Chapter Summary Essay: How Green Has Ruined Our Planet

In chapter 1 McKibben introduces the new Eaarth in contract to the old earth that we had. We ruined our planet through massive emission of greenhouse gases. And then in chapter two High Tide, he points out that we are necessary to change our habits that we had for the old one in adapt to our new plants—the Eaarth. For hundreds of years, people have grow with a concept of the more is better. The growth of nation economy makes more money and therefore a better quality of life. But now, things have changed. He descripted our new eaarth as “a played-out rock and a hot place”. We are drilling and extracting fossil fuels, burning them into CO2 that causes greenhouse effect. The problem is that even we have a sense of what we are doing, we are still unwilling to change our behavior, and according to McKibben, it’s all about the money. Some companies not willing to give up their profits on fossil fuels; in addition, the existing fossil fuel infrastructures worth at least 10 trillion, which takes 10-50 years to be paid off. And again,
Building a technological advance America; Introducing a new kind of economical growth in clean technology, using plug-in hybrid cars and using clean energy like windmill. For example, the green Manhattan Project, generating electricity using renewable power and reducing CO2 emission by 40 percent by 2020. Again, that one doesn’t work. “They understand the size of the problem, but they haven’t yet figure out the timing” (McKibben, We are running out of time. These plans make more sense if we had started twenty years ago. But now “ the waves are already breaking over the levee; the methane is already seeping out of the permafrost; the oil wells are already coming up dry” (McKibben, ). We are right in front of the line. Those solutions sound feasible, but they are not fast enough to preserve our planet from