You are no doubt aware, Dear Reader, that flatulent cows are one of the proximate causes of the climate change that, we are assured by the savants, will almost immediately kill us deader’n a doornail. The more scientifically inclined among you will also know that the climatic impact of their behavior is caused by methane, the primary component of their afflatus, which is a greenhouse gas even more potent than the extremely damaging CO2 that you persist in exhaling. But I will bet you don’t know that your Styrofoam coffee cup, when buried in a landfill, also exhales methane.

            But even if you don’t know it, the city fathers in my local burg do know. They previously outlawed plastic grocery bags because they end up in the stomachs of porpoises, from which I deduce that porpoises are a major source of campaign contributions. Now they intend to outlaw Styrofoam, thus keeping our planet pleasantly cool. This will leave us with only the option to use paper bags. To limit the amount of paper we consume in this activity, they are also planning to force the local merchants to charge us 10 cents per bag, thus saving the trees, like the Lorax. Since scientific studies have proven conclusively that reusable cloth sacks harbor enormous colonies of lethal microbes, they will of course outlaw the paper bags and force us to use these portable germ cultures to bring home the bacon, etc. This will form the basis for inexpensive population control.

            Where will we go next? Well, cloth bags are produced from several sources. Wool comes from sheep, and sheep fart (more methane). Some cloth comes from plants (cotton for example), and killing plants is an affront to Gaia (whom I thought was either a Greek goddess or a stripper, but whom I am now told is the entire living corpus of Earth life). So no cloth bags. Accordingly, we will need to carry our groceries in our arms, juggling when necessary.

            But wait. Clothes are also made out of cloth! So no clothes! We must now run around naked, even in the depths of winter, which will be cold, since we will have eliminated global warming! But if we freeze our asses off, we will die, rot, and emit more noxious gases unless we are buried or cremated. But if we are all dead, who will bury or flambé us?

            ROBOTS, that’s who. But that’s not so bad. After all, with the advance of AI, we can expect the robots to develop higher level emotions. Robots already write poetry and music. We can confidently expect the robots to wax lyrical about the new unspoiled planet Earth. When the little green guys from the flying saucers finally get here, I’m sure they will be amused.