23already begun. In coming years, as ris-
ing seas and violent storms command
our attention, and as green energy
technologies become more affordable,
the governments of countries that re-
main dependent on fossil fuel exports
will face collapse, and as decarboniza-
tion strategies advance, these countries
will export less oil and more turmoil.
The shift toward cleaner energy will
transform long-standing fossil-fuel-
based trade partnerships like China
and Russia, and the U.S. and Saudi Ara-
bia. That trend will shift the balance of
power across entire regions and stoke
conflicts that must be contained.
One of the most important ques-
tions is how to prepare for a world
with the tens of millions of climate
refugees that will be created by the
havoc from rising sea levels and
increasingly erratic weather pat-
terns. The political, economic, and hu-
manitarian stakes couldn’t be higher.
THERE’S ANOTHER CHALLENGE that
may also amount to a crisis. A wide
range of disruptive new technologies
are fundamentally changing our rela-
tionships with government and with
one another. They’re changing the way
we think and the way we live—often in
ways we don’t understand.
Even in a time of pandemic, when
millions of lives depend on scientists
and doctors to develop new protec-
tions and treatments quickly, we don’t
inject large numbers of people with
a new drug until we’ve tested it. We
need to know how it will affect peo-
ple, whether it will protect them, how
long the protection will last, and what
side effects it might have. But when
we develop new algorithms that de-
termine which ideas, information,
and images we’ll ingest, the way we’ll
spend money, the products we’ll buy,
and how we’ll interact with other peo-
ple, we do no testing at all. We allow
private companies to inject all this di-
rectly into the public bloodstream.
Think of the many other ways new
technologies are transforming our lives.
They’re already reinventing the skills
needed to earn a living, for example. We
know that many workplaces are being
automated, and that robots are perform-
ing a lot more jobs once held by people.
But a 2019 study from the Brookings
Institution found that workers with
graduate or professional degrees will be
almost four times as exposed to AI dis-
placement in coming years as workers
with a high school diploma.New technologies are also changing
warfare. In the coming age of autono-
mous weapons, war will more often
be waged with the use of buttons that
push themselves—by calculating how
and when to strike without human
oversight. In addition, cyberweap-
ons are far more likely to be used on
a large scale than far more expensive
and harder to use nuclear weapons.
They have already been deployed with
increasingly disruptive effects in re-
cent years, and the emerging Cold War
confrontation between Russia and the
West will highlight their dangers.
The primary cause for optimism
won’t come from American leader-
ship, hampered by bitter partisan divi-
sions, or from U.S.-China cooperation,
particularly in areas of fundamental
ideological differences over the rights
of the individual. Fortunately, Europe
is already playing a crucial regula-
tory role in some of these areas. On
questions of data use and privacy,
E.U. leaders are using the size of the
European market to set rules for the
globe. The world’s largest tech compa-
nies have far more power to effectively
govern the digital space than any gov-
ernment does. Facebook, Google, Am-
azon, Microsoft, and Apple have all
accumulated power that makes them
arbiters of global affairs.
Whether the crisis that must be ad-
dressed is a new Cold War, the next
pandemic, the profound disruption
of climate change, or the dehuman-
izing power of many new technolo-
gies, there are challenges ahead that
threaten our survival—but which can
also form the basis for practical coop-
eration on important issues.
Our decisionmakers and influencers
don’t have to like one another, much less
agree on a single set of political and eco-
nomic values. They don’t need to solve
every problem. But never has it been
more obvious that political leaders, the
private sector, and citizens of all coun-
tries had better cooperate toward goals
we can’t achieve alone. History shows
it’s both necessary and possible.Adapted from Bremmer’s new book, The
Power of Crisis: How Three Threats—
And Our Response—Will Change the
World, published by Simon & SchusterCooling towers at the Niederaussem coal-fueled power station in Germany as
the country starts to cut its reliance on Russian coal