Commentary:Environmental activism not merely trendy
Whether you are for it or against it, there is no denying that over the last year Rice has gotten noticeably more eco-conscious. In the past year alone, the Rice Thresher has published 39 articles related to environmental issues, compared to 13 the year before. Student groups on campus have organized everything from anti-coal protests to a North vs. South College energy competition, and even Rice's administration got in on the act by requiring all entering freshmen to read the environmentally-focused text, Field Notes from a Catastrophe. Despite environmentalism's apparent popularity on campus, many students have nevertheless begun to lash out against environmental, particularly climate-change centered, activism. These students argue that global climate change has become the "cool issue" for our generation to care about and that environmental activists are more concerned with following a fad than trying to create real change.Before I address the issue of activists' sincerity, I want to begin by dispelling the conception that climate change itself is a fad. For one thing, those advocating carbon dioxide reduction policies are not doing so based on a whim or on minimal scientific evidence. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the hundreds of scientists it represents have been studying climate change since the United Nations convened the body in 1988. Furthermore, simply searching "global warming" on Google brings up 46 million responses, which makes it hard to argue that global warming is a new or understudied field.