Eat the rich

Rich people aren't like you and me -- not only do they have more money, but at least some of them have no souls: the latest fad for rich people who want green cred but don't want to give up the private plane and the summer home in the Hamptons is to purchase "carbon offsets" via organizations that make poor people in Third World countries engage in "cleaner" hard labor. For instance, making them replace irrigation machines that run on nasssty, nassssty fuel with what Megan McArdle calls a "hamster wheel." It's basically a contraption with pedals that people are supposed to manipulate to get water onto their fields.

I don't know how these wealthy enviroslugs do it -- I couldn't support such a thing and live with myself. The spiked article notes that the British penal system abolished a similar device once used for hard labor -- in fact, didn't Oscar Wilde have his health ruined by his sentence to the "treadmill"? It reminds me of that teacher I had in college who complained about roads being built in "pristine" remote areas of some place in South America -- the roads were for buses so the people of the region could be transported to their factory jobs; her complaint was that this was bad because "then they wouldn't get any exercise."

(Via the Sanity Inspector at Atlanta Rofters.)