Excrementally speaking....

Just as we are what we eat, so are we what we excrete, to put it rather crudely.
While impatiently waiting my turn at the Motor Vehicle License Office the other day, admiring ethnic minorities in action in government, I got chatting with a bookworm beside me in the next chair, about the increased numbers of participants around the place since my last visit five years ago. This led to talk of the population increase in general, and its effects on global warming. 

My bookworm gave me a look that said 'You're a complete idiot, aren't you?' as he asked in a superior tone "Haven't you read the IPCC Report?" I had to confess I hadn't, but I could count to 21 without getting naked. He took the bait and asked, "What do you mean?" I explained that when I was born in 1932, there were approximately 2.4 billions of people on Spaceship Earth and we had now gone forth and multiplied that into approximately 7 billions. He gave me a blank stare implying I was muttering nonsense.

I may be an idiot, but I'm not your average garden-variety idiot; I'm a semi-literate, very opinionated idiot whose tenuous magnanimity is easily dissolved into frustrated disgust, so I said, patiently, "Seven billions of pollution creating semi-intelligent bipeds create about three times the pollution and greenhouse gases generated by two billion, four hundred million, and in the words of little Pogo from the comics, 'We have seen the enemy and he is us!' ". He gave me a disgusted look, got up, closed his book, and just before walking away said, "Read the IPCC Report!" 

I didn't get a chance to explain that I already know what the problem is. We'd rather talk than take any positive action, because changing the status quo will ruin many of the richest and most famous industrialists among us, and require lifestyle changes that almost nobody would willingly want to be subjected to even if it did mean saving the planet for later destruction by mediocrity and Mother Nature in her own sweet time. So we wring our hands and dither and pretend its all a mystery of unfathomable proportions, when it's all quite simple; if we're going to continue screwing ourselves out of a place at the world's table, then we have to expect nasty consequences. Every vehicle in the universe has its passenger limits, and we're no exception. Or, as they say in Real Estate, 'They're making more people every day, but they're not making any more land.'