Can we solve the climate crisis without confronting global inequities?
A recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA found that white residents in the USA produce more climate pollution than black or hispanic residents, but black and hispanic people are exposed to more air pollution.
And that is just the USA! Think about the global inequities in the "haves" and the "have nots".
And how are we going to lift people out of poverty without making the climate crisis even worse?
If you are a resident in a wealthy country, is it your responsibility to address both problems at once? And what would that look like in terms of national and international policy?
Environmental Justice >
Environmental Justice
It’s not new information that we harm our environment and earth with the amount of fossil fuels we produce and the lack of care for our actions. Examples of things that show either a lack of care for the environment around us or people not taking a large actions towards are: Deforestation and Recycling/ plastics. According to WWL.org around 17% of the amazon rainforest has been lost in the last 50 years. That also has more questions arise such as “Will that 17% double to become 34% in the next 50 years?” For many people recycling is a everyday thing and for others they tend to stray away from it, but the benefits of recycling things such as plastics is vital for the environments health in the future to reduce things in landfills. There’s multiple issues that the earth will face if we continue to be irresponsible with the environment around us. We can’t keep banking on our ability to reverse it some random year. It will have to be soon otherwise, the effects will only continue to worsen and become more devastating to the environment.
I totally agree! And to find the solution to the increasingly unstable environment and climate, we, as separate people, must begin to work together in solving this critical issue. If nations and people don’t begin to focus on common, major issues like this and stay selfish towards themselves, then we are basically dooming ourselves. We are already the majority cause of these global problems, so we must be the ones to fix them. We are responsible for the damage and therefore the need to save the earth.
I agree. For the climate to go back to what it is supposed to we should slow out advance in certain things. Some engineers are trying to advance technology so fast due to climate change well contributing to it. We as humans have come together before to solve issues with the ozone layer, we can do it again.