How should we protect our environment?

Firstly, I believe protecting our environment is a wise and moral and good-for-our-own-will thing to do. There are many activists who put all their efforts into improving the natural environment; moreover, many governments have also noticed the importance of the environment and set up  environmental targets and made policies and regulations to achieve their targets. These are all very positive and encouraging actions.  

However, the environment movement has some opposite force. It is important for the governments and the environmental activists to understand the oppositions' opinions and create something that can suit both sides' wills, as we are rational and we are not extremists.  

There are several opposite facts and opinions that obstruct the progress of our environmentally friendly movement. The first one is technological issue. Currently we encourage green energy and try to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide and the use of unsustainable energy. This should be the future of our energy use, but due to the technological issue, the green energy cannot sufficiently meet our demand for energy. It is fair to say our civilization is driven by the energy and it is not acceptable by the majority of our population to have energy shortage. We are not using green energy not because we do not like green energy, it is because green energy cannot meet our demand. Therefore, what we really want here is not simply switching to green energy, what we really need is a technology breakthrough. I think what governments should do is not awarding firms for entering the green energy field, instead they should award firms in green energy fields for having technology breakthroughs. We have already had many firms in the green energy field, now we should increase the competitions in this industry and give them more incentives to develop their technologies. 

There is another argument against environmental friendly movement that because of many environmental regulations and laws, many firms close down and the regional unemployment rate increases and the growth decreases. This is understandable and reasonable, should be considered by regulators. When an economy grows to certain stages, it requires a structural change in order to expand its productive capacity and have further growth in the future. Here is just another structural change, which may not be caused by economic reasons, but has similar consequences. In both situations, the unemployment figures in certain sectors could rise rapidly and in the worst case this could lead to a social unrest. The policy makers always try to keep the structural change progressing but limit the damage to the whole society as well as the economy. The first thing that the policy makers should be clear about is what is destination of the structural change. Here is crystally clear, it is the green energy industry and other environmentally friendly industries. The next step is to ensure the economy is ready for such change. Getting the economy ready is not simply creating regulations and telling firms in old industries to close down. Getting the economy ready is to ensure such structural change also happens in the labor market and the financial market and all other relevant markets. For example, in the labor market, the regulators should provide workers in old industry with job transforming training in order help them to help jobs in the new industries and also provide the necessary skilled workers for the new industries to develop. 

As we can see, there is nothing that is really against the idea of improving our environment and the arguments like "Environment or Growth" are nonsense. Improving environment cannot just depend on several regulations or laws and it does not occur in certain fields, it requires a structural cooperation. All parts of the society and the economy have to have structural changes, that labor skills need to be retrained, investment directions need to be changed, the use of government spending has to be changed, some scientific researches may change their focuses. Moreover, only when all parts work hard towards the target and help each other, the loss then could be mitigated to the minimum and we can achieve the goal at the fastest speed.