Earth 2100

In my life, I've seen New York City under full quarantine.

The Midwest, overrun, devastated by pests.

Plagues sweep across California.

And then what happened next was something none of us saw coming.

It became a race against time to save our future,

to even have a future.

It's the year 2100 and I survived.

To change the future, first you have to imagine it.

'Earth 2100"

starts now.

The idea that within this century, perhaps in your lifetime,

our civilization could lie in ruins seems unbelievable.

But according to some of the world's leading minds,

that's not just a worst-case scenario, it's a real possibility.

Good evening, I'm Bob Woodruff.

Over the next two hours, we'll take you on a journey into a world

that could await us and our children.

370,000 babies will be born today.

And we've taken the liberty of creating one more,

a fictional character we're calling Lucy, who will be our guide through this century.

Her life story is not a prediction about what will happen,

but what might happen.

This once glorious city, whose lights at night could be seen for miles,

empty now.

It's towering skyscrapers, once a testament to our ingenuity,

now stand as crumbling monuments to our demise.

Maybe only artists can grasp what that kind off future really holds for us.

It's perhaps in the area that we think of today as science fiction,

but that could be a very real future for the planet.

A hundred years from now, if New York is abandoned,

I can imagine some advanced creatures,

maybe humans, maybe extraterrestrials,

looking at New York and saying,

those ignorant people, how on Earth could they have ever expected to survive?

I can ask myself what happened,

but where do I begin?

With the droughts, the famines, the plague?

It began long before all that.

I lived through it al.

My story is everyone's story,

the story of the last century.

I was born June 2nd, 2009.

Civilization was at a crossroads.

We were in a race for our future.

Today, I say to you that the challenges we face are real.

They are serious and they are many.

The temperature is expected to keep going up.

The stock market plunged.

Douglas County will run out of drinking water.

They will not be met easily or in a short span of time.

Sixth grader came down with suspected swine flu on Wednesday.

Energy, climate, food, population, economic pressures,

any one of these challenges might be very serious in itself.

But because they're happening all simultaneously,

it's going to be very difficult for our governments to cope.

When I look at the next century, I feel it's up for grabs.

- Raising sea levels... - Catastrophic weather.

- Ten-year drought... - it's scary.

These are things that are happening today.

The time for action is now.

The world had never known such uncertainty.

We were used to having what we wanted and doling what we wanted.

The analogy that I would draw is someone looking at their bank account

and week after week, they're withdrawing money and they're enjoying the good life.

If they would bother to read the statements,

they would see that the bank account is dropping $900, $800, $700, $600.

And at that rate you know that another six months of the good life

is not gonna be a good life anymore.

We've acted as though we were independent of the environment.

We burned fossil fuels.

We've overused our renewable resources

in the belief that we could do that forever.

People are complaining about the economic crisis we have right now.

You haven't seen nothing yet.

You know, if we continue down this suicidal pathway that we're on,

where we basically turn living stuff into dead stuff and call that economic growth,

this will look like the good old days.

Although the world I was born into was running out of so much, water, oil, land,

I remember a loving family, a big house, green lawn,

more water than we knew what to do with.

My parents must have known what was happening.

We had a compact car and recycled.

And it wasn't just us.

Smart, imaginative people everywhere were working furiously on solutions.

Our government was pouring money into alternative energy.

It seemed like everyone was growing their own vegetable garden.

Windmills were sprouting up all over.

People were beginning to understand.

But the clock was running out, and nature was always one step ahead.

Flowers are blooming earlier

and trees are leafing earlier.

Birds are coming back from migration much earlier.

If you were to pull back from the Earth, what you would see is

sort of a refugee movement, if you will.

And species are moving their ranges farther north to get to cool,

from south to north, and from the valleys up to the mountain tops.

Of course, as a child, I didn't notice these things,

having nothing to compare it to.

I was a little girl enchanted by my small world.

Until one summer, thousands, maybe millions, of dragonflies showed up out of nowhere.

They were delicate and beautiful and I put one in a jar.

My mother was puzzled and looked them up.

