Good readers, I don’t know what to tell you. Earth Day has passed. It is gone. Did you celebrate? What present did you give to your great, blue mother? If you have yet to make a decision, fear not. Common etiquette states you have at least six months to give this magnificent bitch that special gift she truly deserves. And we in the Ideas Bureau at Jose el Retardo are here to help you become the best tenant on the global block.

I know what you think you should do: Green up. Recycle. Take the Hummer to the crusher and buy the Prius. Mesh grocery bags. Purchase corporate carbon credits. Do all the things that our friendly celebrity monarchy tells us we must do in order to sleep soundly this evening.

But is all this do-gooder status maintenance really in the best interest of our home planet? Many would argue that the solution isn’t as simple as a couple of million people making a change in their ‘carbon footprint.” Even if we here in America started to give a shit about climate change and greenhouse gasses as early as tomorrow—and we won’t; check out this article from last month’s Science Daily—we would, as a nation, have little effect on the actions of developing nations like China and India, neither of whom give the slightest crap about what you or I think regarding anything. But even setting this “stinkin’ thinkin’” aside, read this blurb by noted environmentalist Patrick Michaels from a 2004 article on climate change on the PBS website:

So here’s the real answer: We can do very, very little about human-induced climate change. If every nation on earth that signed the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which reduces emissions in most developed countries roughly 6 percent below 1990 levels by the period 2008-2012, the amount of “saved” warming by 2050 is a mere 0.07 degrees Celsius. Because human-induced warming is a linear (constant-rate) phenomenon, that works out to 0.14 degrees Celsius in a century. Consider that the normal year-to-year variability is about 0.15 degrees Celsius, and you must conclude that we couldn’t even find the “signal” of our attempt to slow warming within the year-to-year “noise.”

He goes on to say that nothing can be effectively changed until we shift completely away from fossil-fuel based energy, and that just costs too much money, people. It takes limitless ingenuity that the oil companies would do anything to prevent. And it would mean making too many sacrifices. What would we store our food in? Make toys out of? Listen to music from? What would we make our dance clothing from? How would we make our bicycle helmets? What would we insulate our super-efficient households with? How do we keep the lights on? Or the refrigerators? Do you like elastic? What else would hold up your undergarments? From what would you make cell phones? Carpet? Buckets? Remember, we aren’t talking about the fear of running out of oil—if that was it, we could very easily use those oil-shitting organisms that Craig Venter is building (click here to read about it)—we are talking about the temperature of the earth. And to halt the warm-up, it’s so complicated as to be impossible.

And that isn’t really going to help mother earth. I say that this task—helping her—is really much simpler than we had previously supposed.

One could argue that humans are the worst thing to happen to this planet since the surface cooled. It won’t be healed until we are gone, and the faster the better. Rip the Band-Aid off, right? Global warming isn’t killing the planet, it’s killing HUMANS (and leading up to the release of tons and tons of methane gas into the atmosphere, where it will wait for ignition by lightening and then explode like hundreds of nuclear bombs) and the faster we’re gone, the faster the earth can get on with the methodical task of cleaning up after us.

So lighten up, America! Just keep doing what you’re doing! Buy those SUVs! Eat pounds and pounds of meat! Spray your deodorant in the air like ya just don’t care! If we keep it up, we can really go out in style, turn the whole planet into something magical and tropical for ourselves (mmmm…I can taste the pina coladas and the margaritas already, yum yum), and for our children, and maybe even our children’s children, and then after that, does it really matter that much?

In review: the best gift we can give the earth is to die, so let’s go out with a bang.

The end.