Post- Age of Stupid Feelings

Although I already wrote an entire post about Age of Stupid, and it is old news in ESS, I still can't take my mind off it. Well, technically, I'm not really thinking about the movie, I'm thinking about my actions as a human being contributing to global warming. I know many people around the world have seen Age of Stupid, and/or many other movies just like it (Inconvenient Truth, 6 Degrees, etc.) and are completely unaffected by it. I even admit when I saw Inconvenient Truth and a few months later Six Degrees, the feelings I had about taking action wore off after about a week. But I guess third time is the charm, and I can't get the problem of global warming out of my head; I think I know why this is.

In the movie, when a family stated that they were invited to go skiing in the Alps, but they denied it because they knew airplanes were one the highest contributors to the problem, I was hit, and hit hard.

I can't believe I've flown so many times in my life. I was planning on flying to California this summer to visit my friend who goes to Santa Clara- that probably won't happen. I'd be too guilty. After the movie, I thought and thought and kept thinking about this, and about how my friend from the western suburbs flies from her home to Champaign and vice versa for the weekend because it's cheaper than driving.

And after those thoughts, more and more kept coming. Like, how much energy are my roommates and I wasting by having 3 sets of Christmas lights in our living room to brighten our living space? And how much am I really saving by taking my phone charger out of the wall after my phone finishes charging? And the bus I just took home for the weekend.. I'm glad I took it because it's like a car pool, and more gas would be wasted if my parents came to pick me up. But is it saving more? Does the bus I took have a completely terrible gas mileage? Is the bus driver going over 75 mph for the 2 and a half hours we're on the highway? Because if he is.. well at 75 the gas mileage is a heck of a lot worse than at 55 ... And are all these little things I'm doing actually adding up and making a difference? Or am I doing all this for nothing?

The only thing to do, I guess, is spread awareness. One person doing all the work won't make a dent. But, spreading awareness doesn't seem to be working. Inconvenient Truth grossed $24 million in the box office in the U.S. and over $49 million world wide as of June 2007. Millions more have seen it since then, not to mention every other global warming documentary or movie. No one seems to care enough to change their life styles. It makes sense in our economic recession that people aren't spending cash willynilly on energy saving appliances because they can't afford it. 

But then what do we do?