From a comment on Facebook from Jeff McQueen:
After our daughter of fifteen years of age was moved to tears by the speech of Greta Thunberg at the UN the other day, she became angry with our generation “who had been doing nothing for thirty years.”
So, we decided to help her prevent what the girl on TV announced of “massive eradication and the disappearance of entire ecosystems.”
We are now committed to give our daughter a future again, by doing our part to help cool the planet four degrees.
From now on she will go to school on a bicycle, because driving her by car costs fuel, and fuel puts emissions into the atmosphere. Of course it will be winter soon and then she will want to go by bus, but only as long as it is a diesel bus.
Somehow, that does not seem to be conducive to ‘helping the Climate’.
Of course, she is now asking for an electric bicycle, but we have shown her the devastation caused to the areas of the planet as a result of mining for the extraction of Lithium and other minerals used to make batteries for electric bicycles, so she will be pedaling, or walking. Which will not harm her, or the planet. We used to cycle and walk to school too.
Since the girl on TV demanded “we need to get rid of our dependency on fossil fuels” and our daughter agreed with her, we have disconnected the heat vent in her room. The temperature is now dropping to twelve degrees in the evening, and will drop below freezing in the winter, we have promised to buy her an extra sweater, hat, tights, gloves and a blanket.
For the same reason we have decided that from now on she only takes a cold shower. She will wash her clothes by hand, with a wooden washboard, because the washing machine is simply a power consumer and since the dryer uses natural gas, she will hang her clothes on the clothes line to dry.
Speaking of clothes, the ones that she currently has are all synthetic, so made from petroleum. Therefore on Monday, we will bring all her designer clothing to the secondhand shop.
We have found an eco store where the only clothing they sell is made from undyed and unbleached linen, wool and jute.
It shouldn’t matter that it looks good on her, or that she is going to be laughed at, dressing in colorless, bland clothes and without a wireless bra, but that is the price she has to pay for the benefit of The Climate.
Cotton is out of the question, as it comes from distant lands and pesticides are used for it. Very bad for the environment.
We just saw on her Instagram that she’s pretty angry with us. This was not our intention.
From now on, at 7 p.m. we will turn off the WiFi and we will only switch it on again the next day after dinner for two hours. In this way we will save on electricity, so she is not bothered by electro-stress and will be totally isolated from the outside world. This way, she can concentrate solely on her homework. At eleven o’clock in the evening we will pull the breaker to shut the power off to her room, so she knows that dark is really dark. That will save a lot of CO2.
She will no longer be participating in winter sports to ski lodges and resorts, nor will she be going on anymore vacations with us, because our vacation destinations are practically inaccessible by bicycle.
Since our daughter fully agrees with the girl on TV that the CO2 emissions and footprints of her great-grandparents are to blame for ‘killing our planet’, what all this simply means, is that she also has to live like her great-grandparents and they never had a holiday, a car or even a bicycle.
We haven’t talked about the carbon footprint of food yet.
Zero CO2 footprint means no meat, no fish and no poultry, but also no meat substitutes that are based on soy (after all, that grows in farmers fields, that use machinery to harvest the beans, trucks to transport to the processing plants, where more energy is used, then trucked to the packaging/canning plants, and trucked once again to the stores) and also no imported food, because that has a negative ecological effect. And absolutely no chocolate from Africa, no coffee from South America and no tea from Asia.
Only homegrown potatoes, vegetables and fruit that have been grown in local cold soil, because greenhouses run on boilers, piped in CO2 and artificial light. Apparently, these things are also bad for The Climate. We will teach her how to grow her own food.
Bread is still possible, but butter, milk, cheese and yogurt, cottage cheese and cream come from cows and they emit CO2. No more margarine and no oils will be used for the frying pan, because that fat is palm oil from plantations in Borneo where rain forests first grew.
No ice cream in the summer. No soft drinks and no energy drinks, as the bubbles are CO2. She wanted to lose some pounds, well, this will help her achieve that goal too.
We will also ban all plastic, because it comes from chemical factories. Everything made of steel and aluminum must also be removed. Have you ever seen the amount of energy a blast furnace consumes or an aluminum smelter? Uber bad for the climate!
We will replace her 9600 coil, memory foam pillow top mattress, with a jute bag filled with straw,with a horse hair pillow.
And finally, she will no longer be using makeup, soap, shampoo, cream, lotion, conditioner, toothpaste and medication. Her sanitary napkins will be replaced with pads made of linen, that she can wash by hand, with her wooden washboard, just like her female ancestors did before climate change made her angry at us for destroying her future.
In this way we will help her to do her part to prevent mass extinction, water levels rising and the disappearance of entire ecosystems.
If she truly believes she wants to walk the talk of the girl on TV, she will gladly accept and happily embrace her new way of life.
Cold and miserable conditions will reinforce the lessons well.
Kudos to this fictional parent !
I know Jeff. He is not fictional.
One or two bitter global winters with a lack of sufficient food will put an end to the “global warming” hysteria.
Alas the poor gullible fools will then probably be duped into a 100 Trillion tax to solve “global cooling”.
I laughed out loud at your plans to conserve our planet and cool the earth by 4 degrees. You have carried Greta’s argument to its logical conclusion. I have a comment which may or may not cheer up your daughter. There is large group of scientist that have studied the history of our world’s climate -- and our sun. Their conclusion is that #1. we need CO2 to survive, especially noting that we exhale it and plants absorb it. #2. the latest cycle of the sun shows a phase that is called “cooling’, in that there are very few or no sunspots. Contrary to popular belief this cooling phase has in the past had a substantial effect on the climate of our earth. Check out the Maunder Minimum or the Little Ice Age. These scientists note that it is extremely possible that the behaviour of the sun will do this again, i.e., cool the planet. If wool is acceptable -- sheep fart very little, I hear -- I advise her (and you) get get some warm clothing.
Epic parenting. This is the all time best cure for the disease of climate change mania and should be applied to all sufferers immediately. It would have the benefit of removing them from social media so the rest of us don’t have to listen to their drivel.
Ha, been sayin this ia an issue a Dad could really get behind, used all my ideas and gave me more!
Actually, to save the planet, she (and everyone else) will need to use ONE QUARTER of the resources of our great grandparents, because there are four times as many people on the planet now.