Handlung

Follows the account of Lucy, who is born into a society where people are desperate for natural resources, while the global temperature and population are highly increasing.

In the year 2100, an old woman named Lucy, having witnessed the collapse of civilization and now living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, begins to narrate her life story. Lucy was born on June 2, 2009 (the date this movie originally aired) to an upper middle class family in suburban Miami, insulated from most of the chaos and suffering in the world. Climate change was a problem her family could not escape, and even though many people, her parents included, were aware of the problem and trying to solve it by recycling and use of renewable energy, it would not be enough.

By 2015, oil had become expensive enough that Lucy's parents could no longer afford their energy intensive, car dependent suburban lifestyle, so they move into an apartment in downtown Miami, selling their house on unfavorable terms. Gasoline becomes expensive, and shortages become common. One day, an powerful hurricane lays waste to Miami. Lucy's family is left homeless. They spend three weeks in a stifling, overcrowded evacuation center, then they move across the country, to San Diego. Meanwhile, world leaders fail to come to an agreement on global climate change, as countries such as China and India refuse to jeopardize their economic growth by agreeing to energy cuts.

Lucy grows up and trains to be an emergency medical technician. In 2030, rising prices and shortages of many goods are common. Around the world, the climate is warmer and rainfall patterns have changed, leaving billions of people vulnerable to shortages of food and water. San Diego has some new desalinization plants, solving their water crisis at enormous cost, but further inland, cities in the Desert Southwest begin to run out of water entirely, beginning with Tucson. Lucy meets her future husband, an engineer named Josh, at a rally protesting water prices. Soon, they are married and have a daughter, Molly.

Josh and Molly are among many of their generation trying to solve the world's climate problems, but these problems are becoming overwhelming. Solar energy and windmills barely put a dent in the use of coal and oil. World population growth continues unabated, reaching 9 billion. Ultra-nationalist governments take hold across the world, trying to protect their own share of a dwindling resource base from desperate hordes of millions of people fleeing from lands that are becoming too hot and too dry to support human life, leading to massacres at international borders. Untold numbers of plants and animals continue to go extinct at an ever-faster rate.

By mid-century, Lucy is entering middle age. Her elderly parents die of flu. Josh, Lucy, and Molly decide to move to New York. On the way there, they see that Las Vegas has been abandoned, after Lake Mead ran dry and deprived it of most of its water and electricity. Law and order has broken down in Texas, with many desperate people trying to head north. One man tries to carjack the family at gunpoint, but another family they are traveling with uses their own guns to protect them. They see farms ravaged by drought and pests, and a few signs of hope in the form of arrays of solar panels and a town in Kansas that uses only renewable energy. Further east, the rains are still plentiful, and they find New York a futuristic, clean, and unpolluted city, still a beacon of hope as it had been for many years.

Josh begins working on a flood barrier meant to protect New York from the rising seas, while Lucy gets a job at Bellevue Hospital. Molly marries George, a botanist, and soon Lucy's grandson Daniel is born. George, Molly, and Daniel move upstate to live on a farm, leaving Josh and Lucy in New York. The flood barrier becomes the largest civil engineering project of its day, attracting thousands of workers from around the world, some of whom carried diseases. Lucy's work helps contain a new virus before it gets out of hand.

In 2071, fears begin to grow that the flood barriers might not be enough. The sea levels are already up several feet and rising faster, as positive feedback loops release more and more trapped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In desperation, air forces around the world spray aerosols into the atmosphere to try to reflect some of the sunlight back into space, cooling the earth. It works in the short term, but the project is abandoned after it is discovered that the chemicals are destroying the ozone layer, and the warming continues, ever faster. One winter's day, a nasty storm approached New York, and one of the flood gates failed to close. Josh goes out into the harbor during the storm in a futile attempt to fix the gate, and he is lost at sea, leaving Lucy a widow. New York is flooded, destroying much of its high-tech infrastructure and transportation network. People begin to leave, if they can find anywhere to go, but Lucy stays on at her job at Bellevue. New York's elite move to higher ground uptown, leaving the masses to live in abject poverty that would compare unfavorably to the worst slums of the Third World today, with little food and contaminated water.

These abysmal living conditions are a breeding ground for new disease, and in the 2080s, a new pandemic, dubbed Caspian Fever, falls upon a population already gravely weakened by malnutrition. This time, Lucy's team is unable to contain it, and it spreads around the world. Lucy herself does not catch the virus, perhaps because of the protections she is afforded as a vital health care worker, but deaths from the virus soar into the millions, and the problem becomes worse when farmers and merchants, unwilling to risk catching the virus or being robbed of their wares, refuse to transport their crops and goods. The world economy shuts down and collapses, the power grid, data network, and other utilities fail, and mass looting takes place. Governments are powerless to intervene, and civilization dissolves to an every-man-for-himself anarchy. Billions face starvation, and the mass die-off of the human population begins. Now at the age of 75, Lucy leaves on the only transportation now available, her own two feet. Behind her, New York lies in rotting ruins, and nature begins to reclaim it.

Lucy finds her daughter Molly and grandson Daniel, now a young man, on the farm. Molly is now also a widow, George having been killed during the chaotic collapse. The world has entered a new Dark Age, with the elites hoarding what they can behind city walls and each settlement protecting what little it has left, long distance communications difficult or impossible, and no central government. People struggle to relearn the art of food production, which is very difficult for people who are removed by several generations from the farm. By 2100, the world population has fallen to 2 billion and continues to drop. Arts, culture, and education have all but disappeared, leaving Daniel's future to be one of barbarism and struggle for survival. Lucy, aged 91, wonders what wisdom she can impart to him, now that she is believed to be the oldest person still alive in the entire world.