Calculating various carbon footprints.

Continued exercises in futility.

A friend texted me a photo of an old package of carbon paper.

“I’m cleaning out some stuff and found this,” he said. “Do you need any carbon paper?”

He lives across the country so he’d have to send it in the mail, but sure. I have two typewriters and the memories of using my mom’s carbon paper to trace coloring book pages to make copies still dwell within.

“Sure. I'll take some carbon paper,” I said. And then a deep thought sprang forth. “If you mail carbon paper, what is the total carbon footprint?”

This might be the appropriate place to delve into the obvious rant about how the harpies who screech about carbon footprints necessarily do so after leaving a huge one, either in private jet travel or in massive computer servers guzzling up energy. It is a strange fact that you are most acutely aware of the faults of others only if that fault consumes your own life.

“You eat the bugs, we’ll eat the meat. You reduce your carbon footprint, and we’ll live comfortably, massaging our conscience by purchasing carbon offsets which are proven to do next to nothing but lets us put a little green ‘carbon friendly’ logo on our web pages and brand.”

But that full rant is low-hanging fruit. We’ll leave that to Eve. We all know they’re hypocrites. I’d like to rant elsewhere today.

As carbon-based lifeforms, the push to reduce the world of carbon is a little unnerving.

Diamonds are carbon. Are they allowed to be forever?

Graphite. Charcoal. My drawing of the Nazgul from Lord of the Rings.

Carbon carbon carbon.

Everything from sparkles and writing and lubricants and purification comes from carbon. Carbon has the highest melting point (useful to know, in terms of 2 Peter 3:10).

What would it look like to reduce our carbon footprint, besides the obvious conclusion of us huddling in caves and huts without running water, serfs who only live to serve the kings?

It would make vegans cry, probably, because plants need carbon.

As one of the top-five most abundant elements in the universe, the push to reduce our footprint in light of the understanding that matter can neither be created nor destroyed makes the effort seem foolish. The carbon cycle is a lovely thing, where plants take the carbon from the air or water, convert it to glucose and other useful bits via photosynthesis; then those plants are then eaten by critters who then exhale it as carbon dioxide, sending it right back to the plants again.

But carbon footprints and cow farts. The world’s economy is crashing and the mRNA shots continue to disable and delete human beings, and we’re worried about carbon and ruminating creatures who must produce gas in order to breakdown the cellulose fibers in the plants they eat.

Ah, but the catch, we are told, is that the carbon cycle is out of balance like a wobbling off-balanced clothes washer. We’re producing too much carbon! The equation isn’t balanced, and the same experts who turned 15 Days To Slow The Spread into Three Years To WW3 surely know what the equation should be (if there is one) and what it looks like unbalanced (if it could be). They have theories—not based on true observational science, because it is impossible in this case—that say the world has continued on the same since the dawn of time (2 Peter 3:4). They believe that the same natural laws that we see in operation today have always operated in the exact same way through time, and everywhere in the universe.

That’s quite an extrapolation, the product of small minds that think they are big.

Uniformitarianism shudders in the presence of the laws of decay and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, insisting that things continue in a constant as if we are in a frictionless vacuum, determining that anything that wobbles is an indication of something off-kilter instead of the normal petering out of a gear box wound up so long ago.

The same folks who hold to uniformitarianism are strangely the very same folks who tend to deny the existence of the one actual Unchanging Constant, and this is why they make idiotic statements followed up by equally idiotic and authoritarian laws.

How constant is our uniformitarianistic culture that gives lip service to the idea that we’re all evolving into a better Utopian-themed critter somehow?

• There’s some dumb new “gender” flavor of the week, and Bud Light is probably racing to sponsor it.

• Bug flour and sketchy chitins seem like a good thing to feed people.

• Exploding lithium batteries seem like awesome alternative power sources.

• Just pick a dumb idea, drop it in the UN or WHO search bar, and you’ll probably find it.

Most of us couldn’t balance equations properly in high school chemistry, and we’re trying to balance the carbon equation by measuring cow farts, closing down ranches, and inspiring kids to be cricket farmers.

I don’t know what the carbon footprint of mailing carbon paper across the country is, but I hope it’s huge.