Only way to live is to die
One of the staff members at The Dappled Planet was alerted to a “Greenhouse Calculator” which is hosted on the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Network’s website. The Greenhouse Calculator is attached to a game called Planet Slayer,” and both of them are currently coming under attack(for different reasons) from some conservative souls in Australia, the UK and the USA (well.. we saw it on US TV, but no link yet…).
People object to the game because if you happen to be someone who works in the nuclear or timber industries or (even more commonly) eat meat, well – you are evil! People object to the greenhouse calculator firstly because it portrays all Australians as carbon dioxide producing pigs and secondly because the pig explodes in a bubble of red cartoon blood if you produce to much CO2, so it is too violent for children’s sensitivities. Glenn Beck on his national TV show in the US went on to point out where this type of stuff contravenes 2 parts of the ABCs own broadcasting code of conduct. True… This but this is their website, not TV and last time we checked children’s TV, a pig exploding in a pool of cartoon blood was pretty mild violence.
However, when we tried out the greenhouse calculator, we discovered there was no way to win! And quite frankly, all the things we are vilified for in the media – flying, driving, not using renewable energy in our homes – actually don’t make a whole lot of difference to our carbon footprint at all (according to this calculator remember…). No, its spending that does us all in.
On the first pass through with the calculator, we pretended to be Joe Average – drove an ordinary car, had an ordinary electrical bill, ate a little meat, flew across the country for a family Christmas and quite frankly, the pig representing us didn’t grow much until the Question 10 “How much did you spend last year?” we entered “$25-40,000″ and suddenly the pig blew up to be a quite a portly large pig! (actually, re-running it now to write this, we see it has changed somewhat and been reduced in size…).
Then after sliding the bars in the last question (very confusing for a child of maybe 8 years of age as the calculator seems aimed at) we then clicked on the skull and crossbone button and BOOM! The pig explodes and reveals “You should die at age 5.7″
Good grief – any child old enough to be playing with this calculator has probably just found out they should be dead!
So we reran the game now trying to find out if we cycled or walked to work, blew off the Christmas holiday flight home, ate no meat, powered our home with renewable energy, and lived on less than $10,000/year would it make much difference… Well, depending how you adjusted those sliding bars on the last question, you could live for about 31 years to ‘forever…’
However, after experimenting with several lifestyles, the end conclusion really was, you shouldn’t live past the age of 10 (at best) and nothing really has a big impact on your carbon footprint other than spending money. And if you delve into the ’science’ behind the question, you are informed the average Australian (well, it is an Australian game!) ‘creates’ 1.6kg of CO2 for every $1 they spend (thats 95c American…) which adds up to 16kg of CO2 (if you spend less than $10,000) to in excess of 160 tonnes per year..
But (here’s the killer punchline) – the ecologically sustainable limit is only 3 tonnes (3000kg) of CO2 per year and globally, every human being, all the poor poeple as well, creates 7 tonnes CO2 per year!
So not only are those poor kids in Australia being told eating meat, flying, driving, living in a house using fossil fuels etc doesn’t really add a whole lot of CO2 to the atmosphere (as if you cared a whole lot at age 8 when you are immortal…), the moment they’ve spend $1,875 ($US1,690)/year they’ve exceeded their annual allowance of CO2 emissions.
So the poor Australian kid on $20/week pocket money (or $1,040/year), is just breaking even with their carbon footprint, but the moment they hit their teen years and get a part time job and increase their spending capacity, poof! They should have died – probably 6 years beforehand… So in other words for an Australian to live in sustainable manner with regards to CO2 emissions, they can only spend $5/day ($4.75/day). In Australia, that would buy one McMeal or 3 chocolate bars or 4 packets of noodles…
Talk about lowering the standard of living! You wouldn’t be able to afford a roof over your head (thank goodness Mummy and Daddy are paying for that!…) or go more than 2 bus stops on public transportation on $5/day. Meat is beyond the budget so that will quickly put the farming industry out of action, but thats OK because the game Planet Slayer says farmers are evil anyway. So surely there should be some compensation for not having an electrical bill or using any form of transportation other than our feet?
Is this really the message we want to be passing onto our kids?!
