Although climate change denial is alive and well, most of us are beginning to acknowledge the wisdom in Governor Schwarzenegger’s analogy:  denial of climate change is like taking your sick child to 100 doctors and siding with the two who tell you that nothing needs to be done against the 98 who say that the child must take medicine or die (Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, 138).  

Most of us are on board in recognizing the threat posed by climate change and our responsibility to do something about it, but we are uncertain about what, and how much, we need to do.  Yes, an internet search on “Tips for Reducing Your Carbon Footprint” turns up plenty of information – 325,000 links last I checked.  About 300,000 of these repeat that you should turn down your thermostat, switch out your incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescents, take public transportation, walk and ride your bike, compost, inflate your tires, insulate, and so on.  But if I follow the tips, will that save the planet?  Unfortunately, the answer is no.  Effectively curbing climate change will require massive, worldwide industrial innovation and change.  Does that mean that each of us is unable to solve the problem and, therefore, we are off the hook?  No . . . it means that an effective personal plan to confront the problem requires action on three fronts: gathering information, taking political action, and changing personal habits.   

Gathering information is necessary because without it, we are unable to connect the dots between our own consumer or political choices and their ultimate effects on the environment.  Most of us never think about the fact that because we pay our utility companies more money when they sell us more electricity, they have no incentive to promote energy saving technologies.  We don’t realize that our government subsidizes American farmers to create corn ethanol, while placing a hefty tariff on imported sugar ethanol, which is a better option from an environmental standpoint.  We don’t realize that cows are a major source of methane, a greenhouse gas that is far more potent than carbon dioxide in its capacity to trap heat within our atmosphere, so we fail to connect the dots between the beef we eat and climate change.  We hear ads by companies such as Exxon-Mobile telling us they are investing in a broad range of energy sources and technologies, but don’t realize that in a year that they earned record profits for any corporation, $40 billion, they invested less than one tenth of 1% of that in alternative energy research and development.  First and foremost, a personal plan for effectively responding to climate change requires information.

Most of us need concise, informative, reliable, journalistic sources of information that do not require specialized expertise or unlimited time.  I recommend Tom Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded.  Friedman is a master at identifying the big issues and summarizing them in a readable fashion.  Secondly, I recommend the PBS Frontline program, Heat, which is available to view online. The program examines major sources of climate change (coal-powered electricity and transportation), potential technologies for addressing them (carbon capture, electric vehicles, alternative energy sources, and nuclear energy), and challenges facing their development.  Thirdly, I recommend the Princeton Environment Institute's “Stabilization Wedges” concept.  This is one of the few resources I’ve found that provides information about how much we need to reduce our carbon emissions and what types of initiatives could enable us to achieve a target goal by 2050.  I will rely on this site in the second and third segments of this sequence, where we discuss political choices and consumer choices to consider in developing a personal plan for confronting climate change.