The Cult of Climastrology is renowned for linking virtually everything, including holidays, to “climate change”. Up till now, I don’t recollect them linking the mostly/solely political issue to Mother’s Day. Till now, as brought to us by Jennifer Grayson at the Washington Post (BTW, there are some actual ecological/environmental issues involved, beyond “climate change”)
Flowers may be nice for Mom, but they’re terrible for Mother Earth
How’s this as a gesture of love for the woman who bore you? Chop off the reproductive organ of a plant and send it to her in a box tied up with a pretty bow.
No, it’s not a weird botanical twist on the van Gogh woo-a-girl-with-a-severed-ear legend. It is what millions of us (67 percent of those celebrating the holiday) will compulsorily do to mark Mother’s Day.
This year, we will spend a collective $2.4 billion to buy Mom flowers. I understand the appeal. I’m a mom of two little girls, and my heart melts anytime they surprise me with a handful of dirt-clumped dandelions from our back yard. But while giving flowers may seem like a good way to show how much you love your mom, it’s a terrible idea if you care about Mother Earth. (snip)
The truth is that most flowers are organic only in the truest sense of that word: highly perishable and thus susceptible to decay, as well as vermin and disease. Up to 80 percent of the 5.6 billion stems of flowers sold in the United States each year are imported. Of those, 93 percent are grown thousands of miles away in production greenhouses in Colombia or Ecuador. And it takes an awful lot of energy and artificial tinkering to keep those flowers fresh.
To preserve the blooms once they’re cut, they’re stored in an energy-guzzling refrigerated warehouse, flown via cargo plane to the United States, brought to yet another refrigerated warehouse to await distribution, and — just to tack on a bit more to the carbon footprint — shipped via refrigerated truck to your mom or to the refrigerated display case at the supermarket or florist. There, the flowers lie in wait for a harried son or daughter to grab en route to Mother’s Day brunch, where still another bouquet of imported flowers makes up the table’s centerpiece.
Add in the cellophane wrap, those annoying little plastic stem tubes and the bouquet’s fate a week later, emitting methane in a landfill, and you may have gotten a gift with a bigger carbon footprint than if you’d driven four hours in a Hummer to visit Mom in person. While it’s difficult to calculate the carbon footprint of a single bouquet, experts estimate that sending 100 million roses (the number believed to be given in the United States on Valentine’s Day, another big flower holiday) produces some 9,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions from field to florist. The average American household has a carbon footprint of 48 tons a year.
That schtick continues on throughout the rest of the opinion piece, but, I think you get the idea, namely that you, dear reader, are helping to skyrocket the temperature of the Earth (sometime in the next 50-100 years, of course, since there’s essentially been an 18+ year pause in warming) and killing Gaia, all because you purchased flowers for Mom. Warmists are especially Evil, since they constantly yammer about the threat of “climate change” but still do things like this which causes an increase in their carbon footprint.
In fact, the movement for local flowers is becoming so strong that this month, the Senate passed a resolution supporting domestically grown flowers for Mother’s Day. (And while it’s nice to see Congress getting involved in something mom-related, it’s too bad lawmakers can’t make any headway on what mothers really need: paid protected maternity leave — the United States is the only developed country without it — or a national fine for anyone who tries to kick a breast-feeding mom out of a restaurant or off an airplane.)
Isn’t it interesting how an article on Hotcoldwetdry includes links to other pet Progressive issues? It’s almost like “climate change” is actually all about Progressive (nice fascist) politics?
But why not sidestep commercial flowers altogether? This Mother’s Day, I sent my mother-in-law an online gift card for heirloom seeds to plant in her cherished garden, and I’m giving my mom what she really wants: quality time with her only daughter at a “girls†lunch. As for me, I’m more than thrilled with dandelions from my daughters and my husband’s promise that on Sunday, I’ll have the morning off to luxuriate in bed.
But, why not sidestep being a climate hypocrite altogether, and give up fossil fuels, energy usage, and anything else that creates a carbon footprint, Ms. Grayson? That gift card creates “carbon pollution” through energy usage. How are you going to travel to that “girls lunch”? Fossil fueled vehicle, perhaps? I hope y’all are eating vegan! She should call for the Washington Post to stop killing trees to publish the paper, stop using fossil fueled vehicles to distribute it, and, hey, stop publishing altogether, since it requires energy, including on the Internet.
This is all just another in a long line by Cult of Climastrology cranks, heavy on preaching, scolding, assigning guilt, and extremism, demanding that we Do Something because they are Offended. Bunch of cranks.
The comments are hilarious. Hard to pick my favorite, but, this one
Environmentalists seem to live in the fear that somebody somewhere is having fun.
That seems to be the view of most Progressives.
Crossed at Right Wing News.
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