Total Word Count: 2843.

 

I think Naomi Klein's point is mostly correct. People can't completely "fix" climate change; all we can do is to do less harm.

 

The first of these reasons is that we cannot abandon fossil fuels, even though their production and use cause local pollution and lasting harm to the entire planet's climate. However, we have yet to find a good alternative to oil. As Samantha Gross, a researcher with the Energy Security and Climate Initiative, points out in her article “Why Are Fossil Fuels so Hard to Quit”, "fossil fuels are still the backbone of the electricity system, generating 64% of today's global supply" (Gross). People still rely on fossil fuels for their daily lives, and it is still an important ingredient in today's modern economy. Therefore, it is impossible to stop using it abruptly.

 

Another reason is that even if people stop emitting carbon dioxide from today, the climate will not return to its former state. This is because the released carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere and is difficult to be consumed. Richard B. Rood, a professor of climate and space science and engineering at the University of Michigan, notes in his article “If We Stopped Emitting Greenhouse Gases Right Now, Would We Stop Climate Change”, "only after many millennia will it return to rocks, for example, through the formation of calcium carbonate - limestone - as marine organisms' shells settle to the bottom of the ocean" (Rood). It will take thousands of years for human emissions of carbon dioxide to stop affecting the climate. However, for humans, this means that once carbon dioxide is released, it essentially affects the environment forever.

 

To sum up, one cannot expect climate change to be completely solved. All one can do is try to keep the climate from being harmed even more.

 

However, there are still some personal changes that people can make to protect the Earth's climate. For example, reducing the number of times one drives and flies, and instead choosing to be more "green". These small changes may seem insignificant, but if everyone is doing the same thing, the results can be huge. This is what Naomi agrees that individuals can do to reduce the damage to the climate.

 

However, Naomi still despairs about this. The reason for it is that the small contributions made by individuals do not seem to affect weather changes around the world. On this point, my view differs from hers. I believe that individuals can also have a greater impact. For example, individuals can exercise their rights as citizens and consumers to protest to the government as well as to large corporations to make them use clean energy more widely. As climate journalist Diego Arguedas Ortiz notes in his article “Ten Simple Ways to Act on Climate Change”, people can choose "to 'divest' funds out of polluting activities - such as avoiding stocks in fossil fuels, or banks that invest in high-emission industries" (Diego Arguedas Ortiz).  People can make bigger changes in this way, and that is the kind of change we need at scale.

 

More than that, people are also constantly researching green energy. When this technology is mature, low-carbon life will no longer be an imagination.

Hi Alicia,

 

I agree with you! In fact, I love it. I share your belief that individual efforts can change the outcome of climate change. And you bring up some ideas that I hadn't thought of, as you say, "Future generations will have to deal with the mess of their ancestors".

Those who are responsible for the huge carbon emissions should take their responsibility and not pass it on to "every human being", which is a seemingly noble thing to say.

 

Despite that, we can also make a personal contribution to the planet's worsening climate problems. For example, choose to walk or take the bus more often when traveling instead of driving a car. Eating less meat products and switching to a vegetarian diet. These seemingly very small things can have much bigger results with the efforts of each individual.

 

In addition, a very meaningful thing that individuals can do is to monitor the pollution of companies. People can exercise their right to report companies that are polluting badly. In this way, those who are more responsible for carbon emissions can do a better job under the supervision of the people, instead of relying on the individual contributions of those ordinary people to reduce carbon emissions.

For modern society, climate change has become a piece of common knowledge. However, even though people know that fossil fuels contribute to climate change, people continue to use them.

While fossil fuel firms have considerable political power across the world, this is not the primary cause for fossil fuels' dominance of the global energy system. It dominates the global energy system as fossil fuels make industry, agriculture and transportation extremely efficient. Sam Meredith, in his article, “‘Turn The Valve Off’: Climate Activists Push For An Abrupt End To The Fossil Fuel Era”, notes that “fossil fuels accounted for more than 80% of global energy consumption in 2019, according to data compiled by Our World in Data” (Meredith). The fossil fuel energy system is the most important component of the contemporary economy. It drove the industrial revolution, made human work more efficient, and in some ways helped define the contemporary world. For humanity, fossil fuels are vital.

