[It looks like the author started the essay as a joke, but when he got to the second paragraph, he suddenly took a serious turn, and the essay evolved into a futuristic dooms day scenario. May be an environmental stripe or two of his shows through all that fuzz. He seems to be reasonably convinced that the scenario that is described in the article could actually come to pass if we don't watch out. Our "not-too-far-in-the-future" descendants could be witnessing a truly run away "greenhouse" planet, which at that point could very well be virtually at a point of no return. But we have a choice, and the choice is now...]

I never understood the logic behind the idea of someone spending a whole day in a boat, catching a fish or two, and throwing it right back into the lake. What's wrong with these people, I wondered! The obvious questions that come to my mind are: Why bother? Don't they have anything better to do? Why don't they bring it ashore, cut it up and clean it, and fry it (if they are of southern persuasion, that is) or grill it?

I, likewise, will never understand our going for fishing in Iraq, catching it, making a mess of the entire area, and throwing it right back to the Iraqis on June 30 of this year! True, Iraq is “off the training wheels” now, and they must ride the bike all by themselves from now on, but I have my doubts. Why don't we, instead, occupy it, colonize it, drill it, ship all the oil we can possibly get out of its land to our shores, pump it into our SUV’s and Hum V’s, burn it like there is no tomorrow, and make our air totally unbreathable? We can even catalyze the process of poisoning our breathing air by cutting down all the trees in this country, and decimating the rain forests in our neighboring countries located to the south of us. Then we can go to Europe, Australia, Asia, and Africa, and cut down more trees there.

I see fantastic business prospects when a totally polluted atmosphere would engulf the earth and suffocate all of us in the near future. Bottled air business will skyrocket. We can buy their shares while they are still affordable. Corporations like General Pneumatics Inc., Consolidated Air (Con-Air?!), American Oxygen Company (AmO2Co), National Carbon Monoxide (NaMoCo) Extraction Corporation, United Carbon Dioxide Incorporated, and International Scuba Private Ltd. will sprout from the ground like toadstools after an autumn thunderstorm. Self Contained Breathing Apparatus (SCBA) will be the norm than the exception! The atmosphere would be so polluted that a red sun will be shining on our earth right from morning till sunset. Forget about rain as we know it; there wouldn't be any, except of course for scattered sulfuric acid drizzles, which may become heavy at times, like they say on the weather report! There will be a reddish orange glow in the night sky even at midnight, well after the sun is gone to the other side of the planet to provide its ultraviolet and infrared radiation, and everything else in between, for the people of Asia, the Middle East and the Far East. Remember Venus, our sister planet? Dooms day? Not yet! But stay tuned…

We'll all need to make sure that our grand kids are equipped with an extra bottle or two of air when they go to school, just so they won’t suffocate during lunch break. I'm sure our futuristic gas stations where we fill the extra large tanks of our General Motors, Ford, Toyota, and Nissan SUVs with gas will also be equipped with breathing air filling hookups. We may not even need to get out of our Hum-V's to get our SCBA filled up. The car will have some sort of a do hickey to achieve this. This will also save us from the trouble of getting any exercise that we would otherwise get by getting out of the vehicle and walking around a couple of feet or three. Don't forget, one third of America is already obese, and it will soon be doubled or tripled! Give ourselves a few years; we’ll get there!

I realize the aforementioned may be an entirely fictional scenario (and I certainly hope it would be!), which may simply be a figment of my imagination. May be none of these will ever happen. According to one of our distinguished representatives in the Congress, global warming is nothing but a hoax. He may know better, and may be I am a worrier, and am thinking about all this for nothing. But wait! Let's not just yet jump into conclusions. Did our grandparents ever imagine in their wildest of dreams that good old water would be sold in 12 ounce bottles? Did they ever see Evian or Dasani coming? Need we say more? I will give a hundred years for these to come to pass, and I’m being generous.

All in all, a no win - no win situation, wouldn't you say? Do we really want to go there?

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