The year is 2030. What does the world look like?

[ik9000]

The UK will mourn becoming a vassel state of the US following it's ill-conceived and hastily signed trade agreement with the US (the uSUKitup pact) and despite calls for a vote to USxit will agree to just become a state of the US because it will be quicker and give them representation in the US parliamentary "system". The government will point out that with a Charles on the throne there is legitimate precedent to seek a change in the status of the monarchy anyway. Yes, they argue, the people could rise-up in a civil war but they are too feckless and stupid to do so - and good luck without any meaningful armaments! The past 15 years have shown they can't think for themselves and just do what Cambridge Analytica manipulate them to do, which was made even easier after all the sheeple downloaded that covid app that did nothing meaningful to curtail the death rate, but helped the government gather massive amounts of personal data to learn more about to manipulate the masses.

Petrol cars are still on the road, and there are regular electric brown-outs with France and China jacking up the electric price, and Russia turning off the gas taps.

Pen and paper is back in schools as a result and people are increasingly being priced out of MS' new pay-per-day fee structure for windows and office software.

Policing has disintegrated to corrupt African standards with the rich bribing officials and common folk having no-hope. The NHS is sold off and everyone has US style insurance policies refusing to pay-out and a growing underclass is becoming malnourished, exploited and increasingly unruly.

Some cities have become no-go areas. Organised crime is rife, both foreign-run and home-grown. Certain counties are trying to push for independence to implement Sharia rule to push back against this.

No-one has a pot to pee in. English beach resorts are booming as it's all people can afford to do for a holiday, what with the carbon tax on airplanes and European tourist toll exceeding the average monthly wage. Central London has achieved its dream of becoming Singapore and is owned by rich Asians, Russians and Arabs. A border has been created around the edge of Zone 2 and no-one without a 6-figure bank account can enter other than to service the wealthy living there. The average building height within this border is 20 storeys, with remaining low-rise pockets being compulsarily purchased for redevelopment.

HS2 still only reaches Manchester, no northern branch lines have been built

Gibraltar is now Spanish and The Falklands have gone to Argentina with the British forces unable to prevent it due to fuel shortages and lack of resources.

Hadrians' wall has been rebuilt by the Scottish to keep the English out following their successful reintegration into the EU and the increased living standards north of the border. This came at a high price with the EU imposing migrant quotas in exchange based on population density. Scotland is now much more densly occupied and migrant numbers are passing 1:1 to native Scottish. Spain and Portugal have access to Scottish reservoirs to try to combat the increasing droughts, with a pipe line has been built via Ireland and Brest.

Northern Ireland has been sold to Ireland under US pressure and with the decline in food and living standards post the USUK trade agreement the people there welcomed it.

Mandarin is increasingly being taught in all schools worldwide and the Chinese OS is beginning to outstrip windows in all major retail markets.

England still haven't won a football tournament

Scotland still haven't qualified for a football tournament.

Venice is underwater

The ice caps are now at 15% of their 1990 area.

Greta Thunberg is still in prison in Moscow along with Pussy Riot and a number of Oligarch ex-pats extradited from London at the Kremlin's requests.

[Helios451]

Trump will be in jail.
Boris will be out of politics and writing books
Bonsonaro will have been assassinated
Starmer will be Prime Minister
Putin will still be leader of Russia
China, India and India will be economically bigger than America
There will be more extreme weather
Astronauts will be establishing a base on the Moon
The new James Webb Space Telescope will have found evidence of life on another world
Quantum computers will design room temperature super conducting alloys, which herald a true low carbon energy revolution. That said, Fusion Power is still ten years away.
Driving petrol cars will be an expensive hobby, permissible by use of a personal annual petrol allowance, for which there is a healthy secondary market.
The sun will rise every morning and set every night
We will have sold our souls to the gods of big data and swapped our privacy for genetically personalised medical and life insurance.
Finally, I hope I will still be here

[Spreadie]

