A warm start to the winter season has left the Great Lakes virtually ice-free and with their lowest ice cover to kick off a new year in at least 50 years.
On New Year’s Day, only 0.35% of the Great Lakes were covered in ice, the lowest on record for the date, and well below the historical average of nearly 10% for this point in winter, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL).
This year’s missing ice in the Great Lakes adds to a growing trend of winter ailments plaguing the US, from dwindling snowpacks in the West to an ongoing snow drought in the Northeast, all becoming more common due to warming temperatures from the climate crisis.
You mean like taking a bike or walking? Let’s not be silly here, I live in a small town right outside a big city. There is a train in my town that goes into the city, it’s highly walkable, there are buses that run within a block of my house into the city. . .and people still drive everywhere.
We’re all to blame for this. While I think the best way to tackle it is to put the burden on the corporations, as it’s much easier to centralize the changes, trying to pretend like the individual has no say in this is the same blame shift of corporations trying to claim it’s the individual who needs to change. Everyone wants it to be convenient and cheap and fast. We all need to shift how we think about things.
There is a train from my town to the one I work in. There is one train per day in either direction. The morning train would get me to the train station about five minutes before my shift, and it’s a 15-20 minute walk from the station to the office, so that doesn’t work. The evening train is late enough that catching it isn’t a problem, but I’d have to figure out how to kill 45 minutes every day. If I got my schedule adjusted to make the morning train workable I’d miss the evening train. If your goal was to technically offer a public transit option while making it completely impractical so no one would use it, it would look exactly like what I have.
The poster made the claim that if it were available, most people would use it. It’s not available to you. So your position is not part of what I am pointing to.
The reality is that even when it is available, most people don’t use it, because driving is very convenient, good for being lazy, comfortable, and doesn’t require much thinking.
Make no mistake about it. We just want to blame corporations, because it’s easier and more comfortable than blaming ourselves and it makes it easy to justify changing nothing in your own life. It’s an uncomfortable reality that people just don’t want to accept.