As every good public school student (and plenty of private school students, too) knows, our addiction to gasoline-powered engines is causing the climate to heat up at a frantic rate, such that the world as we know it will come to an end just eight years from now if we don’t abandon our automobiles and gas stoves and hand over global economic hegemony to the People’s Republic of China. All this is a lot of rancid hooey, of course, but that hasn’t stopped the climate hysterics or even slowed them down, and increasingly conformist corporations are stepping up to save the planet.
Now Unilever, the far-Left corporate giant that brings us Ben & Jerry’s Marxist ice cream and other frozen delicacies, is doing its part by making its ice cream freezers significantly warmer, so that now if global warming doesn’t melt your dessert, Unilever’s woke freezers will take care of that for you on their own.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Unilever is working on ways to “warm up its ice cream freezers in convenience stores without turning its products into puddles.” This quixotic endeavor is, we’re told, “part of a broader effort to pursue green goals and potentially boost sales in the process.” Warmer, softer ice cream that melts faster is going to boost sales? Well, maybe because after the whole thing runs down one’s hand in a gooey, sticky mess, some people will valiantly buy another ice cream and try again, but that’s not likely to be a high percentage of frozen delicacy consumers. Unilever doesn’t appear to have thought this through.
Heedless of the decline in quality that this heralds, Unilever is “testing the performance of its products in freezers that are set to temperatures of roughly 10 degrees Fahrenheit, up from the industry standard of zero.” This is going to make for kids’ broken hearts and sticky hands all over the country because Unilever “owns most of the 3 million chest-like freezers that house its ice-cream tubs and treats in bodegas and corner stores, and the energy used to power them accounts for around 10% of Unilever’s greenhouse gas footprint.”
Heating up the world’s ice cream will solve global warming and calm the apocalyptic fears of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “Keeping ice cream at 10 degrees as opposed to zero will reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 20% to 30% per freezer.” If we all just develop a taste for melted ice cream, maybe this weary world will last beyond 2031.
There is no way to tell if Unilever believes its own nonsense or is just in it for the money—and apparently, there is money these days in melted green ice cream. The WSJ notes that Unilever hopes that its new warm ice cream freezers will “help sales with sustainability-minded consumers and even keep stores’ ice-cream selling season going longer.” Outgoing Unilever honcho Alan “Nope, Not A Dope” Jope explained: “What was happening was that shopkeepers in some markets responded to fears about rising energy costs by switching off their cabinets earlier than they otherwise would have done.” The solution? Why, hot ice cream, of course. That’ll sell like… puddles of sweet goop all over the floor.
Unilever wants us to know, however, that there no use crying over melted ice cream. It turns out that Big Sundae has labored to “reformulate some of its ice creams so they can withstand higher temperatures without melting, losing structural integrity or forfeiting what the company calls their distinctive mouthfeel.”
This is because “higher temperatures can lead to softer ice creams that stick to wrappers and slide off ice cream sticks,” and “other ingredients such as wafer cones can turn soggy in warmer temperatures,” but now they’re assuring us that they’ve solved all those problems. And while reasons to doubt them leap to mind faster than you can say “New Coke,” really, we should all have more faith that the good folks who bring us Ben & Jerry’s know what’s good for us.
There’s just one catch. Unilever is running pilot tests with warmer freezers now, and if these work out to their satisfaction, Big Banana Split will “need to manually increase the temperature of its freezers in around 60 countries.” That might take a while: “The company declined to share a timeline for when the freezer warm-up might begin in earnest, but said it plans for the research program in its entirety to run up to 15 years.”
Related: Biden Grabs an Ice Cream to Distract From Inflation
Fifteen years! But we only have eight to go before global warming engulfs us all in fire! Could it be that Unilever doesn’t share AOC’s doomsday fantasies? And if it doesn’t, can it really be trusted to do what must be done to solve this fictional problem? The mind reels.
Amid all this confusion, however, we can all take comfort in the fact that Nancy Pelosi’s gourmet ice cream freezer, being privately owned, will be unaffected. The Pelosis will still be able to enjoy their tasty treats as nature intended. Only the great unwashed will be awash in melted cones and broken dreams.
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