woman wearing white and black floral hijab
It’s New Year’s Day, 2040, in the land of Idiocracy.
President Ron DeSantis is in his fourth term, having won Powerball and purchased the presidency from Trump’s children after Trump died in office, crushed by a marble statue of himself. Security footage showed some intimacy between the then-president and the stone just before it toppled, pulverizing all but his hair. The head of the staffer who leaked the footage remains impaled on a spike, displayed outside the Trump-created Bureau of Alternative Facts.
The seawall treaty
Following the success of Project 2025, through which Republicans outlawed renewable energy, electric vehicles and the color green, President DeSantis began negotiating with Mexico and Canada to set sea wall levels for the upcoming year. They have held this annual meeting since 2030, after successive monster hurricanes wiped out a third of the population along the Eastern Seaboard, from Newfoundland through the Carolinas south to the Yucatán.
The United States initiated the seawall treaty, promoted domestically as the “Americas Ban Science Under Republican Decree” (acronym withheld), after the last employed physicist warned Republicans that constructing partial walls in parts of the ocean would be like having no wall at all. Water is liquid, she explained slowly, repeatedly and with visual aids, it will just go around.
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Finally conceding that a massive seawall along the southern U.S. coast alone would be futile, given the migratory determination of South American water, treaty signatories agreed to erect a 3,900-mile eastern seaboard levee running from the northern tip of Canada south to Panama, with a companion vertical flood wall, featuring adjustable heights between 20 feet and 50 feet above sea level. Community amenities along the sea wall include boardwalks with Madame Tussauds and Ferris wheels, zoos with lifelike stuffed replicas of newly extinct animals — and a Bubba Gump on every corner.
Panama was delighted with the treaty, as the sea wall converted its climate-vulnerable canal into a levy-based land bridge. However, the drug cartels of Medellin sued for damages after they were cut off from access to their Midwest consumer base, sustaining $11 trillion on a tortious interference claim, leading to a consent decree.
Stubborn islands
After relocation efforts stalled, arrogant islands stubbornly located along the arc of the sea wall were bisected.
In 2035, Cuba, which remained whole owing to its fortuitous location west of Puerto Rico, assessed its technological advancements and officially declared that its calendar would revert to, and remain fixed on, the year 1955.
To showcase its pristine antique car collection, Cuba began hosting the world’s annual 1955 Convention, attracting enough tourism dollars to put a box of Montecristos No. 4 cigars on every dashboard. Enforcing the calendar change, Sunday mass is now mandatory, women are required to prepare meals in heels and the men carry on, shining Cadillac fins and Chevy grills untouched by salted roads. The great GOP migration to Cuba began shortly thereafter, and Havana was officially renamed “Little D.C.” in 2038.
Meanwhile, half of seawall-bisected Puerto Rico is now dry, and the other half, submerged, markets itself as the Great Citadel Reef, where divers can explore office buildings, cafes and cathedrals underwater.
The global pivot
It became clear around 2025 that the Paris Treaty goals for reducing carbon emissions would not be met, causing developed nations to pivot away from preventing climate change and toward regional mitigation pacts instead. The United States led the seawall treaty talks after the Army Corps of Engineers successfully erected the first prototype — a 25-foot sea wall to protect Miami, quickly followed by sea walls along the coasts of Norfolk, Va., and Charleston, S.C.
The political tension between real estate developers (views of tall metal walls hurt sales, even when painted navy blue), and obnoxious, virtue signaling NGOs demanding habitable land for the climate displaced, continued for decades.
DeSantis finally enforced a compromise, setting aside 30,000 square miles of interior Florida land for climate refugees from Central America, provided they agreed to clean houses and pick fruit in the northern half of the state for free, after the southern half of Florida got too hot to grow anything besides iguana.
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When he was still Florida’s governor, DeSantis started bussing migrant mosquitos to feed the iguanas until an old, non-banned school textbook surfaced, showing that iguanas did not actually eat them. The cover of the book depicted an iguana with two mommies, sending the governor on a tear to confiscate and destroy all copies of the book. Few people today know about the incident as history books, science books and all books discussing reptilian reproduction were outlawed shortly thereafter.
In 2035, the developed world reneged on the United Nations commitment to compensate developing countries for climate damage caused by fossil fuels. The next year, Koch Industries, armed with heavy federal subsidies that the fake news media called kickbacks, purchased the complaining countries by suing them for defamation, confiscating their lands to satisfy judgment. Climate change was a leftist hoax concocted to redistribute Kochs’ wealth. Developing nations that played no part in their own climate destruction organized sales of baked goods and bananas to offset big oil’s disinformation campaign, but the $87 they raised proved insufficient.
Sorry, Pakistan!
Pakistan, with one-third of its land swamped by flooding in 2022, was the first country to submerge completely, except for peaks along the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges, in 2030. Geographically unlucky, it bordered Iran to the west and Afghanistan to the north, foisting a Hobbesian time traveler’s choice onto Pakistani women forced to flee to higher ground: either migrate to the fifth century where they had no rights, or migrate to the seventh century where they had no rights.
Bangladesh, Chad, Haiti, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Somalia and Sudan soon followed Pakistan, becoming effectively uninhabitable due to median daytime temperatures north of 121 Fahrenheit. Today, residential real estate transactions in the United States include life leases for multi-generational household servants. The leases are mandatory, not optional, and voting by servants — along with the use of contraceptives — was forbidden by Constitutional amendment in 2035 following a Republican-led effort decades in the making.
Russia embraces climate change; China conquered it
Russia began stealing its next-door neighbors early in the 21st century. During DeSantis’ first term, NATO collapsed when Secretary of State Matt Gaetz conditioned membership on Christianity and led the United States’ withdrawal from the pact. Russia then annexed Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Poland and Moldova. Driving in on the MKAD today, Muscovites are greeted by a five-story statue of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, locked in eternal embrace.
Climate change was a gift to Russia, hence its aggressive resistance to global efforts to fight it. Russia’s calculus — that it would benefit from an elusive warm water sea port — paid off. Russian tourism now rivals Old World destinations in Italy and France, as tourists flock to Siberia every summer to bask in the sun along the balmy Arctic Ocean seaside
China is the only country in the world today that has conquered climate change. In the early 21st century, Chinese authorities amassed the world’s largest DNA database, and perfected facial recognition technologies. They began feeding satellite images to their surveillance A.I. program, transmitted from cameras, laptops, license plates, cellphones and family photos.
China then implanted tracking and recognition devices directly into the right elbow of every newborn infant. The new surveillance allowed authorities to read patterns of electrical brain activity and decode emotional responses, which were then electronically altered via remote control. By 2035, no one in China noticed the heat. When their tires melted into the asphalt, the Ministry of Happiness dispatched a cleaning crew with a new set of radials. In 2040, no one remembers pandas, the Tiananmen Square massacre or that China’s riverbeds used to have water in them.
Tired of all the Greta Thunberg whiners crying about polar bears and bees, DeSantis in 2039 ordered senators convening in Little D.C. — a.k.a. Havana — to acquire China’s cognition revision technology at any cost.
By New Year’s Eve 2050, the United States will have joined China’s ranks in eradicating climate change, and no one will remember manatees, sequoias or how water tastes without salt. Working women will happily return home where God and Samuel Alito put them, pregnant and cooking, while their husbands relax, wax their fins and smoke their Montecristos.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25-year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Follow her on Substack.