Christmas causes global warming (turn off those lights - or don't you care about the planet?)

Can you believe it? People all over town are lavishing their homes, inside and out, with Christmas lights and electric-powered inflatables.

You can't go anywhere without seeing additional, energy-guzzling lights strung on street posts, fences, gates, eaves or around windows like festive cobwebs.

Ely is small and may not be contributing much to global warming. But this is going on all over the world. Even non-Christian countries are being sucked into this Christmas, energy orgy. And that energy has to come from somewhere and the emissions go straight into our atmosphere.

The Friday after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday by retailers because it's the beginning of the Christmas shopping season when they make the majority of their profits. And when our society emits the most carbon dioxide and pollutants in seeking out those perfect holiday gifts.

Stores that usually don't unlock their doors and turn on their lights until 9 or 10 a.m., go bonkers after Thanksgiving and open at 4:30 or stay open all night -- an additional drag on our energy resources.

And the shoppers! They drive more than usual, burning millions of additional gallons of gas every Christmas season. And they don't take their little economy cars; they take their big SUVs to hold all those extra presents -- more carbon dioxide spewing into the atmosphere.

Besides, those products jamming the store shelves don't just magically appear. Factories all over the world have to increase their production for the Christmas rush. And that increase means more worldwide carbon dioxide emissions, more pollutants and a lead shortage in China.

All of those products need to be packaged and shipped. Cardboard cartons are made from trees, for pity sakes. We've been cutting down our forests so Barbie can come in a nice, multi-colored box. And don't think production of all the millions of gallons of ink used to make our product cartons so bright doesn't have a terrible cost on the environment. And Barbie is plastic. Plastic is made from oil!

Then there's the increase in shipping -- unneccesary flights skipping between nations for no other reason than to overstock our stores and malls and stimulate all that extra automobile traffic.

Those jets are dumping their toxic wastes at pristine high altitudes, don't forget.

But driving is the worst. I'm sure urban air quality goes down during Christmas, as cold inversion layers trap all those hydrocarbons at street level. And those long drives to grandma's house for Christmas have to go, too. It's a waste of energy. A brief phone or text message can serve as well, while protecting the kids from grandma's, high-fat 20th Century cooking methods or having to pull grandpa's finger.

Christmas trees? Those young pines are absorbing carbon dioxide as they grow, but we mow them down by the millions before they can capture very much of their potential CO2.

All this holiday over-consumption must be stopped. It's not just contributing to global warming, it's also unhealthy.

The diet at this time of year is full of sugar and fat. You might think of it as just a little Christmas splurge, but it still clogs your blood stream and leads to strokes or heart attacks in December as bad as it does in July.

Worst of all, what are our children learning? What kind of example is Christmas for the kids? All of the rules about good nutrition or conservation get thrown out the window every December when the windows ought to be closed to cut those heating bills!

Fortunately, one of the chief offenders of all this unhealthy and unwholesome Christmas misbehavior is being brought to task.

Acting U.S. Surgeon General Rear Adm. Steven K. Galson described Santa's main problem last week in an interview with the Boston Herald. Santa Claus, Galson says, is a bad example.

Galson had just given a presentation at the Boston Children's Museum on childhood obesity when he criticized, not just Santa Claus, but all of Santa's helpers for being out-of-shape and too fat.

They all need to eat less and exercise more, the top doc told the newspaper. They are role models.

Apparently the average, wine-breathed Santa Claus you might encounter at the mall weighs an average 256 pounds. Not satisfied with their own slovenliness, many of the in-store Clauses pass out sugar canes for the youngsters after encouraging them ask for more, more, more and then more.

The surgeon general wants all Santas to shed their excess poundage and be better role models.

He also wants children to stop leaving Santa cookies and milk on Christmas Eve. Maybe some non-fat milk would be acceptable, but carrot or celery sticks should replace the high-caloric, traditional munchies.

Santa is being challenged everywhere. In Australia, Santa helpers are being cautioned not to “ho, ho, ho,” because it's a demeaning term for women used in rap music. I've read that in some European countries, Santa is no longer trusted with children on his lap and told to keep his mittens to himself.

Nor is this whole bad-versus-good thing healthy for the emotional development of those children who are behaviorally challenged.

Who would put coal in a Christmas stocking? Would you put strontium 90 in some misbehaving kid's socks so he dies of radiation sickness? So why dirty coal?

While the Weather Channel and CNN are attempting to illustrate how serious global warming is by showing its effects on the Arctic Circle, the Santa-believing crowd continues to present this fantasy view of cavorting reindeer, happy Coca Cola-drinking polar bears and a year-round toy factory at the top of the world. Well reality is far different. Polar bears eat inattentive, cavorting reindeer and don't drink Coke: they're drinking sea water because all our CO2 emissions have melted their ice rafts.

Maybe we can save the Santa Claus image for Christmas in the future. But he'll have to become a better role model and help with the global warming crisis.

Loosing weight and working out is a must. Santa should be buff. Facial hair -- beards and mustaches -- attract and trap germs, so Santa needs to shave regularly. We are a youth-oriented society, so a little Grecian Formula couldn't hurt.

We've also got to spread the alarm about the North Pole, so we must drop the pretense that Santa Claus lives there.

Santa should also start telling the children what the environmental impacts are for the presents they ask for. Instead of new toys, Santa should encourage kids to recycle their old ones to save energy. Santa could also raise the children's consciousness about the environment by wearing green instead of red -- it's another Christmas color, after all.

A skinny, young-looking, clean-shaven Santa Claus dressed all in green (no fur, please), who walks instead of rides a sleigh, who doesn't drink sodas or cocoa, or eat sweet treats or overeat at meal time, and lives somewhere south of the Arctic Circle with his solar- and wind-powered toy factory staffed by female, as well as male, elves who are all union members, who doesn't exploit reindeer or make politically incorrect judgments or encourage unhealthy behavior would indeed make a better role model for the generations yet to come.

As for global warming, turn off those Christmas lights! Or don't you care about the planet?

Thanks for your kind words, GSWarrior. I was curious why our website was getting so many extra hits. I presumed I had somehow offended the folks at RealClimate again. A Goggle search brought me here. In the hard copy newspaper, my column appears under the editorial cartoon I draw (as Harpoon). The cartoon also is visible on the website, but it’s a thumbnail that must be clicked to see it full sized. Those who saw the cartoon and column together had an easier time of deciding if the column was typical AGW hysteria or tongue-in-cheek. Maybe some out-of-town readers should visit our website more often. Sen. Harry Reid (Ely is in Nevada) is working on destroying Nevada’s economy by stopping contruction on three coal-fired plants here, two in our county. What he has planned for us is what he has planned for the rest of you if a Dummocrat wins the White House. It might scare the beejezus out of you. — Kent Harper

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