Major company’s such as Zara, Starbucks, Coca Cola etc. claim to be more environmentally friendly than they in fact are. In order to avoid facing repercussions for their negligence. This creates a false narrative that they are not causing as much damage to the environment as originally thought. Even in my community we see green washing within what our schools invest in for scholarship money. So a small group of students including myself have started a discussion about divestment, and making sure the company’s we invest in are environmentally friendly. In order to enact true change we need to know what we are dealing with first, and Green washing is preventing that.

Greenwashing is a huge issue, especially for big companies who want to flaunt being environmentally friendly so people will be more willing to buy from them. The Federal Trade Commision website has a great guide for criteria for consumers who are looking to buy from a genuinely green company. It also makes it easy for companies to understand what practices they need to change in order to be more friendly to the planet. If anyone is interested in this info, it can be found at: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/ … een-guides

I totally agree with this. I think its so sad how companies such as the ones you mentioned above are lying to people. It also sucks that people think they are doing good by supporting those brands that are claiming to be green but instead of helping make the CO2 levels better, its just getting worse. I am glad that there has been something created that lets people know what companies really are green. Even though websites like this exist, so many people still do not realize that they are being lied to and may go on forever buying from these brands. I hope that your websites as well as others can continue to have awareness being spread about them so that as many people as possible can help limit their CO2 levels.

Over the past semester, I have learned a lot about what contributes to global warming. I learned what greenhouse gases actually are and what the greenhouse effect is. Most importantly I learned how this all connects back to me. During this assignment, I saw how each individual decision I make even if it is only choosing between a plastic or glass bottle makes an impact on our environment.

Nuclear energy has an almost net zero impact on the environment in a way most other alternatives to natural gas and oil do not. Reactors generate power through fission, which is the name for the process of splitting uranium atoms and using the resulting heat to create steam. The steam spins a turbine that generates electricity. According to the US Nuclear Energy Institute, through nuclear power the United States avoided 471 million metric tons of harmful emissions. Nuclear energy also is a very land-efficient way of producing power; a 1,000 megawatt facility requires less than one square mile of land to operate, opposed to wind farms which reportedly require 360 times more space. This almost insignificant footprint is just another reason why more reactors are being built in higher populated areas, this is just a short list of reasons why I believe further investment in nuclear power can only lead to the benefit and meet humanity’s growing needs for further power sources.

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/fiss … difference
https://www.nei.org/resources/statistic … r-industry
https://www.nei.org/news/2015/land-need … ear-plants

Climate change disproportionately effects marginalized communities particularly within the black community  “ Black or African Americans are 40% more likely than non-Black Americans and non-African Americans to currently live in areas with the highest projected increases in mortality rates due to climate-driven changes in extreme temperatures.” -EPA When we are talking about the effects of Climate change we need to talk about who it is effecting the most, and sadly it will often not be the people that have cause the most environmental harm. In order to make real social change we need to make environmental change as well, to neglect climate change as an issue will effect minorities disproportionately so if you are about social change you must work on  environmental change as well.

Doing things as simple as composting, turning off lights when you're not home, recycling, taking quicker showers, and carpooling or riding a bike or walking can help the environment. these are all easy and not very time-consuming lifestyle choices that you can make that can help save our earth. Obviously, there are larger problems than plastic straws in the world but every little thing can help.

Dear BigCmanCrago, i agree that we must make these small changes in our own lifestyles, and even though it may not seem like it's making a big deference, if everyone does it, it will.  I know this to be true because I used to use the opposite argument, that if i buy and throw away just one or two recyclable bottles, its not that big a deal. If I take 30 minute showers just this week, it wont really matter. Yet its when everyone in the world thinks like this that we have a problem. We must shift our our mindsets together to start thinking about the little things, and thinking about our future.

I think osker makes a very good point. It can be easy to forget about the other eight billion people we share a planet with, often using the excuse “what difference can one person make?”. And sure, one person who chooses not to recycle couldn’t have less of an impact, but when hundreds, thousands, millions of people decide that its no longer their responsibility, well you can imagine the problems that would come with that. It is imperative that we do not keep a solitary mindset, as climate change is not a battle we are fighting alone.

I agree that these small actions make the environment around us a better place, but what will these actions do for our planet in the long run if not promoted? What is the point of putting ourselves through more work to act sustainably if it only benefits our egos? I understand that taking actions like carpooling and taking short showers takes away from our carbon emission, but these actions will not have a large impact on our planet if there are very few making an effort. This is why I believe that we, as students, must find ways to promote our healthy lifestyles as much as possible. Although much debated, one citizen acting sustainably and keeping it to themselves will not have an impact on climate change or global warming. If change is desired, we should be actively looking for ways to promote our healthy and sustainable ideas to many others.

There are a lot of sad things happening around the world, and unfortunately, they are usually what make the news and get lots of publicity as opposed to the good changes and actions happening. This can lead to hopeless or anxious feelings about climate change that cause some people to stop trying to fight climate change. It is important to be aware of the good and innovative things happening in the world as well as the bad.

