GENEVA – With just less than three months until a self-imposed United Nations deadline on reaching global consensus on CO2 emissions, a breakthrough agreement has been reached that signatories hope will settle the matter once and for all.

Under the agreement, industrialized nations will shelve plans to pay billions of dollars per year to the Third World in a carbon-offset program. In return, they will accept the steady influx of novel diseases spawned by the squalid overpopulations of cohabitating humans and animals and frenetic clearing of rain forests common outside the developed world

“This is a landmark agreement,” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon through a surgical mask and an interpreter. “Like all good agreements, it was not achieved without a lot of hard work, not without both sides feeling they had left something on the table.”

Global talks had been bogged down among the 192 participating nations as debate raged over whether the under-populated developed world should compensate the wildly overpopulated developing world over disparities in per-capita carbon emissions.

Groups like the WWF and Greenpeace had insisted developing countries give $140-$160 billion per year to Third World tyrants with the hope they might use the funds to take action to offset a projected increase in global temperatures of up to 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

Scientists say such a temperature increase could have horrific effects, including floods and droughts and other oxymoronic pairings.

“All of that talk is behind us now,” said a visibly relieved Robert Gibbs, spokesperson for President Obama, confirming the U.S. will sign the agreement.

The issue had been a difficult one for the administration, as it was torn within its own party between far-left environmental groups that were indifferent to the massive destruction of natural resources outside the U.S.  and conservatives who balked at the idea of funneling billions of dollars of handouts to the Third World for the privilege of continuing to produce energy needed to fuel modern industry, including the production of food that is shipped as aid to Third World nations.

“Particularly given that we’re in the grips of Great Depression 2.0, and we’re using fake money to buy things anyway, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to us to hand over billions more,” conceded Gibbs.

Ki-moon said there was a “eureka” moment during negotiations when, during a break, someone came down with the H1N1 virus, formerly known as Swine Flu, and was whisked away to an isolation ward.

“Someone in the room noted that this, along with H5N1 (also known as Avian Flu) and other EIDs (Emerging Infectious Diseases) had all sprung out of Third World conditions and wondered if there might not be an opportunity to trade them for carbon offsets.”

From that initial proposal, talks moved swiftly, as the group identified diseases such as AIDS, SARS, rodent-borne hemorrhagic diseases and other exciting new pathogens.

“Typically, what these afflictions have in common is that they were brought about by people penetrating deeper and deeper into ecosystems that had previously little or no contact with humanity,” said Ki-moon. “There, they are exposed to dangerous pathogens that have the potential to jump species and swiftly spread around the globe.”

Making matters worse, said Ki-moon, is the fact that many indigent populations live in close quarters with filthy swarms of livestock, creating a nurturing petri dish in which viruses can swap genetic material as they transit from human to animal host and more readily mutate into threats for which humans have no immunity.

“At the end of the day, it’s an even trade,” insisted Gibbs. “Since 1975, about 40 new infections diseases have emerged, and we expect the trend to only pick up pace as the developing world rightfully pursues parity with the western world in important metrics like per-capita meat consumption.

Civet cats are a tasty way to acquire SARS.

“They have every right to pursue the same standard of living we do, every right to burn down rainforests so they can cultivate cheap, tasty meat.”

“It’s a noble cause,” Gibbs conceded, “but it has a byproduct: nasty diseases that can wipe out millions. By the same token, our lifestyle has a byproduct, too – an invisible gas we call CO2.

“To a degree, it’s apples and oranges, but we think on balance it’s a fair trade. Plus, when the next really big superbug emerges from one of these backwater cesspools, the hundreds of millions it wipes out globally will no longer be producing carbon footprints, regardless of what th

eir diet was or where they lived.”

Originally posted 2009-09-11 09:47:24. Republished by Blog Post Promoter