Greta's Bright New World

Borrowed from Bella B. on MeWe.com.

One crisp winter morning in Sweden, a cute little girl named Greta woke up to a perfect world, one where there were no petroleum products ruining the earth. She tossed aside her cotton sheet and wool blanket and stepped out onto a dirt floor covered with willow bark that had been pulverized with rocks. 

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Pulverized willow bark,” replied her fairy godmother.

“What happened to the carpet?” she asked.

“The carpet was nylon, which is made from butadiene and hydrogen cyanide, both made from petroleum,” came the response.

Greta smiled, acknowledging that adjustments are necessary to save the planet, and moved to the sink to brush her teeth where instead of a toothbrush, she found a willow, mangled on one end to expose wood fibre bristles.

“Your old toothbrush?” noted her godmother, “Also nylon.”

“Where’s the water?” asked Greta.

“Down the road in the canal,” replied her godmother, ‘Just make sure you avoid water with cholera in it. Greenpeace has successfully banned the production of chlorine.”

“Why’s there no running water?” Greta asked, becoming a little peevish.

“Well,” said her godmother, who happened to teach engineering at MIT, “Where do we begin?” There followed a long monologue about how sink valves need elastomer seats and how copper pipes contain copper, which has to be mined and how it’s impossible to make all-electric earth-moving equipment with no gear lubrication or tires and how ore has to be smelted to a make metal, and that’s tough to do with only electricity as a source of heat, and even if you use only electricity, the wires need insulation, which is petroleum-based, and though most of Sweden’s energy is produced in an environmentally friendly way because of hydro and nuclear (however problematic that might be to you), if you do a mass and energy balance around the whole system, you still need lots of petroleum products like lubricants and nylon and rubber for tires and asphalt for filling potholes and wax and iPhone plastic and elastic to hold your underwear up while operating a copper smelting furnace and . . ."

“What’s for breakfast?” interjected Greta, whose head was hurting.

"Fresh, range-fed chicken eggs,” replied her godmother. “Raw.”

“Why raw?” inquired Greta.

“Well, . . .” And once again, Greta was told about the need for petroleum products like transformer oil and scores of petroleum products essential for producing metals for frying pans and in the end was educated about how you can’t have a petroleum-free, zero carbon emissions world and then cook eggs. Unless you rip your front fence up and start a fire and carefully cook your egg in an orange peel like you do in Boy Scouts. or that you can even find oranges in Sweden anymore (they tend to spoil on those long voyages on sailboats). Plus gas fires use petroleum byproducts like natural gas, electric stoves use petroleum in their materials and manufacture, and wood produces carbon when burned.

“But I want poached eggs like my Aunt Tilda makes,” lamented Greta.

“Tilda died this morning,” the godmother explained. “Bacterial pneumonia.”

“What?!” interjected Greta. “No one dies of bacterial pneumonia! We have penicillin.”

“Not anymore,” explained godmother “The production of penicillin requires chemical extraction using isobutyl acetate, which, if you know your organic chemistry, is petroleum-based. Lots of people are dying, which is problematic because there’s not any easy way of disposing of the bodies since backhoes need hydraulic oil, millenials don't want to dig graves by hand and crematoriums can’t really burn many bodies if all they have to use  as fuel are Swedish picket fences and Ikea furniture, which are rapidly disappearing - being used on the black market for roasting eggs and staying warm despite the carbon pollution caused by burning wood.”

This represents only a fraction of Greta’s day, a day without microphones to exclaim into, televisions, radios and the Internet to spread her message; even print media is gone due to the chemical pollutants required to make paper. It was a day without much food, and a day without carbon-fibre boats to sail in, but a day that will save the planet don't ya' know.

Tune in tomorrow when Greta needs a root canal and learns how Novocain is synthesized and is introduced to the dental tools of the stone age.

*Thanks to whoever the clever boots was that wrote this enlightening little fairy tale.

Tom

Is the Planet Afraid of Us?

An interesting thought occurred to me today. Yesterday I watched a video called "The Great Global Warming Swindle." It's kind of the anti "Inconvenient Truth". I suddenly realized how stupid the controversy actually is. Given the anthropomorphism of the planet by the touchy-feely, nature-wature, Marxist-warxist movement, one wonders whether Gaea (if she exists at all) is worried about us and our carbon output.

If you look at it, the planet has been here long before we were. It's been covered with ice, flooded, covered with dinosaurs, blown up a whole bunch of volcanoes, been showered with meteors and asteroids and other cosmic debris, been bathed in periodic solar ejections of plasma and radiation and generally roughed up. Does anyone actually think She's worried about a subspecies of apes driving too many SUVs.

I don't believe in Gaea myself. I think God designed a self-cleaning, self-repairing habitat for humans. I believe he knew we would tend to make a mess. Remember that, when he put Adam and Eve in the garden, the first thing he put them to work doing was counting the animals and naming them (didn't want us losing any of those) and taking care of the Earth. We are part of the self-cleaning, self-repairing mechanisms of the Earth. If humans wipe themselves out through war, pestilence or pollution, the Earth won't notice. I expect the Earth will simply bury the evidence and wait for God to replant and rebuild. The planet is certainly not afraid of us.

Okay, we've gotten careless with the cleaning/maintenance bit, but the Earth, I don't believe, is very worried about that. If we mess up too badly, the Earth will simply bury the mess, clean it up and start over. I personally think that when God puts us back here in what he calls the "New" Earth, that the first thing He'll do is have us clean up our own mess and start taking care of the garden again.

I don't think that either God or the planet think that we should adopt global Marxism and drive everyone back to the stone age as suggested by the Environmental Luddites that keep telling us they want to save the planet. They only want to save a nice clean place with amenities for themselves. Saving the planet from something like global warming would require them to install some sort of thermostat on the sun. Given how unlikely that is to happen, I think we'd best spend our money researching some new industrial brands of sunscreen and moving agriculture further north and south.

In the meantime, I'll keep my corner of the world as clean as I can and wait on Jesus to come clean house.  And by the way, I don't expect He'll implement global environmental Marxism when He does come.

© 2017 by Tom King

I, Polluter!

Today I am a polluter. To paraphrase Voltaire, "I breathe, therefore I pollute."

Today the Environmental Protection Agency in its infinite wisdom, has declared that Carbon Dioxide, good old CO2 is a pollutant and a health hazard for all Americans. As a result of this ruling, the EPA has given itself the power to regulate anything that produces carbon dioxide no matter whether the Congress approves anti-CO2 legislation or not.

Wait a minute. Didn't I read in my 8th grade science book that plants need CO2 to live?

So is the EPA going to get rid of CO2? Are the plants going to die? Are they afraid that excess CO2 will make the plants grow faster? Are we in danger of being overwhelmed by angry masses of carbon dioxide sucking vines? Are intoxicated trees going to uproot themselves and come after us, drunk on all this extra CO2 we're generating.

"Wait a minute!"

Didn't I read in my 9th grade Biology book that people breathe out carbon dioxide whenever we breathe? So, I AM A SOURCE OF POLLUTION WHEN I BREATHE?

Does this mean that now the EPA is going to regulate me? What's next?

Are we going to ration exhaling? I know, we'll do it like they did during the Carter Administration. If you have an odd numbered social security card you can only exhale on odd numbered dates. If you have an even numbered social security card you only get to exhale on even numbered dates.

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If you're an illegal alien, you get to breathe whenever you want since your social security card is a fake anyway!

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That ought to clear out the riff raff!

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I'm just sayin'...

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Tom "Breath of Death" King

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