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?@?@?@?@A Beautiful Planet
?@Close your eyes and imagine yourself at a distant beach, lying on the sand with a nice cool drink in your hand. Now, take a deep breath. Can you hear the waves roll? Can you feel the ocean breeze? Don't you feel as if you could stay there forever? But today, I must warn you that in the near future, this will become a mere dream. The beach will become a dangerous place because you could get seriously sun-burned. The once ocean breeze will turn into unbearable overwhelming heat. You wouldn't be able to lie on the sand either, because there wouldn't be any sand in the first place. Rising sea levels will eat away the shore and even flood the streets.
?@So, the question is, what do we do?
?@Global warming is an entangled awful mess of many complicated causes, and literally, it is a global problem. However, the solution is quite simple. Reducing green house gas emission will contribute greatly in slowing down global warming. To do this, we have to: 1. Find an effective way to decrease emission, and 2. this is going to sound awkward. . . Believe in ourselves.
?@Firstly, we have to find an effective way to decrease emission. Cutting down energy usage decreases green house gas emission, so saving electricity, planting trees, reducing air conditioning and so forth will all contribute. However, in reality these sources are hard to rely on because most of these depend on individual awareness.
?@So instead, I would like to offer a different solution that is sure to cut down green house gas emission without fail. This is to introduce daylight saving time. By setting the clock ahead by an hour during summer season, we would have an additional hour of daytime. This would naturally reduce lighting and by waking up earlier while it's still cool, air-conditioning demands would decrease as well. In fact, many countries like America, Australia, and New Zealand, adopt daylight saving time. High energy saving can be expected through this because simply, the more time we sleep, the less energy we consume. Since daylight saving effects everyone, we'll all be saving energy, and that's a lot of energy in total.
?@Another way to reduce green house gas is to save the electricity that vending machines consume. Presently there are over 4 million vending machines in Japan. I think most everyone here today would recognize how many vending machines this is, not only by number but also by personal experience. In Japan, no matter where you are, you can always find a vending machine within sight. 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, these machines never fail to sell drinks and cigarettes. Don't you think this is a total waste of electricity? Surely we don't need dozens of vending machines at our service at 3 in the morning. Surprisingly, just by turning off the light during the night, it's possible to reduce energy usage by over 50%. This means we can save close to 3 billion watts a year. This is close to 10% of all the energy the Tokyo Electric Power Company generates per year.
?@Secondly, this may sound odd, but we have to believe in ourselves.
?@Sadly I must admit that we will certainly be influenced by global warming more or less, no matter our defensive measures. We have taken advantage of our planet for too many years, wasting away limited natural resources. It's time we admit; we failed to notice the real dangers of global warming, and at this point, we may already be too late.
?@However, it is extremely important that we don't give up trying to reduce greenhouse gas altogether. Just because climate change can be unexpected and rapid, that doesn't mean that we should resign ourselves to suffering a catastrophic fate. Believing that we can still redirect our future can make all the difference. History proves that when people believe, they can achieve the most surprising things. All sorts of inventions, treasures, and rights have been achieved through great people believing that it could be done. Believing can extract powers we didn't even know we possessed, and it can sometimes easily turn the world around.
?@In sum, this may sound ironic after all I've said about our environment collapsing, but our planet is beautiful. The Amazon, Niagara Falls, the Great Barrier Reef, Taj Mahal, the Itsukushima Shrine, and so many more places are all breathtakingly beautiful. Some people say that the Earth is filthy. Of course, we have polluted our planet, in fact so much that we cannot fully take back what we've done, but how can we be so sure that the earth is filthy when our lives are way too short to even enjoy the least of these beautiful places? Before we mourn over what we've lost through global warming, why don't we try to save what's left? After all, we still have a lot to save.
?@I have a small dream. When I grow old, I want to live near the beach, so that I can read a book on the sand every morning while listening to the waves. How about you? Maybe a boat trip around the world? A villa in a countryside meadow? These may all be small dreams for us, but it's one big mission for mankind to enable such dreams to come true. Reducing greenhouse gas is like painting the future. We have the brush, the paint and the canvas, all we have to do is start coloring.
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