All truly great ideas are simple which is one of the reasons I will have no truck with Einstein. Any theory so complicated that no-one understands it cannot be true and for those of you who have not studied it, his explanation of the universe has gaping holes and will, hopefully in my lifetime, be reduced to unicorn territory. But back to me.
Those of us who would given our first born child in return for never having to listen to one more word about Brexit have discovered that there is yet another circle of hell. Whilst the politicos were off stuffing their faces with chocolate over Easter the desperate-for-a-story media discovered climate change and have been attempting, possibly for a newsroom bet, to reduce us to the same level of self harming boredom on a second subject. But in yet another of my extraordinary revelations the solution has appeared.
The planet is in crisis, we have only months, probably weeks left and absolutely everything is on the brink of extinction. (See Grauniad newspaper most days). What, gentle reader(s), is the source of all this misery and despair? What is responsible for the destruction of our beautiful planet? Us. You. Me. It is people and by a leap of logic that should be obvious to everyone, all we have to do is get rid of the humans. No more cars and factories poisoning our air, no more pesticides polluting our rivers and not a single fragment of plastic ever again. And, as a buy one get one free bonus, world peace. Genius or what?
Apparently if the UK was completely carbon neutral by next Wednesday it would make a whole 1% of difference to the overall problem so that’s a waste of time. By way of contrast China currently has 13 million people employed in coal mining, which in their scale of things is the equivalent of the population of Builth Wells, but it makes rather a mockery of me re-cycling paper waste in suburban London. If we stopped buying Chinese products all their smoke-belching factories would close and that might actually help. Dear old Donald Trump may well be attempting this very result in his own ham fisted manner by imposing outrageous import taxes. Who had him down as a Green?
On to practicalities which I have yet to refine. Do we kill everyone at once, or the oldest every year? We could just ban all new babies and the problem would be sorted in about a century. Perhaps offer the prospect only to climate change supporters as they are most likely to leap at the chance of doing something that will make a real contribution. Should we spare eskimos, Amazonian tribes and aborigines on the basis that they have damaged least and suffered most from ‘civilisation’? There is a lot to discuss but I have never been one to get bogged down in minutiae. Anyone can do that. I merely give you an elegant and unarguable solution. Now, who wants to be first?