We Have Some Questions
Our dog, Eddie, and our cat, Sammy, have matching food bowls. On the bottoms of each of the bowls is this statement: “Made responsibly in China.” I’d have been willing to let that go as meaningless marketing sloganeering, an even more meaningless suggestion of good global citizenship, or some other kind of virtue-signalling bullshit. But Eddie and Sammy (especially Sammy) are more curious than I am. So, I indulged their inquisitiveness.
Here’s what’s on their minds:
- What does it mean to say made responsibly?
- Could they have been made irresponsibly in China?
- Would they have been made irresponsibly if they’d been made anywhere other than China?
- Do other countries make things responsibly?
- Can you name two?
- Is it time to eat yet?
- If not, why not?
I know you’re probably inclined to think this is nonsense. In truth, I was, too. But they were serious as tsunamis at high tide. And when the fellas have questions, we gotta have answers.
This is the Big One, Elizabeth
I think I did okay with the questions above. At the very least, I gave the fellas answers with which they seemed to be relatively content if not altogether satisfied. (I was at somewhat of an unfortunate chronological disadvantage because it wasn’t, in fact, time to eat yet.) But then, after exchanging glances with each other that were, at once, conspiratorial and sheepish, they asked me this: “Since China attended the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit, does the responsibility it touts include being accountable for its pollution?”
Whoa! That’s what’s known in the biz as a stumper.
I was initially taken aback; that is to say I literally took a couple of steps backward, feebly hoping the distance would improve my perspective. The question was pretty astute, after all, notwithstanding the fact that it came from a couple of house pets. (If I hadn’t been there when they asked it, Sammy would have tried to glom sole credit for it.) And I felt duty-bound to give them a response that was equally perspicacious. So, I suppose my stepping back was a time-buying ploy, as well.
“Well, ya see, fellas,” I started timidly, “folks in places like China don’t have the luxury of worrying about things like the Panic of the Week, Junk Science, so-called Settled Science, or any of the the other Causes du Jour we folks here in the West like to fret about. They have other more mundane and much less serious things on their minds like individual liberty, democratic elections, and not getting detained or killed by their governments for wanting that stuff.”
Then Eddie asked, “Who’s Greta Thunberg?”
Making no attempt to conceal my astonishment, I said, “I have to admit I’m surprised you’ve heard of her. We don’t watch the news or otherwise abide the mainstream media around here. But since you asked, I have to ask: Have you ever heard of The Manchurian Candidate?”
“Was that the crap you gave me in that brown can last week?”
“Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter who she is. Whether she gets institutionalized, her parents end up in the hoosegow, or both, she’ll be gone in a few news cycles anyway.”
Then Eddie asked Sammy, “What’s a hoosegow?”
Mr. Know-It-All
Sammy ignored Eddie’s question. He was working on one of his own.
“Hey, Larry,” he said. (For reasons not yet clear to us, Sammy calls me Larry, Bill, or Steve randomly and interchangeably.) “Is anything in the universe immutable?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, answering his question with a question to see if he was headed where I thought he was headed.
“You know: absolutely constant or consistent, completely static, utterly and definitively unchanging — uninterrupted and unvarying. Like that.”
“Why, no. I don’t believe it’s possible for anything in the universe to be like that, Sam,” I said, cringing as I replied.
“Then how can science be settled?!” he demanded.
“Well, no. Science can’t really be settled,” I said. “Whatever you might have heard about climate change isn’t exactly about science. It’s more about sales.”
“Come again?”
“Look,” I said, trying to explain gently. “Abraham Lincoln is popularly reputed to have said, ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.’ While that remains true, of course, there were fewer people around in Honest Abe’s time. In addition to that, electronic and social media weren’t around to propagate information as quickly and ubiquitously as it can be propagated at present; consequently, it’s now possible to fool more of the people more of the time than it was when Lincoln might or might not have said what he supposedly said.”
