What’s real with Climate Change?

When it comes to the topic of climate change, the recent decade of natural disasters has made the threat and reality of it more and more concrete than ever before. Recent studies say that unless rapid change is made in the preservation of our planet and resources, we could be witnessing global catastrophes and natural disasters on a much bigger scale by the year 2040.
Numerous everyday alternatives have been put into play, including hybrid cars and solar energy, to help stop, or at least lessen the degradation of the environment. As far as practicality is concerned however, are the steps we’re taking anywhere near enough? Hybrids do provide a clean alternative to gasoline, and in a world where everyone on the planet would trade in their current vehicles for hybrids, this would greatly reduce our annual carbon emissions. In reality however, most people like practicality. When the car you have gets you to work and back, most people aren’t going to find time in their schedule to find the nearest hybrid car dealership.
The same principle applies to solar energy, and other alternatives we have to “save the environment.” All of the ideas that the great minds of our generation have rely on the people who make up the world to decide that they care about the future of it. Driving hybrids and switching to solar energy, among other things, are great steps to further this cause individually, but it will take all of us working together if we truly want change.
Around the year 2040 is the estimated time when the damage to the planet would, practicality-wise, be unrepairable. That isn’t our grandchildren’s future or our children’s future; that is the future where we will be the voices of the world in a few short decades, and at that point, there may not be a world to save.
This is not an attempt to dishearten anyone who wishes to help the fight with climate change and bettering the environment, but rather, it is a reminder of how vast the responsibilities we have been entrusted with range. We are not the generation that created the circumstance per say, but it has become more than apparent that it will be our generation’s responsibility to save it if we want to continue living here. Our environmental problems are not problems that we must combat in the future, they’re problems that we must be willing act on right now.
When it was election day in 2016, all of my friends in high school wore their ability to vote as a badge of honor (as well as a colorful sticker) that we stood against those who do not care representing our interest. In that fight, we were unsuccessful.
And while the future of our planet may not have the same social media presence of the man who now lives at the White House, it can be 100 times as deadly to our civilization if we let it. So when election day comes around again to make those choices, it’s up to us to keep that same energy.