What Planet Are You From, Anyway?

You'd have to be a cave-dweller to miss the media propaganda blitz about Global Warming....er, I mean Climate Change. We have reduced toxic industrial pollution here in the US to negligible levels. Plastic is passe (not biodegradable you know); we've Reduced, Reused and Recycled, so there isn't much left in the way of environmental guilt trips to lay at the feet of humanity. You'd think.

We needed some way to reinforce the basic precepts; that all men are created equal evil, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights responsibilities...but how??

Then, miraculously, someone in a think tank somewhere dreamed up the buzzword phrase Carbon Footprints! BRILLIANT! A very effective campaign was launched to manipulate the masses into cheerleading for alternative energy sources.

Well, folks, it's not just us humans that environmentalists demonize as gross evil polluters. Now pets are under attack as well, for leaving carbon pawprints.

Recent headlines scream:

"Polluting Pets: The Devastating Impact of Man's Best Friend"

This, based on the book "Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living" by New Zealanders Robert and Brenda Vale. The authors calculate that a medium sized dog requires over 2 acres annually to generate its food. This, they tell us, is twice the resources needed to drive a 4X4 vehicle averaging 6200 miles per year (including the energy needed to build the car).

"Owning a dog really is quite an extravagance, mainly because of the carbon footprint of meat."

Barrett states in his book.

That's right, our pets are greedy, wasteful capitalists, perched right up there atop the food chain along with us, their decadent masters!

Finger-pointing environmentalists also believe that cows produce more dangerous methane than tasty milk or meat. Sounds like a great rationalization for eliminating animal agriculture, doesn't it? Carbon hoofprints, I suppose?

The possible effect mankind (and our animal associates) might have on any sort of climate condition is highly dubious. All this "carbon footprint" rhetoric is a bunch of hoo-ha. And the warnings about carbon emissions ignore a very basic scientific fact; read about the carbon cycle or photosynthesis, and you find that carbon is the very basic element of life!

Here's a definition of "Carbon Cycle":

"It is one of the most important cycles of the earth and allows for the most abundant element to be recycled and reused throughout the biosphere and all of its organisms."

The vast ocean waters absorb carbon dioxide to produce masses of plankton and algae that form the basis of the planet's food chain. Plants use carbon dioxide to synthesize carbohydrates (i.e. FOOD) and to produce free oxygen in the atmosphere, that members of the animal kingdom rely on to BREATHE.

Does that sound in any way toxic or unnatural to anybody?? What planet are these environmentalists from, anyway?

There's even an old joke about two people who are very dissimilar, having in common only the fact that they are both carbon-based life forms.

Maybe some scientists who AREN'T on the government gravy train might fill us in on the real story. Or maybe our legislators might provide us their rationale for wanting to cap and punitively tax our use of energy?

Save the planet? From humans? AS IF our puny human activities could actually influence the earth's climate!

Reality check from the late great comedian George Carlin:

Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun?

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles…hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages.....The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system.

Now you just can't get more solid scientific evidence than a comedian's routine. I rest my case!