[ik9000]

@Spreadie I see your tumbleweed and raise you:

[ik9000]

Nuclear power will be one of our main sources of clean energy

No it really won't. We can say that with confidence as it takes at least a decade to get a plant up and running and we have only one in the pipeline. It would take a minimum of 5 years just to get any others through planning and appeals, nevermind built. I can safely say that ship sailed under Major and Blair, and despite the engineering insitutes writing to the government on the subject (an open letter was published in one of the magazines when I was a student) the governments did nothing and naively assumed private industry would take care of it! As if. By the time Blair caught up he was too busy heading off to Iraq, and by the time Brown came in it was too late, the knowledge was gone, the budget sunk and the government desperate to not do anything to lose voters. Now it is simply too late. No, nuclear will not be part of our energy. Also it's not clean. Uranium mining and processing is dirty, as is dealing with spent fuel. Even if you use breeder reactors and go thorium or similar you still have radioactive waste. Fusion is the dream but until that gets scaled up to a viable industrial scale with sufficient fuel sources nuclear is not going to help. It's a shame as had Major been more keen to get a power strategy and reversed the Thatcher years' destruction of the energy planning systems we would have had them built in the 2000s and our climate targets would be greatly improved, and electric cars much more viable.

[TeePee]

No it really won't. We can say that with confidence as it takes at least a decade to get a plant up and running and we have only one in the pipeline. It would take a minimum of 5 years just to get any others through planning and appeals, nevermind built. I can safely say that ship sailed under Major and Blair, and despite the engineering insitutes writing to the government on the subject (an open letter was published in one of the magazines when I was a student) the governments did nothing and naively assumed private industry would take care of it! As if. By the time Blair caught up he was too busy heading off to Iraq, and by the time Brown came in it was too late, the knowledge was gone, the budget sunk and the government desperate to not do anything to lose voters. Now it is simply too late. No, nuclear will not be part of our energy. Also it's not clean. Uranium mining and processing is dirty, as is dealing with spent fuel. Even if you use breeder reactors and go thorium or similar you still have radioactive waste. Fusion is the dream but until that gets scaled up to a viable industrial scale with sufficient fuel sources nuclear is not going to help. It's a shame as had Major been more keen to get a power strategy and reversed the Thatcher years' destruction of the energy planning systems we would have had them built in the 2000s and our climate targets would be greatly improved, and electric cars much more viable.

The waste 'problem' is seriously overstated. Using breeder reactors, the waste produced is almost nil (It also has a very short half life). Without them, and without the conventional reprocessing we currently do, your entire lifetime of electricity usage would only result in a Coke Can's worth of waste. That can of course, can be carefully disposed of, and not would not be released in to the environment as with fossil fuels. I would not recommend going near that Coke Can, however.

The positive side of Nuclear Power is that the Chinese are building a bunch of reactors, and since they are a huge contributor to greenhouse gasses, this is where some of the biggest reductions can be made worldwide.

[ik9000]

The waste 'problem' is seriously overstated. Using breeder reactors, the waste produced is almost nil (It also has a very short half life). Without them, and without the conventional reprocessing we currently do, your entire lifetime of electricity usage would only result in a Coke Can's worth of waste. That can of course, can be carefully disposed of, and not would not be released in to the environment as with fossil fuels. I would not recommend going near that Coke Can, however.

The positive side of Nuclear Power is that the Chinese are building a bunch of reactors, and since they are a huge contributor to greenhouse gasses, this is where some of the biggest reductions can be made worldwide.

oh I am very pro nuclear tbh don't misread that - but it is not "clean" like a renewable natural energy. I do think however that it is less polluting all-things-considered than destroying an entire ecosystem to try and create a tidal station like someone was proposing to do in the Severn estuary

[ik9000]

You're probably right, over the next decade we'll probably end up seeing more wind farms and solar plants popping up rather than nuclear. Goodness only knows where they will get the land for them though and the batteries which is why I thought nuclear might get a second shot although it doesn't really work "on demand" like coal and gas

