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Vice Blog

NEW YORK - CARBON DIPSHITS

Did you hear the bad news this morning? A plane flew all the way across the Atlantic with five people on it because they had to get it to London in order for the next (full) flight not to be cancelled. Isn't that terrible? It's like 45 times worse for the environment than if the same plane had flown the same route using the same amount of gas and emitting the same amount of exhaust but with all the seats filled. It also totally ruined those five guys' carbon footprints for life, and now they'll have to live in grass huts with no electricity for the next 20 years just to get them back down to normal.

We love how it took literally zero time for "carbon footprints" to go from a reductive-but-interesting model for demonstrating the average person's impact on the environment to a personal scorecard for self-righteous losers to a marketing scheme for British travel agents. Here's a little newsflash: The atmosphere doesn't give a shit how many people are on a plane. Just because you cancel your family's trip to St. Thomas doesn't mean the airline cancels the flight or leaves the seat empty and decides to use proportionately less fuel. It just makes you a pious asshole whose kids now hate him.

The whole situation just provides further evidence to the fact that all but a teeny tiny minority of environmentalists are far less interested in having some sort of positive effect on consuming habits and our relationship with the earth than they are in having you know that "they really care, man." After years spent booing sealers, putting their bottles in a separate box which ultimately gets tossed into the same vat of trash, and attending marches that absolutely no one pays any attention to, it makes sense that they'd eventually make the leap to taking credit for not doing anything at all. Good work, guys.