Hoi Pollutants?

“Peo­ple will need to turn veg­e­tar­ian if the world is to con­quer cli­mate change, accord­ing to a lead­ing author­ity on global warm­ing” is the quote begin­ning Fausta’s blog post enti­tled “Stern Has a Cow.” She then pro­ceeds to make the arti­cle from which the quote is drawn appear hope­lessly unse­ri­ous with her trade­mark sassy asides, as when fol­low­ing the Times lugubri­ous tolling of the cli­mate change dooms­day bell — “Methane is 23 times more pow­er­ful than car­bon diox­ide as a global warm­ing gas” — she chimes in with “Espe­cially if you’re down­wind from the cows.” It’s pretty funny. The whole post is here.

In her post Fausta also points out that the afore­men­tioned “lead­ing author­ity” appar­ently became one by mak­ing pro­nounce­ments, not by fol­low­ing them, not­ing Stern “said that he was not a strict veg­e­tar­ian himself .”

Funny word, that. Strict. I have known veg­e­tar­i­ans who main­tained their morally supe­rior sta­tus by going all Latin – lacto/​ovo/​quo vadis veg­e­tar­i­ans. Once you start pars­ing punc­tilio the sky’s the limit. For awhile cer­tain dietary des­per­a­does were grasp­ing at the moral supe­ri­or­ity claimed by veg­e­tar­i­ans by earnestly announc­ing to all and sundry that they DIDN’T EAT RED MEAT at which point the pork pro­duc­ers started putting out ads which began, “Pork: The Other White Meat.”

The hypocrisy doesn’t end there. I’m sure some of us know peo­ple who will dip a spoon into honey and put it all over an Eng­lish muf­fin, think­ing them­selves supe­rior because there aren’t Cana­dian bacon, poached egg, and Hol­landaise sauce on it, never stop­ping to think that they’re rip­ping the stuff of life from the mouths of baby bees, with­out whom those plants we’re all sup­posed to be eat­ing wouldn’t exist!

Hey! Come to think of it, the same is true of car­bon dioxide. But I digress.

While this Lord Stern char­ac­ter prob­a­bly wouldn’t admit it, this isn’t the first time the Brits have gone down this path, where their upper crust indulged itself by exco­ri­at­ing their own peo­ple as self­ish know-​​nothings who would be fit to live only if they would start think­ing like they would be think­ing were they as with-​​it as the peo­ple who were think­ing such bad thoughts about them.

Hey! This isn’t the first time we’ve done it, either! And OH! There I go again. Sorry. Now… oh yeah, any­way, one of their last episodes of enforced denial was delight­fully chron­i­cled in the book 84, Char­ing Cross Road.  About, among other things, how British rulers pun­ished the British for their boor­ish­ness by not let­ting them eat things they liked to eat.

Now, I know you think I’m get­ting all snarky and any minute I’m going to type the word “elit­ist.” OK. Never let it be said Nolan­im­rod isn’t accom­mo­dat­ing. Elit­ist. There. And this is elit­ism with a dark side.

Lately the British press has been writ­ing glow­ing pro­files of peo­ple who are get­ting abor­tions because they don’t want to bring a CO2-​​generating mon­ster into exis­tence because this “crea­ture” will want to, you know, eat and breathe and pos­si­bly flip on a light switch or two. I can’t find the ref­er­ence, but I read about one such broad-​​minded altru­ist mus­ing that by not hav­ing a baby she and her equally-​​responsible spouse were bal­anc­ing out the jet travel they liked to take to the South Seas. If you think I’m kid­ding here’s one arti­cle I found.

This is why I brought up the E-​​word. Elit­ists never lis­ten to them­selves. They just go on pon­tif­i­cat­ing to the great unwashed – aka (and I can get away with say­ing this, because I’m not say­ing it to a cop) “the peo­ple who pay their salaries” — never dream­ing that some troglodyte in their audi­ence might have access to a snatch of logic here and there. Like the peo­ple who go to Cuba, where peo­ple risk their lives in leaky boats to get off the island, and come back and tell us we should be so lucky to live there.

Aren’t the peo­ple who are so all-​​fired wor­ried about what the human scourge is doing to the planet aware that lead­ing by exam­ple is the most effec­tive way? Why put the onus of sav­ing the planet on some­body else? Why not dis­robe, hop into the tiger cage at some zoo, pick the biggest tiger, and yank on his tail? That would not only guar­an­tee that they won’t be adding to the prob­lem by get­ting, say, cre­mated, but it might keep some­body from rais­ing a methane-​​producing rumi­nant to feed the tiger.

Per­haps it is now time for the self-​​appointed arbiters of every­thing, the spir­i­tual heirs of the sages of Laputa, to cease think­ing of and refer­ring to their fel­low humans as a big blob of toxic waste and engage in some con­struc­tive think­ing that doesn’t take the removal of most of human­ity as a start­ing point.

There is, by the way, a bright spot to this rant. I know some­body who wants to give Lord Stern a big, long kiss, a real tonsil-tickler, although she wishes his veg­e­tar­i­an­ism were just a lee­tle bit stricter.

Kiss me, you fool.

Tags: 84 Charing Cross Road, abortion, carbon dioxide, elitist, Fausta, global warming, know-nothings, Laputa, Lord Stern, pollutant, red meat, vegetarian