So Baton Rouge held its 20th annual Earth Day celebration – which is traditionally one of the biggest in the nation – downtown on Sunday, April 19. Then, a couple of days later, when the rest of the world was preparing to celebrate Earth Day (sans copious bands and artery-clogging foods), The Daily Reveille ran an article reporting, “The highest amount of industrial greenhouse gas emissions in the nation are coming out of Louisiana” and “the highest amount of industrial greenhouse gas emissions in Louisiana are coming out of East Baton Rouge Parish.”

Wait one Earth-saving minute! You mean to tell me that we’ve been celebrating Earth Day in the Capital City for two solid decades, and said celebration is one of the largest in the country, yet we’re responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than anyone else? What next? Baton Rouge isn’t any more appreciative of the arts despite Forum 35’s Art Melt and Of Moving Colors’ contemporary dance performances?

Really, having the largest Earth Day celebration while emitting more greenhouse gases than anyone else is like a couple in a loveless marriage celebrating their anniversary by spending a month in Paris. (Speaking of France, isn’t that where Ira Einhorn, “The Unicorn Killer”/co-founder of Earth Day, hid from justice after being convicted in absentia in 1981 for the murder of his girlfriend Holly Maddux? Just wondering.)

I’m no environmental expert, but I don’t believe having a huge one-day festival intended to save the planet balances out the other 364 days when we treat Mother Nature like she’s our bitch. I’m sure a lot of the people who attended Earth Day downtown last month believe in karma, but I don’t think karma accepts carbon credits.

Besides, I can’t help but wonder how environmentally unfriendly Baton Rouge’s Earth Day festivities are. For instance, how many people who went to Earth Day carpooled there? Anyone? Didn’t think so, but I bet there were a number of gas-guzzling SUVs parked out there, each carrying an average of 2.3 people when they can carry more than three times that number.

Then there’s all the beer and carnie food, which promotes methane emissions from the individuals that ingest it. Don’t the organizers know that methane is 20 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide? You’d think they’d at least offer complimentary Beano to mitigate fart-induced global warming.

Therein lies the problem with our fair city, though. We’ll go to an Earth Day festival to alleviate our guilt about destroying the environment, just as long as there’s plenty of booze, three stages with live music, and enough food to feed half of Somalia. While there, we’ll take a couple of pamphlets about solar panels and homemade biodiesel, let our face-painted kids play in the giant teepee, and stare at the severely distorted tats on the wrinkled, leathery, prematurely sun-aged skin of 50-something-year-old hippies. That’s our version of caring about the Earth.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to dismiss the environmental movement altogether. I have a compost pile in my backyard and I recycle. Plus, I help support the granola community by shopping regularly at Our Daily Bread.

It’s just this is Baton Rouge. We’re the capital of one of the reddest states in the union. Most guys around here think having a big carbon footprint is a great way to impress the chicks. “Hey baby, you know what they say about a man with a big carbon footprint, right? Big carbon tool.”

If you don’t believe me, just look around. Mass transit around here is a joke. Light rail is a pipe dream at best. And people even write letters to the editor proclaiming that bike paths on roadways are a waste of tax money and travel lanes for their Hummers.

This broad-based reluctance to make Red Stick greener is only exacerbated by the hyperbolic tendencies of overly zealous prophets of ecological doom and gloom. Ironically, too many of the people preaching about saving the Earth make the rest of us want to live on another planet.

To make matters worse, the environmental movement introduced us this year to Earth Hour, which I guess is like Earth Day for tree huggers with ADHD. They can’t quite focus on saving the planet for a full 24 hours, so they do it for just one.

Actually, Earth Hour was started by the WWF, which is strange because I figured Vince McMahon was too busy running his wrestling empire to worry about the environment. In any event, the aim of Earth Hour was to help reduce global warming by having a billion people around the world turn off their lights for 60 minutes.

I don’t know about you, but my lights were off for nearly nine days last year after Gustav, plus another 26 hours after it snowed a few inches three months later. The way I see it, I – along with the rest of Baton Rouge – have already done more than my fair share to save the Earth. Let those bastards who never lost power last year turn off their lights.

There is some good news for the environmental movement. Hundreds of newspapers around the country are either dead or dying, which means fewer trees are being used to make paper. Now, if only the same fate could befall the junk mail industry, the Amazon could be saved for all posterity.

Some argue the government should bail out failing newspapers, because they are an integral part of a free press and keep local political entities in check. Others claim newspapers have outlived their usefulness in this age of the internet and should be allowed to meet their demise.

With regard to the fate of the newspaper industry, I say this: Without newspapers, how else will ransom seekers prove that their captives are still alive? What would they do, take pictures of hostages holding a laptop displaying the latest blog published on HuffingtonPost.com? Of course not, for they know that no potential ransom payer would ever take that site seriously.