Informal Climate-change activism and protests

Climate change is a change in weather patterns that persist for extended periods of time (decades to millions of years). While natural change is ongoing and variable depending on location and time, anthropogenic or human-induced change is due to the influence of humans and their use of resources through the anthropocene (the time since humans have had a dominant impact on the climate and the environment). While there are the direct effects on the planet due to landscape level changes primarily through agriculture and development, the major atmospheric changes are due to our current obsession with fossil fuels as a source of energy. While Carbon Dioxide is fingered as the major greenhouse gas resulting from the burning of fossil fuels that has a warming effect on our planet, methane is considered to be up to 72x more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Major contributors of methane are due to the flooding of rice paddies, domestic animals and natural gases. While the first requires a change in rice planting techniques, the second requires genetic tinkering and reducing meat consumption (unlikely), fracking is the major cause of methane release into the atmosphere with some studies stating that fugitive gases that escape during the setup of the well account for more than 4% of the gases released. Indeed, "The United States alone could be responsible for between 30-60% of the global growth in human-caused atmospheric methane emissions since 2002 because of a 30% spike in methane emissions across the country" [due primarily to fracking] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/17/us-likely-culprit-of....