Welcome to Eco Freakos!

Okay, so you may be wondering; what the heck is an Eco Freako?

Being an Eco Freako is the sanest response to an insane crisis. “Insane crisis” because most of us know about our global environmental crisis but we still go about our everyday lives as if everything is normal. It’s a little like finding out your house is on fire but continuing to put your clothes on to get ready for work. But it’s actually worse than that. It’s more like seeing hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people get ready for work while all their houses are on fire and no one does anything because everyone thinks someone will eventually deal with the everyone’s house-is-on-fire problem, so why not go about our day?

Hey, people! Our houses are on fire! It’s time to freak out a little!

We’ve known about manmade climate change for a very long time now – over 60 years. It’s become mainstream in the last 25 years or so. During that time, we have all watched the predictions of climate scientists come true, and yet, not a whole lot has changed in terms of stopping it. Sure, there is activism. Countries are adopting resolutions to deal with the problem. There’s the Paris Climate Agreement. There’s even a green industry that has begun to flourish, mostly in Europe. It’ not like nobody is doing anything, but still, whatever progress we can point to, it hasn’t been enough. We need grand-scale action and we needed it decades ago because it isn’t just that the worst climate predictions are coming true; they are coming true much sooner than estimated. And updated estimates get worse every year. We need to adjust our course radically, but how?

Denial is still part of the problem but it’s not the biggest problem. Many if not most of us believe what the climate scientists are telling us because we see record high temperatures, 500-year storms that are now popping up every few years, record drought, and record flooding. Most of us know this isn’t the same weather we were experiencing just a few decades ago. And we see the culprit, greenhouse gases, being pumped into the atmosphere on a grand scale. Factories, power plants, and cars are just a few of the sources. There are many more. And with over 7.5+ billion people on the planet and that number increasing at an alarming rate, anyone with eyes can see the obvious:

We sure are putting a lot of gases into our atmosphere and there’s no way they don’t have an impact on our planet.

You’d have to be a human ostrich to ignore the obvious. Yet, that’s where we are.

Now, don’t get us wrong. We, the editors at EcoFreakos.com, get it. We hear you. Many of you reading this are saying, “I’m not ignoring climate change!” You aren’t just sitting on your butts. Obviously, you went out of your way to look for eco-related content on the internet and here you are reading this article. You don’t have your head in the sand. You are likely on board with addressing climate change and probably have been for a very long time. Maybe you’ve been on mountain tops shouting, “Hey, world! We need to do something to stop global warming now!” That’s great, but we need a lot more people on those mountain tops because real change needs to happen very soon and on a very large scale. That means our government needs to change. For government to change the people voting for elected officials need to change.  We still have too many ostriches voting every election cycle.

But where do all the climate-ignoring ostriches come from in the first place? The fact is many people in this country are still painfully ill-informed about our global environmental crisis and the urgency of that crisis. A national information gap doesn’t just happen. When the public is grossly ill-informed there is only one conclusion we can draw…

Our national media has failed us.

Let’s be clear. It’s true that a lot of people are currently fighting the good fight, but it’s not enough for a lot of people to talk about climate change and everything associated with protecting our environment. It’s not enough for a lot of people to actually do something about the problem like recycling, reusing, and conserving. That’s all great, but a lot of people doing these things hasn’t been enough to force the change necessary to thwart the oncoming climate disaster. We need everyone on board. We need everyone talking about it. We need this issue to be everyone’s highest priority, but we still have too many people and politicians either denying or understating the problem because we still have too many media outlets who are presenting “both sides” of an issue that doesn’t have two sides.

The reality is you can be a climate denier in this country and still be considered mainstream. That’s nuts. The science is in and it’s very clear. Manmade climate change is real. The scientific community is no longer debating this conclusion because it represents reality. At this point, climate deniers deserve the same mock-worthy fringe status as flat-earthers but that’s not happening. We need to start holding the media accountable for continuing to promote climate change misinformation as a legitimate rebuttal to real climate science.

So that’s the crux of this website. We the people need to change, politicians need to change and the national media needs to change. On the whole, we have to change our national discourse regarding climate change in order to get our government to start acting like all of our houses are on fire. In short…

We have to start freaking out. But in a productive way, of course. We’ll talk about how in part 2.