The Warm Winter Plan referred to a complete urban redevelopment plan for the northern cities, making it easier for the government to centrally organize heating and provide the necessary support.
However, the plan had only been discussed in Congress. It was not yet a mature proposal, let alone an approved project.
Mr. Truman chimed in, "It really isn't easy. Even if businesses and local governments proposed it together, renovating the utility networks and urban districts of entire cities would still require an enormous budget."
The President also nodded in agreement. Renovating a single city might not cost too much—two or three hundred million, or perhaps three to five hundred million, would be enough.
But how many cities were there across the entire north? All of them needed renovation. Added together, the budget was something even the Federal Government could not afford.
He set down the documents, then sighed again. "But the weather problem... has to be solved somehow. No one knows whether the weather will keep getting colder. If..."
He trailed off. Meteorologists believed that if the current cooling trend continued, then within no more than fifteen years, every city in the Federation outside the south would become uninhabitable during winter.
The weather in northernmost Maliro was already approaching ten degrees. At the latest, by the end of September or the beginning of next month, it would drop below zero.
In winter, temperatures might fall to minus fifty degrees or even lower. In such a climate, forget humans—even the most resilient things would struggle to survive!
Moreover, this extreme cold was continuing to spread southward. The number of people fleeing Maliro to escape the winter had increased considerably from the previous year.
Last year, some people had naively believed that as long as they stayed inside their homes and kept