People are still talking about the rather hilarious troll who crashed a town hall being given by freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  In a set up so obvious only the most dim-witted couldn’t see through it, the young woman insisted that the fight against global warming was not enough.  Even some Swedish scientist’s idea of eating the dead (which is apparently a story that is only true on the Internet) was insufficient. We must immediately start eating babies.

This led to the #EatTheBabies and #EatTheChildren hashtag trending on Twitter, with typically hilarious results.  More than a few (myself included) reminded the Twitterverse that this was not the first time baby consumption had been encouraged.  The writer Jonathan Swift, of Gulliver’s Travels fame, once suggested in his satirical essay, A Modest Proposal, that we should eat babies to end poverty.  This was in response to a large number of poor single mothers in his time.  Apparently, even in the 18th century, when single motherhood was very taboo, it was a major driver of poverty.

But today eating babies is offered as a method of population control.  And there’s no question that the explosion in the population (primarily due to medical advancements, such as immunization, and increased food production, resulting in fewer deaths from starvation) is a major driver of carbon emissions.  But eating babies is not the correct answer.

Now I wouldn’t even consider eating a baby, even if the world depended on it.  I have trouble eating veal (baby cow, for the uninitiated).  Unless it’s veal parmesan. Anything “parmesan” is inherently awesome.  Although I still don’t think I would eat baby parmesan.  But more importantly, babies probably have the absolute lowest carbon footprint of all humans.  They are not the problem.

There is a better way, though.  Many modern countries are struggling with obesity.  I once did too. But no longer. Once I discovered an app to track my calories, nutritional intake, and exercise, I was able to discipline myself to eat less and exercise more in a way that resulted in losing over one pound per week.  As a result, I lost 30 pounds in half a year. It was quite simple. Eat 500 calories less than I burn per day, and ensure that I get all the necessary vitamins and minerals. It is only possible to do this by eating more fruits and vegetables and less meat.  So by losing weight, I reduced my carbon footprint.

If every fat person in the world did this, we would have a significant impact and be generally healthier and therefore less of a burden to the healthcare system.  We wouldn’t need to ban farting cows and lamb and other meats. We would just need to eat fewer of them.  But there is one segment of the population that this would not apply to. A peculiar splinter of the Body Positivity movement known as the Fat Acceptance movement.  

Now Body Positivity was originally a good idea.  It was about encouraging people, especially young women, not to harm themselves to attain an unattainable body image.  It’s better to be a healthy size eight than an anorexic or bulimic size four. But then the Fat Acceptance movement got carried away.

Instead of being happy with average weight, they decided that being morbidly obese was fine.  So massive they break normal scales. So huge that when they need an MRI because they have chest pains, they get sent to the zoo because they’re too big for human-sized MRI machines.  So gigantic that, in the words of the eternally corpulent (and now sadly, but unsurprisingly, dead) comedian Ralphie May when he lost 270 pounds, that they could lose an entire fat man and still be fat as hell.  So instead of avoiding the unhealthy lifestyles of self-starvation and forced regurgitation, they went completely the other way and chose the unhealthy lifestyle of constantly stuffing one’s face.

One does not get that large without engorging themselves on absurd amounts of meat.  And it’s pretty clear that they have just given up on health, and will continue to murder the earth by scarfing down an endless diet of dead animals.  So the solution is obvious. We must eat the Fat Acceptance activists.

We must find and corral all of the unrepentant gluttons of the world.  This will be easy, since they can’t outrun us. The obese are nearly 40% of the U.S. population, according to the CDC, and their carbon footprint by far exceeds a normal person’s.  So if we eat all of the ones who won’t go on a diet, humanity’s carbon footprint will be reduced, because normal people don’t eat nearly so many animals. They also don’t fart as much as fatties do.  

Also, since the population will be noticeably reduced, the power consumption will decrease, reducing emissions even more.  Not just because there will be fewer people. Skinny people won’t need the air conditioner turned on so high, because their fat free bodies don’t retain as much heat.  Also, the weight carried by planes, trains, and automobiles will be noticeably lower, improving fuel efficiency.

We could even solve other problems in the process.  We could ship fat people to parts of the world where there is hunger.  If we send fat people to Venezuela, for example, where hunger is rampant due to the widespread mismanagement and incompetence of the Maduro government, we could reverse the weight loss trend amongst their population.  This could be mutually beneficial. We could lift the sanctions and trade fat people for oil.

We could even have a form of slave reparations.  We could send fat white people to the poorer parts of the black community where there is hunger.  This would also be fiscally beneficial, since poor blacks would no longer need food stamps and could feast on chunky white people for years.  The only trick is that there is a higher rate of obesity in the black community. So we may need to actually send some black people back to Africa to feed the hungry there.

Make no mistake, many fat people could become unfat people (as I did) by simply having a responsible diet.  But for those incorrigible few, cannibalism is probably the best choice. We can reduce the carbon footprint of the human race by eating the hopelessly heavy.  In a fat-free world, we would all be healthy, happy, and have a much lower carbon footprint. And since we would all be noticeably more attractive, we could get laid more frequently and have all the babies we want.