They were supposed to be in Cuba, not Miami.

It was not until much later that I realized they were a sign of what was to come.

It's 2015, six short years from now,

and the best-laid plans are getting underway.

A wave farm off Scotland is harnessing the ocean's energy.

Vatican City has gone totally solar.

And here in America, cars are running cleaner and more efficiently.

Still, we cling to that old habit, oil,

and it's getting harder and more expensive to find.

From coast to coast,

motorists are searching for relief from soaring gas prices in California...

We could see a doubling or tripling of real oil prices, that's after inflation.

We're running out of oil and we've created a society,

the American way of life is what we call it,

based on the assumption that oil will be plentiful forever.

The large spread out suburbs that we've grown accustomed to,

the strip malls,

the big box stores with their enormous parking lots around them,

all of those have been made possible because we've had cheap gasoline,

and as energy becomes much more expensive, you'll see that those areas become

less desirable places to live.

The first time I moved, I was six.

A lot of people were leaving the suburbs for the city.

There were new jobs, and you didn't need a car for everything.

My dad was going to work on the new streetcar system in Miami.

And my mother told me we were going to live on the top floor of an apartment building.

She said we'd see the palm trees below us.

I was excited, but also a little sad to leave.

As the price of oil goes up,

It will ripple through every part of the global economy.

In Washington today, protesters demanded an end to rising food prices.

Our agriculture system is almost wholly dependent on cheap oil.

Tremendous amounts of diesel fuel that are used in planting and harvesting

and then moving the stuff, all these vast distances.

By 2015 in the United States, add about 20 million people to the population

and then just play out what that does to consumption patterns.

I mean, the, the number of people that we've got to feed.

There's just basically this slow, creeping tension for natural resources.

As the American way of life becomes increasingly unsustainable,

the rest of the world will be trying to catch up.

The Chinese like cars.

And they like big cars.

You have 14,000 cars out onto China's roads daily.

Incomes are rising really rapidly.

They're moving into meat-based diets.

You need 10 pounds of grain to get one pound of meat.

There is simply no way that the rest of the world can start eating meat the way we do.

If everyone in the world consumed as much as the average American,

It would take the resources of four Earths to support the planet's population,

which raises the question,

should the rest of the world consume less, or should we?

American habits, though, are hard to break.

We in the US have gotten used to the idea that we're somehow

immune to natural limits and it's the other people who are going to suffer.

Good morning, Miami.

The summer of 2015 is on track to become one of the hottest in history.

Temperatures are expected to be in the triple digits.

My mother and I were waiting for gas.

The line went around the block and then some.

Nothing new.

But this time, the line had stopped moving altogether.

A man who worked at the gas station came out holding a sign.

People started yelling and they got out of their cars

and started moving towards him.

My mother got us out of there fast.

I've been staking out an area that's been

hit hard recently by gas snatchers.

Look at him, he gets out, walks right up to the car.

Wow.

Look at this, right in the middle of the day.

There's cars going by, and these guys are -

siphoning gas out of someone's car.

In the face of mounting protests over rising gas and food prices,

Congress today approved a plan to fund the construction of

40 new coal-fired power plants over the next five years.

The country took the easy way out.

Coal was once again touted as our so- called salvation.

But the more coal we burned, the faster our planet warmed.

You get the picture.

We're spewing more carbon, more methane,

more nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.

All the bad things of climate change are coming true.

And most people were just going along with their everyday lives

as If nothing had changed.

And until we have a crisis of some kind,

I don't think we're going to be motivated to wake up and say, okay, now we have to change.

Sometimes it takes a big shock to get people,

you know, out of the inertia that, that, that's built into the system.

They're calling it the storm of the century,

Hurricane Linda packing Category 5 winds.

Big storms weren't unusual.

But this one was bigger than the others.

And it was headed for Miami.

All coastal regions are being evacuated.

This storm makes landfall, we're going to see a tremendous storm surge.

My mother was a nurse

and she wouldn't leave until all the sick were evacuated from the hospital.

My father was afraid we wouldn't get out in time.