We need more than easy tips.

Personally I totally like the idea of we need something bigger to happen in terms of going green from Professor Maniates' perspective. It's difficult or even impossible for us to simply 'reuse scrap paper before recycling' or 'take showers' to be green or environmental friendly. These actions are environmental friendly ones but they will not bring out of the current situation of global climate change. Its time for something larger to happen: the ones will have fundamental effects globally. EPA as well as other organizations provided us different kinds of lists that can guide us to choose green actions. The best result that could happen is that we are "slowing the growth of environmental damage". If we want to avoid the worst outcomes of global climate change to happen, in next 30 years, 80% of carbon emission in the States needs to cut off completely. Keep recycling paper, installing energy efficient light bulbs and taking shorter shower will not help us cut 80% of the carbon emission. These individual and consumer-centered actions are the just a tag used by politicians to tell the public that 'we care about our environment so that you need to this, this and this'. But the fact is that what is going to work to help the society being green, is much more expensive but will have huge impacts. Politicians and government organizations barely talk about these because they know that they do not have that money and human resource to do that.

In order to achieve the goal of cutting carbon emission by 80%, far more difficult technologies are needed instead of tweaking on the margins of what we already have. We need fundamental changes of our energy use, the way of transportation and agriculture system we have now. All of these aspects requires tremendous amount of money. I like the idea that we are grown ups and we know the importance and necessity of making difficult choices and working hard to make changes. Taking the energy change fro example, all the infrastructures we have now have to switch for new ones. This will cost billions of money worldwide. How can politicians raise such huge amounts of money to make the society going green in each president’s term of service? Going green has become a tool for the candidates for advertising themselves for making more job opportunities. It’s a time consuming and costly thing to go green for politicians; they want things that will have immediate outcomes. The essence of going green has been narrow down to personal levels. Environmental elites and our leaders treated us like children. This article really wakes me up regarding of acting green and going green. While I was trying so hard to go for green, what our nation is doing?

Still consuming tons of energy to maintain an American lifestyle for the entire society. While the global north blaming the global south for deforestations, we are living in a luxury lifestyle that needs five or more earth to support all population if we live in American lifestyle. Personal actions can help us starts from grassroots to make changes and brainwashing more people of the idea “going green”, the individual actions will help the progress of going green but without bigger actions from the entire society. It’s impossible to make changes for achieving the goal.