List of people that were not able to convince me to become a vegetarian to reduce climate change: Al Gore, my vegan best friend (sorry girl). List of people that did convince me to become a vegetarian to reduce climate change: Charlie Pickering and Waleed Aly.
At this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival, these two comedy-media megaminds have undertaken the most ridiculous of tasks: to solve a one of the world’s biggest problems each week. They’ll be attempting to solve homelessness, the refugee situation, and world peace throughout their four-week season, but for the first show they took on the far simpler task of solving that little old inconvenient truth: climate change. I was incredulous they might achieve what their show title promised, however, after somewhat legitimately and convincingly solving what K Rudd has called “the greatest moral challenge of our time” it seems that Pickering and Aly are well and truly up to the challenge.
Welcome to the Horizon Institute, Pickering and Aly’s “do-tank”(patent pending), a radical take on the think-tank model, complete with bad powerpoint and conflicting sponsorship. But unlike think-tanks, these guys advocate doing, before, and at times rather than, thinking. Though we are given this disclaimer from the beginning of the show, there is never any doubt that Pickering and Aly know what they are talking about, and have definitely put a lot well reasoned, if hilariously extreme, thought into the Horizon Institute’s proposed solutions.
Joining Pickering and Aly on a makeshift panel was a climate change expert from Cambridge University and everyone’s favourite carnivorous, gas-guzzling ranga, Tom Gleeson, appointed to play devil’s advocate.
So as not to deprive you of the genius of the do-tank’s solution to climate change, here it is, more or less. Pickering and Aly reasoned that though viable solutions for CC are possible now (carbon trading, injection of sulfur into the atmosphere), the main obstruction to these solutions were the selfishness and lack of will power of human beings. Therefore, to solve climate change, we would need to make Better Humans™. To do so, they proposed three tiers to the new human. The new human would be allergic to meat, as meat production, land clearing, and transportation currently make up around 51 per cent of carbon emissions. The new human would be 15 per cent shorter in order to curb consumption; smaller people need to eat less to survive and thus put less strain on food production and transport. Lastly, the new human would constantly be exposed to oxytocin in the atmosphere, the hormone that is often called ‘the building blocks of love’ and is produced when someone falls in love or a mother first smells her newborn baby. Strong feelings of love and empathy are built on oxytocin, causing people to genuinely give a shit about each other and stop driving 4 Wheel Drives in the city because they think their kids will die. So, their proposal? The next generation of humans would be happy, loving, short vegetarians. Totes adorable, right? I think they’ve got this one.
Though many may have entered the Melbourne Town Hall expecting scintillating satire from two of the Australian media’s freshest minds, what actually transpired was a light-hearted, surprisingly informative and ultimately hopeful projection of a future to come in light of our current action on climate change. Thanks, comedy, for putting a true and alleviated spin on the issue, genuinely making me think about my habits and understand how easy this problem could be solved if we weren’t a society of selfish, meat-addicted jackasses.
I’m looking forward to the guys having to solve my sanctimony problem when I’m a self-righteous vegetarian. See them and you could feel sanctimonious too.
-Nat Tencic
Charlie Pickering and Waleed Aly: The World’s Problems Solved is on every Sunday at 4:30pm until April 21 at the Capitol Theatre in Melbourne. For more info and tickets click HERE
