Solyent Green is Swedes!

It’s Birkenau-equse only kinda greenie-happy style.

Is this Swedish town that's routing heat from its crematorium to local homes morbid or brilliant? Let's just call them brilliantly morbid.

The town of Halmstad came up with the idea when trying to curb the amount of smoke emitted from the crematorium.

It was when we were discussing all these environmental issues that we started thinking about the energy that is used in the cremations and realised that instead of all that heat just going up into the air, we could make use of it somehow. It was just rising into the skies for nothing," said Lennart Andersson, the director of the cemetery in the town of Halmstad.

Actually it’s jacket heat, and not smoke that they’re really capturing here, but let’s play along with the only kind of engineering that lit-majors can partially grasp...

It’s the end of the day, only symbolically more hopeless and weak, and the logical conclusion of a life of peevish lecturing about some ideological "objets trouvees". One could almost see how it could be called a moment of glory, and call to arms of the movement championed by a aging, childess, dead continent without a future hoping for one last relevant act – one that amounts to heating some stranger’s apartment for a few hours in a nation with high GDP per capita.

But there must be something deeper in it to lure the caring, committed type expressing their terminal wishes. It reminds me of Joseph Cotton's last scene in Soylent Green: he accepts his death and “reprocessing” so long as fleeting images of an idealized (and harmless) natural world is paraded before him to salve his willful suicide in his last moments on this earth. Similarly, at least the ideologues can make themselves useful, if all they think they really amount to is aspiring to becoming a sort of eco-shaheed without murdering anyone.

The world of Soylent Green is a dystopia much as the one painted for us by environmentalists of our world. It must be hard to face the notion that it really isn’t as despairingly bad as ones’ personal campaign philosophy requires a belief in, so maybe this is a way they can finally end their pain.