So, I’ve started reading environmental news again, and I just decided I feel like posting here. So guess what? Green Questions is back up and running!
It doesn’t really help get us out of the mess we’re in, merely reading about the extent of the problem we face from climate change. It’s much more useful and heartening reading about the things we can do to solve this seemingly gargantuan puzzle. So, that’s what I’m going to seek out and post for you here. Also, I feel really bad about my previous posting in that I would frequently just read the summary of an article and post the link based on that. So I’m not going to do that anymore. If I don’t have the time or patience to read the article, I won’t post the link.
Anyways, what I wanted to post about were these few posts on Gristmill.
This one is about ways to reduce the transportation part of your carbon footprint, even if your area doesn’t have good public transport and you don’t have money for a hybrid. That applies to the vast majority of rural and suburban Americans, probably, so I think it’s worth a read.
This one is from my idol, David Roberts, and is lambasting the “proto-conventional wisdom” about climate change: that there’s nothing we can do about it. Such fatalism is not helpful, just ask the coach of any less-than-stellar sports team, then watch any one of those inspirational sports movies (Little Giants? Mighty Ducks? Not a big fan of that kind of movie myself, but roll with the analogy). With such an enormous challenge facing us, if we want to even have a chance of overcoming it, we need to think about solutions, not just give up. And in that article, Roberts cites several different sources of solutions that would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 (which is what we need to do in order to not break our planet beyond repair…and we can’t really return it to the store in exchange for a new one). All of these solutions also centrally consider the global economy, and provide ways of maintaining, even strengthening it. So you see, Eeyore? There really is something to be done.
We can do this, people. If you want to know what you can do, just look around the internet via your favorite search engine for a couple minutes, there’s sure to be a nice list somewhere. Here, I did one search via Google, “personal action global warming” and came up with some good stuff in the first page: Union of Concerned Scientists, Al, a whole blog about it, and Wikipedia. And that’s just in the first page!
If we all do as much as we can, we can kick this problem without breaking a sweat. Go for it!