The tyranny of big numbers

Now they want to grow it on the moon and eat it raw. 

I can see the day coming when even your home garden

 is gonna be against the law.

-Bob Dylan-

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The problem with living on a planet with 7 billion other people is that the tiniest of things become consequential.  Something that costs me less money than I would be willing to bend down to pick up translates to obscenely vast amounts of money and resources just because there are so many humans infesting our world who might just reach for that penny too..

The things we hear from environmentalists may make them seem like out of control Luddites and haters of technology, but in the kind of crazy way the flap of a butterfly wing may cause hurricanes, plugging your cell phone into a charger in your car is the equivalent of burning almost a billion pounds of coal. Or so we're told by credible sources. How then can we justify having hot water in our homes or eating toast for breakfast or refrigerating our food?  How soon before we live in the dark and cold and eat raw potatoes just to keep life from going extinct?

The need to save energy seems like it's going to choke the life out of us and bring civilization to the point of collapse if you read the warnings, and a Kategorischer Imperativ hangs over our heads like a sword. Costs a penny to make a slice of toast? What ef everyone did it -- the world would go dark and trillions and trillions of Watts would be used and mountains of coal would burn and the sky would turn black as night.  Light a candle against the dark and you destroy the world by adding umpteen gazillions of pounds of Carbon Dioxide to the air. Don't ring the doorbell which uses a microwatt second -- just knock.  Make a pot of coffee and some island sinks beneath the waves. Stand away from that car, the dome light alone would use megawatts per second if everyone did it.

7 billion people!  If we all face West and fart, the planet will stop turning.  We need to ban beans but how soon before it's 10 billion -- 20 billion people?  Kind of suggests that the "lets produce food like we did 200 years ago"  people may become food for the starving billions and all the "save the planet" schemes and products will fade away with the power mower when we start to eat our lawns because there's no more agriculture.

But of course you're environmentally conscious and so you didn't read this because it would take enough power to move Everest to Idaho if you all did and so you'll just go ahead and act like you're not the planet-killing consumer you are and you will just go on making phone calls and flushing the toilet and eating a hot breakfast until it all blows up.  Me?  I don't give a damn so batten your hatches and stock up on bottled water. My phone needs charging and I'm gonna plug it into my great big V8 automobile and do it right now!