The sky is falling: Green Science and Carbon Trading

If there’s one thing that makes me madder than a milliner sucking mercury from a broken thermometer, it’s these hemp toting dread-haired greenie totemplonkers who want to tell me that I’m killing the earth because I’m breathing too much air and drinking too much water. I mean, what do these ‘recycled my brain from pushbike inner-tubes’ know about anything anyway? How can they assert that when I walk down my local main street in New Zealand with a latte in hand that my actions will somehow result in the extinction of the sub-Saharan Aardvark in 2043? Come on, get real! Go and wash your hair you dumbass greenie… and use some God damned biodegradable deodorant!

And it’s not like these greenie doomsayers have anything more than a broken Mayan calendar, a Nostradamus riddle book and a guide to Morris dancing to support their ‘end of the world’ Roland Emmerich directed CGI apocalypse. Like they can’t even agree on whether we’re all going to be killed by popsicle in a new universal ice age or boiled like ketchup in a mega-global greenhouse. If you ask me, it all sounds a little like vague Katie the weather girl: “and so tomorrow is likely to be either hot or cold with a slight chance of rain or not. But the important thing is my outfit was provided by local designer [stick your label here], and it certainly does wonders for my cleavage.”


I think you get the picture.


And while the greenies have a clear vision of our multiple pathways to self-destruction, they seem incapable of coming up with any plausible solution beyond saying “stop living!” Yes, that’s their best strategy… we’re all destroying the earth and the only way we’re going to avoid killing ourselves is to stop living.

I think someone’s been smoking their handbags again…

But I’m being unkind. The greenies do have a solution and it’s a beauty! Carbon trading. It’s genius – a strategy that works at the core of human nature: economic greed.

So what is carbon trading? Well it’s simple. If I’m an industrial polluter then I can offset my carbon output by purchasing carbon ‘credits’ from my neighbourhood tree-hugger. So I ring up my mate who happens to be one of those tree-huggers and I give him some money for his tree air, and then I can rest easy that my chimney stacks are clean and green. What’s more, if I decide to up production and pump more toxins into the air over some Ohio community-based social housing project, I just give my tree-hugging mate another cheque and his tree plantation in southern Mexico wipes my conscience clean.

So the more crap I want to send up into our atmosphere the better because I’m supporting the growth of the tree hugging industry and therefore, saving the planet. And if all my mates do the same and increase their toxic output, then the planet will be saved much quicker than any of us could ever have imagined.

Isn’t green science amazing?

Of course that is until my tree hugging friend starts doing the ‘Wall Street’ integrity thing and begins selling four times the tree air stock he actually has at hand (like I said, the core of human nature). Then, when an unexplained giant toxic cloud offloads 75 millilitres of acid rain on southern Mexico, wiping out mega-hectares of credit-earning trees, we are confronted with our first ever carbon-based recession and a world-wide tree hugging market freeze (so the greenies were right, death by financial popsiclcide).

So you can see why I get as mad as an Indonesian palm oil farmer with a chainsaw and a license to deforestate when it comes to this ‘save the planet’ bunk. I don’t care about Aardvarks, I care about Brazilian farmed Angus steak – and it’s time for lunch thank you very much!

That’s what I think… And usually I’m right.