How bad is it? Well, a report found that Xbox Ones and PS4s would combine forces in supervillainous harmony to dump 3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thanks to energy usage that's two to three times that of previous-gen consoles. Oh, and that's only considering the units sold within the first two months of their release -- 8 million total -- not the over 55 million that have been sold to date. Go ahead and extrapolate those numbers if you feel like making Al Gore shit himself inside-out.

Paramount Classics
"Honestly, my lift doesn't go any higher."

To put this all in even more perspective, it takes the average American around two months' worth of driving to produce just one metric ton of carbon dioxide. So, basically, doing actual donuts in a mall parking lot is only marginally worse for the environment than doing the same in Grand Theft Auto, assuming you don't take out any strollers in the process. You could just unplug your system every time you finish using it, but then you wouldn't get the aforementioned automatic updates required to play every modern video game until the next time you turned it back on, and most of us would rather slowly poison the Earth than have to wait for a download.

Probably never, because there's no such thing as gum recycling. All that gum goes straight into the trash, then into a landfill, or spat onto the sidewalk where it costs cities more than $2 per wad to clean up.

The free elves option was struck down by unions.

For those wondering why we used tires to put this issue in perspective: It's because Goodyear, the famous tire/blimp conglomerate, also manufactures the base ingredient of most chewing gum. See, at some point humanity decided that natural tree resins weren't nearly as fun to chew as a crude oil byproduct that will never, ever go away (unless you're referring specifically to its flavor, which vanishes almost instantly). So while gum doesn't really stay in your stomach for seven years if you swallow it, if you spit it out it absolutely will remain undecayed in a landfill until the heat death of the universe.

Another difference between commercial facilities and your driveway is that the commercial facilities recycle their water for multiple washes before sending it off to a waste treatment plant, while the water you spray at home ends up in a storm drain that empties directly into nearby rivers and lakes. Even if you dump your dirty wash bucket into the toilet (which no one does), you're still rinsing all those harsh cleaning chemicals, in addition to the oil, gasoline, and rust residues from your car, straight into some fish's goddamn living room. You may as well drive out to the nearest watershed and beat an otter to death with your spotless rims.

... yogurt companies had absolutely no idea what the hell they were going to do with the leftover toxic whey.

Now, when we say "toxic," we don't mean that falling into a vat of it at the Dannon plant is going to turn you into a mutant. The main problems are that A) it's acidic, and B) it's being pumped out at an unmanageable rate. The Northeast U.S. alone produces more than 150 million gallons of the stuff a year. You can't simply dump all that in a river and hope for the best, because "the best" in this case would be an oxygen-deprived dead zone for marine life.

Thus far, the yogurt producers' best plan to deal with the ocean-sized whey problem has been to sell it to farmers. It makes decent fertilizer when mixed with good old-fashioned poop (remember, this is the same product you're willingly trading money to eat). But you can only feed a cow so much of its own dregs before it starts wishing it had bigger horns to gore you with, which is why others are looking to solve the dilemma by bottling all that whey up and selling it back to you as health drinks, because the human race is doomed to extinction by pretentiousness.

The White Mustache
Pictured: bottled acidic fertilizer waste with a trendy label.

You probably think of junk mail as an everyday, mostly harmless annoyance of the modern world -- the tottering granddaddy of email spam -- but in actuality it's more like a parasite hell-bent on devouring the Earth by slowly burying it in colorful, obnoxious advertisements.

Every year the process of producing junk mail pumps over 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That's the same amount produced by heating 13 million homes in the winter. And things only go downhill after all that crap gets delivered -- over three-quarters of all junk mail ends up in landfills, with nearly half of it never having even been opened (who out there is opening half of their junk mail?!?).

John Howard/DigitalVision/Getty
"Five percent off yogurt whey drinks? Ka-ching!"

You know what they say, though, about there being two sides to every coin. Anyone who's watched the financial perplexities of the United States Postal Service over the past several years knows that it's facing obsolescence thanks to newer, more instant nudity-friendly forms of communication. And considering the fact that junk accounts for more than half of our mail, you might say that junk mail is the reason we even still have a postal service at all. Of course, the third side to that severely warped coin is that the USPS pumps out its own 10-plus metric tons of greenhouse gases each year.

USPS

Add that to the aforementioned 50 million, and the result is an ocean of polar bear tears.

So what can we do about it? Well, for starters we can toss the junk in the recycling bin rather than the garbage. It won't stop the bulk mailers from producing it, but at least if it gets recycled you can eventually get it back as toilet paper and wipe your ass with it. Next, with a few phone calls and emails, you can remove yourself from the vast majority of junk mailings. It takes a bit more effort than tossing it straight into the garbage, but that's kind of the point: Saving something generally takes more work than destroying it.

AndreAnita/iStock/Getty Images
"Thanks everybody!"

If you're upset about the fact that everything you do kills the planet, Nathan can try to cheer you up on Twitter.

Which Sci-Fi Trope Would You Bring To The Real World, And Why? Every summer, we're treated to the same buffet of three or four science fiction movies with the same basic conceits. There's man vs. aliens, man vs. robots, man vs. army of clones, and man vs. complicated time travel rules. With virtual reality and self-driving cars fast approaching, it's time to consider what type of sci-fi movie we want to be living in for the rest of our lives. Co-hosts Jack O'Brien and Adam Tod Brown are joined by Cracked's Tom Reimann and Josh Sargent and comedians David Huntsberger, Adam Newman, and Caitlin Gill to figure out which sci-fi trope would be the best to make a reality. Get your tickets to this live podcast here!

For more ways we're killing ourselves, check out The 6 Most Insane Ways Going Green Can Backfire and 6 Awesome-Looking Things That Are Destroying The World.

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