Time Travel 1: The Black Tide

I've decided to make use of the Time Machine Kip Thorne threw out - I picked it up out of the garbage in the alley behind his place - and go forward to actually see how the grandkids are making out in the world we created for them.

The first thing I noticed was that the seas were full of oil, and the beaches and estuaries were on fire most of the time. When Climate Change really kicked in, vast hurricanes and storms demolished as number of oil rigs, of which fully 40% lacked proper emergency shut-off systems, and the seas were fouled with a black tide.
Some were still pumping out crude. The resources needed to meet the situation just were not available any more.

The stocks of Insurance companies I had invested in and passed along to my offspring were now worthless, since these companies had been part of a world-wide consortium insuring the oil companies. The consortium went belly up, along with most oceanic creatures, and if oil rigs still are operating, they are operating as "pirate rigs" without any insurance of any sort. This actually increases their profitability rather enormously, but they are true "men without countries".. all countries will buy from them, but none will accept them as citizen traders and citizen merchant businessmen.

And, in all truth, the seas were burning, at least portions of the Caribbean and the Mediterranean were on the day I flew over. And the particles in the oil fire smoke were in the atmosphere, filtering the light so that the full moon at night resembled an albinoed leech engorged with hemoglobin and suffused with the pink hue of red blood cells.

The official seated next to me was looking out the airplane window at the fires, muttering "Damn terrorists, damn terrorists." After introducing myself and chatting him up for a while - he thought me a decidedly odd fish and rare bird... a bit "behind" the times and fanciful, for "fishes" and "birds" were scarce as hen's teeth in his time... and hens themselves were housed at the Smithsonian - I found out that the oil rigs had become a favourite target of terrorists during WoT IV, or War on Terror: fourth installment, as they called it, as if it were a "sit-traj", or "situation-tragedy" for the television.  He himself was on his way to the Middle East to help evacuate a group of his co-religionists who were being kicked out of Jerusalem since its re-unification in the war of 2051.
"Jesus wept," I said.
He gave me a rather goggle-eyed look. "Oh, Yeshua..." he said.
Leave it to good old American know-how: we have finally gotten Jesus' name right, having lost everything else.