For most people, the reality of global warming hasn't sunk in -- relatively few people understand what's really at stake. I spend my days at a leading environmental group trying to make people understand how bad things will get unless we do something now. (I've been trying to raise the alarm since the early 1990s.) I've tried everything in the communications toolbox, but I haven't tried satire. Check it out.
Hello America, 2009! I’m not sure this email will reach you. We’re still working out the bugs on time-travel electronic communication. We know it sometimes works – we proved that when Dick Cheney admitted he was wrong about Iraq. That came after we emailed to tell him Iraq became a province of the New Persian Empire in 2080, under the Ayatollah Darius. So, here’s hoping this email gets through.
Up here at my summer home on Hudson Bay, it’s a perfect day for late July, 2105 – blue skies, no tornadoes in the forecast, and a mild temperature of 86 degrees. The orange tree in my back yard is bearing some really pretty fruit, and what with the great local vegetables and produce here, we’ll never starve (unlike those poor people in Italy, but that’s another story). Who would have thought you could grow excellent mangoes in Northern Manitoba!
We have global warming to thank for that, of course. It’s been a real adjustment for everyone, especially those two billion refugees in South Asia, but we’re mostly getting along fine now. Some really remarkable charities are helping out big time with that refugee thing, especially Save the Children and Everyone Else. We’ve had to contend with the spread of some nasty mosquito-borne tropical diseases (I caught yellow fever last summer), but ever since Google bought the pharmaceutical industry, we’ve developed a bunch of amazing new drugs that help a lot. When Ebola showed up in Wisconsin about 20 years ago, though, everyone was a little shaken up.
Some problems are quite regrettable. I really miss wildlife, and songbirds in particular, but for the most part we’re getting along fine without them. I understand we Americans spent a lot of money back in the day to save the Florida Everglades, and I guess all that money went to waste, since South Florida is now called “the Caribbean.” (On the plus side, the sea level rise helped drown all those Burmese pythons and weird African toads.) Miami couldn’t be saved, but you can now get terrific Cuban food in Burlington, Vermont. New York, of course, had to be saved because it’s New York, but those dikes and sea walls around Manhattan were pretty expensive – at a quadrillion dollars, the costliest public works project in U.S. history. (Of course, a quadrillion isn’t what it used to be.) The Donald Trump Company got the contracts, after promising another $100 million to help relocate the Statue of Liberty. The Bronx and Queens are gone, along with the New New Yankee Stadium (built in 2025), but people were getting tired of paying $65 for a bottle of beer anyway.
Another big problem was the loss of America’s “Farm Belt,” which overlapped with what we now call the Kansas Empty Quarter. But at least our kids are no longer obese, since high fructose corn sweetener is a thing of the past. In fact, a lot of kids today look like they could use a few more calories. Fortunately, many of us can afford food flown in from Siberia, which is actually quite nutritious and tasty. We’re importing 100 percent of our oil now, which is a real drain on the Treasury and American drivers when they fill up. But my Chevy Goliath still gets me around pretty well. (Venezuela didn’t appreciate it when we tried to tap their oil fields with horizontal drilling from Texas in 2063. President Hugo Chavez got so upset he fell down and broke his hip.)
But all in all, it hasn’t been that bad. Just ask the people who work at the Port of Sacramento. Having everyone dependent on state government just wasn’t a recipe for a strong economy. And having the Atlantic Ocean right at the doorstep of West Virginia has been a real boost for the state’s tourism business. Folks started getting worried about West Virginia’s economy when Senator Byrd retired five years ago.
Well, I have to go now. President Obama (Sasha’s daughter) is having a press conference, and I understand she’s going to issue another warning about what will happen in 100 years if we don’t get a grip on this global warming thing. Some people still say it’s not caused by human activity, but I’m beginning to have my doubts.