London, June 29th, 2035 - - - Teenagers visiting the newly opened "Old Schooldays Museum" in South Kensington were saddened to see the wasteful ways of just 25 years ago. What shocked them most about the mock-up classroom was not the furniture, nor the antiquated audio-visual equipment, nor the non-circular layout, nor even the dominance of the whiteboard at the 'front' of the room. It was the heating system.
Back in those days, when oil just seemed to pour out of the ground, classrooms were artificially heated whenever the temperature started to fall below 18 degrees Celsius - that was the law. In those days, even in winter, children wore light clothing. Indeed, wearing of woolly hats in the classroom would have been banned!
Indeed, it was only twenty years ago, as oil shortages began to push prices up towards their true values, that people across Britain began to wear thicker clothes, and shops and offices were authorised (and then compelled) to switch off their heating systems. Indeed, it was not until 2025 that potable anti-freeze was introduced into all drinking water systems. Before then, it was not uncommon, even in those extravagant 'heating days', for water pipes to burst as the water froze. Unbelievably, because of the frost risk, people used to keep their heating on in their houses, in offices and in schools, even when they were empty!
How times have changed. If they had realised that their children and grandchildren would be obliged to walk and cycle, simply because, in the space of a few decades, they had extracted and set fire to nearly all the planet's oil, then one might hope that they wouldn't have been quite so short-sighted.
They were worried about global warming in those days - but as we know to our cost today, that wasn't the main problem.
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