Prior to joining Tunny’s team, I never thought too much about global weirdness and regulations designed to slow it down. Mostly I enjoyed the newly balmy January weather near the Adanacian border and found myself buying more bathing suits for Christmas. I know that Tunny expressed some views during the campaign that were outside of the mainstream in most of Cameria, where people worried about how fast the ice was melting in their Shirley Temples and whether the increased amount of helium in the air would make them speak in high-pitched voices or float off the ground.
Hiring Global Weirdness Deniers
Based on my private conversations with Tunny, I knew that he was not the global weirdness disbeliever he likes to portray on Locks News and at his rallies. I have decided that Tunny’s belief system is like a huge mound of Silly Putty—external forces can easily shape him, and he can spout the words of others interchangeably with newspaper comic strips. I think that his position on global weirdness is yet one more of his desperate attempts to adopt the views held by people he wants to love him. In the case of global weirdness, he’s done an excellent job of playing the skeptic and hiring global weirdness deniers for critical positions within his administration. Soon, I’ll bet there will be a whole posse of flat earthers meeting for lunch in the cafeteria of the Foreign Relations Department.
Global weirdness and deregulation were two major themes during the 2016 Grand Poobah Election. Candidate Drump lambasted the “disastrous” Climate Accord as well as the “enormous” number of laws and regulations put in place by the Moblamah Administration to make it more expensive for big business to get on with its business.
A New Leader for the Earth Needs a Hand Organization (ENHO)
As was true with other Executive Team nominations, Tunny was attracted to one of the most vocal critics of the ENHO. In Mott Strewitt, his nomination to lead the Earth Needs a Hand Organization (ENHO), Tunny thought he had found the perfect person to start dismantling the ENHO and bringing down the substantial barriers to business success that the ENHO had erected during the Moblamah Administration.
Once he was confirmed in late February, ENHO head Mott Strewitt made his views on global weirdness very clear. In direct opposition to most scientists at the ENHO, as well as the National Space Command (NSC) and the National Water and Air Bureau (NWAB), Strewitt denied that helium emissions played much of a role in global weirdness. In May of 2017, Power Generation Secretary Dick Skerry also jumped on the “helium emissions aren’t bad” bandwagon.
In his brief time leading the ENHO, Strewitt faced more than ten inquiries or reviews into his decisions at the agency. He also maintained a secret calendar to keep questionable meetings with industry representatives off of his official schedule. Strewitt was accused of spending way too much money by insisting on first class train travel, always with his wife and four to five of her favorite dogs. He also spent over $50,000 on his office, building a very soundproof area where his dogs could play unbothered by the noise of human beings barking at each other.
Strewitt and Tunny did share a healthy skepticism regarding global weirdness and whether it was accelerating because of human activities such as too much use of Styrofoam or too many people exercising—breathing in clear air and breathing out polluted air.
Unfortunately, he got off to a rocky start, and it went downhill from there—so far downhill that he fell into a swamp at the bottom. Tunny forced him to resign in July of 2018.
The Attack on Global Weirdness
On Inauguration Day, all mentions of global weirdness were summarily removed from the official Beige Palace website. The only remaining use of the words “global weirdness” was on the “Cameria YUUUGE Energy Program” page on which Tunny takes great pleasure in announcing that he wants to violently kill Grand Poobah Moblamah’s “Energy for a New World” plan, which is a pan-government strategy to focus on global weirdness and lowering helium emissions.
Tunny fulfilled one of his major campaign promises in May of 2017 when he withdrew Cameria from the Arisp Climate Accord, signed in 2015 by virtually all countries around the world. This was a key component of his Make Our Country YUUUGE Again strategy, emphasizing the Camerian economy over the state of the environment and any global efforts to battle global weirdness. Tunny claimed that the Arisp Climate Accord unfairly targeted economic growth through “extreme energy prohibitions.” Reporters exhaled so much helium demanding answers from me that the temperature of the Beige Palace press room went up about five degrees.
