Climate change 

Everyone is talking about it. Every day our climate worsens and heats up more and more. The worst part? Most of this warming is man-made! Simply put we are killing our home.

Do you know what that means for us? If the earth keeps warming at its current rate we won’t be able to live here either! We talk about solutions and brainstorm ways to stop climate change but unfortunately, that is not enough. It is time for us to stand up, put down our devices, and DO something about it. We may be the younger generation and I know we may not feel powerful enough but that does not mean we cannot try!

We as humans tend to think about the dark side of things. We have been told that we have reached a critical point of heating for our planet and that we launch more greenhouse gases every day into the atmosphere. I understand that this is scary. It feels like we are helpless so why even try, right? Wrong! Just because it may seem impossible does not mean we should not try. 

A quote from my favorite book The Phantom Tollbooth explains this perfectly “ ‘Yes indeed’ they repeated together; ‘but if we’d told you then, you might not have gone and, as you’ve discovered, so many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.’ ” 

So many things are possible that only exist in our imaginations for now, the future is not set in stone and we can change it starting now. We have the ideas and tech to make things happen; if we don’t have the tech yet, we can invent it. We just need to take some of the ideas we already have for global warming and start using them. 

Some ideas will be very expensive, but which would you choose to spend a couple of million dollars or melt the icecaps, flood cities, endure heat waves that kill millions of people, and be forced to migrate to the north or south poles, if you even survive the natural disasters and storms? Yeah. My thoughts exactly. 

By now you are probably wondering, what on Earth can we do about any of this? Well here are some solutions that I have thought about. If we can make snow for skiers, why can’t we use snow-making machines on the poles to help cool them? If replanting trees in the Amazon helps, why wouldn’t replanting trees in our burnt-down forests help? It isn’t that difficult. The hardest part is finding a place to plant them and earning the money to buy trees. We can also grow them from seeds, many of us live in neighborhoods that have trees that give off seeds. Plant them! Another thing is staying home as much as possible and driving less often. I get that people need to drive a lot of the time for work and school. However, during the summer why not try staying home to have fun? During the mandatory lockdown, there were reports of the planet starting to heal and global warming ebbing away just a little. This is because there were fewer cars on the road so less carbon dioxide was entering the atmosphere helping to cool the planet. 

Another way we can fight climate change is by shopping second-hand instead of buying things brand new. Clothing, electronics,  and plastics are all things that produce carbon during production so by buying less of them or buying them already used we can reduce the amount of carbon produced. 

So are we just going to sit around and hope for a prince charming to save us or for some magical solution to just pop out of the air and fix everything? Or are we going to be our prince in shining armor and save our home? 

The choice is ours.