesn't want to think about. The issue driving price is supply and demand. Even the effect of Peak Oil could be cushioned if nations prepare for it and start developing alternatives. If demand reduces before supply starts to decline oil prices don't have to shoot through the roof. This is the lesson of the two big oil crises of the 20th century. These were generated by suppliers intentionally restricting supply and this led to some startling price spikes. When demand outstrips supply prices soar and for no additional effort profits increase, and users must belatedly struggle to find alternatives. Thus, it serves the purpose of the oil business to encourage complacency and downplay the prospect of Peak Oil. 

But, while Britain chortles as Jeremy Clarkson and the Daily Mail mock developments in renewable energy Germany is forging ahead. The Fukushima incident served as a catalyst to Germany to declare that it would start to close down all its nuclear power stations. German hopes to produce 35% of all its electricity from renewables by 2020 and 80% by 2050, with a reduction of electricity usage of 50% by 2050.

Currently the anti-renewable lobby claims that all renewable proposals are lacking when it comes to dealing with the fluctuations of supply, windless day = stationary windmill, thus renewables are in trouble. And that  when renewables fail to meet demand additional costs are incurred by starting up hydrocarbon powered peak-load turbines.


Even with non-renewable power, with much of the load carried by nuclear or coal/oil powered generators, peak load turbines are required. Power consumption goes through all kinds of peaks and troughs during a 24 hour cycle and when demand is very low, at night time, a conventional generator plant often has to waste power venting steam because demand is so low. 


A fully developed renewable system can deal with both demand and supply fluctuations. A very mature, low risk, system is possible that stores power by pumping water into elevated resevoirs.

By pumping water to a higher level at times when demand is low or supply high, and allowing it to flow down and drive a generator when demand is high or supply low, the peaks and troughs of demand and supply can be managed.


However, one of the main issues is finding suitable areas for the two essential bodies of water. Now Germany has come up with an innovative concept, the possibility of flooding used up coal mines therefore concealing the reservoirs underground, and finding a use for those exhausted, non-renewable energy sources the coal mines.


Already some 20% of Germany's electrical power comes from renewable sources: Windpower, Biomass, Hydropower and Photovoltaic Solar power. In the UK it's about 6%. No prizes then for guessing which nation will develop the essential renewable power technologies of the future.

Further down the Hubbert curve

In the last blog I spoke of modeling a fictional world - Beyond Peak Oil. Any real model of the economy, on the downslope of the Hubbert curve, must be immensely complicated, and prone to error. For writing spec. fiction we can use simpler methods. Suppose we look at some key events  of the upslope of the Hubburt curve and revoke them, in the order they took place.

Looking at the last 100 years and projecting forward I can 'predict' an economy changing back from its present  2% of workforce employed in agriculture back to some 20% by 2060.

The exact timescale is in question. The steepness of the downslope of the Hubbert curve depends on demand for oil and its products. If these stay high we can expect a steep downslope which compresses the timescale. If demand reduces the rewind takes longer. Of course, if you are in the oil business the goal is to maximise profits which is best done by ensuring that demand exceeds supply as much as possible, as it has done in the oil crises of the last century.

The story is set in 2060. Describing a society that is an exact mirror of the past period is not interesting. We would, I reckon, be able to maintain some of our technology. A society with computers, the internet and television but without mass, cheap travel.

There is still oil, but it is very expensive. There is some combustion powered aviation, for the super rich. You can buy a small electric car as good as a 2010 combustion powered car but, if you are member of the 20% of the agricultural workforce you can't afford one. You either walk to work, or if you are lucky, go by bike. But you do consider yourself lucky because you are employed and with the healthcare benefits of an employed citizen.

Working people cannot afford to travel much. They see the past century, the Time of Plenty, which is accesible via TV and films, as a lost golden age of apparently universal wealth.

The middle class are much reduced as a percentage of the workforce, many formerly middle class professions are automated or have disappeared as a consequence of the increased cost of hydrocarbons. But the lifestyle of the middle class is superior to the present day.  

The upper class, the super rich, are almost invisible to the naked eye. They travel the world in combustion powered aircraft. They have ownership of wilderness areas and have longer, fulfilled, healthy lives. Just occasionally they come down to earth to influence the world of men.

In some countries there is a virtually abandoned underclass with no rights, no healthcare and almost no social mobility. Such is my model of 2060.