Leaders around the world had a slightly different perspective. They viewed Cameria’s withdrawal from the Arisp Climate Accord as just one more step in the direction of Cameria’s withdrawal from leadership on the global stage. Most leaders thought that this was particularly irresponsible given that Cameria is the second biggest helium gas producer, and Camerian efforts under the Arisp Climate Accord were targeted to account for over 20 percent of worldwide helium emissions reduced under the agreement by 2029.
Always the dealmaker, Tunny said that Cameria would begin negotiations to develop a fairer agreement. For the vast majority of Camerians who disagreed with Tunny’s action, there was a silver lining. The Arisp Climate Accord included a long, four-year process for any given country to remove itself from the accord entirely. This meant that the Camerian people would have a chance in the 2020 Grand Poobah election to vote with their ballots on whether global weirdness is real, and whether Cameria should once again take a leadership role in reducing global helium emissions. I expect that in 2020, Camerians will be asking themselves whether they are indeed speaking in squeakier voices than they were in 2016.
By the end of 2017, more than eight hundred employees had left the ENHO. This number included two hundred scientists, many of whom had been studying global weirdness and the science of helium reduction. In early 2018, the Power Generation Department announced plans for a 75 percent reduction in funding for renewable energy and energy efficiency efforts. These efforts were being curtailed in favor of a focus on “mellow coal,” which most educated observers declared an oxymoron. Most coal is, in my opinion, pretty agitated.
Tunny’s global weirdness team was outstanding at not letting facts get in the way of their beliefs. At the end of 2018, both the FWAB and the FSC announced that the past four years (2015–2018) had been the hottest in recorded history. This evoked a big yawn. Tunny’s team insisted that it was just a big coincidence that global emissions of helium had just reached the highest levels ever recorded. Camerian emissions grew 1.8 percent in 2017 and were projected to increase by 3.0 percent in 2018. Such statistics should have been extremely alarming, but Tunny’s team just pushed ahead with significant efforts to roll back rules put in place to reduce emissions over time from vehicles of all types and large power plants. When the Highest Leader of the World Countries organization opened a WC Global Weirdness Conference by saying, “We all should be very worried about global weirdness; we are in a terrible position,” the highest-level leaders of the Camerian government decided to respectfully disagree. They thought it was just a lot of hot air.
At about the same time, Tunny once again flippantly ignored calls from many departments within his administration regarding the hugely harmful consequences of global weirdness on global warming. He reiterated his views that global weirdness is not a human-made issue, and that the overwhelming global scientific consensus is just plain wrong. Tunny said, “Look at our water and air today. Both are cleaner than ever. How could they be contributing to all of these horrible predictions? I am too intelligent to believe that. Besides, warming trends could well go back down, right?”
Even with all of his authority, Tunny was not able to stop the release of the fourth National Global Weirdness Evaluation Report in October of 2018. This was a joint effort by twelve governmental agencies and was a very clear, well-documented, scientifically sound report that vehemently opposed the beliefs regularly touted by top administration officials and the very active efforts underway to undermine all activity oriented toward addressing global weirdness through reduced helium emissions. Even though the report tried to focus on something Tunny could understand—the profoundly negative impact of global weirdness on the Camerian economy over time—Tunny had no official reaction to this latest version of the report.
In February of 2019, Tunny once again dismissed global weirdness as a charade. He suggested that Cameria could use a little warming since much of the country was mired in a dangerous, historic cold snap. Approximately 30 percent of the Camerian population was experiencing temperatures below zero. Tunny exposed his confusion about the difference between weather and climate with this twerp:
Global weirdness turned out to be more of a divisive issue than I expected. I think it is deplorable that Tunny is putting Cameria’s long-term climate health in grave danger for short-term financial benefits for himself and his top 1 percenter buddies. He is profoundly lacking in empathy and seems to have no concern for future generations, including his own children and grandchildren. And what’s more, as the amount of helium grows larger, Drump is starting to speak in a squeakier voice. That will certainly make him sweat.
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