It’s almost unheard of that any action is taken. Yet fortunes in money and grief could be saved if some of these warnings were heeded. The trick, of course, is to understand who is simply making good analytical connections, and who is making a drug-inspired prediction because a goat is in the seventh house of Blues, or whatever.

For instance, the creator of IBM, Thomas Watson, once said, “We anticipate a global world-market with place for perhaps five computers.”

Perhaps that’s not a good example. What about the people in Houston who were saying in 1970 that the region had an air quality problem? Thirty years later, we’ve just developed a plan, after decades of argument that the sky was not filling, when it fact it was.

Or when a major study about Houston back in 1990 concluded the city was losing tons of taxpayer dollars because it was reacting to growth instead of planning it. Today, still reacting, we’re in a monstrous budget crisis and worried about infrastructure problems – particularly sewers – that people don’t even want to think about.

There are a lot of examples of people pointing out new trends and patterns, and of course they’re often wrong. But I have a growing list of things that I can guarantee are going to happen. Here are a few of them:

• We will turn to distributed power generation, starting in isolated areas and moving into cities.
• We will add “green infrastructure” to our mix of infrastructure, and the direction will be toward establishing networks, not isolated units.
• We will create thousands of “quality places” and demand for living near them will reach above 55 percent of residents.
• We will divide our transportation systems to enable through traffic and local traffic to move in separate channels in metropolitan areas.
• “Super-regions” like New York/Washington/Baltimore will be connected by elevated high-speed trains running at 350 miles per hour.
• Metropolitan areas will abandon physical growth as a goal and turn to income growth.
• Business leaders will view poverty as the major impediment to economic development.

What are the ramifications of all these? Well, I can see the bottom of the page coming, so let’s just look at the first one: “We will turn to distributed power generation across America, starting in isolated areas and moving into cities.”

Distributed power generation means we’ll move away from huge central power plants and bring the equipment to make electricity closer to its use. Today, a lot of banks and hospitals use fuel cell power plants as backup power because it is the most reliable system there is. There are no emissions (except small amounts of pure water) and no sound. In the northwest, small, individual fuel cell plants are powering 200 houses in a Bonneville Power project. There are no electrical wires connecting the houses. They’re off the grid.

Daimler-Chrysler says it will put fuel cell-powered cars up for sale in 2004 and the federal government has now chosen fuel cells as the next power source for cars. So let’s say you have one of these cars, and you park it in your garage at night with the fuel cell on, noiselessly feeding electricity into your house.

This is coming, so how do we get ready? Do we put up more wires all over the city? Build new central power plants? Or do we start to design all our new buildings for this technology, which is absolutely clearly coming? Or do we not even think about it, and ignore the fact that California is turning rapidly in this direction?

Since I have guaranteed all these things will happen, I need to note that what I am talking about here is innovation, and a community’s willingness and ability to produce and absorb it. I’m just a little bit short of a guarantee that the City of Houston is going to engage in a General Plan process in a couple of months, but if we do, are we ready to look at the future and do our best to be among the first to innovate and try new ideas? I hope so, because I live here.

PS: Last month I wrote about my intense moral struggle over buying a new car and promised to continue that thrilling account. Here’s what happened:

I went to San Diego, and while I was walking around downtown, I stumbled upon a showroom jammed with classic cars, including a 1970 Mercedes 250 convertible. The price was the same as I was willing to pay for some dumpy little fuel-efficient car that would solve all my moral problems but leave me hungry for style and flash.

The next day I went back, on the verge of throttling the little voice of conscience that was still trying, but getting weaker. The car was gone. In its place was a 1955 Thunderbird that cost a little bit more but was even better than the Mercedes.

Dazed and confused, I roamed the streets and finally hit on a justification: if I buy a used car I’ll be refusing to encourage creation of a new car, I’ll be recycling, and I’ll be making a statement for style. It was all baloney, but it almost worked. In the end, I knew I couldn’t bring a Thunderbird home, but I had opened a new front: the used car idea.

Well, that evolved into the idea of getting my current car fixed and not getting another car at all. And that just killed all the speculation, and today I’m not doing anything about it. I still have the old car, I haven’t repaired it, and I’m not looking for a new car. It’s all just too hard.