Fat City Carbon Reduction Plan

Some people drive more than a 100 miles round trip every day into our little valley up here, to keep the big houses popping up on the hill, to keep our bellies full, to keep the service industry alive here in this place where working people can barely afford to live. They drive that round trip not in remarkable carbon free space ships, but in cars and trucks that spew exhaust every moment their engines are alive, like when they sit idling in traffic every morning on their way in and every evening on their way out in our “cough, cough” congestion, so I find it entertaining that a dumb little canary just flew in this morning and told me that Snowmass has made it illegal to smoke cigarettes in public.

I myself am not a huge fan of cigarettes, although I do char my lungs with them every so often when my guard is down and a craving for death hits me. But as we pollute the planet with reckless abandon, filling the atmosphere every day with more nasty crap, turning up the temperature on ourselves and the other species here on this little planet we all float around on, we seem absolutely incapable of any form of reason or sanity. We keep doing as The Lord commanded, living longer and longer, and “prospering” more and more, pumping out little kiddies with ever increasing efficiency while taking more and more space away from other life on earth, and while we are finally acknowledging that maybe we aren’t being any too careful with our precious life support system called nature, we seem totally incapable of putting one and one together and realizing that our obsession with long life and prosperous consumption is just a touch troublesome in light of the damage we are doing to life on earth. We cannot spread “freedom” (read capitalist free market growth and economic development) around the world without also increasing carbon emissions and savage land rape. This is unavoidable at present because “economic development” and the first world lifestyle, of ever increasing life expectancies and consumption, has been built upon a foundation of fossil fuel dependence and selfish individual hoarding of money and materials.

So while our valley’s present sustainability is based on a problematic dependence on workers having to travel long carbon burning distances so that our town can run (since actually holding a job in this Disneyland is too much to ask people who buy 40 million dollar mansions the size of middle schools and are busy catching their next private jet flight out to visit their plastic surgeon and refill their Viagra prescription). And now it’s against the law to smoke cigarettes in Snowmass? Give me a break people. This is just too much. Let’s put two and two together por favor.

The best thing we can do for the earth and for our future generations on the planet is to cut our carbon emissions. What is the fastest way to cut your carbon emissions? Die. So why is it then, young Einsteins, that we are making illegal the very habits that are most likely to reduce our emissions the fastest? Maybe we should start encouraging people to smoke, especially if they want to anyway, and maybe we should thank the smokers for the second hand smoke, which might help curb our ridiculously long and savagely destructive lives just a bit.

Maybe we should start encouraging risky behavior, and make life for us just a little bit more dangerous and give some of the other species on earth a touch more of a shot. In fact, if we want to get people off the roads in this valley, as our City Council is so busy trying to do with ever increasing parking costs, which actually make people want to keep driving since it’s less expensive than being parked, maybe we should start encouraging drunk driving. A whole fleet of crazy drunk maniacs crowding our roadways would probably be effective at keeping at least sane people on the sidewalks and safely out of their cars. And while we are discussing sensible policy changes, I think we should start subdividing some of those middle schools on Red Mountain while their owners are out of town. When they return, we can simply offer them a nice 1500 foot apartment in their former 20,000 square foot mansion, and we can offer them jobs as bus drivers in our newly outfitted, drunk-driver proofed, busses. Ah, how I love Fat City; Snowmass, you can take your law and shove it!