cheeky monkeys

Courtesy Radicalgraphics.org

Lots of people in the media—myself included—are getting really hyped up about global warming these days. All this talk about carbon-dioxide this and fuel-efficiency that. The level of collective anxiety is enough to make me go on a (locally grown, organic) potato-chip binge. Or something. But recently, the cheeky monkeys over at Cosmic Variance advanced a fascinating new theory: that feminism, not greenhouse gas, is destroying the planet. To support their tongue-in-cheek hypothesis, they used a cool new Google tool to build a helpful graph showing tons per capita of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere as a function of the ratio of girls-to-boys attending school in different countries. Where women are educated, they suggest, environmental destruction inevitably follows. Read it and weep. —Megan Miller

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