7.9 BILLION TONS of Fossil Fuels Released in 2005

Originally posted by DYepes
What do you suggest Stellar?

I think i summed it up by suggesting that you should be a activist instead of someone who tries to save the world on his own?

I do what I can and have done what I can at my level as a private citizen.

The world is not changed by people who try do the right thing in isolation. Setting a great example is a good thing but not enough in a world where people are becoming ever more isolated from each other and their community as a whole.

I do not own a mega-corporation and am not a politician. Short of us all becoming either one of those, how do we force anything?

Well there have been mass actions to get these things into law for a long time now and all 'we the people' ( I'm not American but anyways) must do is to actually force our local representatives to bring this up and force their superiors to enforce the laws already enacted. You do not have to become a politician and there does not have to be rallies with placards and all to change what is happening in this world. Your father and his father before him already ensured that most of the tools and protections you need to change your local community is in place and besides that it only takes conviction to achieve what you want in this world.

I do what I can with the current resources available to me.

I admire that but i believe that if we can not convince others ( once we are sure that we have discovered a truth worth defending) to join in what we believe to be right we can not really bring about real large scale change in any relatively speedy way. While self interested action will in the end force people together to do the 'right thing' it is always more bloody and destructive when we simple act in the hope that our example and individual action might somehow become the norm by 'environmental' pressure. .

I cannot afford to do anything meaningful except recycle,

And i believe that you are selling yourself very short believing that you can do no more than what you are already doing; we can ALWAYS do better even if that may not be obvious at the time. Recycling is not as efficient as is often suggested and without proper oversight it may in fact be more wasteful and energy intensive than creating a new product. I agree with the concept but it's not enough to just hope that what you are doing is in fact saving energy or resources.

use less energy, and offset my contribution to air pollution with this program.

Why not rather agitate for the general reduction of energy prices? I have no problem with acting to reduce wastage in your life but is that the best we must be happy with? Are you aware of all the 'free energy' technologies out there that can after a initial cost tap energy from the active vacuum for as long as the machine is maintained and that every generator you use in your home already taps millions of times more energy than what is diverged into the circuit it powers? Why should we be forced to change our lifestyles because our governments seeks to hide the reality of nearly boundless energy supplies from us?

What are you proposeing? What kind of initiatives must we take? What is your solution?

I am proposing that individual resistance to these powerful forces are not the best way to fight back and that there is real strength in being part of a like minded movement. How we can bring about this public acceptance of the truth is the complex part but it should imo never involve asking of people to change their energy usage habits as that is undermining one of our greatest accomplishments from which so many of our basic freedoms today stems.

Stellar