Climate change. It’s not a conspiracy theory by the liberal “snowflakes.” It’s real, it’s happening, and not enough people are talking about it.
It’s a mess made by people and people should be able to clean it up.
But has the U.S population’s refusal to acknowledge and accept it made reversing climate change too late?
Neil deGrasse Tyson told CNN that the results of the hurricanes that recently occurred have indicated how severe climate change has become and that we “might not be able to recover.”
Tyson goes on and questions what it would take for people to recognize climate change despite the already dozens of research performed by a community of scientists.
The world as a whole, however, has made progress toward accepting climate change.
According to the New York Times, China is one of the leading countries to agree that climate change is largely due to human activity, followed by Argentina, Italy and Spain. The countries on the lower end of this spectrum include Russia, Australia, Great Britain and, surprise surprise, the United States.
Let’s just add that to the list of things we believe we’re number one at but really aren’t.
Of course, being behind the curve on a topic like this isn’t actually a surprise and our current president isn’t helping matters.
One of President Donald Trump’s claims during his campaign was that climate change was a hoax, and throughout his presidency he’s proven that he either really thinks that or just flat out doesn’t care.
Trump has given the OK to the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines which not only pose a threat to drinking water for nearby communities and land considered sacred by Native American tribes, but will also contribute to more greenhouse gases due to extracting oil from tar sands, according to the National Geographic.
He nominated Scott Pruitt as the EPA administrator even though he is a known climate change denier and has strong ties to fossil fuel interests, and according to The Guardian, has even challenged his own agency on pollution rules during his time as attorney general of Oklahoma.
To thank Pruitt for taking on such an important role in our government, Trump decided to cut the EPA’s budget by nearly a third in his proposed budget plan, hurtting climate and clean energy programs the most, according to The Guardian.
One of Trump’s biggest action against climate change was withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, which is a global effort to fight greenhouse gas emissions.
Withdrawing would mean joining Syria and Nicaragua as the only nations that are not a part of the agreement.
His reasoning was that he was elected to “represent the citizens of Pittsburg, not Paris,” according to The New York Times. Hinting at the more likely reason, which is that he has no idea what the Paris agreement is or does. He does, however, know it involves a lot more nations, making it not all about the U.S. and of course we can’t have that.
Instead of making rash decisions like this, we should be sending out “Our deepest apologies” cards to the rest of the world as we are ranked number two for largest carbon emission contribution at 17.62 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The rest of the world is moving forward trying to fight a common evil yet we’re still stuck in denial.
Newsflash, climate change isn’t something you can just sweep under a rug and forget it’s there.
Just like Tyson was wondering, what will it take? For there to be more hurricanes that are a lot more severe than they should be, uncontrollable wildfires in everyone’s backyard, the extinction of polar bears?
Maybe we’ll finally get the hint when we’re the stars of our own version of Waterworld.
But by then, what would be the point?
