Have you ever noticed how much professional athletes get paid compared to the average American doing manual labor? The highest paid American athlete in 2015 earned around $300 million dollars in 2015, meanwhile the minimum wage is $7.25. Minimum wage jobs like fast food cooks, cashiers and dishwashers are daily, hard working, manual labor jobs and the benefits usually aren’t great. Professional athletes like boxers, basketball players and football players do their job occasionally and get paid millions of dollars and the benefits are endless. 

I believe that this is quite a big problem. Workers who do hours of labor get paid very little and have to support themselves, and maybe even a family while earning just over $15,000 dollars annually. This seems quite unfair compared to athletes who have weekly games where they do their job and get paid millions for very little labor.

Now, I do understand that you have to be in excellent shape to be a professional athlete, and there are some risks while playing these sports, but it doesn’t seem fair that they are being paid millions of dollars when many manual labor jobs also include those risks. For example in order to be a quick and efficient waiter/waitress you do have to be in shape as well.

These jobs do require different skills and different types of hard work but the difference in the amount they get paid is far too large. Now, of course I do not think minimum wage jobs should earn millions of dollars but neither should professional athletes.

Did it feel warmer than usual to you last year? Well you’re not the only one. 2015 has officially gone down as the warmest year on record since 1880 when they first started keeping track of global temperatures. Not only was 2015 the hottest year on record, it was also a part of a 39 year streak of above average temperatures. What’s the cause of these crazy numbers? According to the third U.S National Climate assessment “The global warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human activities, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels.” The burning of fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide and natural processes cannot fully absorb those gasses so the rest of it ends up going into the atmosphere. All of this has many harmful effects on ecosystems, biodiversity, and of course us humans.

In December, the 2015 United Nations Climate Change conference was held in Paris and the 195 participating countries agreed to a global pact named the Paris Agreement. These countries agreed to reduce emissions to try and reduce the greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere. This agreement is to be adopted through these countries’ legal systems and by doing so, they are then required to try to reduce their emissions. Many people have said that this is a big step to help the rising temperatures.

This may seem like a daunting task to many, but I believe that we already know the solution to these problems. Renewable energy resources like solar, wind, hydropower, and geothermal energy are the greatest alternatives to burning fossil fuels. The earth does not have infinite amounts of fossil fuels, and burning them is just damaging our planet. Thankfully there are is an infinite amount of renewable energy resources and these will not damage the planet.

Another problem with fossil fuels is that  those sources are spread out and some countries don’t have any. Renewable sources can be found anywhere, and most countries have at least one.

Therefore, I believe that if the world would start to switch over to these renewable energy sources, and continue to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, global warming might slowly become something of the past.