Prime minister of cold, grey island unveils daring plan to dim the sun

What could possibly go wrong?

Sir Keir Starmer has decided that we should dim the sun so Jeff Bezos can keep sending his favourite pop stars into space. What do you mean, this sounds like the opening of a really bad disaster movie? Lady Gaga wants her turn on Blue Origin, and let’s be honest, it couldn’t go any worse than Joker: Folie à Deux.

Sadly, no one can think of a more environmentally-friendly approach than dimming the sun, such as not letting billionaires have space programs. Starmer’s plan to dim the sun would not only save us from extinction, it would stop us being dazzled when the sun gets in our eyes. On the downside, I won’t have an excuse to “accidentally” run over teenagers, but we all have to make compromises.

Starmer assures us that his experiments will help us figure out whether dimming the sun is dangerous. If we don’t notice harm during his experiments, this means sun dimming is just as safe as the early days of CO2 emissions. As we all know, nothing went wrong in the long term in that instance so there is no reason to think sun dimming would go wrong either. Our track record of messing with weather patterns is excellent.

You would think everybody would be thrilled at the idea of dimming the sun, but surprisingly not. Some people are expressing concern about the weather patterns.

If you’ve ever been to the barbarian stronghold known as “Scotland” (yes, it is a real place), you will know Scotland only gets four minutes of sunlight a day. There are fears that when Starmer dims the sun, Scotland will become uninhabitable to all but the hardiest creatures, which is no different from now to be honest.

Temperatures north of Hadrian’s Wall are expected to fall to absolute zero, but Geordies (close relatives of Glaswegians) say that won’t stop them walking around shirtless. Apparently, “shirts are for softies”.

Now that we’ve decided we can dim the sun, rather than reduce CO2 emissions, billionaires agree climate change is real and are offering their services. I can’t see how anything could possibly go wrong.

Elon Musk has offered to send Grimes into space to turn the sun off for 12 hours every day. He called this idea “night”, but others pointed out we have been switching the sun off for thousands of years. Apparently, “night” is not a new idea, but then again you could say this about most of Elon’s “inventions”.

With Elon’s “night” idea ruled out, Bill Gates has put forward a “hydrogen capture” plan. He wants to build a giant pipeline in space to suck all of the hydrogen out of the sun. We could use that hydrogen as an eco-friendly fuel, killing two birds with one stone. However, some have suggested this plan would kill more than two birds. It would probably kill all the birds, even ducks, and we all like ducks.

Astonishingly, Starmer doesn’t need any billionaire’s ideas because for the first time, he has come up with his own idea. I know, I can’t believe it either…

Rather than reducing the amount of chemicals we pump into the atmosphere, the prime minister is actually going to increase them. His strategy is to make the clouds brighter, which is really confusing if the aim is to make the sky dimmer. This must be one of those ideas that only the smartest people understand, like trickle-down economics.

Someone explained that clouds above shipping lanes tend to be brighter so perhaps Elon Musk could invent a new type of boat that travels over the ground. We could call this ground boat a “car”. Alternatively, we could build a roof over the planet to stop the sun getting in entirely. If all else fails, we have the nuclear option, quite literally.

The point is that other solutions to the climate crisis would cost billionaires money, but dimming the sun could make billionaires more money. Not only would they continue with their destructive behaviours, such as turning poor people into spaceship fuel, they would get government contracts to mess with nature even more.

Imagine someone trashed your house, so you paid them to clean up the mess and they spilled gallons of Domestos on your floor, declared your house “clean” and continued trashing the place. That’s basically our solution to the climate crisis. Isn’t it clever?

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