Prequel Enviroment

I'm aware that some people find the topics of Global Climate Change and Peak Oil controversial. Generally, the science I've read supports these theories - and frankly, it can't hurt to address them as problems. What is the worst that can happen? "Oh no, we made the world a better place for no good reason! The water is too clean, we must dump more sludge in it for the children! Curse you James Lovelock and your Gian hypothesis."

Such rants aside, these two elements are a fairly major factor in the back story of the Anarchy Zones, and how the world came to have a very cyberpunk milieu before the events of 2050.

Doubling and doubling again of oil prices between 2020 and 2030 effectively mandates the creation of more nuclear power plants, dams, wave energy, and wind turbines. It also serves to limit travel, encourage armies to downsize (Tanks get an economy of one to three gallons of fuel to the mile!),or focus on multi-fuel vehicles.

Altered climate changes migration patterns of humans and other creatures.With more people moving, new virus resiviours opened up, and urbanization brought them together. Nana-vaccine was not so much a medical breakthrough as a much needed counterstrike in the war against new diseases.

These elements combined make super expensive projects like the NEST arcologies feasible. As expensive as a 150 story city in a bottle is, that removes potentially thousands or cars from the roads, places the inhabitants in one place to monitor for disease and quarantine pandemic, and high standards in construction reduce future resource requirements.

This also placed more emphasis on telecommuting and centralizing resources.  Even in America, long beholden to its cars, High Speed trains like the French TVG began to appear. Dirigibles and blimps made a surprising comeback due to their ability to transport large loads with decent fuel economy, and VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) meant they could bring supplies right to the factories rather than hubs.

Nano-factories and micro-facs began to sprout up as transportation costs prohibited the ease of accepting international manufacture.

These new migrations and the importance of augmented reality over physically being there led to new social groups, and a belief that old national borders may be obsolete. These sentiments would lead to the free city of Tesla in the "present day" of the setting.

Before 2050, the setting would be ripe for a cyber-punk game, and indeed, perhaps a decade from now I'll write that prequel.