Via Weasel Zippers. My read on most “X causes global warming” stories is that X is an activity which the left frowns upon and which they’d like, if at all possible, to reduce through regulation.

I’m now rethinking that theory.

[British] MPs on the home affairs select committee said the drug was devastating Colombian rainforests because trees are knocked down to grow coca plants.

Group chairman Keith Vaz said: “We were horrified to learn for every few lines of cocaine snorted in a London club, four square metres of rainforest is destroyed.”

Un Office on Drugs and Crime chief Antonio Maria Costa added: “Europeans know they shouldn’t buy blood diamonds or clothes made by slaves in sweatshops.

“Yet with cocaine the opposite occurs. Worse still, models who wouldn’t dare to wear a tiger fur coat show no qualms about flaunting their cocaine use.”

Isn’t cocaine an appetite suppressant? More coke consumed means less food consumed, which means less industry needed to turn animals into food, which means … less carbon emitted. The IPCC should be able to put together some models comparing total emissions generated by a chubby, drug-free population to those generated by a lean, mean, coke-snorting public machine. Plus, don’t forget the population-control factor. Hardcore environmentalists always turn their thoughts eventually to ways to thin the damnable herd. Will cokehead overdoses produce more deaths than heart attacks caused by obesity? Will they perhaps produce earlier deaths, which will carry the added “bonus” of weeding people out before they can reproduce? We need to know these numbers, my friends. Cocaine may be the key to sustainability.