Beyond that, fossil fuel has many crucial advantages. As Linden Cheek points out in “3 Reasons We Are Still Using Fossil Fuels”, “Earth’s fossil fuel reserves were formed over millions of years as the organic material of ancient plants and microorganisms (not dinosaurs) were compressed and heated into dense deposits of carbon—basically reservoirs of condensed energy” (Cheek). For example, oil, one of the fossil fuels, is energy-dense, with an average energy content of twice that of coal by weight. It is the very best fuel from the point of view of efficiency.

In order to save the planet's ecology, people need to transform their energy systems. However, this is not an easy task. To go forward in a new path, the world requires both technology and strong policy.

However, climate change is politically intractable. As Samantha Gross, a researcher with the Energy Security and Climate Initiative, points out in her article “Why Are Fossil Fuels so Hard to Quit”, "Minimizing the impact of climate change requires re-making a multi-trillion-dollar industry that lies at the center of the economy and people’s lives. Reducing humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels requires investments here and now that provide uncertain, long-term benefits" (Gross). So the decision to stop using fossil fuels is particularly difficult for politicians. They tend to be more inclined to issue policies that have direct benefits that voters can see. Policies that restrict the use of fossil fuels, on the other hand, not only don't have an obvious outcome, but they can make politicians a lot of enemies with conflicting interests.

Hello, Jacob, 

 

Thanks for your interest in new energy vehicles!

 

I really like your opinion and agree with it. Although people promote electric cars, automakers prefer to manufacture traditional cars because of the high cost. It's not that they don't know traditional car fuels contribute to climate change, nor is it because the government isn't promoting it. The key issue is the cost, and the lack of maturity of the technology. Manufacturers tend to avoid risk. They believe that developing a new technology is high-risk, so they choose to build traditional cars from the perspective of their own short-term interests.

 

Again, this reflects the reason why most of the world's manufacturers are not following the government's call to use greener energy. I believe that once the technical difficulties are overcome and the technical cost of green energy is reduced, most manufacturers will shift to go to green energy.

In my opinion, the message of The Sixth Extinction is about the extinction of creatures. And these extinctions are unusual because the cause of them is human activity.

 

Its audience is the majority of ordinary people, and those who really care about the fate of humanity. This is because, several times in the book, Kolbert depicts the extinction of various different creatures in history, and even now. This easily allows the audience to associate with the future fate of humanity. Will humans also become extinct? Is there a way to save humanity?

 

Kolbert also explores the topic of salvation. In her chapter, she shows human attempts to save some species that are going to be extinct. However, in order to keep alive, those small creatures have to give up their freedom and live in tanks being carefully taken care of. This is perhaps the price of going against nature to survive. It leads the audience to think.

 

The first half of the book consists mainly of short stories about extinction. Kolbert just talks about extinction and not much more, which left me feeling unsatisfied. At the end of each short story, I expected her to summarize some of the causes of the creatures' extinction or to make some moral appeal, but she didn't do that; she just wrote about extinction. My guess is that she is deliberately leaving the audience unsatisfied. That way, the audience would be more eager to know the cause of the creature's extinction, or even go and gather information about it themselves.

 

From what I've read so far, I've learned that in nature, humans are small. We may also become extinct in the future. Compared to previous life on Earth, it seems that humans have only existed for a small period of time, but their impact on the planet has been enormous. These impacts have even caused the extinction of other creatures. And, it could also be human suicide. We already know that the energy sources that have allowed our civilization to advance are causing climate change.If we don't moderate it, the next extinction could be human.

Kolbert makes the loss of biodiversity the central theme of the book because it serves as a more visual warning to humans about the topic of death and extinction than other evidence about climate change. Death is an event that every living thing will face, so humans will be more concerned about it. While extinction seems far away for most humans. In this book, Kolbert introduces the audience to the extinction of the small creatures around humans in daily life, or the extinction of ancient creatures, so that the audience will slowly become more familiar with extinction, and will have a sense of sadness for the "loss" of these creatures forever. Perhaps the sense of "losing" an ancient creature is not important to human beings, but if the "loss" is a common creature around us, people will really start to feel the fear. That's why Kolbert describes in her article a number of short stories about extinction, each with a different creature going extinct. It is at this point that her audience really experiences the "loss" and has a concrete fear. Kolbert wants her audience to be aware of the irreversible damage to nature caused by human activity, and hopes that it can be remedied before it is too late.

