It seems to me that only people who get "funded or sponsored" by industries that contribute to the climate emergency "don't believe" that it's already happening.
In truth, even a person who lives under a rock would know about the dire state of our planet, if the person had a phone and a social media account. This is what I saw in my feed on February 7, and practically every week:
The climate emergency is expensive
Some people already deal with the climate emergency's effects on a regular basis.
The owners of this house live behind sandbags. The recurring torrential rainfalls in the region force them to live this way. Of course, their problem could be solved by installing French drains but doing that is quite expensive.
In regions along the east coast, people have seen their electricity bills skyrocket because in their environments the recurring hurricanes knocked over tens of thousands of shade trees.
Additionally, in states along the Atlantic and the Gulf, windstorm insurance policies increased steadily for an obvious reason: In the last twenty years, the United States has been hit by 13 Cat-5 hurricanes that caused damages in the hundreds of billions, which doesn't include the costs of smaller hurricanes.
At some point in the not so far future, insurance policies might get so expensive that many people can't afford them any longer (or can't afford eating out or other entertainment because they have to pay the higher premiums.)
The question is – Who is going to help us, if things get worse?
Though all of us can always take more steps to reduce our carbon footprint, in reality, our options are limited by the opportunities corporations and governments create.
While, recently, I could make the choice to buy a refurbished (instead of a new) computer from a local business, which was also not packaged for getting transported from one end of the country to the other, I have limited choices when it comes to buying groceries because they are packaged the way their manufacturers decide to package them.
Unfortunately, corporations don't always make the best choices for our planet. For example, though Environmentalists want Coca-Cola to ditch its plastic bottles, the company says people like them too much.
Or, put in a nutshell, Coca-Cola seems to "blame us," the consumers, for producing more plastic than this planet can bear when they could easily switch to "aluminum cans only." Aluminum cans are recycled at the highest recycling rate for any beverage container.
While in the world of fiction the strong protect and guide the weak, in this case, Fortune 500's company #100, who is well aware of plastic littering the world, seems to make solving the problem our, the people's, problem. And, it appears that their point of view is that if the climate emergency costs us more money, it's not their problem because "we like their plastic bottles." Meanwhile, the company netted more than 6 billion dollars in profit last year.
"We protect ourselves"
Coca-Cola's statement demonstrates that in order to protect the planet and influence the government and huge corporations to make the best choices, we have to literally "force them" to do better.
Here is Mark Ruffalo laying out the argument that only we can protect ourselves in the movie "Dark Waters" (2019).
It's about measurable actions
To protect ourselves, we have to show the government and huge corporations that we are serious about wanting our greater home, planet Earth, protected – by taking measurable actions.
If Americans (and people worldwide) would stop buying Coca-Cola's 200 products in plastic bottles and switch to drinks that are bottled in aluminum cans (and recycle them at an even higher rate), the company would probably change their opinions in a heartbeat.
If you ever sat in on a budget meeting you know what would happen at Coca-Cola. The Chief Financial Officer would say, "The unsold merchandise costs us x amount of dollars in warehousing. Additionally, we are losing x amount of dollars in sales per day..."
And, a decision to change course would be made relatively quickly.
Similarly, if Americans stopped idling their cars in drive-throughs and treated them like special parking spaces (only the elderly, the disabled, and parents with young children in the car would use them), this easy action step would save Americans a good chunk of money and at the same time cost the fossil fuel industry millions of dollars per day.
Money talks... and the loss thereof does too
"Refusing to buy" is the most obvious way to signal to the government and huge corporations that since they ignored our protests in the streets, we, "the people," are "moving on to the next step of protesting."
To change corporations' and the government's opinions, nobody has to change their way of living and bicycle to work or take the bus, or raise chicken and goats behind their house. All we need to do is "avoid buying products that harm the planet," especially from huge corporations whose misguided ways of doing business do the most harm.
At this point "protecting ourselves" (and our financial bottom line) means asking ourselves: Is it more convenient having to shell out hundreds of dollars for higher utility bills and thousands of dollars for higher insurance premiums than buying drinks in aluminum cans instead of plastic bottles or taking the few steps from parking lots to businesses' doors?
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She tweets @Naked_Determina.
Join us on Facebook and share how many plastic bottles you did not buy and how much CO2 you are keeping out of the Earth’s atmosphere (about 250 grams of CO2 per not using a drive-through).
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Gisela Hausmann is a creative provocateur, nonfiction writer, and environmentalist. Her work has been featured in regional, national, and international publications including Success magazine and Entrepreneur, and on Bloomberg's podcast "Decrypted."
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© 2020 by Gisela Hausmann
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