Mandatory suicide to reduce carbon footprint no joke
In an interview with Stephen Wright at Cracked.com, the comedian tells a favorite joke: You never know what you have until it’s gone, and I wanted to know what I had, so I got rid of everything. He lamented, “I really like that one, but it didn’t really get a laugh.”
Every comedian has a story of a beloved joke that never gets a laugh, and of other quips that everybody inexplicably likes.
I tell you this my friends because I worry about you. My number two son and I posted a “story” about Zombie Attacks Increasing Due to Global Warming, and the thing is linked at hundreds, and at a growing number, of websites. But the next day’s post—in my opinion, my most hilarious—about people willfully turning themselves into Soylent Green to battle climate change didn’t even rate a chuckle. Many of you even took it seriously! You can’t go wrong with Zombies, I guess. (By the way, check out waywardrobot.com today.)
The posting on the Soylent Coroporation’s government contract to encourage people to Go Home–i.e., commit suicide—to reduce their “carbon footprint” was, of course, a satirical observation on the zany lengths to which people will go when swayed by ideology. But it actually wasn’t too far off the mark.
How do I know this? Well, according to this fine article by Brad Allenby at GreenBiz.com, a “recent study from the Swedish Ministry of Sustainable Development argues that males have a disproportionately larger impact on global warming” because “women cause considerably fewer carbon dioxide emissions than men and thus considerably less climate change.” So we need fewer men.
Think the worst of sins is driving an SUV? Not a chance. Being obese and having children also up people’s carbon output. Eating meat is bad, too. These behaviors obviously have to be curtailed, if not voluntarily, then at some point by force—force of law, of course.
It might not come to that. There might be enough deeply concerned volunteers to pull the load for the rest of us. Says humble citizen Erik Daehler, in an article about how we can all do out part, “You do have to sacrifice,” said Daehler. “I think a lot of people are going to have to soon assess themselves and figure out that what they give up now may allow their kids to have it, or their kids’ kids to have it. It’s sort of a selfish relationship we have with the environment right now.”
But even reducing your [carbon] footprint to zero and living a so-called carbon neutral life may not be enough, said the [director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate change program John] Steelman.
“You can take yourself out of the equation,” he said…(emphasis mine)
[Ordinary citizen] Tony Napolillo said he won’t wait for politicians to act.
“Everybody has to realize they have personal responsibility,” he said. “They can’t just wait for the government or the corporate world to do something about it. If everybody could strive to be carbon neutral, this would be a greater world.”
It’s never too long these days before reality overtakes parody, so I should take my own advice and leave well enough alone, before somebody does think “Going Home” is a good idea.
6 comments February 5th, 2008
