The environment

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During the last 30 years a series of ecological disasters have taken the greatest toll on the United States' infrastructure. Global warming has melted much of the polar icecaps, resulting higher sea level. Large parts of eh East Coast and South are now under water or partially swampland. New Orleans is on stilts and Houston has an alligator population. Much of Alaska, central Canada and the upper US have now thawed, these are the new breadbasket areas, producing the verdant fields of bioengineered grain that is the basis of much of the US economy. Unfortunately these climate changes have dried up even more areas than they have helped. In the Great Plains and the Southwest, whole regions have become desert in only a few years; unhampered by tree cover, violent winds scour the land with driving sandstorms.

The Pacific Northwest has suffered through twenty years of drought-stricken forests and water shortages. From Seattle to San Diego, the main issue is water, how much, who owns it and where to get more. In LA, shifting ocean currents have diverted rainfall from the central coast; the result is dense groundfogs mixing with smog to create an acidic, poisonous soup over the LA basin. Only sixty miles away that same shifting current has left San Diego (capital of the free state of Allied South California) a desert city. Night City, straddling the area between North and South California (NorCal and SoCal respectively) gets a mix of everything - sweltering dry summers and cool, dry winters, punctuated by periodic acid rainstorms and choking poison ground smogs.

It doesn't stop there. Sloppy pollution controls in the latter half of the 20th century left permanent environmental scars. Massive acid rain storm fronts still batter the Midwest, poisoning water and crops. Two entire regions of the Easter seaboard are wasteland as power companies abandoned nuclear reactors during the Collapse and let their contents leak into the water table. Abortive "rock strikes" from the ESA's lunar-based massdrivers have obliterated Tampa and Colarado Springs; the explosive impacts blasted millions of tons of dust and heat into the atmosphere to further aggravate global warming. Toxic spills on both coasts, the dumping of medical wastes from the years of the Wasting Plague; all of these have contributed to a steep die-off of ocean life, including marine mammals, food fish and the phytoplankton necessary to replenish Earth's oxygen supply.

Plagues have decimated large sections of the population; the Aids problem of the 1990's escalated into the Aids II crisis of the early 2000's. Stalling by politicians and academic infighting, among researchers delayed a cure so long that in the intervening years, the disease mutated into a more virulent form. The Wasting Plague, (now known to be a tailored bioweapon developed by several Arab nations during the Mideast Meltdown), further reduced the population, until it stabilised at its current level of one hundred and ninety-five million people.