“I unplug stuff more…”

This intentionally “folksy” and grammatically awkward line is appearing all over the city on bus stops in an advertisement for Chevron. The words are supposedly coming from a nice looking youngish woman who is presumably letting us know that she is doing her part to help the environment and to get us off foreign oil. This goes to the heart of one of the debates we have been having in class, that our government and the corporations are, through advertisements such as this, trying to make the consumer feel personally responsible for the environment and dependency on foreign oil. By assuming that all it takes is a little effort by each one of us, rather than a wholesale societal change, to stop climate change and that change is well within our reach, all we have to do is “unplug stuff more.”

Okay, I got that small tangent out of the way, now on to technology and a little more positive outlook this week. I have been firmly in the camp that believes we are fooling ourselves if we think all we have to do is wait for a technological solution out of our current problems concerning the environment. However, that being said, there are interesting ideas that, if implemented, could help to solve climate change to some degree. For example, this video by Amory Lovins discusses new conservation technologies that are truly astounding:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/amory_lovins_on_winning_the_oil_endgame.html

He has bold claims that the United States can break the oil habit and revitalize the economy through using light-weight carbon composite materials to build cars.
While certainly this is not a complete solution to all the problems one can foresee, given a rather large problem of mustering the financial backing, that a combination of technologies coupled with grand societal changes on an international level could go a long way in beginning to address the issues of climate change towards a more positive future.