Blog Post 7: Why not taking immediate action towards clean energy is going to kill our planet.

Why is it that 56% of Republicans claim that climate change is a hoax, despite the fact that 97% of scientists have agreed that global warming is real and is being affected by humans? Science has been treated as myth by frontrunners of the Republican Party for years, but our current administration is continuing us down this dangerous path of lies with horrifying haste. Our new president is dismantling all of the environmental protections put into place during Obama’s presidency with ease, due to support of the Republican Congress. Obama struggled to pass the smallest act due to gridlock in a split party government. Since Trump does not have this same problem, our country is moving away from clean energy at 4x the speed that we were moving towards it last year.

I am not going to be redundant and repeat the hundreds of articles that describe how humans are affecting climate change, because it is clear that climate change deniers have seen the facts, and chosen to ignore them. But in addition to denying that humans are causing climate change, many people also choose believe that the temperatures on earth are not changing at all, that global warming simply doesn’t exist. Often, these people are ignorantly using the results of global warming to prove that it is not real. As the greenhouse gases affect our earth, the warm currents that sweep north in the Atlantic Ocean, east of the United States, the warmth reaches the ice caps, and melts them, a fact that should be well known to everyone. However, the cold water of the melting ice caps is brought south by the continuing currents and will in fact result in colder temperatures in Europe over the next few decades. Due to this, the more appropriate term for this phenomenon will always be “climate change”, but either way, people have falsely tried to claim that because Europe is getting colder, global warming is nonexistent.

In fact, these contrasting changes in temperatures better depicts the true danger that our planet faces. In America, we continue to use polluting, non-renewable resources as our energy sources despite the fact that clean renewable energy is well within our grasp. With Trump as president, it has become even more obvious why we can’t move away from our disgusting energy choices. With all of the big money coming from the hugely successful oil companies, it only makes sense that they would use their money to keep themselves in first place as the main energy supplier. Every day that oil and coal are our main supply of energy, is another day that we are putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and increasing the rate climate change. But aside from that, there is another important reason why now is the best time for us to take action. Building wind and solar energy facilities will obviously use lots of energy itself, and will be an expensive endeavor. So for it to be financially viable, it makes sense to start the process now, when oil is only 50 dollars a barrel compared to in the future when our natural resources could cost us three times that amount.

Every day we waste is further destroying our planet, and why are we wasting time? To support the big companies that want our money. This path of action serves no one except for those already at the top, and it’s time for us to make a change for the better, for ourselves, and for our Earth.