The Great Change

What finally galvanized the governments of the world to cut off the use of fossil fuels for civilian use in 2030 was not what had become the impossibly high costs of travel. Nor was it the worldwide hyper-inflation brought on by the skyrocketing costs of goods, all of which required enormous amounts of energy for their production and transport. It was not even the increasingly destructive impact of Global Warming:
  • critical disruptions of agriculture due to dramatic changes in climate and years-long droughts in formerly lush agricultural areas
  • disastrous annual flooding by nearly every remaining major river in the world
  • dozens of annual killer (class 5+) hurricanes and typhoons
  • tornadoes a commonplace world-wide
  • the dramatic rise in sea levels due to melting of the polar ice caps, resulting in a significant loss of coastline and the virtual submersion of most sea islands of the world, including dozens of island nations like the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Madagascar.

Rather, it was recognition of the unsustainability of the trend, which began with the now infamous Johannesburg Earth Summit in 2002, toward what was euphemistically called “sustainable development,” but which, in truth was more about development than sustainability. As a result of this world summit meeting and the expectations it engendered, billions of people from the developing nations of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America had come to demand a standard of living that included not only improved health and enough to eat, but also cars, air-conditioned homes, and all sorts of electronic consumer devices. These expectations (and demands) placed enormous pressure on the dwindling supplies of fossil fuels, not only for electricity, transportation, and home and office temperature control, but also to produce the myriad synthetic products on which our increasingly comfortable civilization relied. Most critical among these synthetics, in the eyes of citizens and politicians alike, turned out to be the pharmaceuticals that were largely responsible for the enormous improvement in the world’s health, which had taken place in the first decade of the century, spurred on by a series of world-wide flu pandemics and, to a decidedly lesser extent, the African AIDS pandemic. Of course, these very same advances in world health had also resulted in the exponential and unsustainable rise in the population of the Earth, as life expectancies world-wide began to nudge the age of 90 with centenarians a commonplace in the most highly developed nations, like the United States of North America, the European Union, the Federation of Oceania, and the New Empire of Japan.

It was at this point, around 2020, that most world leaders realized that all remaining petroleum reserves needed to be used exclusively for continued pharmaceutical production, mission-critical synthetic building materials, and the transport of vital goods, especially food and increasingly scarce fresh water for drinking and agriculture. So, despite the colossal social upheaval they knew would be caused by cutting off civilian access to fossil fuels, in 2021 the U.N. and its member nations (which notably did not include the former global power, USNA) decided on this drastic, but necessary course of action.

There followed a decade-long, nearly world-wide campaign to prepare for the Great Change, which involved:
  • intense planning and the construction of low and non-fossil fuel-based transportation, manufacturing, and agricultural systems
  • an end to single-family home construction and ultimately government confiscation and demolition of such homes in all but temperate zones
  • strictly enforced draconian energy conservation laws in all buildings
  • government-enforced in-migration from northern to more southerly climes, and a gradually phased withdrawal of fossil fuels from civilian use
All of this was accompanied by an extensive public information and propaganda campaign that left no doubt about the necessity of all of these measures.

Meanwhile, the USNA pursued a tragic course of “business as usual,” Its leaders (a powerful coalition of right-wing politicians and global energy companies) scorned the UN resolution and expressed typical American confidence (most would say hubris) in their ability to “solve” the energy problem, which they claimed was simply a temporary shortage of energy resources, caused by America’s over-dependence on so-called foreign oil. Many Americans ---increasingly xenophobic and isolationist ever since the first great Radical Islamic Jihadist attacks of 9/11/01--- preferred this explanation to the alternative ‘tough love” position taken by progressive politicians and liberal pundits, such as Paul Krugman, Tom Friedman, and Nicholas Kristoff, all of the New York Times, who insisted that America needed to take dramatic energy conservation measures and to curtail its conspicuous consumption. As a result, pro-business, right wing politicians dominated national and state governments in the USNA throughout the first three decades of the century ---setting both consumer-driven energy policies and go-it-alone foreign policies of the USNA.

By 2030, however, even the most self-interested leaders of the USNA recognized that their citizens' profligate and unfettered use of fossil fuels could not continue, although it took the break-up of that once great power to bring them around to that realization, by which time the USNA was far behind the rest of the world in planning for “the great change.”

Also missing from official accounts of the transition to the Great Change are the dozens of civil wars that raged throughout the world for many years, as ethnic, religious, cultural, nationalistic, and social class sub-groups warred among themselves for power (and resources) under the new world order. These included several brief skirmishes in the USNA that eventually led to the collapse of the USNA . While these civil wars have been largely forgotten, they are occasionally and begrudgingly acknowledged by American authorities, who always insist upon referring to them as “minor civil disorders.”

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