Smith argues that the combined trends in demography, natural resource use, globalisation and climate change, as well as urbanisation will crucially change the world by 2050. Without any wild cards such as a change in the global thermohaline circulation system, huge land-based melting of ice, carbon emissions from thawing of the permafrost, which will affect the whole world dearly, the likely new winners will be the Northern Rim countries (NORCs), with Russia being a bit of an outlier. Sure losers are those countries closer to the tropics. How the NORCs will be handling their newfound wealth is a bit of a mixed bag. Smith mentions the Canadian tar sands as an example of massive environmental destruction with a potential much larger than it is today, but also speaks positively about the NORCs' ability to secure agreements in a rather peaceful way. It is a book worth reading, but with so many books on environmental trends and geopolitics a focus on how human behaviour interacts with such new unfolding realities, is lacking. Human beings are not just passive recipients of such mega trends, in fact, many of those are shaped by our own decisions.