Copenhagen Update

For those of you who are not following the news coming out of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, an alternative to the Carbon Credit plan was proposed yesterday. The new plan was developed in hopes of reducing public outcry over rising energy prices. The new plan is based on the generally accepted and peer reviewed conclusion that each time a cow farts in Argentina, a penguin or a polar bear in Antarctic dies.

In the new proposal, it was acknowledged that cow flatulence is not the only cause of global warming. Human farts also contribute, however it was conceded that average human fart volume is somewhat less than cow fart volume. This finding was careful to exclude Taco Bell customers so not to skew final results. Even though fart volume is lower in humans, fart frequency was found to be far more controllable than with cows. This conclusion was reached after reviewing findings from the 2 year, $30 billion dollar study where a group of cows were reminded daily to curtail their flatulence. This invaluable study found that controlling cow farts was not a realistic and that fart control techniques would be more effective if expanded to other mammals.

The new global warming remediation proposal has shifted to humans. Humans tend to understand language better than cows which improves overall feasibility of the greenhouse gas reduction plan. The basis of the new plan mimics Al Gore's Carbon Credit Model. Each person is allowed to fart twice each day (as per Kyoto Protocol). Two farts per day was found to be a reasonable reduction in the average methane fartprint for most individuals. Just as in the Carbon Credit plan, those who fart only once would be allowed to sell that "fart credit" to someone who fart three times each day.

Governance of the plan was also discussed with the following recommendations:

• The United Nations would monitor global fartload to ensure it does not exceed 12,000,000,000 farts per day
• Each participating member country would assign monitoring and reporting duty of their country's fartload to a Fart Czar
• The Fart Czar has the power to broker additional fart credits to their citizenry not to exceed 10% of total fartload
• Each Fart Csar is empowered to create policies that encourage new fart monitoring or fart prevention technologies, such as personal fart monitors, fart credit markets, fart credit pooling and personal fart plugs
• The Fart Csar may determine that children under 6 and retirees over 65 are exempt from methane fartprint monitoring since many cannot control their gaseous secretions
• The Fart Csar working with the country's agricultural leadership may use proceeds from fart credit sales to subsidize bean farmers who will be decimated by this methane reduction plan

Initial reaction by the countries represented at the Copenhagen talks was mostly positive. Mexico was a notable exception claiming the rules unfairly penalized their citizens due to the high levels of fiber in their traditional diet.