A Foolproof Solution for Climate Change

The United Nations has politely reminded us of the impending collapse of civilization. Rough news. There’s no easy way to tell everyone they’re going to die, so I admire them for avoiding the blame game. The pill is bitter enough.

The thing is, there is blame. It’d be easy to pin it on one’s personal partisan shit list, but the truth’s a little more basic than that. The blame lies with every functioning adult. We all, in ways big and small, could have done more.

Mercifully, there’s still time. I’ll admit it looks grim: the planet can’t support seven billion humans, or the seven billion new Range Rovers they need to survive. It could, however, support two billion humans driving hand-me-downs. Instead of despairing, we can take one simple step.

To save the species, everyone over eighteen should be killed.

This includes myself, which is unfortunate. I love life. The joys of friendship, food, sex, exercise, literature, and sex far outweigh the negatives. But it’s time to give up the ghost. Or rather, become a ghost.

Killing every adult neatly solves the impossible questions before us. With the majority of carbon-producers dead, we’d be free to pursue the conversion to alternate energy at a leisurely pace. In fact, if we committed to repeating the purge every thirty years, we’d never need to convert at all. I’m offering the one solution that doesn’t involve destroying the fossil fuel sector. We’ll have to kill everyone in it, but a new generation can take the reins.

Yes, changing our habits would be an easier moral pill to swallow than ageist genocide. It’s also less practical. We are far, far better at genocide than shopping with paper bags. You could purge any ethnic group in the country with half the propaganda it took to get ten people to stop using straws. The shot clock is winding down, and its time to start shooting threes. And civilians.

The next generation doesn’t need us to educate them. All the information they’ll ever need is already out there. We’ve publicly archived every human thought for the last twenty years, adding a detailed capstone to centuries of meticulously preserved history. We have nothing to tell our children that they can’t find written twice as eloquently by someone a hundred times more qualified.

I recognize that eighteen is a somewhat parochial choice. There’s a world beyond America. The age of adulthood varies, and I encourage each culture to preserve local practice. If it’s twenty, kill everyone over twenty. If it’s thirteen, kill everyone over thirteen. What’s important is killing the plurality of people old enough to have done something.

There’s only one practical problem: how? It sounds easy to hand kids guns and tell them to go for the gold, but child soldiers are generally reliant on adult supervision. I also believe they’d lack proper enthusiasm: youth can imitate their parents’ interest in murder, but a real appreciation for it usually doesn’t kick in until later in life. Violence, like red wine, takes a more refined palette.

Ultimately, it falls to the individual. As a responsible adult, you must kill your neighbors, and then yourself. There will be those who resist. Some of them will have beans and shotguns. Fortunately, since you skipped the beans, you should have a better shotgun. All you need is the courage to pull the trigger. Do it for your children, and remember who the last bullet is for.

Or you can buy a hybrid. I guess.

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