The Millenium Development Goals, agreed to by every member country of the United Nations in 2000, call for the worldwide eradication of poverty and hunger, universal education, gender equality and huge improvements in health by 2015: two years ago!!
Can we do this without making the planet warmer?
Let's think big and imagine how we can confront the climate crisis in a way that is realistic about the other major problems that we face as a planet and as a species on it.
Clean Development >
Clean Energy must be slowly phased into our World
After reading various articles and after using the carbon footprint calculator, it is clear to me that it is imperative for our world to rely on cleaner energy sources. However, due to lack of sufficient scientific development and to public opinion, often times the clean energy we need can not be used in the quantity the world needs. As such, the smartest way to make our world run on Clean Energy is to slowly phase clean energy into our society. As an example, examine the rise of hybrid and electric cars. Electric cars have actually exists since the 19th century, but were not the car of choice because gas vehicles were more cost efficient and drove longer. This remained the case until Toyota unveiled their Toyota Prius, which uses fossil fuels and electricity. This was a much cleaner vehicle than sole fossil fuel cars, and was practical. The Prius, along with many other hybrid cars are exceedingly common on the road these days. Even fully electric cars are quit e common nowadays. I believe that this slow development will be beneficial to other areas of clean energy developments.
I agree that gradual change is important. If we attempt to make changes too fast without proper support structures in place, policies can have harmful consequences. In China, to combat extreme pollution, the Chinese government decided to ban the burning of coal for heating. However, because this was so sudden and many poor households had no other way of keeping warm, people almost froze to death through subzero temperatures. Change must be gradually implanted through education, technological research, and incentive subsidies. Also, I think incentives like carpool access for clean air vehicles are a great idea because they cost the city nothing yet help support clean vehicles.
I definitely agree. I feel like several people are aware of the fact that climate change is real and happening right now and they keep saying do something; this and this and this have to be done right now or in the next couple years... and so on. But things have to change slowly. Climate change is not going to disappear in just one day, week, month are even a year- even if everyone really tries. If everyone did try to reduce the amount of CO2 that is released into the atmosphere, by the end of the year our carbon footprints would have gone way down but climate change would still happen and would still be a problem.