The Environment in 2050

By Farhana Damji

As he woke up, Joe looked at the clock on his table. 8:15AM on Monday, March 28, 2050. He tossed his briefcase in the back of his electric Honda Mariana and drove down to work.

1 Hour Later

“You're late again, Joe. This is your last warning. Be late again and you're fired.” said Joe's boss as he walked past Joe's office. He never thought that helping the environment could be a job, but apparently it could. He worked in the Environmental Office of the Dominion of North America (formed in 2026). His job was to make sure that all the electricity providers were environmentally friendly materials to generate it.

As he was taking his coffee break, he noticed his boss's name in the newspaper. It said that he had bribed officials so that he wouldn't get caught on his emissions test. He was actually using an old gas engine! The judge had sentenced him to 100 hours community service and a 100,000 fine. It was because of idiots like this that global warming was changing the seasons. 31C in FEBRUARY!

It was too bad that parts of the world were underwater now such as Joe's homeland of Australia, but that too was balanced by people all over the world having access to clean drinking water from the polar ice caps. Parts of the world were fine, although areas in the arctic circle got it the worst. The only other problem with the flooding was that a few old nuclear missile silos were caught up in it and some of the radioactive material had washed out to sea.

As Joe walked out of his office at the end of the day, he wondered if the earth would ever be able to get rid of the filth of humanity. He figured that the whole problem here was that humans had gotten greedy and disrupted nature's balance, so nature had started compensating by using more water to lessen the heat.

Mankind came up with a “solution” yet again, which was huge locks around each continent, along with many ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The rules for reducing the emissions were almost the same as the Kyoto Protocol, although now everyone ratified it.

The overall reduction was by 43% from 2007 by 2049, and by the end of 2050 they were expected to drop another 4%. Technology was getting to the point where it excreted very few greenhouse gases, but was still at normal operating standards. It also used less and less electricity, therefore reducing the number of greenhouse gas emissions from that section. This was Joe's main job.

Another problem too, was that the ocean was receding in parts of the world, such as Joe's condo. It used to be on the shoreline of Lake Ontario, but was now about 300 meters away from it. He had also found a few fish that looked really funny. He thought that their parents might have been exposed to some of the nuclear waste, as these fish had 5 eyes and 2 tails.

Thankfully the moon colony wasn't exposed to much greenhouse gas, as the colony had only been established in January. The moon was probably never going to have a global warming problem, even though it had been pressurized and had many things the same as on Earth.

Sometime around 2075, the world would end up being cleaner, as all of humanity was fighting global warming. They were planting more trees, cutting down fewer, expanding cities less, and, most importantly, using alternative fuels that were safe for the environment. These fuels were things like corn oil, used cooking oil, or water. Some people were now doing everything possible to use less fuel, and bike or walk to most places.

Joe thought all of this as he was going through his paperwork, and realized that Mother Nature was probably smiling, as the humans helped her clean up the Earth.

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