Earth 2100

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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.

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,

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