Interview with Ingrid Stephanson, Environmental Director for the European Union.    (May 24, 2083)

What are the main environmental challenges facing the European Union in the last decades of the century?

Certainly it is the issue of global hotting. At the beginning of the century, there was still controversy in certain quarters as to whether global warming was an established trend. For about the last fifteen years, that debate has ended completely. We have not only entered an age of long term global warming, but we have actually passed beyond that into global hotting.

Last year in North America there were more than eighty major cities where the daily low temperatures never got below 27 C (80F) for nine months or more. Europe had four cities that also went through such continuous heat waves.

Temperatures of more than 60 C (140 F) were considered world records at the beginning of the century. Now they are happening at least one or twice a year somewhere on the planet.

What has been the human impact of the hotting?

The average life expectancy has started to trend downward. It peaked at 87 years in the rich nations about ten years ago. Since then, for those who live in the vertical cities it is about the same. But those who live on the outside can expect to live five or more years less. The very young, the very old and those who have serious illnesses are the ones most likely to die from heat stress.

How does living in the vertical cities change the equation?

The vertical cities were first developed in Los Angeles in North America. Since then, there have been a total of fifteen cities built or under construction in North America and six in the European Union. Each of the cities can house about five million people. So you can see that even when they are fully occupied, there will still be a large gap in our ability to house our total populations in the cities.

So far only North America and the European Union have begun building the cities. Other countries have had to design other ways to deal with the heat.

The advantage of the vertical cities is their default climate control is set at 20 C (68 F). And since residential, working, shopping and entertainment are all enclosed in the same buildings, there are very few reasons to go outside (except to go to a different city).

Why haven’t more vertical cities been built?

They are incredibly expensive to build. The building of the cities is the most expensive human endeavor ever undertaken; even when you consider it in inflation adjusted currency. Each building costs more than any previous project and we need around two hundred buildings just for our two countries. The building of the Pyramids in ancient Egypt were trivial in comparison.

Our governments are spending an ever increasing portion of our respective national budgets on the cities each year. We are doing that through higher taxes and lower spending on other projects (both unpopular decisions). The large business community has committed to spend trillions of dollars and euros over the next twenty to thirty years to complete the projects.

Even with all that effort, our current projections show that completing all the necessary cities within the next thirty years is still considered fairly optimistic.

An unfortunate consequence of all this activity is that money is being drained from all non building activities. So businesses that need money to grow and the general population who want to use credit are being forced to pay very high interest rates for the funds. We are increasingly becoming cash based societies rather than credit based societies. And when the buildings are all completed, there will have to be a major transition of all the workers and businesses that are currently involved in the construction because they are going to have to find something else to do.

In the meantime what is happening?

People are beginning to migrate to areas that are either higher altitudes or further north. The areas formerly known as Canada and Scandinavia have had a massive influx of new arrivals in recent years as people flee the hot southern areas to the more temperate northern regions.

What are the other countries doing?

The five richest nations in the world are China, North America, the European Union, India and Japan, in that order. Combined, they represent almost half of the world’s population and eighty percent of the world’s total national production. Of those, only North America and the European Union have begun building the vertical cities. The rest of the countries are looking for solutions but have not committed to any concrete plans.

As an interim step, China is encouraging that all new construction (both residential and commercial) be built underground. The advantage to this is that structures that are two meters or more below the surface are much cooler than above the surface. In many areas they begin to approach the target temperature of 20 C (68 F) that is considered comfortable by most people. The disadvantage is that underground construction is at least three to five times more expensive to build than above ground structures. So clearly, this is not a long term solution.

The other countries are coping as well as they can and their vulnerable populations are beginning to die off in ever increasing numbers.

We are in a race against time and time is winning.

The hotting is the result primarily of greenhouse gases that come from industrial level human activity. What is being done to attack that side of the equation?

The Greenhouse Gas Treaty (GGT) of 2074 was signed by one hundred and thirty two nations, including the five richest countries. The goal of the treaty was that by the year 2100 net additions of carbon dioxide and methane gases be reduced worldwide to the levels that were present in the year 1900. If those gas reductions can be achieved, our meteorologists estimate it will then take an additional fifty to one hundred years for the world ecosystem to stabilize and bring temperatures down to the levels enjoyed at the beginning of this century.

When the price of petroleum went past 500 euros per barrel, people began to quickly abandon internal combustion transportation as just too expensive. Although there had been sporadic flirtations with alternate fuels, there was always the problem that alternate fuels required large investments in new fuel distribution networks. What didn’t require any new distribution system was electricity. Every country in the world had some sort of electrical grid already in place so it made the transition to electric driven vehicles much simpler.

By the time of the signing of the GGT, the percentage of land based transportation (cars, truck and trains) that used internal combustion engines in the rich nations was less than five percent. And in the poorer nations it was even less than that. So when they were finally banned entirely, there was little political opposition.

Aviation and ocean based shipping continue to create large environmental impacts. Currently there are no effective ways to store enough zero emmission energy into an airliner or ship to make it economically viable. More research is needed here.