Never one to let me off the hook, Sammy asked, “Is there an actual sales-related point anywhere in the relatively immediate vicinity, Steve?”
“Indeed there is, ye of little faith. Here’s the deal: There are now more people with more agendas to sell. Electronic media makes it easier and faster to sell more agendas to more people. And given the law of averages, the large number of people in the middle of the bell curve are likely to be more susceptible to specious agendas than people to the left and right of the curve. So, if you target the susceptible people in the middle — BINGO!
“That can’t be possible, Bill,” Sammy said sternly.
“Au contraire, Furball. I once knew a man who made a killing selling just two products. He sold ice cubes to Eskimos and teeth to sharks … until he was thrown to the sharks by the Eskimos; although, it took the Eskimos a while to catch on. The same logic enabled Al Gore to win an Oscar, a Grammy, and a Nobel Prize. The dude had a license to steal, used it, and walked away fat and happy, with a trail of suckers behind him that still hasn’t given up.”
Blow it Out Your What?
Thinking I was out of the woods, I turned to walk away. But Sammy wasn’t finished. “Hey, Larry,” he said. “Who’s AOC?”
“Oh, no! What do you know about her?”
“She’s the lunatic who thinks the methane from cow farts endangers the planet.”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “She thinks that, along with thinking she has to cripple the planet economically to save it, we have to eat fewer hamburgers.”
“It’s a good thing thing she wasn’t around when the dinosaurs were,” Sammy said, rolling his eyes.
“What precisely are you on about here, Sam?” I asked, a hint of perturbation entering my tone.
“Meat and dairy cows only produce about 100 million tons of methane a year,” Sam said. But according to Planet Science, dinosaurs could have produced 520 million tons of methane a year. If AOC’s right about cow farts, the Flintstones would have died from global warming caused by dinosaur farts. AOC would have been all over that.”
“Despite what you might think, Sam, I don’t know all that much about farts. But I wouldn’t worry too much about AOC. She’s not terribly well acquainted with things like science, math, history, empiricism, logic, and reality.”
Breathe Deep
After that exchange, the fellas huddled for a few minutes, earnestly discussing something in hushed tones and periodically looking over their shoulders to see if I was eavesdropping. I pretended to be learning Swahili; although, I knew the chances of their falling for that were somewhere between negligible and fuggedaboudit. When they broke, Sammy had a few more questions:
“Hey, Larry. Ya know how the environmental hysterics have their shorts in a bunch about Earth’s oxygen supply because of the cockamamie notion that the fires in the Amazon Rain Forest are going to deplete it?”
“Are you kidding me, Sam? Did you really just say cockamamie?”
“And ya know how the global warmists and climate changists have their own particular knickers in a twist because of their hysteria over fossil fuels and atmospheric carbon dioxide?”
“I do.”
“Well,” Sammy continued, “if those two delusional groups actually succeed in their quixotic quests to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide, what happens to all the plants that depend on carbon dioxide for photosynthesis — you know, the ones that emit oxygen into the atmosphere as a byproduct?”
“It’s funny you should …”
“And while you’re at it, you may or may not want to consider the fact that Eddie and I — to say nothing of the seven-plus billion people who don’t live in this house — depend on that oxygen, too.”
“You might have to get in touch with the IPCC on that one, Sam. It’s above my pay grade. But you may also want to hurry up. My Spidey Sense tells me the IPCC won’t be around long. Its market demand is likely to go the way of the Eskimos’ ice cubes and the sharks’ dentures.”
“Yeah,” Eddie chimed in. [At nine pounds soaking wet, Eddie’s the small, silent type When he talks, people listen.] “If more people ask more questions about the vaunted 97 percent — and if more people find out that stuff is politically motivated baloney — all this carbon dioxide nonsense will go away (please, God) and the IPCC will be as dead as Al Gore’s integrity.”
“Good call, Little Brother,” Sammy said. “Let’s eat.”
I glanced at my watch, shrugged my shoulders, and filled their bowls, which were, of course, made responsibly in China.
