A green emergency

Last week as part of the Public Policy Seminar Series “Advice to the next President”, Seth Kaplan, Climate Change Program Director of the Conservation Law Foundation was invited to Northeastern University to speak about global warming. And even though this is not a new issue to anyone in the world, every time they talk about it there are new facts that scare me to death .It feels like I'm hearing all over again for the first time that there is something called “ Global warming” and the danger our planet is going through.

After Kaplan explained in easy terms the effects of global warming, the same thing Al Gore did in "An Inconvenient Truth”, he mentioned some other scary facts. He said it took at least 1000 years for humans to get the planet the way it is right now on the edge of catastrophe. “We have created a different planet” he said. So if we are able to actually do something about it, this is not a change our children will be able to live because it is going to take another 1000 years to reverse the damages of the modifications that had been inflected to the earth.

As we already heard there is one basic way to help stop this problem: we have to diminish the Greenhouse Gas emissions to the atmosphere. Kaplan mentioned the emissions have to be reduced to at least 80 %to 90% by 2050. That is a lot considering that this emissions come from pretty much everything we consume such as the heat of our houses and cars to agricultural and industrial activities at a bigger scale. And although it is assumed that "we" does not necessarily refers to us but to our countries governments, we have to stop telling ourselves there is not much we can do about it because that is not true.

Kaplan said that in US the biggest emissions of Greenhouse gas comes from the following:
1. Energy
2. Transportation
3. Heat and Cooling for Houses.

Considering the factors mentioned above, we as citizens can do a lot. Kaplan mentioned that moving to a place near our work will make thousands of people stop using their cars. It is not such a crazy idea, is it?

A lot of people still think this issue is not as bad as it is presented, however changes ahead of us will be very bad ones. Kaplan said the environmental modifications will not be gradual, they will appear as big bursts: big and powerful storms. As we know they have already started taking place.

Our task is not simple, time is already ahead of us. It might sound as cliché, but we have to take measures now or we’ll end up taking away the planet from the children of our grand children.
If you are interested in the subject there are blogs such as Michael Brune’s Blockading Global Warming that provides information and opinion about the problem.