Fact: The new IPCC report says the world will need to be radically reshaped by 2030 in order to avert catastrophic climate change.
Fact: The report’s impact had all the staying power of a straw house in a hurricane—even the old-fashioned kind of hurricane that isn’t souped up by climate change.
Fact: While governments ignore this threat, concerned citizens wonder what they can do, unaware that there is a simple, elegant solution available to everyone.
Fact: The solution mentioned in the previous fact is so bold and original, it must be centered and get its own line:
Smoke More Cigarettes.
“Smoke?” you say, your voice rising in a weak, unflattering chirp. “But I quit years ago, except if I’m drinking, or when Smitty’s around, because you literally cannot not smoke with Smitty…” Hey! Shut up. Look at me. Now is the time for bold action, not cowardly whining. If you’re not out buying a fresh pack of rods by the end of this article, I might have to kick your ass personally. So let me lay it out for you.
First of all, when you start to hear about some of the stuff headed our way in the next few years, you’re going to need the stress-reducing qualities of nicotine. Guarantee. Oh, you don’t believe me? What if I said that you’re going to be using the phrase, “Back when there used to be Boston…”? What if I told you that under certain heat-wave conditions a person’s skin will literally fuse with a cloth-type car seat (the windows would have to be rolled up and the A/C would be broken)? So light up, clear your head and focus.
Secondly, if you’re not smoking, how are we going to pay to get everything fixed? There’s at least, like, twenty bucks worth of taxes slapped on every pack of lung warmers. And that’s good. We need that money for flood barriers, alternative energy research, CO2 sequestration, and, when that doesn’t work, developing huge flocks of genetically mutated birds with UV-ray absorbing feathers. I’m talking big birds, like condors, but with the intelligence of a crow. If everybody aged 14 and up started smoking right now, all of this could be achieved by next spring.
Third… Hey! I’m still talking to you. Sit down. You know what else we can do with smoking? Re-create the aerosol effect of 1940-1970. That’s when there was so much pollution in the air that global warming was slowed down because the sunlight couldn’t get through and heat things up. If we get everybody smoking, including lab dolphins and wild monkeys, plus we release those flocks of birds I was talking about earlier, we can slow things down enough to get some of our other plans up and working. Like splitting the moon down the middle and hollowing out the halves to create two huge umbrellas.
And number four: why are you so excited about being around in 2035? Sure, if you really think you’ve got what it takes to tough it out in the world that’s coming, I’d love to have you on my team. But if you’re just going to cry “mama” while I’m drawing down on a human/car seat hybrid breaking into my algae farm, I suggest you make an early exit, with your dignity and three-pack-a-day habit intact.
“Aren’t there other solutions?,” I hear you bleating, like you forgot that there’s a reason the good Lord gave you two ears but only one mouth. I wish there were “other solutions.” But heavy drinking’s already been taken as a solution to politics. And cannabis is being used to celebrate the spread of the legalization of cannabis. So if we want to keep any semblance of the world we know—a world built by smokers like FDR, Edward R. Murrow, and the woman from the Virginia Slims ads in the '70s—coffin nails are all we’ve got.
So—you ready to prove your green credentials? Great! Go get us some Luckies.