Going green? Think again
Cartoonist: Nishat Bhuiyan
Stephen Kuluris
September 9, 2009
Filed under Columns, Opinions
“Going green” has gotten a lot of hype within the past few years. People are riding bikes and recycling. These things are little steps in the right direction to fight global warming, but to actually help the environment people are going to have to make the leap and put large scale plans into effect.
Small steps like carpooling are a good start, but compared to other ideas carpooling only saves a fraction of energy. Yes, carpooling helps; it saves about 850 million gallons of gas a year. However, what if we could save 4 trillion gallons of gas?
The idea stated by the United States Secretary of Energy Steven Chu projects that we could save that much energy. This could be done by painting roofs white and lightening all roads from black to a concrete color. The energy that is saved would be the equivalent of taking every car off the road for 11 years. That would be saving a billion gallons of gas a day for more than 4,000 days. If we can save all that energy, then what is keeping us from putting these plans into effect? The answer is money.
It would take a lot of taxpayers’ money to paint all roads and roofs and people are not willing to pay for it. People are not dedicated to helping the environment and they aren’t willing to turn global warming around. They do small little things to steer away from big ideas that may cost them more than buying Clorox Greenworks.
Another example that shows people are unwilling to sacrifice their money to reduce carbon emissions is The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.
This bill addressed the Cap and Trade program. The program would require companies to have a permit for each ton of carbon waste they produce (Cap). Businesses that adjusted well and had produced less carbon emissions than they had permits for could then sell their permits (Trade).
There would only be a certain amount of permits that could be purchased and there would be fewer of them each year. The goal is to do this until companies use better technology to reduce waste and carbon emissions are drastically reduced.
A price increase for energy would likely result to offset the cost of the companies that use more efficient technology and buy more permits.
If permits were sold, families would have less expendable income and people all over would be hurting from the high energy prices. People would then be more conscious of the energy they use and would likely conserve more.
But if you had less money in your pocket because some politicians passed this bill, you can be sure that they won’t be in office for long. Why, because people like their money.
So therefore, the bill required permits to be given away in order to keep energy costs low. In turn, this means there is still the same amount of coal power plants as before and carbon emissions are not falling as much as they could.
This goes to show that there can be plenty of ideas to fight global warming, but people are going to have to put them into effect. The real problem of global warming isn’t the lack of being able to solve it but rather people’s unwillingness to solve it.
I feel that many may not even understand how little they are doing to help the environment. And they’re little acts could in fact hurt because they feel they’re already doing their part with small-scale things when more than that is needed.
People need to realize that to halt global warming, it’s going to hurt. So are we really ready to stop it? Do we truly care about the environment? Or do we like our ways and our “green” too much to go green?
