If you've been reading any of the various and assorted blogs (Isolated Desolation, Lose an Eye, It's a Sport, Harris County Almanac, No Upgrades or this, current, one) then it should not surprise you to read that I am no big fan of Earth Day.
Oh sure, I'm a fan of conservation and reducing pollution and generally protecting the outdoors. But Earth Day isn't really about any of that. It's about attempts (and speeches) that try and guilt people into working against their own financial interests to forward the financial interests of companies who have figured out that there are very large profit margins to be had from convincing people that scary things like "evil oil" and "rampant population growth" are somehow destroying the planet on which we reside.
Earth Day is the worst of all the "guilt-trip" holidays (as I call them). Think about it....for Earth Day there are no decent parties, no cakes baked for Mother Gaia, no beer specials, no sales down at the shopping malls and nothing of any consequence except (I'm not kidding here) holier-than-thou green scolds FLYING to Florida to tell us that our tailpipes are damaging the Everglades.
Apparently the fix to this is two-fold:
1. We all need to stop (immediately) emitting any sort of carbon dioxide or methane in an effort to reduce the 7% of total CO2 that humans are dumping into the atmosphere.
2. Stop having babies.
Of all the solutions it's the latter that is spoken only softly by the more verdant climate change true believers the population bomb is one of the most problematic. IF you're going to decrease the human population of the Earth to say 4 Million people, that means over 2.5 Billion people have to be eliminated from the equation. The question then becomes: Who needs to go?
My answer to the environmentalists? "You first."
Until they volunteer to take the leap off the bridge first, I think it's fair to say pretty much everything they say can be ignored.
In a similar way it's fair to ignore their dire predictions about the climate. If they truly believed that Gaia was reaching her natural end due to human activity they would not be doing wasteful things like flying in Air Force one to warn us about it, a webcast would probably do fine. Nor would they be using energy and resource wasteful items such as computers, smart phones, Prius and electric cars (which use coal-fired electricity as their power source).
So, instead of getting all worked up about your personal .0000001% contribution to the Earth's CO2 and methane levels, instead worry about the things you can control. Recycle when possible, if you go outside leave it cleaner than you found it, make sure your car is running efficiently and don't be wasteful. If you're in a charitable mood donate to organizations that focus on conservation not environmentalism. At the end of the day these actions are more likely to clean the planet than are any high-minded speeches by wealthy, entitled politicians or rallies by the terminally unwashed and the wealthy, hypocritical celebrities that the worship.
And somebody bake the planet a damn cake will ya?
