by ELIAZAR ORPOISONEDHALLIWELL, Alternate Reality News Service Environment Writer
“I mean, take Belgium,” Yolo Montefiore proposed. “Would anybody miss it if it was destroyed in a nuclear blast? I mean, really miss it?”
The odds were good that Montefiore was being rhetorical, but not wanting to risk a misunderstanding so early in the article, I pointed out: “I suspect the Belgians might.”
Montefiore waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, please – they’re biased!”
That stopped me for a few moments, but, out of a misplaced sense of youthful optimism (I’m only 64!), I persisted: “People who love Belgian chocolate?”
“They’ll adjust,” Montefiore assured me. “I’m told Belarusian chocolate is…well, not exactly to die for, but certainly to be bedridden with a moderately debilitating disease for!”
“Tintin fans?” I tried.
Montefiore sighed. “Print comics are such a 20th century art form!” she responded.
Desperate, I continued: “People who follow the adventures of Hercule Poirot?”
“Oh, you really must be desperate to bring him up,” Montefiore wryly commented.
Busted! And it wasn’t even a good move, either!
Montefiore, the golden parachute manufacturing industry gazillionaire, had floated the idea that the solution to global warming was to set off nuclear bombs around the world, causing smoke and ash to be deposited in the atmosphere, which would cause a global cooling offset. She had a little list, she had a little list, of geographic regions that never would be missed, that never would be missed, and, just my luck, she was sharing it with me.
“Central Canada,” Montefiore continued. “Imagine how grateful Hollywood will be to get all of the film and television production back from Toronto. And in any case, the city has become so expensive that only three people actually live there. Fact! It will be a shame to lose Montreal, but as long as its restaurant owners share their recipes for baguettes and poutine before we nuke ’em, it won’t be much of a culinary loss.”
Beppi “Not a Marx Brother” Crescent-Rolle, Vice President of Countering Absurd Anti-environmental Plans Even Though the Press Won’t Listen of environmental lobby group Earth Worst! responded, “You’re actually going to listen to me? Are you…really a journalist?”
I suggested that the only way he would know for sure was if he talked to me and people started attacking him on TwitherdXLax. “Sure, we could totally set the world on fire,” Crescent-Rolle said. “Oooooorrrrrr, and I’m just throwing spaghetti against a Van der Whall here, we could reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. We could stop putting carbon dioxide into the atmo – what?”
Crescent-Rolle was interrupted by Montefiore’s laughter, even though it took place on a different phone call two hours earlier. “Oh, sure,” Montefiore finally stated when the laughter had died down, “people will just naturally want to give up their cars, their refrigerators, their air conditioners, so that we don’t have to nuke Benin, a country most people confuse with a line of men’s care products!”
“I’m not saying it wouldn’t require some sacrifice,” Crescent-Rolle stated, although who he was talking to at that moment was an open question. “I’m just saying that if we want a world in which people can live, sacrifice might -“
“Sacrifice?” Montefiore scoffed. “Have you met the human race? Most of us would rather kill the last polar bear with our bare – ha ha! – hands than turn down our air conditioner a couple of degrees in the sweltering summer heat! I mean, honestly, what have polar bears ever done for the GDP? When a polar bear becomes the CEO of a major multinational corporation, then maybe we can talk about sacrifice!”
When I asked her if she had a particular animus against bears who lived at the pole, Montefiore shrugged and answered, “Doesn’t everybody?”
“No!” Crescent-Rolle shouted so loudly his response transcended time and space. “No, some of us don’t have an animus against polar bears! Some of us actually love the furry big bastards and want to keep them from extinction!”
“I’m not sure I wanted to know that much about your personal life,” Montefiore sniffed.
“This isn’t about my -“ Crescent-Rolle took a moment to visit his happy place (which probably looked like an ice floe with a polar bear on it, but I didn’t want to ask because I didn’t want to know that much about his personal life, either; perhaps some day I’ll Go Ask Alice.) and continued in a more reasoned tone, “The problem with setting off nuclear winter is that you can’t control it. Extreme cold could be just as deadly to life on Earth as extreme heat.”
“Jeez Louise,” Montefiore complained, “some people really know how to take the fun out of saving the planet!”