![]() ![]() Things have become very bad in Bangladesh, and the Maldives are being evacuated save for a few stubborn stay-behinds in houses with new steel and concrete stilts. The icecaps are busily melting, and the north Pole is usually open water in the summer, but thermal inertia is such that the rise in sea level is so far gradual, and is mostly noticeable when storm surges push further inland than ever before, and coastal cities temporarily do a Venice. Polar bears are going blind in the ozone-depleted far north. They had largely given up on trying to convince people by the end of the 2000s.įrogs are largely extinct, and the last whales were lucky enough to be eaten before they could slowly starve. Outside of a few resource-poor nations short of options, oil was replaced by coal (until the theoretical time some clean source such as fusion or solar satellites could take over), nuclear power having disgraced itself (the Ventana nuclear power plant’s melt-down and contamination of Los Angeles having somewhat peeved people), and for a couple decades governments assured their populations that renewed prosperity was right around the corner. The Communist nations laughed at the failure of the Decadent West, and continued to build huge toxin-spouting factories and load of unnecessary Big Metal things, although the laughter stopped in the 90s when the first of the climate-changed induced droughts combined with mass vegetation die-off from airborne toxins brought famine from Pinsk to Peking. The Good Times (so to speak) continued into the 80s, only coming to an end in 1988, when the Last Arab-Israeli War led to the nuking of the Middle Eastern oil fields, and the bottom fell out of the world economy. Strange chemical changes took place in the atmosphere as industrial fumes of all types combined and produced molecules never seen before on earth, which in turn came down with the rain, into the soil, into the rivers, into the sea. The anti-revolutionary “one child” policy was never adopted. As for China, where Neo-Maoism so-called (after the Supreme Leader’s mysterious-but-certainly-not-coup-related-we-assure-you death) mobilized the population to build shit on a level never before seen, heavy industry surged forwards at astonishing rates, and before long a filter mask was as much a part of the revolutionary outfit as the blue Mao suit. Growth took place in the Third World as well, where heavy investment in third-world countries led a thousand malodorous industrial centers to bloom (and large Soviet expenditures to create heavy-industrial Worker’s Paradises to match what the West was doing soon was outperforming them, at least in pollution). The move to demographic transition was slowed, and corporations busied themselves with increasingly sophisticated ways for consumers to clean and filter their air, water, etc. ![]() Environmentalism never really gained momentum until too late: the oil embargo never took place, and in an environment in which it was assumed “continued growth” was the solution to all ills, what was a bit more pollution or a bit more CO2 in the air? Feminism also failed to get much traction in a world where there was less need for a second income bringer and the pill and other forms of birth control suppressed as “promoting sexual license.” Betty Friedan perished tragically, run over by a truckload of drunken fratboys. ![]() Two major cultural trends of OTL were not duplicated. And then there are the industrial chemicals, the radioactivity, the acid rain, the ozone hole, the mutated insects… Agriculture production has dwindled in many areas ravaged by drought, and in others (such as the interior of East Africa) devastated by floods. Overall, however, population continues to grow, if more slowly than before. It would be more, save for the massive famines and plagues striking malnutrition-weakened populations. ![]()
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