End of the Hydrocarbon Age

The year 2030 is considered by most modern historians to mark the end of the Hydrocarbon Age and the beginning of the Virtual Age. That was the year by which almost every government in the world had decreed that individual citizens could no longer directly use the Earth’s nearly depleted supply of fossil fuels; what remained of coal, oil, and natural gas reserves would be allocated exclusively to government agencies (especially law enforcement and the military) and to companies authorized to manufacture or transport food and other necessities to its citizens.

In fact by 2020, the leaders of most countries (with the glaring exception of the isolationist USNA, which had a centuries-long history of “going its own way”) had recognized that fossil fuels were about to run out after two decades of exponentially increasing energy use. This extraordinary demand for energy was largely driven by industrialization and runaway consumerism in highly populous formerly agricultural countries like China, India, and Indonesia and by the inability of the so-called developed countries to curb their appetites for petroleum-guzzling private automobiles, cavernous stand-alone single-family homes (dubbed McMansions at the time), frequent non-essential air travel, and a dizzying array of unnecessary consumer products. Thus, in 2021, most countries, in keeping with United Nations resolutions, passed draconian laws that greatly restricted civilian use of fossil fuels, strictly enforced energy conservation measures, and began to re-establish communities that did not depend on petroleum-based transportation of people and products. Over the next decade, super highways fell into disuse, international airports were closed, and waterways became the primary means of transporting products, leading to The Great Change.

In the USNA, meanwhile, fossil fuel shortages and rapidly-rising fuel prices that had begun in 2005 intensified dramatically over the next two decades, leading to widespread anger at profiteering energy companies and the Republicrat administrations that protected their interests under the pretext of homeland security.

In rural and suburban areas of the USNA this anger was expressed primarily in the voting booth where neo-Populist politicians were elected to congress on promises that they would limit federal government interference with the states and state laws were passed that limited the interference of the states in individual lives. The result was a highly destructive and peculiarly American reactionary movement, neo-Anarchism , which took the position of “every family for itself” in an era that required exactly the opposite---extraordinary cooperation and mutual sacrifice.

In most urban areas of the USNA, something quite different, but equally dangerous was occurring; as the prices for food and other necessities that required fuel for their manufacture and transport climbed ever higher (compounded by uncontrolled inflation in health care costs), vast numbers of previously middle-class people became working-poor, many of them going into personal bankruptcy, losing their homes to mortgage foreclosures, and having to make choices between feeding their families and expenditures for any other purpose. The reduction of all but critical spending by so many people set off wide-spread collapse of many sectors of the cities’ economies, including: restaurants, private transportation services, and most retail stores. This in turn led to widespread lay-offs, so that soon the working poor were no longer working. Largely African-American cities like Newark, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Gary virtually stopped functioning, leaving its entire populace in the sort of grinding poverty and hopelessness more commonly associated with famine-ridden regions in Africa. Meanwhile, the wealthy continued to become wealthier, as their energy, food, and tech stocks flourished. As the gap between the very rich and everyone else became a highly visible and unbreachable chasm, the inevitable occurred: unchecked urban riots and looting, which, when it spread to the wealthier suburbs, was countered by repressive law enforcement by the all-powerful Department of Homeland Security.

Finally, however, in 2030, the USNA fragmented into more than a dozen smaller countries and city-states all of which joined with the rest of the world in totally banning individual citizens’ use of fossil fuels. However, by that time, with the exception of progressive and foresighted countries like New Vermont and wealthy city-states like New York, much of the former USNA was far behind most of the rest of the world in creating the infrastructure for this “brave new world.”

Although many scientists, especially those in the field of Global Sustainability Planning, had for many years warned of the imminent depletion of fossil fuels, when it actually happened, it appeared to come as a colossal surprise to most American lay people, who had been reassured by the Authorities for years that alternative energy sources would solve the energy crisis long before fossil fuels ran out. Among those touted by the authorities in the first two decades of the century were: traditional nuclear fission cold-fusion nuclear energy, solar energy, wind power, geothermal energy, hydro-electric power, hydrogen fuel cells, synfuels from coal, and gasohol from corn that could be grown in abundance almost anywhere.

What few ordinary Americans citizens realized, and what politicians in the USNA hadn’t had the courage (or honesty) to reveal to voters, was that the world’s swollen population of forty billion with its dramatically growing and energy-dependent standard of living would far outpace companies’ and most governments’ abilities to shift to other forms of energy. So, for example, by 2020, the world was so low on fossil fuels that it couldn’t manufacture the fertilizer needed to efficiently grow corn for gasohol or cost-effectively mine, ship, and convert coal to synfuels. Moreover, although renewable sources of energy produced by efficient solar panels and huge wind-generators had helped meet the energy needs of some of the Earth's less densely populated regions, they couldn't put a dent in the needs of the world's burgeoning city-states. Similarly, natural energy sources like geothermal and hydroelectric power were, and still are, so limited and their transport so costly and inefficient that, even today, they can, at best, meet the energy requirements of their immediate regions like the exclusive gated enclaves of Greater Niagara Falls and Yellowstone Park .

In contrast to the laissez-fair approach taken by the USNA throughout the first two decades of the century, the European Union, India, and the New People’s Republic of China, through careful planning and timely investment, were initially, at least, successful at producing enough energy from newly constructed, relatively safe and efficient nuclear power plants. The latter have continued their safe and innovative nuclear power programs to this day. However, in the 2020s, Europeans turned against nuclear power when meltdowns at several technically substandard nuclear power plants in the former Soviet Union led to the deaths of tens of thousands and poisonous radioactive fallout that rained down across the European continent. Although accounts of these meltdowns have been largely expunged from the authorized historical record, you may be able to find individual citizen-witness accounts of earlier, 20th century nuclear power plant disasters like the one at Chernobyl in Ukraine .

In the USNA, meanwhile, anti-nuclear energy sentiment in the first decade of the century was very high as a result of the shocking attacks on several of its large urban centers by terrorist groups using “dirty bombs,” laden with radioactive material stolen from nuclear waste dumps and inadequately protected nuclear sites in the former Soviet Union. Although the actual damage caused by the radioactivity was slight, the panic that ensued killed thousands and seriously disrupted the nation’s economy and the lives of millions. There ensued nearly a decade of debate among environmentalists, private industry, and USNA government officials over the construction of new nuclear power plants, so that when the severe energy crisis of 2015 hit, the USNA ended up pursuing a disastrous and short-sighted policy of re-commissioning older (1970s era), unsafe nuclear power plants .

The result is well known to all: meltdowns and explosions in a half-dozen of American nuclear power plants over a 10 year period, leading to the deaths and serious illness of thousands. And worse was to come with the discovery in 2025 that, for nearly 20 years, tons of nuclear waste stored in various sites in the USNA southwest had been leaking into the water supply, initially resulting in tens of thousands of deaths from radiation poisoning among those living in the immediate areas.

Much of the population of the southwest had, by this time, already left due to the near impossibility of providing adequate power for air conditioning and the rapidly diminishing water supplies to support the vast population resulting from overdevelopment. Now, however, the radioactive contamination of much of the remaining water supplies forced the government to order the complete abandonment of the entire southwest, leaving it an arid land of hundreds of ghost towns and cities. Gone were the cities of Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, El Paso, Juarez, and all the smaller cities and towns of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, west Texas, and northern Mexico.

As a result, the Hydrocarbon Age did not give way to a Nuclear Energy Age in most of the world, but rather to a Virtual Age.

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