'Basically, Moore and his colleagues have made a film attacking
renewable energy as a sham and arguing that the environmental movement
is just a tool of corporations trying to make money off green energy.
“One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that
alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different
from fossil fuels,” Ozzie Zehner, one of the film’s producers, tells the
camera. When visiting a solar facility, he insists: “You use more
fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would
have been better off just burning the fossil fuels.”
That’s not true, not in the least — the time it takes for a solar
panel to pay back the energy used to build it is well under four years.
Since it lasts three decades, it means 90 percent of the power it
produces is pollution-free, compared with zero percent of the power from
burning fossil fuels. It turns out that pretty much everything else
about the movie was wrong — there have been at least 24 debunkings, many of them painfully rigorous; as one scientist wrote in a particularly scathing takedown, “Planet of the Humans is deeply useless. Watch anything else.” Moore’s fellow filmmaker Josh Fox, in an epic unraveling
of the film’s endless lies, got in one of the best shots: “Releasing
this on the eve of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary is like Bernie Sanders
endorsing Donald Trump while chugging hydroxychloroquine.” ' Read the Rolling Stone article
This is a great question and I’m sorry I took so long to get to it.
The short answer is: Find other people working on the same problem you want to tackle and join them.
It
doesn’t matter if you aren’t sure how to start making a difference if
you can find a group/organization that has been working on it for a
while and already knows what they are doing.
Two additional pieces
of advice: 1) I recommend joining a cause that you’re passionate
about/interested in or that fits your skill set. It will be more
rewarding for you and easier to stick with it. 2) If you’re
joining/supporting/fundraising for a bigger organization it doesn’t hurt
to do a little research on them to make sure they’re reputable and
actually making a difference with the resources they are given.
If you’re interested in boots-on-the-ground political activism in particular, checking out the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion would probably be good places to start (I believe the Sunrise Movement is fairly US-centric).
However,
environmental activism can take many forms: You could volunteer with a
tree planting or habitat restoration project. You could help campaign
for environmentally friendly politicians or laws. You could volunteer at
a local nature center, zoo, or aquarium to educate people about
conservation and habitat loss. You could fundraise for or donate to an
environmental cause.
To quote environmental activist Bill McKibben:
“Part
of the problem is that climate change seems so big that it’s hard to
conceive that any individual action on our part could work. When people
ask me ‘What can I, as an individual, do to save the planet?’ I say, ‘The most important thing you can do is be less of an individual’”
" A new report makes the case that the fossil fuel industry prefers
geoengineering as an approach for addressing climate change because it
allows the industry to keep arguing for continued fossil fuel use. In Fuel to the Fire: How Geoengineering Threatens to Entrench Fossil Fuels and Accelerate the Climate Crisis, the Center for International Environmental Law (CEIL) warns that
geoengineering, which includes technologies to remove huge amounts of
carbon dioxide and to shoot particles into the atmosphere to block
sunlight, potentially offers more of a problem for the climate than
a solution.
“Our research shows that nearly all
proposed geoengineering strategies fail a fundamental test: do they
reduce emissions and help end our reliance on fossil fuels?” said CIEL President Carroll Muffett, who co-authored the report with the support of the Heinrich Boell Foundation.
If you've ever wondered about geoengineering, @ciel_tweets has a new report–you should definitely read it, and then you should get to work repowering our planet with renewable energy!https://t.co/XoRXOW73ap
