hiester.com

If you’re going to make a list of heresies, you don’t put 10 items on it. You have to put 13 items on it. 13 is a heretical number. I don’t even want to spend much time on how naive and phony WIRED’s list is. They present a set of false choices, such as picking a hybrid versus buying an old used car (how about not having a car at all or at least cutting your driving by 80% or more–that would reduce carbon output more than anything WIRED recommends). Another bogus point is that air-conditioning emits less carbon than heating. Duh, WIRED, consider that most people in the USA have to both heat AND cool their homes. A better idea is to conserve as much as possible; insulate better, keep your house a little cooler in the winter and a little warmer in the summer. Why quibble over whether “organic” cows produce less beef and fart more than their “conventional” bovine brethren. The better suggestion is to STOP EATING BEEF or at least cut down a whole lot. Those aren’t provocative topics that can divert a person’s attention to a magazine on a newsstand (with content that is so weak that it requires a neon orange background), so WIRED dismisses the more commonsense and ultimately even less convenient truths about climate change. If we want to reduce carbon emissions, we’re going to have to give up our gigantic SUV’s, our bacon-double-cheeseburgers and our sprawling McMansions.

My true goal here, however, is to help WIRED fulfill its act of heresy against the green movement(actually, my goal is to poke fun at the numbskulls at WIRED who wrote the article, but play along) Hence, here are my three additional WIRED-style “green heresies” that will bring their number up to the very sinister total of 13.

11) Buy Lots of Cigarettes - Think about it. Tobacco is a plant. Plants absorb CO2. If thousands and thousands of additional acres of tobacco were planted, think of all the carbon that would be kept out of the atmosphere. What’s that you’re thinking? When you smoke the cigarette, it just puts the carbon right back in the atmosphere? Well, you wouldn’t actually smoke them, silly (I suppose you could and still be “carbon neutral”, and, hey, since curbing carbon is our number one goal, we’ll have to make a few sacrifices to our health to get there). Carbon-cutting citizens could put all those packs of cigarettes into crawl spaces and attics for insulation. Americans are accustomed to buying lots of stuff we don’t need (and that we’ll never use) and then letting it all sit around and clutter up our homes, so this won’t require any change in behavior and it would be great for the economy!

12) Be Even More of a Couch Potato - When you boil it all down, it’s human activity that is causing global warming. Want to cut carbon emissions? Then just stop doing so much. Every time you come up with something to do, you’re suddenly spewing out carbon like nobody’s business. You jump in your car and you buy stuff that had to be shipped halfway across the earth and it was made with oil and other natural resources that burned up tons of hydrocarbons to get to the store in your local strip mall. Here’s a better idea: sit on the floor in the dark. If you’re worried about obesity from lack of exercise, try a seaweed diet. Homegrown seaweed. There you have it, WIRED’s recipe for reversing carbon emissions: sit in the dark and eat seaweed that you grow in your swimming pool.

13) Cancel your subscription to WIRED.

“Look, Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon”

-George W. Bush, our illegitimate, unelected fraud of a President, who now declares endless war on knowledge

Citing the persistent failure of his “No Child Left Behind” act to inculcate knowledge into the minds of American schoolchildren, the President has concluded that that the program could easily be tweaked to erase dangerous facts from the minds of evildoers. The President has decided to seize top Iranian scientists via extraordinary rendition and enroll them in American public schools to eradicate their “knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

The President also stated that the USA will declare war on Denmark, another nation where scientists have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon (never mind that they don’t have the resources or any interest in doing so).

I, for one, am relieved that North Korea and Pakistan(our ally, despite being an undemocratic dictatorship), while having actual functioning nuclear weapons, have somehow miraculously passed Bush’s new “knowledge” test.

In 2004, two Princeton scientists, Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow, published a paper in the journal Science titled “Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies“. The genius of the study is that it breaks down the problem of reducing carbon emissions into manageable parts. They visualize the problem and solution as a right triangle. The hypotenuse represents the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The bottom leg of the triangle represents no growth. The scientists divide the inside of the triangle into a series of “wedges” and they recommend measures that can be taken to flatten out each wedge. So, for instance, one wedge is “Efficient Cars” and the effort to flatten out the “car” wedge is “to increase fuel economy for 2 billion cars from 30 to 60 mpg”. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Still, I worry. Flattening out the wedge, as Bill McKibben points out in this month’s National Geographic, requires Americans to make some significant lifestyle changes. The auto industry hasn’t even reduced fuel economy one mpg in the last 25 years. Unless it gets too expensive, Americans will keep driving alone to work in their SUVs (with increasing chunks of time spent idling in traffic jams). While the wedges seem more “manageable” than looking at reducing carbon emissions as a single overwhelming and impossible task, I don’t see how Americans can “manage” to flatten out even one of the wedges. It’s getting late. We’re in Act III of the drama of climate change. It’s time for the deus ex machina.

Who will intervene to save us from ourselves? I’m thinking of a super hero. Mercifully, there IS a super hero who specializes in wedges. His name is Captain Underpants. He’s the only super hero with WEDGIE POWER. It will be his stiffest challenge yet. He has already vanquished the Talking Toilets, the Bionic Booger Boy, and the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space. He is our only chance. CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS, WHERE ARE YOU?

I received an email newsletter today from Relevante containing this memorable passage:

Relevante is pleased to invite you to attend our 2007 Internal Audit Symposium. We have a great lineup of cutting edge topics … which are important to the internal audit world in today’s environment.

Internal Audit. Cutting Edge. Whoa, my oxymoron advisory system spiked all the way up to Krakatoan lava orange. Someone who thinks internal audit is cutting edge probably watches C-SPAN on their video ipod. I don’t know how I got on this email list. It must have been a practical joke. Then again, I have had an email account since the second Reagan Administration, so my addresses are scattered throughout the telecosm like Caesar’s last breath. But an accounting symposium for me? You can say “Accounting” and I’ll be asleep before you get to the “ing”. Go ahead and give me a root canal. It’ll take one of those 911 recordings of O. J. Simpson screaming expletives to wake me up.

As oxymorons go, the “cutting edge internal audit conference” might be the best one I’ve heard since I saw a “clean coal” billboard while I was driving my Fry-O-Diesel-fueled 1984 Mercedes 300SD across the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Did you know that my car is really “PZEV”, a “partial zero-emission vehicle”? What the hell kind of Orwellian nonsense is that? Partial zero? You can’t divide by zero folks. Anyway, I consider my old tank to be PZEV—it does not emit anything when it is parked and turned off. I guess it’s kind of like clean coal.