Kolbert wants us to care about the extinction of these creatures and, in turn, about the fate of humanity itself. She constantly depicts individual stories about extinct creatures and writes about human attempts to save them. However, the root cause of their extinction is human activity. Human activity cannot be stopped abruptly, so we cannot save them at the root. All we can do is to keep them in tanks and take good care of them, but these creatures lose their freedom in order to survive. Creatures that have lost their freedom will gradually lose their nature because of their comfortable lives. This results in a sense of guilt for the audience, and a sense of urgency to restore nature. Therefore, Kolbert is successful in her attempt to make the audience care.

According to the “National Geographic Society”, the Anthropocene refers to the"unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. " Some institutions have noted the significant impact humans have brought to the planet and have used the term "Anthropocene" to provide an overall overview of this period. Eugene Stormer, a biologist, and Paul Crutzen, a scientist, coined this phrase in 2000 (National Geographic Society).

 

However, the term's definition has sparked a scientific discussion between geologists and environmentalists, and the International Union of Geological Sciences has yet to officially embrace it (IUGS). According to Joseph Stromberg in his article, “What Is the Anthropocene and Are We in It”, atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen promotes the Anthropocene because of the lasting effects humans have had on the planet. For example, people's activities have caused major extinctions of organisms, polluted the oceans by dumping waste, and even changed the climate. However, many stratigraphers have criticized this idea, saying that no clear evidence for a new era exists. Whitney Autin, a stratigrapher at the State University of New York College of Brockport, points out that "when you start naming geologic-time terms, you need to define what exactly the boundary is, where it appears in the rock strata" (Stromberg).

In addition to the above, it is not certain when the Anthropocene began. According to Katie Pavid's article “What Is The Anthropocene And Why Does It Matter”, “some argue that the Anthropocene began with the 18th century Industrial Revolution in England, which resulted in the world's first fossil fuel economy. Others argue that the Anthropocene began far earlier, with the introduction of agriculture. More people believe it began in the 1950s, when nuclear bombs dispersed radioactive materials all across the world” (Pavid). As a result, despite the fact that the word Anthropocene has been around for more than two decades, scientists have yet to officially accept it.

I agree with the idea that we humans are "overkillers". This is because humans have indeed caused the extinction of many creatures in our long history. Although this was not the original intention of mankind, the truth of the cause and effect and the result cannot be refuted.

Compared to other creatures on earth, humans are constantly progressing. We are constantly exploring new things and developing many great inventions that can help humans be more efficient. However, they come at the cost of causing more pollution to the earth. Should we continue to develop, or stop for the sake of the environment? Humans have chosen to continue to develop. And the impact of this is huge. Factories emit waste and sewage, polluting the environment and killing the surrounding creatures. At the same time, the greenhouse gases emitted from factories have led to global warming and the extinction of many creatures that cannot adapt to the climate. The birth of human civilization has caused the extinction of 83% of wildlife to date. There are many evidences, one of which is the extinction of Falkland wolves. Humans considered Falkland wolves as a threat to their sheep, so they poisoned and shot them in large numbers in an organized manner, which caused their extinction.

In conclusion, human progress has indeed led to the extinction of other species. As one of the most capable creatures in nature, human beings should do their best to protect other creatures.

Hi Ryan.

I agree with your opinion! Yes, striving to survive and thrive is a natural thing for any living being, but it comes with some costs. For example, the greenhouse gases emitted by human factories in order to thrive have led to global warming. And this result poses a threat to all life on Earth. More extreme weather is happening, and many creatures are becoming extinct. As intelligent creatures, human beings have the responsibility to protect the environment and to protect the earth.

Now that I have finished reading "The Sixth Extinction", it has led me to a lot of reflections.

First, I would like to talk about my main takeaways. This is the first time that I have been able to go so deeply into the extinct creatures. I am grateful to Elizabeth Kolbert for bringing them into my world. If it wasn't for this book, I probably wouldn't have been exposed to these former creatures in my life. In addition, this book made me realize the fragility of life. Humans are endlessly ruining the environment, and if we don't put limits on it, more creatures will probably become extinct in the future because of humans.

What surprised me most in this book is that the "extinction" of living things seems to be cyclical. And human activity seems to be accelerating this cycle. I am not surprised that humans are indeed destroying the environment and thus affecting other creatures. However, what I did not expect was that human activity has had such an impact on the natural world. Even that it would lead to the mass extinction of other creatures.