Ask Fred: The Environment

Dear Fred,

I am the President of a country that believes in pretend-drowning terrorists more than indisputable scientific facts about how much we're killing our planet. I genuinely care about this country and the safe, healthy future of our children, and as such I've made a bold move to try and steer us off the road of coal power production. I've devised a plan to tax power companies based on carbon emissions, in the hope that I can promote good behaviorand penalise the bad. I'm doing this for all the right reasons, and my reasons are backed up by experts in finance AND science, but everyone seems angry. Help?

B.O.

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Thanks for your question, Mr President. I'm sorry there's been a backlash to your good intentions, but are you really that surprised? You've decided to tackle a multi-million dollar business that cares more about money than it does about accidentally creating weather that can Raiders-Of-The-Lost-Ark the fuck out of a child's face. The coal industry, which is based on using black rocks to slowly terraform our planet into something suitable for the Mer-People of Venus, is not going to take kindly to you suggesting that they pay tax on all that spare poison they're giving us.

Don't get me wrong, it's a fucking sensible idea. Coal is a supremely inefficient power source and pollutes more things than it powers. YouTube 'clips of coal being burnt down to sludge,' and you'll see it produces a thick green smoke usually reserved for Dracula attacks and/or exciting acrobatic ninja escapes. It's an antiquated fuel that only really took off because rocks are easier to catch than whales. The process involved in converting it into electricity has so many hazardous side effects, it's comparable to trying to build a set of shelves using napalm, herpes and a Ouija board. It creates mercury contamination, carbon dioxide pollution and fucks fish harder than Tom Hanks (*It's not libellous, there isn't a court in the land that hasn't seen Splash.)

Deciding to put pressure on these assholes to pay for their impossible horror-gas and fish corpse business makes good, conscientious sense, but you may be going at it the wrong way. You can talk about trust and science all day, but you're preaching the good word to the stupid and greedy, and neither of those guys like bar-graphs about lung cancer. The Republicans are still trying to wrap their heads around how it's legal for a black man to be the president and the coal industry is trying to figure out why children don't just learn to breath arsenic. I don't think science or sanity is going to help much.

Sure, America could learn to wean itself off fossil-fuel dependency, but where's the short-term gain? You say "Cleaner environment, more prosperous future," and all your opponents hear is "LESS MONEY, JOB LOSSES AND HIGHER ELECTRICITY BILLS." But environmental responsibility is a bit like Monopoly: a long game in which everyone playing gets enraged, but the moment it's done, you get to pack the whole damn thing up and never play it again.

And fuck them and their 'job losses'. It's only a steady job inlet because it kills so many miners. There'd be more than enough jobs in hairdressing if we just asphyxiated or crushed 30 of them a year. Remember, you're talking to people who complained that your gun laws prevent them from purchasing silver-plated Bazooka rounds because your health policy won't cover giantism and lycanthropy. They're a lost cause; the planet ISN'T. Stay the course, do it for a better tomorrow. Years from now, when we're all gone, our future clean-air breathing space-children will thank you.

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Dear Fred,

I'm a polar bear. I'm worried because my home is shrinking and no one seems to care. Not the people, not the businesses, not the children. When my home goes, so does yours. Why don't you care?

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Thanks polar bear.

It's hard to get anyone, let alone soulless corporations, to give a shit about the environment. It's kind of like One Direction; it's goddamn everywhere, but if part of it gets fucked in the face by a bulldozer, it's probably easier just to sit back and watch. Saving our planet is an arduous, complicated and expensive task, and these are three adjectives that don't sit well with a culture that values Pot Noodles over not-diarrhoea. We are tiny creatures on a giant rock, in an infinite galaxy. We've just worked twelve hours in a shitty job and what little money we have left after squandering it on luxuries like food and warmth is about to be spent on repairing our leaking boiler, our TV license and Tesco Value vodka. You think we have any fucks left to give that in less than ten years, a polar bear might be a little grumpy? SCREW YOU AND THE ENVIRONMENT.

Right now, Earth has what zoologists classify as "seven billion lazy, self-destructive shitlords" on it. Now consider the fact that we're adding an additional 70 million more of those every year; is it any wonder the planet just put itself on suicide watch? A delicate biosphere of environmental harmony can only take so much abuse, which should be evident to anyone who's ever shat in a bowl of sea-monkeys. You can only clumsily finger-bang Mother Nature for so long before she either dries up completely or starts creating Godzillas. Like any relationship, 'giving something back' is the key to happiness, but as flower sales and divorce figures prove, it's a pain in the ass and you have to be 100% committed.

Early attempts at getting our apathetic asses behind environmentalism resulted in an ill-advised 90s cartoon about a whispy, bachelor superhero who magically appeared when a bunch of 12-year-olds mashed their rings together. Positive environmentalism is simple in theory, but complicated in practice. Captain Planet took an already clouded issue and dropped it in a bucket of insane. According to the show, environmentalism was accessible to anyone with a ghost, laser-jewellery and a half-naked, overly friendly Adonis. (Why the fuck would a sumptuously muscled, blue, shirtless man bring 5 preteens to fight a radioactive monster? I'll tell you this: if Captain Planet wasn't a paedophile, he had a lot of explaining to do.) The show hoped to inspire an entire generation to become environmentally responsible and fight for a cleaner, fruitier future. It couldn't have failed harder had they just punched a hippy and recorded him whining for twenty-five minutes.

We don't care, because caring is hard and time consuming. The here and now is what matters because that's all we're taught. The news, the media, the movies, the food. It's instant and short term. Problems of the future are problems for future-us, and by then, we'll be so futurey, we'll be able to solve it all with ray guns or robots. Movies have taught us that every disaster is easily survivable via a series of car chases and being John Cusack. We're pretty much numb to the reality: WE'RE EXACTLY FUCKED.

I don't really have an answer for you, polar bear, other than to suck it up and hope we as a species wake the hell up before it's too late. Take a leaf out of the President's book. Reward the good, reject the bad. Insist that those in power make the changes. THE POWER IS YOURS.