Fake Butter-Boobs-N-Trees -- Not Necessarily Better Than The Real Thing!

Go ahead and try to convince me it's healthier to consume fake sweeteners and fake butter -- just be forewarned, whatever fascinating argument you may conjure up will surely fall on deaf ears. Even if you leave food out of the picture and attempt to explain in glorious detail why silicone implants are any better than what Mother Nature intended (not to mention other assorted under-the-knife cosmetic procedures), sorry...I'll never budge. Call me a fan of all that is genuinely natural and pure in this world. I'd like to think that some things are left sacred and that we can truly appreciate them even if they fail to fit society's absurd and increasingly warped notion of what is a-okay. Crooked Owen Wilson nose? Bring it on! Fugly heirloom veggies? I'll happily sautee them -- blemishes and all -- in a generous dollop of real creamery butter made from the milk of a certified, organically raised clone-free cow that dined on nothing but grass and dainty wildflowers growing in a wide open pesticide-free field. Sounds like an impossible utopia though, especially in this world of infinite fake objects that have misleading appearances, flavors, colors and other undesirable laboratory tweaked qualities.

Edible stand ins for the "real thing" -- such as Bac-O-Bits, high fructose corn syrup, veggie burgers, and non-dairy creamer -- have been an integral part of our lives for decades upon decades. It's gotten to the point where we almost forget that they are fake. Similarly, we've been spoon-fed a steady diet of pop culture plastic, from permanently buoyant Dolly Parton, Pamela Anderson and 1.6 million of their contemporaries to impossibly stretched Joan Rivers, Burt Reynolds, Kenny Rogers and, well, 3.6 million of their contemporaries. Fake has become a fact of life that is hard to escape, but the saving grace is that we can choose how much of it we allow to infiltrate our lives. It's a huge relief to know that no one can tweak our bodies or our diets without our consent, although with the latter, it requires a lot of label reading and self-imposed education. Can the same be said of the infiltration of fake plastic trees into the landscape of our lives? Yes, fake trees. Oh, haven't you heard? They're the next trend -- they're hip, they're happening, they're now, they're WOW!

Scientists at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (who automatically sound like a pretty clever bunch) believe that one of the very best ways to stop climate change is to erect vast synthetic forest expanses that will filter CO2 from our heavily polluted atmosphere far more effectively than yesterday's underachieving tree species. Hmmm, I take back what I said about those scientists being clever. They claim that just a single fake tree prototype (which costs approximately $30,000 to construct) can filter one thousand times more carbon than a genuine wood and leaf variety, which in English equates to one ton of carbon dioxide each day. Considering how rapidly climate change is progressing, they feel that this type of geo-engineering project should be propelled to pole position. According to the BBC News, "many climate scientists calculate that the world has only a few decades to reduce emissions before there is so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that a dangerous rise in global temperature is inevitable." As such, they are green lighting the mass production of these carbon filtration devices which would each be the size of a typical shipping container (anywhere from 24 - 35 feet). If you're as gag-me-with-a-spoon about this prospect as I am, then brace yourself for the time frame that this plan will become a reality -- a mere 10 - 20 years according to most estimates.

I realize that we are in a precarious position and drastic measures must be taken but honestly, I'd rather see a landscape jammed with real live trees than one studded with a thousands of looming sci-fi fly swatters. From a scientific perspective, I can see the appeal of these synthetic work horses -- their resin filters trap airborne CO2 and through a series of moisture and compression processes, the dreaded element can be tucked away for millions of years into porous rock below the sea bed. Of course, we don't know what the consequences of such disposal method might be -- implosion anyone? -- but we've got to do something. Our global production of CO2 currently hovers at around 30 gigatons each year. The truth is that we'd have to plant a mindnumbing amount of real trees to offset that volume of carbon and yet, if we hammered just 10 million fake trees into the ground, each year an estimated 3.6 gigatons of carbon would be removed from the atmosphere. Of course, we could always limit our driving, stop being so wasteful...you know, actually practice all of the sensible green lifestyle changes that are constantly being preached. Somehow, the remarkable technology of synthetic trees falls to the wayside when you look at them from an aesthetic perspective. The natural beauty of our landscape would effectively be visually polluted in order to draw a notorious greenhouse gas from our atmosphere. While scientists continue revising their synth-tastic design, how about you and I and 100 million of our global compadres start planting the real thing?