Obama’s ‘Cash for Cardigans’ to Cut Carbon Emissions

Posted By Scott Ott On December 15, 2009

(2009-12-15) — President Barack Obama has acknowledged that his new $23 billion weatherization subsidy program will merely slow the leakage of heat from homes.

So today the president introduced what the White House calls “phase II” of an overall program to completely eliminate carbon emissions from residential buildings.


The $37 billion “cash for cardigans” program will help homeowners to pay for sweaters, cardigans, housecoats, even Snuggies (the blanket with sleeves, As Seen on TV), so that they can dial back the thermostat to a setting that would require combustion of fossil fuels “only during the most frigid episodes of global cooling.”

According to experts at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, widespread “bundling up” in the U.S. and U.K. will “unquestionably save island nations from seawater inundation, African nations from utter dessication and polar bears from spontaneous combustion.”

“The data, which we recently misplaced, is irrefutable,” said CRU director Phil Jones, currently on involuntary sabbatical. “By combining carbon-credit trading with weather stripping, vegetarianism, cardigan-wearing, alternate-day respiration, and other simple lifestyle changes, we can stave off the destruction of billions of acres of wildlife habitat, and perhaps save humanity as well.”

Under the Obama “cash for cardigans” program, citizens would receive a one dollar credit toward woolen wear for each degree they reduce their thermostat. The White House said this means a senior citizen, living on a fixed income, could receive a $45 cardigan at no charge, simply by turning the thermostat back to 27 degrees Fahrenheit.