Global Warming and the super charged Hurricane Katrina it spawned is our 9/11. It is the external threat, the emergency that demands radical changes from the status quo. It will unite us, it will embolden us to make the changes needed to save the planet. The world changed after Katrina hit, we all knew we could never go back to the way we were living. We simply cannot afford pre-Katrina thinking. Because there will be more hypercanes (props to Darksyde), probably hypercanes every year.
The Gulf Coast after hypercane Katrina was like a nuclear bomb, without the radiation, and thousands of American's died.
After hearing that for the second year in a row polar ice failed to reform in the winter, and that the Inuit's fishing cabins are falling into the sea and James Hansen, the head of NASA's climate change institute saying we have 10 years to drastically reduce emissions before we reach a tipping point on climate change I have decided that I will dedicate my life to the single most important crisis facing humanity.
Yeah it is fun to expose that right wing plagiarist hack from redstate.org and figure out that republican politician used a picture from Istanbul and called it Baghdad. But you know what? None of that really matters when you think about how fucked we are when you consider the nightmare scenario that's unfolding right now.
We need drastic change, drastic reductions in emmissions. We don't just need conservation, we need cessation. We need to actively seek and end activities which we just can't afford the carbon emissions for. Conservation technology is not going to save us from this problem.
Here is an example of activities we just can't afford the emmissions for:
Obsolete, wasteful Telephone billing systems.
Horrendous emmissions spew into the air to run the pointless billing systems for soon to be obsolete phone service. Voice over IP will replace the telephone system. We need to have affordable/free municipal broadband internet and telephone calls routed over the internet (Voice Over IP). Elminiate the billing departments of the major telco's and you'll save so much tonnage of carbon emmissions from all their servers, printers and mailings we might be able to keep NASCAR for the red states :)
Feel the urgency. The threat is very real.
Here are some quick ideas for saving energy:
1. Be an energy miser. Don't leave your computer/lights/TV on.
2. Don't close the shades and turn on the lights in the day time. If they do this at your school or workplace, try to introduce to them how much their grandchildren will hate them for it.
3. Live simply.
4. Forget screensavers, have your screen just shut off after 2-3 minutes of inactivity. Have your school/library/work computers do the same.