Divorce is bad for the planet! Every time two people who live together split up, they double the amount of space that is needed to house them which, consequently, doubles the amount of space that needs to be heated, refrigerators that need to be run and ovens needed to bake tonight’s lasagna. All of that takes electricity which is most often garnered by burning coal which causes tons of icky pollution.

These findings are kind of like the findings that show that being overweight is bad for the environment because it causes your car to burn more gas trying to move around a large bottom than it would if you would drop those extra pounds. Either way, we as Americans need to find a way to alleviate the strain we are putting on the environment by being fat and unhappy.

To fix things, we could take up therapy and Tae Bo. But Tae Bo is exhausting, and without the high rate of divorce, punk rock as we know it would come to an end. The problem of overweight Americans using more gas than they would were they to get skinny can be fixed by only filling your gas tank halfway up.

If you figure that a car with a 16-gallon tank, like my car, holds more than 160 pounds of gas when it is full, then if you only fill up halfway, you will see an effect on gas mileage equal to you, your spouse and your two kids each losing 20 pounds. See, there is no need to work out.

As for the divorce problem, it doesn’t take a visionary like Johnny Appleseed to see that the best solution is to give people what they want. Instead of, say, prohibiting divorce to keep this world squeaky-green, we should just allow gay marriage and bigamy. All of the homosexuals moving in together after tying the knot would easily offset the heterosexuals who changed their mind.

And bigamy, oh bigamy, why, that would be the greatest thing to happen to the environment since, well, Johnny Appleseed. Imagine five, 10 or even 15 adults living in the same house. Hell, I can only pray that there would be enough bigamists in America to vacate enough houses to drive the housing market down so that hard-working immigrants can finally afford a four-bedroom home in the suburbs on house cleaner wages.

The media are quick to jump on issues concerning the environment. I understand. The state of the environment is as tragic as the media’s other favorite topic: Britney Spears. However, in everyone’s fervor to end the crisis, they neglect to consider all of their options.

I hate to sound French, but I’ll risk it: It is tres American to try to fix a problem by attacking what is causing the problem instead of finding ways to compromise. If the trees are blocking the view, we Americans tend to try to chop them down, put them on a diet, or bring them to marriage counseling when we could just as easily climb them to get a better view.

Or give persecuted people the rights they deserve.

Or spend less money each time we are at the pump.

Maybe if we changed our approach to problem solving, people in other parts of the world might not dislike us so much. There is a chance that we could be friends. Hell, imagine that!

Us, the United States, friends with Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea and all the others (meaning the world)! If we did that, our worries over which countries were producing nuclear weapons would go away. It wouldn’t be because everyone stopped trying to make them. It would be because they are our friends, and we don’t care if our friends have nukes. The sweet prospect of real diplomacy!

But first thing, first. We need to fix the world. And to do this we should concentrate on offsetting the damage we do on a daily basis.

So, what I say is, “Eat, divorce, or be married, for tomorrow we diet.” As long as we can all be heathens, and we never top off our tanks, the world will be a better place.