Maniates Article

Maniates definitely brings up a good, and often overlooked, point when he says that we shouldn't let easy, half-hearted solutions kill our hard-working, collective potential when it comes to solving the climate crisis. There's definitely something to be said about rising to the occasion and doing what needs to be done, and I sincerely hope that we as a nation can somehow manage to do that in a timely fashion.

However, I think the reason that so many environmental groups tout "lazier" environmental actions is because our society is, at this point, simply too consumeristic to care much about enacting anything on a larger scale. I like to think of changing light bulbs, recycling and taking shorter showers as baby steps that implant the general importance of conservation in citizens' minds. Eventually, though, I absolutely think it is necessary to collectively move to the next level, as in meaningful, sweeping policy solutions to really tackle the problem.

In the meantime, though, it's also important that at least a few key U.S. politicians shift the discourse to focus more on the severity of global warming and the need to orchestrate a calculated domestic and global approach to fend off incoming disaster. Hopefully these actions will facilitate the public's shift towards a more conscious environmental awareness and willingness to act.

I'm not that optimistic, but change needs to start somewhere. It's unfortunately never as fast as we'd like it to be.