What's your carbon footprint?

If you answer that question with a resounding, "what the f&%$ are you talking about?," you haven't been paying enough attention to your BP commercials. On a more cheerful note, Belgian officials, in a bid to save the environment from the evil, Bushchimphitler coprorate resource marauder barbeque fans, have passed a 20 euro tax on grilling outdoors. You got that right. For all you'un Jeebus types not learned up on foreign exchange rates, that about $26 every time you cook out.

http://en.rian.ru/world/20070403/62999935.html

With that being said lets do a little math. The average outdoor grilling event amounts to about 75g of CO2 emissions, cited from the article above. Conversely, burning a single gallon of gasoline releases about 8788 grams of CO2. Now, if you consider that the average Nextel Cup stock car gets about 5.5 miles per gallon fuel economy, then a car running the Daytona 500 would have to pay up about $284,000 if taxed at the same rate as our evil barbequeing Belgan friends. With that being said, I sincerely hope to see a Sierra Club lawsuit against Hendricks Motor Sports in the coming months.

Here's some more mathematical reasoning. If you consider that the Nextel Cup runs 37 events a year, along with the pre-Daytona shoot-outs, qualifying, happy hour practice with 43 cars racing and about 50 trying to qualify, you can see that the entire series burns about 115,000 gals of gas a year (not counting moving driver RV's, trucking cars & tools to the race, testing, fans driving to races etc.) which amounts to a staggering 989 MILLION GRAMS OF CO2. This also doesn't consider the thousands of innocent racing slicks that are cruelly used up during the season and the effect their manufacture has on our fragile Gaia. With 989 MILLION GRAMS of CO2, poor Europeans could grill out 13 million times, which could be a major boon to the faux meat industry. On an even more ominous note, misguided NASCAR crew chiefs routinely DEFLATE TIRE PRESSURE when their set-ups become "too loose" (think latent homosexual innuendo), and any serious Earth lover has to be seriously concerned with a sport that condones running tires at less than their manufacturer recomended pressure, a major source fuel inefficiency. Who can even fathom what putting in a "half turn of wedge" or "adding a spring rubber" might do if taken seriously by the misguided NASCAR viewing audience in their every day driving? To top it all off, the pandering, profiteering money-whores known as NASCAR team owners even prostitute the very sides of their cars to the likes of Kingsford Charcoal, which exacerbates the effects of latent penis envy NASCAR male insecurity outdoor cooking on our precious environment.

The bottom line people, Stop grilling. Stop your support for silly corporate American race car races. Trade in your Dale Jr hat or your Calvin peeing on "48" sticker for new lease on life, green style. Once everyone in America becomes a pompous, pacifist, metrosexual patron of the modern arts and worshipper of the divine earth mother, the rest of the world will come to truly respect our inner beauty and wish to be at peace with us. We can all live in a world with reduced carbon emissions and red state cultural influence.