Recently there was a pretty huge gathering of people in New York City to march and rally together for the sake of climate change awareness. Additionally, there have been hundreds of articles popping up in the collective news about climate change and how it is real and should not be ignored. Now, as a new mind in the mix and a product of the Internet generation, I can’t help but fathom who doesn’t believe in climate change at this point?
The answer is really stupidly obvious: people who don’t want to believe it. More specifically, people who benefit from not changing to greener technologies and other, more sustainable, alternatives.
Many who read these articles will get frustrated at big businesses that apparently stymie the efforts of valiant scientists and other environmental activists. But what then? You can agree with the scientists (who are right, by the way) that climate change is happening and we have to stop it. But if all you do is nod your head and click another link, shame on you.
I shake my head. And here is why: no matter how hard I as an individual may try, my efforts will be in vain.
Allow me to elaborate. If you think big business is the primary contributor to the desecration of our biosphere, you’re wrong. They are big, yes. They pollute, yes. But there are bigger, scarier things. It isn’t just gas that makes up this pollution, as we have been lead to believe through our youth (speaking for my generation, at least). While our cars and factories produce a lot of pollution that wrecks the air, have you ever wondered just how much pollution charging your phone might cost?
With this technological boom happening, and every human using plenty of electricity every day, companies are going to have to put their generators into overdrive to power our homes, our devices, and the servers that host websites and webservices. And no, the green energy doesn’t quite cut it yet. Wind and sun just aren’t always on your side. Sometimes it is a cloudy, windless day. And there are nuclear power plants, but many people don’t trust those, and the little waste they do produce is debateably more harmful than the fumes in the air. So we need a viable replacement (that is not only reliable, but econmically feasible, and reasonably easy to maintain) before we can start making headway on this front.
However, it is not the only front. A few other huge producers of carbon dioxide are the livestock that we use for food. If you think that your beef that you get from ShopRite was from a cow on a ranch in Wisconsin, you are gravely mistaken. Odds are, the hefty chuck of beef came from a cow, standing next to a few thousand other cows, in a cramped environment, being fed routinely to get it to maturity. Across the world, thousands of these farms kill hundreds of cows, chickens, pigs, and turkeys every day to fuel these markets with food that expires quickly and is rapidly consumed. How much carbon dioxide is produced from their breathing while they’re alive? How much methane from their stool?
If you want to combat climate change, you have got to look bigger.
This is why I shake my head. People wander the Internet or watch television and form these opinions about how “if we just did this one thing, we could fix the climate,” and when they do, I get very frustrated.
If you want to help fix the world, then you better actually go out and do something. Because it isn’t just “their” fault, whomever that may refer to. It is also your fault. A massive collaboration is necessary if anything is to improve.
How, you may ask, does The Stute fit into all of this?
Baby steps. You should have noticed a trend on our papers recently that we are pushing our website more and more to one day transition to being an online only publication. It will be a sad but necessary day. Additionally, we have recently implemented policies to shutting down the computers when we leave the office. It makes for a slightly less convenient startup, but this way, we don’t blatantly waste electricity for no good reason.
But The Stute is just a little blip on the radar. One of a few billion blips. It is up to you to change youtrself and try to tackle the world’s problems.
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