For those who don’t know what carbon trading is, I’ll give a brief step-by-step summary:
- Governments around the world impose limits on carbon emissions from various businesses
- Some businesses emit below the limits, and the difference between the limit and actual production is turned into carbon credits
- Carbon credits can be sold to businesses that emit above the limit
- Sanctimonious fucking yuppie white people become ‘carbon traders’, acting as intermediaries trading carbon credits between businesses, while claiming to be ‘saving the environment while making money, too’
I was listening to NPR this morning when some mid-twenties carbon trading shitbox made the ‘saving the environment while making money’ claim, and I nearly drove my car off a fucking overpass. This asswipe actually said, on a national radio program, that being a middle man was helping to SAVE THE PLANET! By stepping in and increasing the cost of trading carbon credits (and, by extension, placing downward political pressure on governments lowering their limits even further), you think you’re actually helping the environment somehow? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!?!?
Figure 1: Yuppies trading their mothers’ souls
Stuffwhitepeoplelike.com definitely dips down from the airy realm of dry satire into earthy swamp of cold reality when the site states, repeatedly, that there’s a certain type of white person out there who just loves to delude himself into believing he can save the world by doing practically nothing. Listening to this NPR bit about carbon trading was almost like hearing SWPL.com come to life in physical form: they were interviewing three white people on public radio who were having a dinner party, drinking wine nobody’s ever heard of, eating some kind of fish that probably doesn’t actually exist (I’m sure a SWPL article on ‘rare fish’ will be coming out eventually), and talking about how carbon credits would help developing countries while listening to the soothing sounds of obscure fucking Indie music playing in the background.
The last time I was this close to vomiting while sober…I was an infant.
Figure 2: How I feel every single time I listen to NPR
I wonder when people are going to get it through their thick fucking skulls that society’s collective adjustment to climate change will not be a lateral move – it will be a backward one. There’s going to come a point when we simply have to cut back on consumption and take it in the ass for awhile as technology catches up.
Nobody wants to do this, though, because we’ve all been spoiled since World War II. No one in this country has had to make any real sacrifices for the collective good since then (notwithstanding certain parts of the civil rights movement), and now everyone either thinks a.) collective sacrifice never has to be made, or b.) collective sacrifice should be voluntary (which is damn near an oxymoron). This is complete and utter horse shit, especially the second one. While I personally haven’t, for example, given up my car – I will happily and enthusiastically comply with any future environmentally-based U.S. government mandate to do so. Short of such a mandate, voluntary concessions of personal conveniences by the scant few that can afford to do so are akin to throwing a handful of sand on a beach.
Figure 3: What it’s going to come to…
To this end, I really wish George Dubyah had been an environmentalist – because instead of terrifying the American public about terrorism (ironic, no?) for the purposes of oil exploration, he’d have instead terrified us about impending doom from climate change, and we’d all be riding horses and bicycles by now…
…and those fucking yuppie pricks on NPR would be out of work.
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