Chapter 5

Well, things were getting interesting, and I was living in interesting times. The inventions and discoveries Curse and I encouraged were blooming into a new paradise on earth. We had sponsored a rationalized single multi-use plastic that simplified recycling tremendously, and starting in Europe and eventually in the U.S... , a tariff sufficient to encourage 90%+ re-use. A homeless person still couldn’t afford a home, but they could get enough to feed themselves and their dog for a number of days with just a shopping basket load of Eternaplas™ turned in at the nearest Recy Station.

Highly versatile, using this one type of plastic for nearly every consumable use meant that the environmental impact was mostly just the water to clean the Eternaplas™ so it could be reused. And clever systems could reuse the water, anyway.

Any non-recyclable specialty plastic was required to be a puke yellow-green color, and environmentally conscious persons eschewed it. Manufacturers tried to get that color out of their product harder than they tried to add to the labels the words ‘Non GMO’ and ‘PFTE free’.

The Powerbrick and Skybeater™ meant the end of internal combustion engines, except for racing and motor enthusiasts and collectors. The general commute not only took to the sky, but even on the roadways the vehicles were most likely powered by a brick. It was rare to encounter a gasoline powered car, much like encountering a horse drawn delivery truck in 1939.

There was a short lived effort by some sincere yet misguided people who had endured the tragic loss of traffic fatalities to outlaw cars altogether, but even their argument that traffic kills more people than guns by a large factor didn’t convince anyone to stop driving cars. The most they could achieve was to get the driving age increased to 21. I had no objection to that, it seems to me that most bad drivers were immature hormone driven young jerks, on their journey to become assholes.

A lot less oil was required, but Eternaplas™ was so much value added to the crude that the oil countries didn’t lose out much. At least until the world had all the reuse able plastic it could reuse. However, that took awhile, and inventive minds figured out what else they could do. In this case, it was a desalinization process that produced limitless fresh water from ocean water. The deserts bloomed once more, and fruits, vegetables and grains replaced oil as the life-blood of the region.

Amazing almost everyone, France was the first country to unilaterally disarm and divest itself of nuclear weapons, trumping Germany’s disavowal and abjuration of plutonium based power plants. It was a brave and principled stand.

France gave free professional looking rifles with high capacity magazines along with training and ammo, to any of it’s citizens who were sane and patriotic, saying every armed person in France would defend the nation at need, but weapons of mass destruction were immoral and the citizens of France had decided they refused to use or have them no matter the circumstance.

Everyone thought they were certifiable, but after all, the less actors on the nuclear stage, the less likely they were to stumble into each other, or trip on their shoelace. Lots of countries didn’t have nukes. Not very important ones, but important to whom?

With the wide spread use of the Powerbrick, there wasn’t even the fiction of ‘cheap power’ to justify ‘atoms for peace’ a guilt-ridden attempt at justification if ever there was one.

Sane people everywhere admired the spunky fortitude of the French. Anyone who knew the true character of the French as a people wasn’t shocked by this move. Tourism increased 500%, and everyone was friendly towards the French as a whole and found that they were a nice bunch of folks after all. (Aside from the Parisians, but eh? They were probably just reacting to too many New Yorkers.) Bit snobby about their language, but everyone has faults. The nation bloomed, a veritable Renaissance.

Seeing the economic benefit of being a former nuclear power, A nearly bankrupt since Brexit but maintaining a stiff upper lip and whatnot, England was next to foreswear nuclear power and weapons. (you didn’t realize England was a nuclear power? They don’t brag about it... )

Meanwhile, the orgy of celebratory tourism tripled England’s GDP. Someone pointed out that South Africa had once had and no longer has atomic weapons, which went a long way toward mitigating the stench left lingering from apartheid, and Kazakhstan also had Peace Tourists treking her trails, making pilgrimage to former weapon sites. North Korea joined the party, and didn’t know what to do with all the wealth and opportunities flooding in with the lifting of the Tariffs. It seems that all they had wanted all along is for other nations to recognize their right to exist, much like Israel.