It’s hot enough outside to liquify rubber and she wants to continue using her five 30,000 BTU window air conditioning units around the clock. Unfortunately, every so often she feels guilty about the toll that her 62-degree apartment takes on the environment, especially when she’s hard at work in her DMV kiosk for eight hours a day, unable to luxuriate in the cold air blasting away at home. Therefore she uses her Thursday lunch hour to devise a series of ingenious solutions for global warming and its consequences.
First she conceptualizes a tree that generates its own water supply via photosynthesis. This vegetation makes absolute sense on a Post-It note partly stained with fried lasagna. When the sun is shining, the tree’s roots produce enough water to hydrate the surrounding soil and replenish local aquifers. When the sun is not shining, the tree simply produces oxygen, and sometimes apricots. People will plant these chemically-enhanced trees in deserts and in two years those same deserts will be deciduous forest. Even people who don’t get out much into nature will go bonkers for these trees. When planted in clusters, these trees will sculpt out deep ponds where before there had only been desiccated craters. These trees will either cost nothing or be available at deep discount after federal tax rebate. These trees are gods amongst thirsty men.
Her second ingenious solution has to do with population control. She will move everyone in the world onto a single continent. This continent will probably end up being North America for the sake of her own convenience. When humans see how many other humans exist on Earth and begin to feel claustrophobic, they will probably not want to have sex with one another. Within a few generations, cities will revert to a manageable, medieval size. Meanwhile plant and animal populations on the remaining six continents will bounce back because they’ll have more food and territory at their disposal. But if anyone misbehaves in North America, they will be deported to Australia, same as before.
Her third ingenious solution addresses the frying of the oceans. The oceans need to be cooled. What cools water? Ice. What objects are made of ice and can be dropped into the ocean like rocks into a glass of Smirnoff? Moons. Just off the top of her head, she can think of two icy moons that are currently going to waste in the immediate solar system: Europa and Callisto. Europa alone has enough ice on its surface to chill Pacific bathwater into polar bear central for at least five years. All it takes is a space rocket and the kind of machine that breaks up highway cement. But she is not in charge of logistics. She is the idea person.
Lastly, air pollution. This is a no-brainer, at least for anyone who has ever had a connecting flight in Phoenix or Las Vegas. If power plants and oil refineries are to be located exclusively in North America, where all the people are, there is no reason why industry, in its entirety, can’t be situated inside the Grand Canyon, which the Senate will have covered with a tarp. The toxic gases will collect under the tarp, then get sucked down many miles of canyon into a giant vacuum built for that purpose in Lees Ferry. There, the pollution will feed into a factory operated by Original Americans who will know how to convert toxins into something innocuous, like fresh breeze or a cancer vaccine.
But what is to be done about the existing atmospherics, the extreme weather conditions and the deteriorated ozone layer that humanity lives with everyday? She would prefer to leave this job to Obama, but she shouldn’t stop now, not when she’s already come so far and still has half a Diet Coke left. Her solution is this: if chemists in New Jersey can put disinfectant, cheese, and hair product into aerosol cans, surely they can determine how to spray an element into the air that will rise up in a heroic cloud to bind with CFCs, causing chlorine to fall to earth in the form of raindrops. And if scientists play their cards right, they could even get the chlorinated raindrops to descend directly into untreated public swimming pools, thereby saving the government money. Every human will receive two of these specially formulated aerosol cans free of charge, care of the House Budget Committee, and he or she will use them liberally, though always after reading the cautionary label which provides instructions for what to do if someone’s eyeball is sprayed accidentally.
Now that she’s done her part to save the world, she can’t wait to get home and lower all five of her AC units to a goosepimpling 55 degrees. She’s bored of her entire August wardrobe and has been longing since April to sleep under a pile of blankets in her fuzziest flannel pajamas. Before bed she’ll crank both her bathroom and kitchen sink faucets so her apartment will sound like the Colorado River in the midst of winter monsoon season. Then she can rest easy, knowing the government has it from here.