Events had unfolded faster than expected for Ann after the 12th of December 2025, the day now recognized as the date of birth of the new age in the history of the Earth, the Great Readjustment age.
The epoch would still be the Anthropocene, it would be the Anthropocene for a while yet, at least until the mess humans had left behind would be cleaned up. The world would keep changing for a while yet. In another 10 years, the human world would be carbon neutral, humanity would be operating at a quarter of its energy consumption of 2025, and all energy would be provided by renewable forms, mostly from wind and solar, and some still operational nuclear power plants.
From that day in about 2035, the only direction for energy consumption would be South. In 2080, the human world would no longer rely on any industrial energy generation; the only energy generation would be insignificant from small scale domestic systems which would soon decay into piles of rust and rubble.
Another 50 years, in about 2130, it would be very unlikely to be worthwhile trying to generate electricity. The thinned out human world would be too dispersed to warrant even medium scale production which would necessarily be sourcing materials from too far away and with too inefficient a transport infrastructure for any net positive benefit.
Human societies would by then have stripped down to the bare necessities dictated by the resource crunch and the need to preserve both climate and biodiversity. Humans would live in small communities, rich in culture, simple in needs, resilient from its acquired scientific knowledge, but now without reserves, constrained by the need to live within their means and recycle nutrients in a world with no longer the resources to start again on the thermo-industrial path.
Work to clean up the world would be ongoing. After the shutdown of most of the industrial production and transport, the air would clear up significantly. This in turn would raise the average temperature on earth another half a degree. Sea levels would still be rising, average temperature would still be rising on top of that quantum leap. The decreased ice caps albedo, the methane clathrate releases from the thawing permafrost, all the positive feedback loops of the climatic engine would still be at work for a while. Temperatures would keep rising for another 200 years, sea levels for another 3000 years, until rock weathering would start to bring CO2 levels below levels that would still add heat to the world. In tens of thousands of years, the earth’s climate might be back to what it was in the 20th Century. Those mitigation and sequestration measures to drawdown as much as possible would greatly affect that timescale.
The next ice age planned for 50,000 years from now and stalled by our recklessness today, might even now eventuate. Without mitigation efforts, even that planetary scale event brought by natural cosmic cycles might be defeated by the lunacy of a naked ape who got drunk on petrol fumes in the space of an eye blink.
Mitigation measures would be a big part of day to day life for decades. Refrigerant capture and neutralization would have to go on for at least two decades, that tedious work of recovering the gases from the millions of air conditioning systems throughout the world filled with potent greenhouse gases, each molecule a more potent greenhouse gas than a thousand CO2 molecules. This was a mine field that would otherwise start to explode spontaneously, as time and rust would start to let those gases escape into the atmosphere. The demining branch of the UN Peace Corps would help in the process for those countries which needed a hand.
Drawing down on atmospheric gases would also be a big part of the cleanup, just to stem some runaway effects that had started. Carbon sinks would come from rehabilitation of degraded lands, from changed agricultural practices, from stopping the reliance and overuse of artificial Nitrogen fertilizers, a power hungry and polluting process. Humanity would indeed be in damage control for a while yet.
At least the natural world would be somewhat free from the previous relentless attacks by civilization, it would be given a clear path North and South to try and survive the best it could in a still fast changing climate. And still, many of the irreversible changes would be felt by the living realm for decades yet. Local collapses, cascading effects, habitat fragmentation beyond ecosystem viability, those would continue to be the grim reaper of animals and plants species above all other forces that Natural Selection was already throwing at them.
The whole Natural World picture would take centuries now to stabilize, millennia in some cases, in some cases, ecosystems would just disappear. Life would rebound, speciation would re-occur eventually, in millennia, in millions of years, but at what tragic cost in that blink of an eye that started a few millennia ago when humans freed themselves from the forces of Nature, and peaking off the scale within a few decades. The Anthropocene was indeed not over for a natural world that had got to a whisker of being obliterated.
Plastics recovery from the oceans would be another all out effort needed to save what could still be saved, to limit damage to ecosystems virtually obliterated because we wanted to grab a plastic bottle drink on the run wherever we were in the world, probably in search for the next photo-op with the last remaining member of one or another species of seabirds dying of hunger from stomachs filled with plastics. Ann attempted to imagine those bird’s feelings of being full, of not being able to fit another morsel of food into their beak, and at the same time collapsing from exhaustion and depleted blood sugar level, being completely lost as to what was happening, instinct being of no help whatsoever in finding a solution to avoiding a slow and certain death. “What have we done?” she simply whispered to herself, bowing in shame.
The world was of course now cleaved into the United Nations and Great America. For the time being, Great America was staying put. From all indicators, it would soon implode. Right now it was busy with its new toys North and South of its usual territories. The continent was still consuming and polluting and vacuuming all in its wake with the rage of a spoilt brat breaking its toys one by one. That would annul some of the mitigation efforts the world was pushing along, but now was not the time to worry about them, or worse, use that as an excuse to question the current effort.
Indicators from underground informers were showing great resistance to the adoption of the frenetic consumption and religious fervor model that were being rolled out in the Americanization camps in South and Central America. The rest of the world was showing a way out, and the newly annexed territories wanted in. Sabotages in the Canadian tar sands extraction fields were now common as Canada had been winding down the extremely polluting and nonsensical operations prior to annexation. Reversing overnight the wins from that exhausting and drawn-out battle of the multitude vs the few oil barons was not going down well at all.
So overall, the effects of the thermo-industrial civilization would be felt for a long time yet, the Great Readjustment age would span probably for thousands of years, the world was not out of the woods yet. There may soon be another glitch when the phosphate crunch would come, but Ann was getting less worried now.
That planned intersection of food production and food needs was decades away, anything could happen in the meantime, but most countries had wanted off the bat to go down the path of minimizing death, that was simply the right thing to do.
As Ann was now relaxing husband alongside in a chair by the sea on the porch of her small shack in her native Portugal, she could feel in her gut that something else had changed, deep down in the human psyche. She herself had been used to traveling throughout the world, to be in Rome in the morning, Brazzaville at lunchtime, and back in Geneva in the evening. And whenever she could, she would flee to her little seaside shack where she could wind down briefly before hopping again on a plane and starting the infernal cycle again.
Stopping the industrial world along with the economy meant this previous way of life would soon be impossible, so she had made the choice very early on. She had retired to her shack early in the new year of 2026, year One of the Great Readjustment age, and year one of the new universal calendar.
She had installed an SSB radio so she c