CO2 Sarcasm

I received this assignment in my sustainable engineering class…

Go through the powerpoint slides in Global Warming Consequences and write a short essay on what you plan to do to deal with global warming (conserve, live simply, migrate, adapt, become political, develop a new social movement, ?????). Be creative.

I decided the best approach to dealing with such a horridly depressing topic was to satire it a bit. Let’s hope my professor approves!

The Sarcastic Approach to Dealing with Impending Doom

I don’t know what I’m going to do about the CO2 problem. I am not studying anything that directly pertains to the carbon cycle or to sequestering carbon or to reducing carbon emissions. I don’t plan on an engineering career dedicated to reducing the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. I’m not going to get rid of my car or stop flying on airplanes. I don’t plan on moving to Canada and living in a small hut to reduce my footprint.

If I’m still living in Oregon when the climate takes a turn for the warmer, I’ll probably buy an air conditioner and make sure it’s well chained down to my house so no one tries to make off with my suddenly highly sought after appliance. I’ll buy more pairs of shorts and Hawaiian t-shirts. Flip-flops and sandals will be the footwear of the day. Wide-brimmed hats will be the latest rage in fashion.

I’ll build a cistern under my house to collect rainwater from my roof. I’ll have a filtration system to pull out all the harmful compounds that come with the future rains courtesy of China. To combat the rolling blackouts due to a lack of water behind the dams of the Western Power Grid, I’ll install several banks of photovoltaic cells on my roof complete with large batteries to store energy for nighttime air conditioning use.

As petroleum resources get scarcer I’ll convert my car to run on bio-diesel and turn my attention to the unwanted grease so often dumped by fast food restaurants. I’ll have a couple of well-secured bio-reactors behind my house to produce much needed energy. I guess, in respect to fossil fuels, my carbon emissions will decrease a bit. This reduction in consumption, however, will be driven by market forces, not by my person feelings of guilt over killing the planet.

If I’m living outside of Oregon, I’ll most likely be living abroad in some far flung canton of the United States, such as Iraq or Afghanistan or Brittan. The America of the future will have many new colonies and protectorates. As I’ll be part of the ruling class, I’ll have an easy and idyllic life, when not oppressing the natives. I’ll have boys whose job is to fan me with palm fronds. As it gets hotter, I’ll have more boys and more palm fronds. Being one of the privileged elite will mean that I won’t have to worry about such things as conservation of scarce resources or my impact on the planet. Instead, I’ll be able to burn hydrocarbons like there is no tomorrow. I’ll go out on the weekends to clear-cut tropical forests and burn the wood for relaxation and escape from the dull monotony of administering the unenlightened indigenous inhabitants.

Before sea-levels rise, I’ll calculate exactly where I should expect the rise to stop. I’ll buy large swaths of property at that elevation and hold onto them until they’re beachfront properties. Then I’ll sell. For a lot of money. If there’s one thing to be learned from today’s disasters it’s to always watch for the profit angel. Hurricane victims, of which there will be many more in the coming years as larger and larger hurricanes form, will pay a pretty penny for the privilege of a bag of melting ice. Rich and unintelligent people with today’s ocean-front property will scramble to buy my very reasonably priced and conveniently dry beach-side property of tomorrow.

Before water becomes too scarce I’ll start buying up strategically placed pieces of property around the world that sit atop very large fossil water reservoirs. When things get dry, I’ll drill and start selling the water at a very affordable price. It won’t matter to me that within a generation all of the fossil water will be gone. The important thing is that I will have made a tidy profit. If people can’t afford the water, then they simply can sign over their first-born son to my business interests. They all will be well looked after working on water pipeline-laying projects around the world. After all, a dead worker is a useless worker. We won’t use such nasty terms as “slaves” in the future. Instead we’ll call them “volunteers.”

When the concentration of CO2 gets so high in the atmosphere as to cause grave danger to our very respiration, I’ll be sure to own a number of oxygen generation stations. For mere dollars a day, a family of four will be able to buy all of their oxygen needs from me. Meanwhile, my lumberjacks will continue to clear forest lands that otherwise could have provided free oxygen to the masses. One must always make sure that ones competition, natural or otherwise, is kept under control.

The farther and farther our planet spirals toward climatic disaster the better and better my economic bottom line will look. As areas of the world dry out and become sun-baked wastelands, my tan will increase exponentially until I’m the spitting image of a tanned Greek god. A new ruling class of “resource elite” will form which will subjugate the rest of the world under their iron grip. For a few liters of water or a couple of kilometers worth of energy, people will find themselves doing amazing and unimaginably barbaric things.

Global warming heralds the end of our civilized world. Global warming ushers in a new era of boundless greed and corruption. I only hope that I’ll be at the forefront of greed and corruption, otherwise my life will be pretty miserable.