A power strategy needs a baseline and switchable surge generation to deal with spikes which can be quickly powered up and then deactivated. As I understand it nuclear and hydro are excellent for the baseline. Coal+Gas are excellent for the additional switchable - quick to turn on and off, were it not for the CO2 problems. Wind and solar are not guaranteed sources, and nice-to-have but just not dependable enough. To really make use of them, as you say, requires storage. Also consider that most energy demand is in the winter months when solar is worst. The windiest months are not winter, but usually spring and autumn IIRC. Someone has come up with hydro "capacitors" where energy is used to pump water into silos during energy surplus. When the demand spikes hit they drain the silos back to power generators. Nice in theory but any energy exchange like this will be lossy, and it would need to be at a grand scale to deal with large-scale situations. Presumably hydro could be used only for additional generation but does that fit with how the reservoirs and damns are designed to operate? Battery systems are currently rather polluting to manufacture, and require a lot of land.

My 10p solution would be to have a large nuclear and hydro network, run at a high baseline to provide energy to run desalination plants for water and to split water to hydrogen gas and oxygen. That hydrogen would then be used to run clean gas turbines for the additional switchable boost production. Anything we get from wind and solar, great that's less hydrogen demand and less energy used in its production, but to me it seems, while admittedly a bit energy inefficient (using electricity to make products to make more electricity) it provides the means to have rapidly switchable power generation with minimal CO2 production. I really don't see why this couldn't work, other than we sat on our hands and forgot to renew our nuclear power stations when we needed to. Obviously there is the lower calorific value to consider vs fossil fuels, but even so, is there no mileage in this?

[kalniel]

Battery systems are currently rather polluting to manufacture, and require a lot of land.

Not if there are suddenly a lot of mobile battery storage units around anyway in 2030 (aka cars). There's a reason Musk got a license for power supply in the UK...

I agree about the hydrogen solution though.

[onlyme2]

With environmental change the life cycles and mutations of viruses are altering, a quick look at the past few decades indicates that more esoteric viruses are in the pipeline, so on top of all that was mentioned we are likely to be facing yet another virus, let us just hope that by then powers that be will start prioritizing human life over economic growth.


-Ebola 1976
-Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) 2002
-Swine Flu 2009
-Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) 2012
-Covid-19 2019
-??? 2030

[ik9000]

With environmental change the life cycles and mutations of viruses are altering, a quick look at the past few decades indicates that more esoteric viruses are in the pipeline, so on top of all that was mentioned we are likely to be facing yet another virus, let us just hope that by then powers that be will start prioritizing human life over economic growth.


-Ebola 1976
-Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) 2002
-Swine Flu 2009
-Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) 2012
-Covid-19 2019
-??? 2030

ebola and the like are not new. The difference is we just hear more about them these days. Flu pandemics are typically 1:100 year events. We've been due one and on the look out for it hence reporting of swine flu, SARS and the like. I really wouldn't panic about that. The rise of antibiotic resistant superbugs however...

[TeePee]

With environmental change the life cycles and mutations of viruses are altering, a quick look at the past few decades indicates that more esoteric viruses are in the pipeline, so on top of all that was mentioned we are likely to be facing yet another virus, let us just hope that by then powers that be will start prioritizing human life over economic growth.


-Ebola 1976
-Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) 2002
-Swine Flu 2009
-Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) 2012
-Covid-19 2019
-??? 2030

Economic growth and human life are the same thing.

[spacein_vader]

Economic growth and human life are the same thing.

Come again?

[Ttaskmaster]

It will be a very dystopiate version of Firefly, a blending of American and Chinese cultures and depression in all but the very rich Alliance areas.

And so, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet, I shall aim to misbehave.

[TeePee]

Come again?

Economic growth protects and enhances human life. Economic recession kills.

[ik9000]

this forum really needs a facepalm smiley