GLOBAL WARMING? CLIMATE CHANGE?

How prescient is this photo immediately above? What unintended dark comedy from Madison Avenue! The first foto is, of course, the way to go.

Unless you've been stuffed in your cookie jar again, you will know by now that a major meeting of scientists and political leaders met in Paris yesterday and issued an unprecedented warning to the world about the destructive path we have trod all too well in recent years.

The Good News is that the meeting has occurred and the warnings have been heard. The Bad News is that what we have already done in the manner of shitting in our own nest cannot be readily undone. If every automobile on earth were junk piled today, poor Mother Earth and Sky would need about 50 years to clear her throat!

As everything starts at home, herewith is my own tragic little scorecard in the Global warming Shootout:

Good

I walk a lot. I rarely drive the car to pick up groceries, mail a letter or read a book in a coffee shop. (By the way, very few people read books in coffee shops these days. They are on their computers or on their cell phones or chatting with friends or all of the foregoing at once. Although we are told that book sales and library usage is up, there is little public evidence of this. People must be reading under the bed covers at night with a flashlight.)

My car is tiny, fuel efficient, old and well-maintained - a 1993 Mazda 323.

I'd like to own one day a Smart Car. I'd like you to own a Smart Car. I'd like the world to own a Smart Car.

I hate SUV's. Come visit the private school near my house some day. I call it "Our Lady of Perpetual SUV's." Tiny little mother with tiny little kid in giant claymation gas-guzzling, carbon-spewing Monster Truck. Hundreds of them every morning and every afternoon. These are the New Bourgeoisie, suffering as they always have from the disease of the middle class - "STRIVING." What did the Edward G. Robinson character in Key Largo want? As Humphrey Bogart teased him. "Rocko wants more! More of everything." And that is the pathetic, anxious middle class screeching for the latest shoes, stove, HDTV, hideaway. Nowhere is this obsession to climb the imaginary, illusory, unattainable social ladder more evident or more pathetic or more destructive than in the race for a bigger Dumb Car. Get some self respect, you fools and Go Small!

BAD

Most of my negative footprint in the race to destroy the planet comes with my home.

I live alone in a big house. No excuse.

My house is badly insulated and my heating bill in the winter is much too big. The house is heated by baseboard oil pipes, which are run by electricity. I don't often leave lights on needlessly, but I do run this computer all day and I have 3 sound systems and TV.

That's the gist of my score card. What's yours? And what can Industry and government do, or better yet, what might industry and government be willing to do, about this most urgent of problems?