Thread by @tjayaraman

MINISTRY OF THE FUTURE
A sci-fi novella for Twitter
Names of places, people, organisations are purely fictional. Any coincidence with real names is purely accidental

ACROSS Europe the forest fires began to rage. The war began the same day. This was a summer like no other.

https://twitter.com/dwallacewells/status/1548391533010857985

Water and chemicals were needed at the fire frontline. But there was no transport. XR climate rebels had disabled retail gas and petrol chains everywhere last winter. And recovery had been slow.

Electric vehicles could not reach the fire. Where they could, batteries began exploding in the intense heat. As firefighters turned back, the unchecked flames began to sweep over the land. Rural Europe would never be the same again....

... as the fires consumed forests, agricultural land and then communities in their midst. Meantime, governments' attentions were divided. Through the corridors that were accessible, troops and their armour, began to move. A war they had sleep walked into had begun.

What had begun as a proxy conflict 20 years ago in the Ukraine, had slowly spiralled up into wider conflict. Torn between getting out of fossil fuels quickly and the Europe's imperial insistence on their right to cheap energy as they saw fit, the latter had carried the day.

Regime after regime saw it easier to appease their citizens with cheap energy and finger-pointing at China, Brazil and India. The carbon trading system had collapsed after the first few years as massive cronyism and corruption in allocations had gutted the system.

So war it was..over gas lines and oil supplies as Russia diverted it to Africa and South Asia. As troop and armour began to roll, it would soon become difficult to distinguish between the fires from heat and those from war - little though it mattered to those trapped within.

Urban Europe bore the brunt of war. It was war on slow-burn. Yes the pun is deliberate. Governments, as divided at home as between themselves, struggled to keep going. Alongside climate terrorists, the anti-science of the COVID pandemic had morphed into a "deny all" movement.

Vandalising renewable installations was their contribution, with pitched battles with the climate terrorists on occasion as the police struggled to keep control. After the pandemic, the early promise of Europe leading climate action had wilted away.

Across the Channel, in London, far from the burning continent of Europe, Maria looked out on the desolate streets where long lines snaked out of food depots, as the poor, now more than half the population, sought to keep body and soul together. She was lucky...

Her work with the Climate Council ensured that she was among the nomenklatura that had access to facilities and goods. Either that or one had to be incredibly rich, one of the 20,000 families that ran Britain and determined how it worked. The cities had emptied ...

.. in a digital Britain that produced nothing and bought all it needed from outside. The rich and middle class, had taken refuge in the countryside, digitizaton aiding their move. 20 years ago it had all seemed wonderfully possible - the zero emissions Britain that was promised.

They had certainly succeeded in forcing their emissions down, Patricia mused, but at what cost! When she moved here at that time, it had all seemed the best way to go...how had had this descended into this morass of inequality she wondered...

The media laid the blame for Britain's collapse on globalizaton and general of the retreat world-wide into a counter-culture of autarky, while East and South Asia had turned inward, though open to each other, leaving Europe and the US out of the equation.

All sacrifices to no avail of course, as their Atlantic cousins had left both the Paris Agreement and its successor the London Agreement. With Senator Munchkin's presidency, the US had turned its back on everything that it had agreed to earlier.

But worse was on the way. Maria's colleague Jean, longing to go back to a home he could not return to in France, worried about his daughter in the United States. Unprecedented xenophobic violence had taken over -- though an Europe embroiled in war hardly noticed.

It was xenophobia for climate. Americans now believed that immigration was the cause for rising extreme events in the US and the country had turned to even more violent rebuff of legal and illegal migration. Discourage them from coming (with guns) was the common excuse.

Three decades of small nations looking to the US for leadership had led nowhere...as they stared at sea-level rise on their doorsteps. The only bright shaft of sunshine from the darkened sky was the offer of Asia to accommodate the refugees of the Pacific.

To be continued.....

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