Save The World

Last summer I suggested a workable direct deposit plan -- instead of buying me a foreign made piece of shit for my birthday, just buy it yourself, drive it to the landfill, and provide me the receipt for the direct deposit. That's all the birthday gift I could ever want.

Some time last night I thought about applying this to the Cash For Clunkers program. Yeah, the new car will still be bought, but send it straight to the recycler/dismantler. We can thus ensure that hundreds of thousands of domestic manufacturing jobs, making things Americans want, will still be there.

Hire a slew of teenagers to drive them from the new car showroom to the wrecking yard. Nineteen year olds would absolutely love to redline a new engine while dumping in an engine seizeant.

The recycler will take his plastics, steel and rubber and ship them straight back to the car factories, and the cycle will be repeated. "This car manufactured with at least 40% post-consumer content." Wouldn't you feel special about buying a car with that label affixed to the windshield? You'd think you were saving the planet and all.

You would be saving the planet! Think of the carbon offsets that you could sell to others because you aren't buying gasoline. Your purchase is carbon free! Now, other American companies who do produce carbon dioxide can buy your carbon offsets and receive credit for the carbon your car will not be producing.

With the just the right volume of government intervention & incentives, this could work. I would position myself somewhere in the middle of that revenue stream, probably closer to the carbon offset program because I'm a self proclaimed greenhead, perhaps taking profits off the top for brokering the carbon trading between individual car buyers and American factories. My job will be to pool sellers into complex tranches of risk and sell them wholesale to all those icky, icky carbon polluters. This would be a "white-green" collar job instead of a "blue-green" collar job like those teenagers. I could be counted in the green rolls and I'd know that I'd be saving the world...I wouldn't just think about it, I'd be doing something about it. What are you doing to save the world, huh?

Nothing? Yeah, that's what I thought.