This class brings up many arguments about climate change. Climate change is a serious subject that is often times pushed aside as something that is not a worry at the moment and that people will worry about it when it gets worse. This however is not the case. As we saw in the global weirding project and discussed in class, even if everyone was on board and acted the best they could to prevent further pollution and greenhouse gasses going into the environment, the results of global warming are not reversible by these actions. As we discussed, the greenhouse gasses that are already in the environment will continue to warm the atmosphere, damage has already been done. There are ways though to slow the amounts of the greenhouse gasses that are going into the environment, and we as humans need to do as much as we can. Last Sunday I read an article in the newspaper about the disregard for this need written by Alan Journet titled, “Jordan Cove Analysis Ignores Climate Change”. In this article he discussed a new pipeline that a group wants to build to carry natural gas.
The author of the article is clearly one who is concerned about global warming, but he explains other reasons as to why this pipeline is a bad idea to build other than the environment, showing that it should not be built. He explains that the pipelines that exist are not being used to full capacity, and that there is no new sources of natural gas being made so there is no need for a new pipeline. As far as the environment is concerned he argues that the pipeline would endanger the environment more than do any help for humans. He explains that natural gas is methane which is a greenhouse gas, so if there is any leak then a green house has is escaping straight to than environment. He uses this to argue that natural gas pipelines are much more dangerous than coal or oil because natural gas is already in the state of a greenhouse gas where coal and oil have to go through a chemical reaction first before they are a greenhouse gas.
It amazes me that many do not think that greenhouse gasses and climate change are not that big of a problem, yet as shown the effects done already are not reversible and we are being careless and building equipment that are dangerous to the environment that are not needed. We can see in some of the short stories that we have read in this class that once the effects of greenhouse gasses are in full effect there is not much of a return. As in “The Tamarisk Hunter” and in “Diary of an Interesting Year” we see that the air and water supply will be gravely affected by global warming. Lolo hunts tamarisks so that whatever water there is left, the people who have water rights can have all the available water on earth. The irony of this is that the plants are one of the ways that carbon dioxide is taken out of the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas that is causing global warming- the reason for the water shortage. In the diary we see that the air qualities are so bad that babies do not live long, maybe a few months, which will eventually eliminate the human population if that problem is not solved. In both of these stories, the question that remains is, how are the effects reversed? We need to be concerned about climate change now! We as humans need not to wait to worry about the deadly effects of greenhouse gasses. I would argue that the research needs to focus on how to eliminate greenhouse gasses from the environment. Humans have perfected the methods in which to add them to the environment, but how we need to find a way to eliminate a portion of these gasses from the atmosphere. How? That’s a good question. One that if someone finds the answer to should definitely be the next Noble Prize winner. It may seem impossible, but we need to hope, for the future of humanity, that it is possible.
Kelsey Lindstrom
Kelsey — thank you for this insightful and impassioned post. I was intrigued by your point about the trees in the short story “The Tamarisk Hunter.” What would it mean to read the story with more empathy for the trees themselves? This might make for an interesting close reading. Something that we haven’t addressed much so far in our discussions is the role of non-human entities in stories (that is, in how stories are narrated and plotted, how characters are developed, etc). Would you consider the tamarisks as a character in the story?