Sustaining Life on a Tough New Planet: A response

Today, I had the opportunity to listen to a talk from Bill KcKibben, an author and Environmentalist who was very intriguing to listen to. I found the talk to be very informative, but I'm not sure that it helped others in trying to figure out what to do after addressing the problem. The main and key statistic that was addressed was that the overall heat of our planet has increased one degree, but has made major changes in everyone's lives. Our summers are brutal, and we have had 100 year rain storms twice in a summer that we shouldn't be having. These are just the short term effects that are addressed, and changes needs to happen now. How Mr. Mckibben addresses this is interesting since he mentioned no physical movements to help do something physically other than 350. 350 is used to address the ppm level of CO2 in the atmosphere, but our economy is clearly above that level (388ppm). In order to change, we have to make changes, but Mr. Mckibben doesn't exactly do a good job of explaining how to, especially for farmers, or just simple ways to help out. When he said this, it reminded me  of a quote from the movie Notorious saying that "We can't change the world unless we change ourselves", which is very true. If you want others to change, then you need to be that start of that change.

If there was one thing I learned from this, it was that we can change, but the changes are either so massive that it would nearly impossible, or we don't have an physical force to prove to the world that we need to start making changes. What I found most intrigueing was that at the end of the talk one of the questions made was were bio-fuels initially made for the solution to the corn problem and not for ethanol? At the time, people were so intrigued by it and thought that it could solve everything, but now that they are trying to make an electric car, it will be interesting to see how it compares to the bio-fuel solutions. Overall, the talk was great, but it could have been more informative on what we can do, not just the issue at hand.