The government has much power over the media and websites. I wanted to see if citizens thought the government was doing a good job about alerting people on climate issues. I also wanted to see what actions people would take in sustaining a healthy climate and stop global warming. So, on Saturday, July 14th, I went to the Revolutionary War festival with two of my colleagues and surveyed people. Many didn’t care, while others had lots to say.
My group had already composed two questions we had ask each interviewee: “Do you think the government does their job of alerting citizens about the climate change issues through media and other sources, such as educational websites?” and, “How do you think citizens could take actions to help in sustaining a healthy climate and stop global warming?”
We received much feedback, some detailed and some short, yet powerful, answers. Talking to new people was definitely a challenge we had to overcome. We had to make sure the people we talked to seemed nice and were not busy (some were still setting up their stall). When we came up to someone we told them who we were, where we came from, and what we wanted to do. It typically sounded like this, “Hi, I’m Jai and this is Nikolai and Marvin. We are summer students at Phillips Exeter Academy. We were wondering if we could ask you some questions on the government, media, and climate change.” We then proceeded to ask our two questions and wrote their responses down with our notes. After we finished with our survey, we politely thanked them and began to look for more people to survey. We repeated this process until we surveyed about 30 people.
Now to the responses. The majority had said that the government needed to do a better job informing citizens about climate issues, while the minority said the government was doing a great job with the media. On the topic on what we can do to help with sustaining a healthy climate, about 90% of the people said things like, recycling, using reusable materials, start community organizations, and use the car less and instead walk. The last 10% responded with answers such as, “not our problem”, “just the way the earth was”, and other comments that gave the message, that they didn’t care. Overall our results showed a great varied of views.
However my opinion is that the government’s involvement in the media needs to be improved. The government is not admitting that the climate issue is, well, an issue. It recently censored language that pertains to climate change on the EPA’s (Environmental Protection Agency) website. As Time Magazine accurately puts it, “In my experience, new administrations might come in and change the appearance of an agency website or the way they present information, but this is an unprecedented attempt to delete or bury credible scientific information they find politically inconvenient,” This goes to show that the government doesn’t really care about the citizen’s knowledge on climate issues. It only cares if that information is politically inconvenient for them. One of the most credible sources for citizens to get information on climate issues was censored and info was removed for the government’s selfish reasons.
I believe that the government’s voice in the media needs to be improved because from looking at the data our group collected, many citizens are not aware of the up and coming dangers of climate change. The government needs to get involved to make sure that citizens know so they can help with the process of climate change. Hopefully our government can start to realize what a problem climate issues really are and starts to take an initiative to help the world.