The Ringing Ten

清旬 465

Sunny Lai's winning speech

We Expect Too Much from Our Heroes - Climb, mate! Climate!

5C Sunny Lai Ching Fung

Winner of Public Speaking Solo in 73rd Hong Kong Schools Speech Festival

Switching on the TV, and you will keep seeing news about climate change: how experts say it’s serious, how students stop going to school for protests, and how world leaders hold summit one after another discussing how the world should cooperate to reduce carbon emissions. Accompanying the phrase “climate change” is often the phrase “world leaders”: leaders of research teams reveal new discoveries and predictions. Protest leaders demand more prompt actions. Nation leaders set carbon neutrality goals. We expect leaders, the heroes of our generation, to somehow split the Red Sea and deal with the problem in time.

A quick Google search will give you a pie chart of the global greenhouse gas emissions. “Industry: 14%, transportation 14%, agriculture: 24%, electricity and heat production: 25%” it says. But don’t get carried away by these numbers and start thinking about there is nothing wrong with them. What do they actually mean? We often focus too much on the macroscopic and neglect the details, and the devil is in the details.

Picture this in your mind - whatever hamburger you bought from McDonalds. Two loaves of bread, a juicy, mouth-watering slice of ham, with a few leaves of green. Tasty, ain’t it? That’s called agriculture. Hopping on a taxi ride this morning to avoid being late? That’s called transportation. Chilling in a room that is 25 degrees any time of the year? That’s called electricity and heat production. Throwing away an Apple iPhone you bought last year for a new model? Apple, right? That’s also called agriculture, uh, no, I mean industry.

Slowly and subtly, piece by piece, we have just made up the pie chart! The excessively academic and formal words that scholars use to discuss this issue are nothing but the things we consume in our daily life. We may think some greedy mega corporations or developing African economies are responsible for the upcoming destruction of the Earth, but no. WE are the one behind it all.
Quit thinking about a magical hero that will descend from the clouds to rescue us from everything. We, our very own selves, are the ones and the only ones responsible for the status quo, which means the mess we are in. We expect too much from our heroes. We don’t need heroes. We are our own heroes.

So, climb mate! Climb out of the disastrous climate that we just caused and begin to make changes. Glaciers, icebergs and animal habitats will be lost for good, but hope and faith will never cease. The mountain we must conquer is not any lower than the global temperature charts, but just as we have been able to cause the destruction, we will be able to repair what we have destroyed. Start learning the public transport network by heart, try not to buy aerially shipped goods, use a fan instead of an air-conditioner, you know the drill. But this time, remember that a forest is nothing but a collection of individual trees, and society is nothing but a collection of individuals. One accumulates to be many, and small, even atomic changes by an individual compound to a big shift in the global trend. We are stronger than we ever imagined. We expect too much from our heroes. We don’t need heroes. We are our own heroes.