Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: Offsetting Carbon Offsets

My glass of sherry finished, I turn to my dinner - a salad, alas. I dislike salads. Besides the fact that lettuce and celery serve no discernible nutritional purpose, it's all just so desultory, so lacking in - how do the French put it? pizzazz, I think is the term. But, a woman of my manner and means just cannot be wolfing down rare slabs of steak. It's just too impulsive.

I fork an olive and stop. The Discovery Channel is on and is going to tell me all about the Carbon Crisis. I have been worrying about just this issue for some time but really have very little idea what carbon actually is, much less what kind of a crisis looms before us. Even so, I am happy to say that I have been doing my part, meticulously checking fabric labels in clothes, studying the contents of cereal boxes and canned goods, checking under rugs and doorstops, to insure that carbon is not hunched down somewhere near me, waiting to bring the apocalypse with the rest of its fellows.

In one admittedly paranoid moment, I even took a nail file to my Faberge Opera Russe pattern silver. As all young ladies should know (but don't), 92.5% of Sterling Silver is .99999% pure silver, while the remaining 7.5% is some other metal. I understand that mathematics tells us that .99999% silver multiplied by 92.5% content is really only 92.49999075% silver, but that's mathematics and this is 925 Sterling Silver, and never the twain shall meet. Especially since mathematics is a concept and silver is a thing and concepts and things have always been a bit antagonistic, to put it mildly.

But I digress. In my worry over carbon, it suddenly occurred to me that in all my Sterling Silver, there is some 7.5% of something that no one seems to want to talk about. In the catalogues 925 Sterling Silver is up there like Las Vegas neon, whereas any information on 75 copper, for instance, is as nondescript as a lapel on a suit. References to other 75's, boron, zinc, platinum and silicon, are buried in the footnotes as well, although, if my catalogues are any evidence, Argentium metalloid germanium seems to be establishing some sort of reputation out there.

All I can say is I hope not. As my Mother used to say before she married my Father, standards are important, and I can't quite envision a world in which fine dinner flatware includes a majority of something called metalloid germanium.

But I digress. In sum, it occurred to me that I had no information whatsoever about the 75 in my Faberge 925 Sterling Silver dinner settings. Faberge is very professional, but they did get their start in eggs. Could a carton of carbon have fallen mistakenly into the smelting vat? So, I attacked a salad fork with a nail file, which didn't tell me much, except either nail files are not as sturdy as they ought to be or my 75 is in fact metalloid germanium, which bothers me because ...

But I will not digress. Paranoia disposed of, I realized that if I don't know what I am looking for, then there is little likelihood I will find it. Plato said that in some context or other, although I suspect he stole it from Socrates.

Now suddenly I am discovered by the Discovery Channel. What is carbon? will be answered in one concise hour by a slew of delightfully erudite people. I drop my olive in front of Frederick's (pronounced Froderick's) nose, and begin concentrating.

Continue .....
And get worried. Discovery is beginning so far back Old Sol is not even a gleam in the eye of the galactic disk. I mean, it's as if someone asked me where I came from and I intoned, "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth ... " Come on, people, let's at least skip on up to the Jurassic Era.

But time contracts swiftly after the first commercial, as I think Einstein predicted it would, and I begin to get the picture. Dinosaurs, immense pressure, and then oil and coal. So, that stuff is carbon. But then ... It's a gas? Like natural gas? Apparently not. Professor Tweed Jacket says it's a gas in the atmosphere that is destroying the world, it is .....

Carbon dioxide!?!

I exhale suddenly and catch myself, coughing. To solve the Carbon Crisis we need to drastically reduce carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But the trees, my garden, the grasses in the meadow, the flora and fauna around and in the pond, they breathe carbon dioxide like oxygen. They live on the stuff.

Dark things begin to drop into place.

I keep a neat yard and a colorful garden. But this Spring, it's as if I cannot prune enough. After a heavy workout in the yard, the next afternoon, the very next afternoon, the bushes and trees flush that much more over the fence; the vines have halved again the distance to my house; and the vegetation has advanced its glacial movement over the walkways.

It's as if they know. It's as if they found out we plan to take their air away. It's as if they have decided not to stand by any longer, mute and patient. They have decided to act.

They have decided to offset us, all of us, before we offset their carbon.

I click off the TV in some vain hope they might not think I am the enemy. But it's too late. I glance down at Frederick, my black dog, mostly Labrador, and he seems strangely relaxed. So, I say, "I don't know why you're so comfortable. My people are only considering the possibility of taking away their air. We haven't done anything yet. You on the other hand go out every day, nonchalantly nose around their roots and then lift a leg or two on them. You think they'll let you off easy? Hah!"

He gives me a tired look that says, "Nice try," and then yawns and closes his eyes. He's right. They don't want him. Why not? And then the olive in front of his nose, my dinner that I dropped, fixes me with an unblinking gaze.

I realize: it's not the carbon. It's the salad. It's not what they breath, it's what we eat. Especially, I think, things like those baby tomatoes and little artichoke hearts. “The children,” laments the wind through the trees. “The children!”

I sigh with relief, shakily sipping a second sherry. If that's all they want, well then, no more salads. I could use a bit more beef in my diet anyway.

And the bovines in the meadow? Won’t they be upset that I am offsetting salads with steaks? Well, the fence thing really baffles them. By the time they figure some way around that, Frederick and I will be long gone from this carbon infested earth.