[Now with a photo-shopped image of the Bush McCain-Saudi handhold!]

If anything should put a stake through John McCain’s absurd gas tax holiday idea, it’s that the Saudi King advocates it, too!

As I have previously noted, the only ones who benefit from the gas tax [holiday] are the oil companies and the petroleum producers. Case in point, the biggest producer just said:

Next month, the Saudis will be pumping an extra half-a-million barrels of oil a day compared to last month, bringing total Saudi production to 9.7 million barrels a day, their highest ever level. But the world’s biggest oil exporters are coupling the increase with an appeal to western Europe to cut fuel taxes to lower the price of petrol to consumers.

Why do they want the West to lower fuel taxes? They want to be able to raise their own prices and/or they want higher demand for their primary product:

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So when will the last Father’s Day be?

Proposed nearly a century agao to honor the “strength and selflessness” of fathers, the underlying premise of the holiday is that fathers selflessly work hard to ensure their children have a better future than they did. Interestingly, “the holiday was not officially recognized until 1972.”

Certainly it made sense to honor the fathers who came from the Greatest Generation, with their grit and determination to win WWII. But on our current path, for the first time in US history, we know with high confidence that thanks to our actions (and our inactions) our children will not face a better future, quite the reverse (see “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 0: The alternative is humanity’s self-destruction.”)

No books will be written labeling the Baby Boom generation, the “Greatest Generation” or even the “Second Greatest Generation.” Right now, we’re not even in the top 10.

Selflessness? Try selfishness. We appear unwilling to shift even 1.1% of our fabulous wealth toward the clean energy investments needed to avert catastrophe (see “Must read IEA report, Part 1: Act now with clean energy or face 6°C warming. Cost is NOT high — media blows the story“). Conservative politicians rail against any price whatsoever for carbon dioxide. The supposedly climate-wise candidate of the GOP opposes any subsidies for clean energy, even existing ones, as does most of his party. Politician after politician calls for a Manhattan project or an Apollo program to develop breakthrough technologies, which is the same thing as saying, let someone else deal with the catastrophic problem we created (see “Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 3: The breakthrough technology illusion“).

In a few decades, we might see a best-selling book about the baby boomers titled, “The Greediest Generation,” though. Once it becomes clear to all that the Baby Boom is a Bust, that our self-absorbed myopia has doomed the next 50 generations to centuries of sea level rise, widespread desertification, the loss of the inland glaciers, hundreds of millions of environmental refugees, massive species loss and so on, people will wonder what exactly we are celebrating with holidays like Father’s Day.

By mid-century, I’m not sure they’ll be very many holidays at all, other than, of course, Triage Day. Enjoy the new tie while you can, Boomer Dads. The party is almost over.

Bill Nye, science guy, maybe. Math guy, not so much. Here is an excerpt from Nye’s speech to graduates of Johns Hopkins:

When my father was graduated from Hopkins in 1939 and my mother from Goucher in 1942, the world was home to 2.3 billion people. That number has gotten somewhat larger recently.

My parents took me to the Worlds’ Fair in New York City in 1965. I remember well, what to a little kid seemed like, a huge display depicting the estimated human population of the world. It was getting larger, counting up by one every seven seconds or so. I was very disappointed, because we had just missed the number changing from 2,999,999,999 to 3 billion humans on Earth. Well, you all lived through the transition from 5 to 6 billion. If you look at a similar population clock today, it says about 6.7 billion, and it skips through three or four births each second. By the time you reach your billionth second, when you’re a little over six months into your 31st year, we will probably be over 12 billion and on our way to 15 billion humans on Earth.

Say what? When recent graduates are 31 — that is, in about ten years — we will have nearly doubled our population, from 6.7 billion to 12 billion?

I don’t think so, Bill.