Climate change response
Climate change possesses a great threat to our planet, and will still be a big threat in the future, as stated in Bill McKibben’s story from Rolling Stone. In a century like this, it is almost certain that everyone has the knowledge of global warming to some extent, some people care, and some don’t. Governments and major companies contributing to global warming, such as the carbon industries, has held a fair amount of meetings to try and solve this problem, or so it seems.
According to the text, what the government and carbon industries did were all surface actions. BP attempted to invest in renewable energy systems, but only ended up investing very little and has finally shut the solar divison down few years after. They care because people want them to, because companies needed that eco-friendly image to continue attracting customers, but when they stopped, none of the consumers cared, and so it seems like to them that it doesn’t matter if they continue to mine for more carbons that contribute to global warming.
Companies never cared, all they care about is their customers and their supplies. People are greedy, once they start earning a lot of money it doesn’t matter what is going to happen to the world — because they can always live a comfortable life using the amount of money they earn, or so they thought. In the text, it can also be seen that a lot of people seemed to not know the seriousness of global warming. Lots of people think that a certain individual’s action would not affect the planet, which is true, but when a lot of people think that way, it becomes a mass’ action, which will affect the planet. This idea goes the same for saving the planet, if people are willing to work together and pressurise the major carbon companies, right now, then we might be able to have the chance to save our planet.
This text by McKibben is very inspirational to me, it summarises all the information we need to know about the importance of stopping global warming, and supports it with scientific evidence. It exposes the ugly side of humanity — greed, by featuring various companies and presidents’ actions, which has immense effect on the reader, as now we know that, we, are the ones who live in the planet, and we, are the ones that have to save it.
As a designer, I think that it is important to not only look at this problem just as it is. We designers are here to create a more interesting, visualised way of presenting datas to people so that it has more effects on them. We are here to emphasise and catalyse the scientific knowledge so that people understands the importance within. Many scientific data collected are horrifying, yet they have little impact because they don’t seem to be horrifying. Designers should visualise these datas by relating them to other daily life things so that it is more relatable for people.
