Addicted to Veed

Waking Thoughts: 4/5/2008

Morning all. It’s the fifth of April already! Isn’t that crazy? As I’m getting older it seems that time goes by increasingly fast. Now we all know the old saying, “time flies when you’re having fun,” but that makes me wonder, am I just having more fun as I’m older? No way. I don’t want to be cynical, but being a child was awesome, not a care in the world, just having a good time. Now I’m two months away from turning eighteen. A legal adult in two months. It’s crazy. I’ve always associated Turkey with my childhood, but now here I am, an adult. Not just me either, everyone around me has grown to. All my friends from when I was a baby have become young adults, my little baby cousins have girlfriends now and one just got bar mitzvah’d. Ageing is a strange thing, sometimes time just gets ahead of you. Or maybe it just managed to get ahead of me. 

Oh well, that’s life I suppose. Time never stops, it always moves on and we just have to try and keep up. 

-Veed. 

five dolla

(inside jokes are fun)

Extended Thoughts: Global Warming, top-down, not bottom-up

Let’s begin with the fact that “global warming” is not an accurate term. Apparently “climate change” is preferred. The more you know…

Anywho, this will be a brief(er) extended thoughts session:

I’ll just put it out there that I’m not completely sold on the more melodramatic aspects of climate change. Maybe it’s because I’m not a climatologist, or maybe it’s because I’m in denial, but it’s my right to still be on the fence about the issue. Whether I’m right or wrong does not matter. Not to me, anyway. For the sake of this post though, let’s just assume everything Al Gore told us in An Inconvenient Truth is one hundred percent true.

Here’s my problem with the “end climate change” brigade: Ending climate change should not be a grassroots issue! 

I’ve always been bothered by someone telling me I should keep my lights off when I’m not in a room, or take public transportation when I can instead of a car. The reason behind this is to reduce my, personal, carbon footprint. Okay, that’s nice I suppose. I can understand that it might be satisfying for some to know that they’re not contributing to the alleged destruction of our planet. I respect someone who can do that. Someone that can sacrifice daily comforts for the sake of our amazing world. But I have to be realistic, a bottom-up approach is not going to off-set all of the negative effects of climate change. In fact, it probably wouldn’t even off-set a fraction of them. 

The true effort needs to come from the top-down. Industry needs to make significant changes to their methods, then maybe we can  off-set some of our upcoming problems. What’s the use in me turning my lights off if some factory is burning millions of times the amount of energy, and in the process putting an exponetially larger amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Let me follow that question with another question: what will force industry to actually change their ways? Becoming environmentally friendly would no doubt reduce profit, so why do it? The obvious suggestion would be having government enact legislation forcing industry to follow environmental standards. Yes, that might work, but it’s doubtful such a thing would happen. Even if it did, I doubt the EPA would be very effective in enforcing such legislation. Plus, I’m not too hot on increasing government oversight over industry in the first place. So what are the other options?

Industry wants profit. A growing number of (very smart) people want industry to become friendlier with the environment, and by extension decrease the harmful effects of climate change. Add these variables together and we have a possible solution. Environmentalists, instead of sacrificing daily comforts, fight the good fight in a different way. Find a creative solution that solves everyone’s problems. Make environmental friendliness profitable. Is that impossible? Hell no, everything is possible, especially with the immense creativity and genius of our species. This is where the bottom needs to really shine so that the top can begin mounting an (profitable) assualt on the apparently upcoming end of our world.

Struggles as polarized as the one over climate change will never have a pretty ending. One side will never be completely satisfied. But there are always compromises that can be made, and solutions that can be found. So work to find those solutions! Just please, don’t guilt-trip me because I like having lights on, or having the water running while I brush my teeth. Not at this point in the struggle, anyway, because there are some much larger changes that need to come about before my daily actions will even have the smallest significance.

-Veed.

Waking Thoughts: 4/3/2008

Good morning, or afternoon. Not much time to post any waking thoughts today, got a doggy waiting for me to take him out. So here’s a very brief thought: dogs are awesome, and everyone should have one. That’s all I got, see you later in the day.

-Veed.