How to Cook? Sunday December 2nd 2035

from Pam Brown’s 2035 diary

Power cut just as I was cooking dinner in the electric oven, transferred everything to the top of the wood stove as it’s awkward connecting the generator to the cooker. I’d like one of the multi-fuel cookers but can’t help worrying about air quality. The government can’t ensure continuous electricity, rejects gas and oil, but has prohibited so many wood and coal heaters and stoves that it’s a real dilemma – to keep to the regulations and be unable to cook or keep warm, or burn what we have available and suffer polluted air? Life is about impossible questions these days. 

Mar e Lago Under Water: Saturday December 15th 2035

Mar e Lago at Palm Beach, the glitzy Florida country club residence of former US President and near-nonagenarian Donald Trump, is under water, so it’s not glitzy, gaudy or even functioning anymore. Florida is changing shape, shrinking, and people with money are moving to where they think they may be safer. Donald Trump was a climate-change denier, maybe still is, I don’t know, but denying that such a serious problem exists, when there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary, is like wandering onto a battlefield wearing a blindfold and ear defenders.

Rainy Christmas: Tuesday December 25th 2035

Christmas Day, warm, wet and quiet. When I was at school we were taught that Mediterranean climates had warm wet winters and hot dry summers. The heat is Mediterranean but we have a deal more rain, often so heavy that the drainage network is overloaded and the force of the flow lifts manhole covers. People walking in flooded streets have drowned after falling into open drains. That’s a sad comment for today, but there you are, climate disruption is not a happy story. You can’t plan for the future when conditions are so unstable, and you can’t keep on repairing damaged infrastructure. It’s throwing money down the flooded manholes. 

I had a microwave dinner – microwaves are frugal users of energy, at least – and video calls with Rose, Wil and Seren, and elder grandson Jac. I enjoyed those.