As I sit inside with ice on my driveway and more snow forecast for tomorrow, I realize just how right people have been about climate change. It changes almost daily and in New England in winter, it hardly ever changes for the better.

When the sun comes out, it is usually bone-shattering cold. If it is cloudy, it’s even colder, or about to rain and freeze on the roads and cars, or about to snow and stay until May. We do usually have a January thaw, except some years, but even then it is really just an excuse to create slush that careless drivers splash all over the desperate walkers who mistakenly take to the streets in hopes of finding spring.

It is at these times that I think most about climate change and how we might seek solutions to this problem that our President has labelled as the most pressing issue facing us in the world (unless you happen to have just been captured by ISIS).

One answer to this issue, which I actually thought up a few years ago, but, surprisingly, has never been acted upon, seems worthy of bringing up again in hopes that the world will soon be free of “climate change”. My one caveat is that this policy should be enacted in summer in New England so that the southern hemisphere gets stuck with the drawback of “no climate change”, which could mean eternal winter for those poor fools.

My solution was previously published in Granite Grumblings (Snap Screen Press, 2011) under the title Solution to Global Warming but has been updated here to reflect the realization that “global warming” is really “climate change”.

Glenn K. Currie

Solution to Climate Change

I’ve been doing some thinking about climate change. All the publicity and concern about its dangers has prompted me to seek a real solution to these serious issues.

Initially, I was led to believe that the cause was a bunch of unthinking folks driving big SUV’s, and maybe those politicians in Washington emitting all that hot air. But, recently, I read an article that stated that the biggest contributors to our ozone hole are cows. Yep, old Bessie’s flatulence is what is really doing us in.

When I looked at the big picture, this made a lot of sense. While I personally didn’t think Bessie’s  issues were that bad, I had long sensed that it was a problem being downwind from Vermont.

As I pondered the Earth-destroying subject of cow flatulence, it suddenly came to me that this could be the solution to many of New Hampshire’s and ultimately, the world’s problems. We could seize the opportunity to be on the cutting edge of this issue. Why not sell “flatulence credits’? Al Gore has been pushing his company that sells “carbon credits”, but I think we could do better.  We could copyright “flatulence credits” and then sell them to cow owners. This would in turn let them off the hook for their olfactory role in causing climate change. They could put little stickers on their milk and cheese and butter certifying that they are “flatulence friendly”.

The concept would work like this, initially. The state sells these credits to cow owners, the revenues from which are used by the state to buy up all the cans of beans on our grocery shelves. This simultaneously removes another only slightly smaller cause of flatulence. Ultimately, we could license this concept worldwide (it would work for sheep, too) and the State would collect a fee for every credit sold. We would in turn use the revenue from the credits, after buying up all the beans, to pay for schools and other needs, and maybe build some giant wind power fans at the Vermont border to blow Vermont’s flatulence down to Massachusetts, where they are accustomed to bad odors.

This would solve a lot of climate change problems. Cow flatulence would be offset by a reduction in human flatulence, our taxes would probably go down, and we would be drinking environmentally-approved dairy products. The only losers would be the growers and processors of beans. But I have a solution to that also. We just get Congress to pass a bill requiring all vehicles to start using a new fuel blend called beanahol. Then everyone would be a winner, once drivers got a good whiff of the beanahol emissions, we would surely see a lot fewer drivers on the road. This might eventually solve the climate change problem completely, and  New Hampshire could take its rightful place as the state that let the air out of the flatulence balloon, ended climate change, and got the ice off my driveway.