Reykjavik, Iceland – Ever since gaining independence from Denmark in 1944, Iceland has arguably grown to become one of the premier symbols of forward-thinking, progressive democracy. According to the Human Development Index, it is the most developed country in the world. In a move seeming to confirm this status, Prime Minister Gier Haarde announced today that Iceland will begin constructing a giant plastic bubble to protect the island nation when global warming plunges us all underwater.
“Basically what we are doing is saying ‘fuck you’ to the rest of the idiots on earth and protecting ourselves since everyone but us seems determined to let this planet go to hell,” said Haarde at a press conference attended by media outlets from most of the Western world. Despite the fact that Haarde speaks English, he chose to speak in Icelandic, an incredibly bizarre native language long assumed to be fake, in order to further his point that Iceland is “way better than everyone.”
While describing the plan in further detail, Haarde admitted that geographical luck will play a large part in the success of the bubble. Iceland is a volcanic island, located directly above a geological hotspot: a literal crack in the Earth’s crust that provides residents with relatively easy access to geothermal and hydroelectric power. Iceland already produces 99% of its energy from renewable sources and scientists believe that these energy sources will sustain themselves long after the rest of the planet has either been drowned or reduced to taking turns huddling on the tiny bits of mountain peaks that remain above water.
Konrad Steffen, a glacier expert who has been collecting global warming data for years at his research facility on Iceland’s Arctic neighbor, Greenland, said that the bubble plan has an almost 100% chance of working. “The resources those lucky bastards have at their disposal aren’t likely to run out for hundreds of years,” Konrad says, “which is more than long enough for them to figure out some way of adapting to life on a mostly-water Earth. Of course, they got this idea from a joke I told during an environmental conference, but is there a place for me in the bubble? Nooooo. It’s like a modern day Noah’s Ark now and what would those ‘fish-fuckers’ want with a glacier expert like me when the whole problem is that soon there’ll be no glaciers left?”
Even though the bubble is not expected to be done until 2020, the race is on to secure a spot on the only inhabitable piece of land this planet’s future seems to offer. People from all over the globe and a variety of backgrounds from astronauts to contractors to artists to janitors are flocking to the island, hoping to become part of the bubble project as a means of saving their asses from very likely doom. Many, like artist Jaan Waalbuurn, complain that decisions are based soley on nepotism and personal connections. “It’s like New York’s Chelsea galleries,” he says. “If your daddy’s on the board, you’re in. Other than that, it’s all about who you know and who you blow.”
Iceland’s government has also received heavy criticism from the press for the methods it will use to pay for what is undeniably the largest engineering endeavor in history, specifically the part of the payment plan which includes opening Iceland’s rich offshore oil deposits to drilling by foreign companies. Facing attacks of hypocrisy, Prime Minister Haarde was indignant, stating that “the only way we are going to get foreign nations to pay for us to protect ourselves during a global catastrophe while letting the rest of the world die a miserable death is to offer them the one thing they can ignore all moral consequences to buy: oil.” He says that an earlier fund-raising plan involved a world-wide benefit tour featuring such Icelandic music sensations as Bjork, Sigur Ros and Mum, but that the bands refused to play on the grounds that the bubble was just too selfish to be financed by the people it would exclude. Haarde did mention, however, that Sigur Ros has agreed to let their music play from speakers installed throughout the bubble.
“They’re just so catchy,” Haarde said. “They’re terrifically upbeat and they’ve really perfected that whole three minute pop song thing into an art form. It’ll lift people’s spirits to hear them 24/7, broadcast from the heavens.”
To close his speech, Haarde ended with a joke about Greenland, which he said was either the best or the only joke about Greenland since the Viking leader Erik the Red tricked his people into moving to the glacier-covered island by calling it the “Green Land”.
“Imagine that the people of this planet have now burned enough oil to melt Greenland,” said Haarde. “The punch line of course is that now all the oil companies can get to the oil that used to be under the glaciers, so that they can burn that too and melt more ice to get even more oil.”
“That’s the kind of joke that’s just going to get better with time,” he continued. “I’m sure we’ll all be laughing about global warming for a long time while we’re underwater in our cozy plastic bubble.”