#climatechange is gonna save the planet everyone!

Except its not. It may, on the rare occasion, educate others and encourage them to take action, but the post itself is not enough. We like and follow, but do we take the time to learn about the topic and what needs to be done in to help. Social media is helping us convince ourselves that we are “doing our part”, and I think that many of us struggle to find reassurance, scared that we too are a part of the problem. But we soon become so enveloped in this fear are that we neglect our duties of a citizen of planet earth. It is important that as we move forward with climate change that we remember that a repost is not a solution, it is simply a bandaid stuck on top of a problem that has become to real.

We don't all have the resources to do big things to save our planet, like spending money on electric cars, or buying expensive heating systems that use electricity instead of gas. And that is totally fine because there is so many more different ways we can help our planet, for example: recycling and composting, when you recycle it reduces the amount of garbage that would have been sent to the landfills. Or just putting your left over scraps in a bin thats only for compostable things, that reduces so much waste that we would mix with garbage and put and put in our landfill. Other simple things we can do are: Talking to people about this topic, turning off lights when leaving rooms, taking more transit or carpooling, bringing reusable bags to the grocery store. And all those small things can help reduce the affect us humans have on the climate.

I completely agree. Nobody's forcing you to change your home's heating or invest in new cars, but so many easy things can reduce our carbon footprints. One example is taking shorter showers. Instead of taking your time and using the water for 20 minutes, you can easily reduce down to 10 minutes by going at a normal pace and using the water for a small amount of time. Another thing is powering down your laptop. If it goes into sleep mode, it's still using battery and it's technically still on. Constantly leaving it on can also cause it to have a shorter life. These are two examples of things that don't require you to spend money or make huge changes in your daily life. I think everybody needs to consider opportunities like this to lower our carbon footprints.

Oil & fossil fuels are some of the biggest contributors to pollution and our global ecological footprint, so why don’t we stop using them? There is no true answer because there are too many unknown variables. Although I am confident in the belief that through innovation we can find an alternative what if we don’t, can we really continue to rely on oil & fossil fuels until we pollute the earth beyond repair? What would we be able to do without our main source of energy? Oil fuels every industry within our lives, transportation (which already affects every other industry), medicine, the production of electricity, etc. Without oil, we would essentially be back to the days when electricity wasn’t a thing. So my question is, what is the answer, what if we never find another way to harvest enough energy from resources besides fossil fuels?
    Personally, I think that right now we should focus on innovation so that we can solve these problems, however, if we were to assume that we can’t or we are incapable of doing so I think that we should begin to slow down oil production and begin to rely on more environmentally friendly resources until we can become stable off of just these resources.

I think that us cutting off oil wouldn't be possible, because the use of cars every day, machines in factories, heating in buildings are a few things we can't live without. People with gas cars might not be able to afford electric cars, people using machines in factories are needed for jobs, and heating in buildings / houses are needed so people don't freeze. Therefor we need oil in our every days life to life and survive.

The average human will produce less carbon during their entire lifetime than a large company produces every day. The capitalistic society we live in is the cause of our pollution, the system needs to change if we want to keep our planet.

It may not be the system to change but how we run it. Government laws can be used to force companies to abide by strict protocols for emictions, waste, and the materials that products are made up of.

ddoust25, I don't think you realize how much our society relies on the large companies of the world, the computer you used to make that statement is in your hand because of large companies. if all large companies where abolished it would send the world into a spiral, there would be no easy fashion of transferring knowledge without internet, planes, cars or motorized boats all being produced by large companies. I agree that large companies are a large part of pollution but there are other waysto reduce help their environmental footprint then what you are suggesting. if you want the world to go back to the dark ages then by all means end capitalism.

Not all of the Carbon in the atmosphere is human caused. Animals respirate and die, which is the natural cycle of life, volcanoes erupt, and carbon leaks in through cracks in the earth, however, before the industrial revolution, there was a balance of plants taking in carbon and animals respirating carbon/dying. We as humans, for the last ~150 years, have totally disrupted the carbon cycle, rendering it unbalanced and causing the temperatures to heat up. Animal agriculture is the leading cause of emissions, followed by vehicular and household emissions.

Because of the Carbon in the atmosphere, we have dodged an Ice Age which should have happened, and because of that the earth has avoided the "ice age extinction", but we have caused our own extinction for the plentitude of species of the world.

Developing countries need to build up, and thus they must find the cheapest way of generating energy and means of construction. Concrete accounts for ~8% of the global CO2 emissions, which countries use for construction.

At the end of the day, unless some big political change or a new ground-breaking discovery happens overnight, then it won't be over just yet.

It is already too late to get back what we have lost, but we can still save the future.

Please refer and watch this video by Kurzgesagt to learn more.

Thank you for taking your time to read this and feel free to criticize me in the comments.

