People Power

Acid rain burns away our forests as poisoned rivers flow through neighborhoods, and radiation bakes us through a pockmarked ozone layer. Yup, coal and nuclear energy and all the other wonders of the modern world are sure bringing up the quality of life. This isn't a political problem: it's an environmental problem, and like the government and just about everything else, they should be separated.

Unless, of course, the environment is allowed to fight back against Washington. Directly. Tit for tat. A nice plague of locusts would add new motivation to conservation talks.

Hydroelectric power is the only pure, clean, and totally safe way to generate the electricity we need. Problem is, you need powerful (read: falling) water.

There's another problem wracking the country: the predominance of idiots and those who make life unnecessarily difficult for those around them. Go to the grocery store and count the unmarried middle-aged guys pushing their carts with their distended bellies through the "15 items or less" lane to buy seventeen items. Most of their shit is beer and canned meals, and a pack of condoms for their self-esteem, but the effect is what matters: they make life unnecessarily difficult for the rest of us. Fully half of the people in this country are below average. Figure that the middle ten percent of that half exist solely to spite logic and order, and you get a huge figure of people we could do without. There's another ten percent at the top of society who similarly serve no purpose beyond pissing the rest of us off and impeding our right to pursue happiness. Most of them are in politics. Throw in the really gnarly criminals, chicken fuckers, and most of George Carlin's "four groups that gotta go," and the result is a nice slice of America, around the 30% mark, ripped right off the park benches near middle schools.

Now, to bridge these converging storylines.

Oil is a non-renewable resource. Once we burn it all, that's it. We have to wait a couple million years for a bunch of dinosaurs to die and get compressed into black ooze. Judging by the number of dinosaurs in my yard, we have a while to wait. But, we do have a disproportionate amount of stupid and counterproductive people. They reproduce like retards turned loose in a dark room — and note, I don't necessarily include retards in the list...they're probably just as pissed off as we are at the people who pay in nickels and can't coordinate their spandex body suits at Wal-Mart. (No hate for the 'tards. I wouldn't blame them if some were just faking autism to get away from the rest of us. It's actually quite genius.)

So knowing that we have a lot of people waiting for natural selection's fickle finger, and knowing that spinning a specially-constructed turbine can transform kinetic energy into electric energy, I propose we construct a giant paddlewheel at the base of a cliff. We bait the cliff's edge with a TV broadcasting some reality show, then push them off the cliff. A 200 pound male at terminal velocity produces several thousand pounds of force. Listen to that paddle wheel spin, making kilowatt hours to power New York while making life a bit more livable in the process. It's genius.
Like hydroelectric plants sprout up on rivers, we can take these high-dive paddlewheel generators straight to major population centers. Start near Hollywood, and listen to the West Coast's mean IQ skyrocket as wayward surfer dudes and moderately famous soap opera prima donnas are lured into kinetic-public-service. The wheel spins, the San Andreas Fault groans with relief, and somewhere an angel gets its wings.

Now, to find financial backers...