During a Sunday night appearance with John Oliver this week, Bill Nye the “Science” Guy went off on a tirade about climate change, frantically waxing on about how the “planet’s on f***ing fire” while managing to insult just about every viewer who ever watched his youth science show as a child.
Nye, who sports a degree in mechanical engineering and knows just enough about science to entertain eight-year-olds with some potatoes and a light bulb, went off in a profanity-laden diatribe about how we’re all…well, slowly killing the planet by driving cars.
"By the end of this century, if emissions keep rising, the average temperature on Earth could go up another four to eight degrees," Nye told Oliver. "What I'm saying is, the planet's on f***ing fire. There are a lot of things we could do to put it out -- are any of them free? No, of course not. Nothing's free, you idiots. Grow the f**k up. You're not children anymore. I didn't mind explaining photosynthesis to you when you were 12. But you're adults now, and this is an actually crisis, got it? Safety glasses off, motherf***ers."
Nye then explained how taxing carbon (a plan that will in no way disproportionately affect low-income communities, wink-wink) would help save us all from our fiery doom.
"When we release carbon, say, by burning coal or driving an SUV, all of us pay for that in the form of things like fires, floods and crop failures," Nye explained. "Putting a fee on carbon creates incentives to emit less carbon, and, more importantly, it also incentivizes the development of low-carbon technology, which is huge, because that's vital to reducing emissions globally.
“And because for some reason, John, you're a 42-year-old man who needs his attention sustained by tricks, here's some f***ing Mentos and a bottle of Diet Coke. Happy now?" he added for good measure.
Of course, back in the 1970s, scientists (even ones with actual science degrees) were predicting we’d all be dead within the decade. But hey, Bill, maybe insulting everyone who made you famous as the world’s least-qualified "scientist" will be the best way to get things done this time.
Let’s experiment and see what happens.