Thank you very much for this information, I never knew that the built-up carbon prevented an Ice Age. CO2 emissions have helped us of course, but the amount that has built up means that all the radiation coming from the troposphere is causing some pretty horrible environmental changes. Global warming has gone too far, and while we do need greenhouse gasses to survive in a hospitable environment, it has just become too much.

Thank you so much for this information! I was under the impression that humans nearly 100% of the time were the leading cause for climate change, air pollution, global warming, etc., but now I see that animals and other living organisms are also fairly prominent causes to the global CO2 emissions.

I knew that humans had disrupted the cycle of climate change, but I had no idea that we had dodged an ice age because of it. Do you have the source for the information of the ice age? I would also like to thank you for your incredibly informative and well put together post if you do end up reading this comment after 2 years since your posted. I also would like to know more about how concrete contributes so much and if switching to roman concrete would make a difference, you have inspired me to search for more information. Thank you for the amazing and thought provoking post; also I am also a big fan of Kurzgesagt, so its cool to interact with someone else who knows who they are.

Nature must be protected so that we can breathe fresh air, drink and swim in clean water, enjoy the beauty of filelds, meadows and forests. We must protect it not only for ourselves, but also for future generations, foe animals, birds, and fish living on our planet. Nature must not perish.

I agree that people should protect nature so that other living creatures can survive. Moreover, I think that a lot of people don’t realize just how much nature affects us, too. Nature is the beginning of all things we need to survive. Like you said, it allows us to breathe, but it also gives us the food we eat, the water we drink, and it provides us with numerous mental health benefits.

I agree that protecting nature is important because they play a big role in supporting our ecosystem. It provides the basic things we use to survive, like the air we breath, the food we eat, and the water we drink.

this is so well said! if it weren't for nature, life here on earth wouldn't exist to begin with. all these gifts nature has provided for us make the planet worth living, and not only us humans, but almost every living organism here relies entirely on nature. .

Yes! Very well said! Nature is very important, it brings life to this planet and it helps us live and thrive. Without nature, we wouldn't be here living and breathing. There's so much to learn on this planet, we must do everything we can to preserve it for future generations.

I agree with you! More often than not people overlook the effects that their actions have on the world around them. When it comes to innovation, we instead look at the ways that things could benefit and make things easier for us as opposed to how making our lives easier can make other lives harder. I also agree with you on the fact that we also need to protect nature for ourselves, in negatively impacting nature, we can negatively affect ourselves just the same.

I agree! We must protect nature! We depend on nature. Nature provides us with food and everything needed to live healthy lives. We protect wildlife and biodiversity by protecting nature also. I believe that we must also preserve the beauty of nature.

Nature is very important because it provides us with food, water and everything else needed to live healthy lives. Even the air we breathe is part of nature. We need to protect nature in order to protect wildlife and biodiversity. We need to reduce, reuse, and recycle. We can also take action by going to volunteer in cleanups such as beach cleanups. We can also plant trees to increase biodiversity. Furthermore, I believe that we need to educate more people to take similar actions to protect nature.

I agree with you completely, nature is important and we have to protect it otherwise we will all die,

I agree, it is very important to protect nature because it is the base for all living things, and without a healthy environment, nothing can be alive.

I believe it is quite obvious that nature is important, and all of you commenting 'I agree, nature is very important', followed by the reasoning for nature being important, is quite irritating. All you're doing is saying 'I care too!'. It doesn't do a damned thing. Another thing you are doing is wasting your time writing why you care, instead of ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING TO SAVE NATURE!!!

camden so real for that one, it's a total echo chamber.  Thread should be titled "how to protect nature" so that we'd get some ideas with actual substance.  The problem is I feel like our whole system is promoting this fake treehugging culture and saying "stop climate change" because that's sexy and trendy, meanwhile people putting actual conservation efforts that deserve funding forward are getting overshadowed by bigger voices.  I also think the best way to separate those two demographics is to stop pushing and forcing people to care, like how the people from my school are being forced to type and respond in this forum.  Most, if not all of us are going to turn around tomorrow and forget about everything we said because we don't actually care about the environment, we care about following instructions.  It's admirable that these people want our generation to care about the issue because of how dire it is but at the same time if the climate change discussion gets too overcrowded it all just turns into a wall of noise and we don't accomplish anything, we waste time and resources and we all die anyway because we were too busy talking instead of taking action.  I don't know if you're aware that earth is gonna be pretty much all out of top soil in 60 years or less.  It's already the beginning of the end.

Camden2005, I think you need to calm down because if you really, genuinely think that a bunch of high schoolers are going go out and do something to save nature, when most of us don't have cars, money, or any of the other resources to do this, you have to be actually crazy. People don't have time to do anything because of homework, sports, and clubs that take up their whole days, don't get mad at them for that.

Takoyama, This activity was supposed to be about sharing your perspective to other people. Yes all of us care about our grades, but that doesn't mean at least some of us care about the environment too.