One Of The Comforts Of Home

You'll have to pry this plush toilet paper from my cold, dead hands!

It is a fight over toilet paper: the kind that is blanket-fluffy and getting fluffier so fast that manufacturers are running out of synonyms for "soft" (Quilted Northern Ultra Plush is the first big brand to go three-ply and three-adjective).

It's a menace, environmental groups say -- and a dark-comedy example of American excess.

The reason, they say, is that plush U.S. toilet paper is usually made by chopping down and grinding up trees that were decades or even a century old. They want Americans, like Europeans, to wipe with tissue made from recycled paper goods.

I want to put my carbon footprint right up their environmental asses.

Leave our bums (as the Europeans would say) alone. Americans work hard... harder than most Europeans. Perhaps the reason we can sit at our desks for 60 hours per week is because we don't wipe the thing we sit on with tree bark.

Toilet paper is far from being the biggest threat to the world's forests: together with facial tissue, it accounts for 5 percent of the U.S. forest-products industry, according to industry figures. Paper and cardboard packaging makes up 26 percent of the industry, although more than half is made from recycled products. Newspapers account for 3 percent.

But environmentalists say 5 percent is still too much.

Of course, environmentalists say 5 percent is too much. Environmentalists won't be happy until we are all walking around with a biodegradable Fair Trade wiping glove made by villagers in Peru.

Environmentalists won't be happy until President Obama appoints a Toilet Paper Czar. And then they'll tell Fox News, "Please don't squeeze the Czarmin."

Environmentalists won't be happy until all humans are unhappy... and nothing will make a human unhappier than a wicked case of hemorrhoids. (Perhaps we should all buy stock in Preparation H.)

Why don't environmentalists ever talk about the paper Americans save each year now that we are all obsessed with our computers? A few years ago, I was writing out a dozen or more checks per month. After switching to online banking, I now use one. How about the environmentalists start wiping with our old checks and let us keep our 3-ply?